The Church Of Me
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Kissing in the churchyard, I know a righteous woman

Sunday, November 27, 2005
WHY RACHEL DIDN'T GET IT

In the hospital where I work the League of Friends have a monthly sale of discounted goods. The most recent was a week ago last Friday. Amongst the bric-a-brac on offer were a pile of new CDs "Donated For Charity" by various record companies – mainly Universal – retailing at competitive prices, none of them having managed to sell many or any copies at more competitive prices. At the bottom of this particular pile – and even in this company looking somewhat ashamed; reduced circumstances, but at the bottom, as an afterthought, as ballast? – was Come And Get It, the recently-released second album by Rachel Stevens, yours if you’d wanted it for £1.99, complete with a bonus DVD of seven videos, all featuring the lady voted last week by the readers of Smash Hits as Most Fanciable Female. Were this not sufficient humiliation, a few weeks previously – in fact, on its first Saturday of release – I had witnessed, in the HMV shop at Oxford Circus, a crowd of typically Saturday Top Shoppers openly congregating around and laughing at the album, which was not conspicuously displayed in that week’s selection of new releases; a spectacle last seen by me in 1989, when punters were pointing and sniggering at Terence Trent D’Arby’s underperforming second album, Neither Fish Nor Flesh. Overheard comments included: "Who does she think she’s kidding?" "Does she think she’s Goldfrapp? She’s fackin’ S Club and always will be!" "It’s embarrassing, it’s like your mum." In the mainstream broadsheets and the specialist music press the album was either ignored or given rave reviews on the proviso that it wasn’t going to sell. The album accordingly made an unspectacular, and nearly unnoticed, entry into the album chart at 28, and quickly made its excuses and left, despite Ms Stevens doing the blanket rounds of chat shows and teen television over the previous fortnight. Or perhaps because of her doing so.

So what happened? Why did one of the most outstandingly creative and discreetly avant-garde pop records of 2005 become, essentially, stillborn? When I first heard the finished version of Come And Get It in September I thought I had borne witness to the herald of the second coming of New Pop Mark II. Goldfrapp’s Supernature had sounded surprisingly alluring when heard on a blindingly hot summer’s day in Brighton, but this far surpassed it. Every track contained at least half a dozen ideas for a pop future. But then I thought the same about Anniemal a year ago, and that particular masterwork persists in its reluctant residency in the bargain bins. Is it that some pop just goes over the heads of today’s consumers? Or is it another indictment of the British music industry’s craven inability to handle female talent properly?

With Rachel the problem may have been more deeply rooted. "Some Girls" hit number two last year on the back of a Sports Aid charity tie-in and residual S Club fan interest, but apart from a dull cover of "More More More" which is pointedly absent from her album, subsequent, more complex singles have typically foundered at around about the number 11 mark (which in 2005 singles chart terms is the equivalent of number 41 in old chart currency) pretty much in inverse proportion to their musical interest. Did The Kids get confused by Rachel’s ad libs in the Kim Wilde-does-"Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" knockback of "Negotiate With Love" – "Can you turn down the track a little bit please?" etc.? In fact these asides add to her endearing vocal qualities; her playing with phrases actually mirrors and refracts the playing around of the Other of which the lyric complains and she sounds like she’s having fun if periodically being politely bowled over (that almost apologetic out of breath "negotiate with…love" at the start of the final chorus). What was it, indeed, that record buyers didn’t understand? Similarly "I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)" is an utterly charming mindfuck of a pop song (listen to those "1-2-3-4"s – they make you want to hug her!) which was universally derided as an "Antmusic" ripoff. Unfortunately the nay sayers neglected (a) to check the songwriting credits, whereupon they would have found that one of the writers was Rob Davis, formerly of Mud, so it’s fair to say that Rob was simply taking back what "Antmusic" took from "The Cat Crept In" (Mud’s 1974 #2 follow-up to "Tiger Feet") in the first place; and (b) to recall that Antmusic was a gloriously unapologetic exercise in pilfering and reshaping elements of Link Wray, Morricone, Roxy and so on.

The invention continues throughout Come And Get It. "Some Girls" was a typically filthy Richard X production, of course, its subtle duplicity (a would-be pop princess being ripped off by a mentor more incompetent than sinister) virtually unnoticed. In the context of the album it’s one of three exercises in schaffel-pop – the bitemporal approach (a fast, light 6/8 superimposed on a hardcore dance 4/4 beat) pioneered by the likes of Akufen and Vitalic at the turn of the millennium, reviving a form which in pop had become lost to follow-up – previous historical examples of the same rhythmic matrix would include Blondie’s "Call Me," Amii Stewart’s version of "Knock On Wood," Elvis’ "Way Down" and, for those who really have lived long enough, Polly Brown’s "Up In A Puff Of Smoke" (and Gary Glitter, lest you forget – those "Rock and Roll" chants bolster up the closing seconds of "Some Girls"). The other two are "Crazy Boys" – a noticeably cleaner Richard X production which sounds like someone applying sparkling polish to the Goldfrapp template, gleamingly striding through hitherto inaccessible hotel lobby connecting doors, wiring up James Bond ("nobody does it better" indeed!) with Christ ("Forgive me, I know not what I do") – and the terrific "Every Little Thing," another Rob Davis co-write which sounds like Eno producing Clodagh Rodgers doing "My Coo-Ca-Choo;" check out the lovely quadrangle of "Oh! The sting of your kiss! Mwah! The twist in my touch! (Beep!)" in the second verse.

And yet here is an album which finds its artist at the start assertive and slightly threatening ("I like to watch you suffer ever so slightly" she croons on the sprightly "It’s-Just-Like-Kylie!" opener "So Good"), but by its end she is virtually on her knees, pleading for love and understanding of her façade ("Dumb Dumb"). Despite the aemotionalism perceived by the album’s critics, her ballad singing is touchingly fetching in a Thereza Bazar-had-she-been-Art-of-Noise’s-lead-singer kind of a way. She betrays exquisite fatigue on "Funny How" which effectively undermines the determined Luomo-out-of-Kylie rhythmic bounce with a lyric which references both the Pet Shop Boys/Patsy Kensit and the KLF ("The night got cold/It’s way past three/Take these fools away from me") and acts as a curious cold rationalist counterpart to the painful poignancy applied to the same subject matter on Sing Sing’s "Going Out Tonight" (a song which in itself has proved to be the missing link between Slowdive’s "Catch The Breeze" and the Streets’ "Blinded By The Light") even as it then goes on to cite Nomad ("I wanna give you devotion") and the Four Tops/Joy Division ("so don’t walk away"). Her reading of Alexis Strum’s superb song "Nothing Good About This Goodbye" is also sublimely hurt, wandering in a limbo between Air and Emma Bunton. But perhaps deepest of all is "I Will Be There," a song which many thought should have closed the album, and which is very nearly the last will and testament of Thereza Bazar on that videotheque screen before she truly mutates into a ghost. Rachel sounds on the verge of tears on the treadmill of "Round and round we go/Here we go again" before coming as close as this record dares her to do to becoming nakedly emotional – "We can live forever/This doesn’t have to be the end" – before evading her body entirely. "Is it OK if I meet you in heaven? Is it alright if I’m with you forever?" a chorus of Rachels sing, as smooth as the blanket swept over to cover the pain. And that unearthly, tender chord change on the third line of the chorus ("I will be there…") is enough to make a tender soul wish to evade Earth altogether. Watch Kylie cover this next year when she’s recovered. The poignancy will be, literally, unbearable.

And all of this appears on an album which hasn’t sold, or has been purposely undersold, is laughed at in shops and buried at the bottom of charity piles. Why?

Some possible reasons:

1. "She doesn’t mean it!"

As said by Chris Evans on Radio 2, dismissing "I Said Never Again." "Not like Charlotte Church! She means it!" This ties in with the Guardian music critic’s observation that Rachel Stevens possesses "the personality of a boiled egg." Not to mention "Who the hell does she think she is?" The overriding impression would appear to be that with Come And Get It, Rachel has proved herself to be a fish out of water, someone dabbling with things The Power Of Which She Does Not Know, your mum doing the Twist to LCD Soundsystem.

This theory cannot be entirely dismissed. What was sorely evident on her numerous television appearances was the extreme disinterest Rachel exuded when it came to the music she was supposed to be promoting, if not championing (and if not championing, then why not?). As I’ve said previously, she came across like a Young Conservative who’s accidentally walked into an electropop(ist) club night; a bit above it all, perhaps, desperate to get back to the David Gray and Dido she really likes. Her snooty air on the children’s TV show hosted by public school alumni Dick and Dom didn’t exactly encourage floating voters, either.

And as far as "meaning it" goes, it’s probable that she hasn’t been afforded the opportunity to show what she "means" – the general consensus is that she’s still the Baby Spice equivalent of S Club (indeed, one outraged Telegraph letter-writer – is there any other kind? – complained about how he was to explain to his eight-year-old daughter why squeaky clean Rachel Stevens now only wore knickers on TV!) and hasn’t really proven herself as an independent particle. Charlotte Church, however, gives a well-known history; with her it’s the classic teen idol-becomes-adult conundrum, but it’s one she’s handling exceptionally well. The twinkle in her eye is ever present; she makes no secret that she’s having a ball playing this game; her eyes smile when Rachel's evidently do not. And her strategy is better thought out, such that the startling futurism of tracks like "Let’s Be Alone" (one of 2005’s most sheerly pleasurable pop songs, including that "Enola Gay" quote in the final chorus) or the sneakier futurism of the likes of "Crazy Chick" (whose opening handclaps are as stridently sensual as Amelie’s heels tap-tap-tapping to your door in "1 Thing") come across as heartfelt and genuine as the straighter-edged ballads (though the latter still convey a weird aura of the Manics going R&B). The Sugababes, too, have had a chart-topping triumph with their splendid new album which is just as futuristic and Wire-friendly in its own way as Come And Get It. But then again, the Sugababes also now have a background story to tell – fans have never known them as anything other than Sugababes, they have to an extent grown up with them, are still interested in the paths of their lives, so are able to connect with them on that elementary but still vital level.

Nonetheless it remains rather unfair to dismiss Rachel for not "meaning it." I think her voice is the right one for the tenor required by the songs on Come And Get It; light but not drowning, vulnerable but never terminal. She possibly simply needs to learn to convey that emotionalism visually.

2. "Madonna is Madonna and that’s what makes her Madonna."

Ah yes, the elephant in the living room who refuses to be ignored. So here is Madonna, who is Madonna who is anybody or anything you want her to be in any given financial quarter, crassly digesting Rachel and Goldfrapp and maybe even Linda Lamb, for those who haven’t lived long enough, and she does the double – number one single and album, Hung Up On A Dancefloor – which seems to sneer at Rachel, look, kid, this is how you do it and here is how you don’t give a shit, which sees her swallowing up No Wave for the second time and regurgitating it as a handy, yummy revival as if Cristina had never revived "Is That All There Is?" (where is where Madonna starts, in the same sense that Patrick Hernandez’s "Born To Be Alive" is where Madonna starts) and views her swallowing up the future of music from the perspective of those of us who never forgot the Young Gods and who thought that the possibilities of sampling meant a million new possibilities for music, Bartok against Duane Eddy, Braxton with Bonzos, except that the future of music has turned out to be the astute Mylo who has correctly divined that we don’t really want music to have a future, just an endless, easy past, that we deserve no more from the limitlessness of sampling, that instead of plunging into a sexy abyss of chaos we clutch back "Bette Davis Eyes" and ooh do you remember the school disco and deelyboppers and the Kids From Fame and isn’t it a laugh and then you scream DOES EVERY FUCKING THING HAVE TO BE A LAUGH but then you go down the route of Celine (Ferdinand or Dion, it all ends the same) by thinking that.

So Impressions On A Dancefloor superficially sounds impressive and mighty and up to the second as long as you’re listening to it two rooms away from where it’s playing. You could briefly chortle at the little Gwen Stefani tick-tock jibe which opens the album ("Time goes by so slowly" – will our Gwen be singing "Unchained Melody" when she’s 47?) and hey, here’s how to play the game because Madonna asked Abba nicely and the KLF didn’t and turns the hi-energy sleepless heartbreak of "Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)" into an irritation which can be relieved with a dash of Nytol. In the same way, you might think that "Future Lovers" revs up "I Feel Love" to speeds and power unimaginable in 1977 if you’d never heard what Mark Stewart did with it on "Fatal Attraction" in 1987, which was rather more than superimposing a "Ray Of Light" rewrite on its top. And "I Love New York" seems to swoon with improbable modernity if you’re not familiar with Dakar and Grinser’s cover of "I Wanna Be Your Dog" (the latter is less In Your Face than the former, but then the former loses among many other things the deviously subtle Dark Magus keyboard curlicues). After a while the UP-ness refuses to let you relent – rather than being celebratory, listening to the record is like being battered over the head with a weighty exercise bike 120 times per minute. Confessions Of A Hangman will not allow the listener to breathe as ultimately it does nothing more than billboard the joyless John Knox work-and-nothing-but-work ethic without which Madonna would have to look in her own mirror, and we can’t have that, can she? If anything the album’s "downbeat" second half is even more pestilent than the first half, for herein we find a shameless farrago of self-pity, self-glorification ("I guess I deserve it," she coos imperiously on "How High" apropos her career and money, not in that order) and self-love masquerading as selflessness ("Push" wherein she sings "You push me" while staring in the mirror rather than looking her audience in the faces), perhaps reaching its nadir in the interminable Kabbalah recruiting advert that is "Isaac" – think "Frozen" remixed by the Afro-Celt Sound System and pass the Imodium, Alice – before concluding with the inevitable, if loveless, schaffel of "Like It Or Not" whose message is "You can love me or you can leave me," alongside other subsidiary Wittgenstein-esque homilies such as "Sticks and stones will break my bones," "Better the devil you know," "Can’t get you out of my head" and "OK I made that last one up." That a purple leather jumpsuit is seemingly enough to get her to number one in this reduced world of ours asks why other musicians even bother trying, but not in the Aerial way.

3. "The British music industry cannot handle female musical talent properly."

And by that, I mean British. Perhaps Annie From Norway should have done a few more Popworlds and a few fewer Shoreditch DJ sets, but her record company had absolutely no idea how to market her and thus was a great pop album lost. Even with Charlotte and Goldfrapp there is the aura of "hedging their bets," albeit markedly reduced. But I’ve also been listening to a couple of very fine ‘60s girl pop compilations which came out this year – It’s So Fine: Pye Girls Are Go! and Sassy And Stonefree: Dreambabes Volume 6 – which between them contain some 70 pop gems, two of which were hits. What happened there? The sleevenotes more or less give us the answer; whereas in America talents like Carole King, Jackie De Shannon, Ellie Greenwich, Toni Wine, Carole Bayer Sager etc. etc. were given room to flourish and develop, in Britain the likes of Barbara Ruskin and Val McKenna – both considerable talents, and in the case of Barbara Ruskin a seriously awesome, lost talent, as singer, songwriter and producer – were marginalised; only Jackie Trent, by dint of being Mrs Tony Hatch, thrived (and the Trent/Hatch reinterpretation of Scott Walker’s "Such A Small Love" on It’s So Fine has to be believed to be heard). Otherwise it remained a boys’ club, and fantastic Northern Soul stompers like Nita Rossi’s "Untrue, Unfaithful (That Was You)" were routinely buried on the B-side of slushy MoR fare which it was decided – by the men in suits, many of whom had been in the music business since the days of Al Bowlly – The People Wanted. You realise just how important Suzi Quatro was as a symbol when she came along; but that was all she was – she was from Detroit, her hits were written and produced by men, and the wave of women who followed in her immediate wake – Patti Smith, Joan Jett – were Americans. Is it an exaggeration that we had to wait for the Slits and Siouxsie for British women musicians to finally have their say? And is it because 49-year-old men still think they know what’s best – i.e. women singers and musicians are only marketable as come-on R&B fodder or breathe-on-me-and-I-break vulnerables – that genuinely vulnerable people like Rachel Stevens end up being pushed and pulled any way as though on a pinball table, with the inevitable lack of jackpot?


posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink
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Wednesday, November 23, 2005

THE AGE OF THE AERIAL

 

 




"Give me, instead of beauty’s bust,
A tender heart, a loyal mind,
Which with temptation I could trust,
Yet never linked with error find.
One in whose gentle bosom I
Could pour my secret heart of woes,
Like the care-burthened honey-fly
That hides his murmurs in the rose."
(George Darley, "It Is Not Beauty I Demand")

The wind is inescapable, unavoidable. It is the same wind which could either fuel or blow out the fire on Wuthering Heights. But this time it isn’t just about coming back. It’s about summoning others to come back; in other words, life. Why Elvis? Why Rosebud – and by Rosebud, is that Hearst or should it be Orson?

"Why does a multi-millionaire
Fill up his home with priceless junk?"

"The interiors were cramped. The garden was littered with thrown-away Macanudo cigar butts – this is a terrible image, a blindness to nature…His bathtub was full of old books. His closet had maybe thirty identical black silk shirts."
(David Thomson on the living conditions of the last days of Orson Welles, Rosebud: The Story Of Orson Welles)

She is of course summoning herself back, after twelve very busy years, but not simply her own self. She’s been listening extensively to the works of Massive Attack, whose once-removed imprints are all over both halves of Aerial; on "King Of The Mountain" the not-quite-splendid isolation is articulated by the slowly ascending triple string chords as well as the Ryuichi Sakamoto synth pattern in limbo. She’s impersonating Elvis (there’s a chuckle buried deeply, which will eventually emerge from its chrysalis) as well as trying to will him back to life, to deny that he died

(and here’s the section where I’m afraid you’ll need to go back to Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) and remind yourself of what she said about Elvis. Did he die the day he died?)

to return that 40-year-absent smile to his face ("Looking like a happy man?"). Meanwhile the wind whistles, its chill palpable, and it’s evident that the same spirit breathes here as breathed on "Dead Souls" – Kate Bush is summoning the souls of the dead, trying to understand why or how they died. In the multitracked "blow southerly" chorus it is as if she’s caught in the act of exhuming them, dragging their bodies back onto the ground. And then every individual will live again, proud and triumphant atop their mountain – and they can never make their way down again ("The wind it blows the door closed").

A Sea Of Honey is a study about how life can expect to be lived once that door has been blown shut, and we choose never to open it again. Far from being a prelude, or a softener, to disc two, it defines everything at which the songs of disc two laugh, or ridicule, or negate. In other words, the simple and complex joys of A Sky Of Honey would not carry nearly as much emotional impact were we not aware of the tragedies slowly being dissected on disc one. A Sea Of Honey is the tunnel through which we are obliged to swim if we are ever to emerge into the light of blissful blue.

Grieving penetrates virtually everything on A Sea Of Honey – and where there is grief, there is often associated compassion for others who decide to shut themselves away from the world, for whatever reason, never more so than on what everyone else has mistakenly thought to be the album’s comic relief, the song "Pi" which is actually a heartbreaking plea to rejoin humanity, to realise that a world comprised of lists and numbers, of doomed rationalisation of random biological occurrences, is not a substitute for interacting with other people. "Oh he love, he love, he love/He does love his numbers/And they run, they run, they run him/In a great big circle/In a circle of infinity" – a circle from which he does not seem to wish to escape. Thus does Bush sing him a tender lullaby to try to prise him away from this dead world, a lullaby comprised of the number Pi extended to however many decimal points are needed, as though any were wanted. Gradually her singing of the numbers drifts out of tempo, after an initial sustenato of the number "3" to make it sound like "free." Her 5s are like cuddles, her 8s and 9s see her in a virtual flood of tears, her 4s are subtly sensual, and she freezes in dread as she rolls the fatal number "zero" around her tongue like a barbiturate she doesn’t want to swallow. The verse musically offers Hugh Hopper/Matching Mole chord changes, but the numbers are accompanied by rueful electronica which, not for the last time on Aerial, indicate some familiarity with the work of Boards of Canada (compare, for example, with "Olson" from Music Has The Right To Children, which latter’s number count stops making sense, eerily, at 36).

Both "How To Be Invisible" and "Joanni" could represent Bush turning into herself, to denounce her own wilful absence from the world, if indeed she can be said to have ever been away from it. The former is a strangely loping torch song in which Bush examines the consequences of thinking "inside out," the slow decay which will occur once you have decided to remain "under a veil you must never lift/Pages you must never turn" and subsist in a microscopic world of yourself ("Eye of Braille/Hem of anorak/Stem of wallflower/Hair of doormat")

"The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning."
(Sylvia Plath, "Ariel")

"Is that an autumn leaf falling/Or is that you, walking home?" The sudden sob at the word "mirror" in the line "You jump into the mirror" and the whistling ("The wind is whistling," remember) which bookends the song. But those two lines again – "Under a veil you must never lift/Pages you must never turn/In the labyrinth"…

…of militant Islam?

The lyrics to the song "Joanni" are accompanied by a photograph of Bush, the lower half of her face seemingly obscured by a veil and her hands clutched together in prayer. She may well be laughing, or trying to laugh, underneath that veil. The song itself, with more sinisterly ascending strings, returns to Massive Attack territory, or at least on the same planet surface at right angles to the narrator of "Antistar." With its description of a girl who ostensibly is Joan of Arc ("All the cannons are firing/And the swords are clashing?…/And she looks so beautiful in her armour/…blows a kiss to God/And she never wears a ring on her finger") but reminds Bush of someone else ("Who is that girl? Do I know her face?"). Herself? Or…given the apocalypse of the first verse ("And the flags stop flying/And the silence comes over/Thousands of soldiers")…a suicide bomber? The progenitor of Eno’s "Bonebomb" ("I waited for peace…and here is my piece")? In these two songs there is definitely the touch of the muezzin wall present (even, at times, bearing a bizarre but entirely logical resemblance to John Lydon’s voice).

And then there are the two flattening songs with Bush alone, voice and piano, which almost made me wish that the whole of A Sea Of Honey had been recorded solo, which cut into an exceptionally deep core of pain. First, "Mrs. Bartolozzi" – a song about a housewife watching the clothes of herself and her family spin around in her washing machine, and the fantasies which that engenders in her mind, primarily sexual in nature. What is perhaps most remarkable about this song and its reluctant twin "A Coral Room" is how unhurried it sounds – one marvels at the increasingly rarefied qualities of slow patience which Bush applies to her writing and performance. Note the many pauses in "Mrs. Bartolozzi" – it’s as if she’s thinking over what she’s just sung and hasn’t quite decided where to take the song next, which road to travel down (or which river to swim down). This was a quality very common in thoughtful avant-garde British singer-songwriters between 1969-78 (see John and Beverley Martyn’s Road To Ruin and Simon Finn’s Pass The Distance for two extreme approaches to this tabula rasa) – the tradition of Roy Harper, indeed the same tradition within which those formerly lost souls Bill Fay and Vashti Bunyan worked. Remember that Kate Bush was virtually the last British singer-songwriter to come out, or come into, that tradition before it was supplanted, or superseded; thus when listening to Bill Fay’s Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow we can see exactly where Bush got the ball and how far she subsequently ran with it, virtually single-handed for the next 15 years. And what about Vashti Bunyan, whose second album, a mere 35 years after her first, finds her sounding 35 years younger than she did on Just Another Diamond Day (again, the patient compassion of a Bunyan song like "Turning Backs" is the other, necessary end of the tender Bush spine)? There’s something quietly significant about all these artists coming back from the cold in 2005.

But back to "Mrs. Bartolozzi." Wade in the Woolf waves of sensuality as Bush does so effortlessly here, gently transforming banal domesticity into a David Cox seascape. When she sings "Oh and the waves are coming in/Oh and the waves are coming out" with the piano ebbing and flowing in watery counterpoint, you can tell she really feels the movements which matter. "Oh and you’re standing right beside me/Little fish swim between my legs" would have been about a thousandth as astonishing if that couplet had appeared on the new album by Madonna, Bush’s senior by two weeks. Because we hear it so infrequently it penetrates far more deeply than the corporate wink which we pretend not to worship in 2005 mainstream pop (though that of course isn’t to say that the more intelligent pop operatives – the Sugababes, Girls Aloud, why the same intelligent pop operatives we had three years ago – aren’t sneakily and sexily dismantling those memes and know full well that they are doing so; contrast with Rachel Stevens, who torpedoed one of the year’s best pop albums basically by acting like a Young Conservative who had volunteered to work in Spearmint Rhino for a week for an ITV documentary).

However, the sea and the fish are – for now – merely a daydream. And it’s a daydream parenthesised by a nearly unspeakable pain. "I think I see you standing outside/But it’s just your shirt"…and if we look at the accompanying photograph in the CD booklet, it depicts a washing line in which there is a terrible red in the centre, as unavoidable as the red coat in Schindler’s List, bloodied…and then Bush virtually breaks down. "And it looks so ALIVE!" she screams, whimpers, "Nice and white." This is someone who might not be coming back ("And all your shirts and jeans and things"). The childhood memory of a nursery rhyme which intrudes towards the end of the song, and the mystifyingly terrifying first few lines of the song: "I remember it was that Wednesday/Oh when it rained and rained/They traipsed mud all over the house/It took hours and hours to scrub it out." And the song’s progenitor is obsessed with getting everything clean – note how the words shiny, clean and white keep reoccurring throughout – that you wonder: what horror is she trying to erase? Who were "they"? The Gestapo? Come to take her husband and children away? Was Mrs. Bartolozzi...interfered with?

Finally there is the option of drowning in A Sea Of Honey’s closing song "A Coral Room," a song which continues to leave me speechless as, with its visions of ruined houses, of past lives ("And the planes came crashing down"), the memories we clutched to our breasts, held against our hearts, now in disrepair, a broken home for spiders, it quietly sums up what for me has been the overriding trend of 2005’s important music – the feeling that, especially after both 7/7 and Hurricane Katrina, it’s after the end of the world (if Bush doesn’t mind my citing Sun Ra, which I’m sure she wouldn’t) and we’re engaged in a salvage operation. Think of the Shortwave Set’s reclaiming of battered 1974 MoR, their refusal to let their source material rot; of Eno’s generously gracious hymns of solace to a dying world (notwithstanding the deadly punchline of the final track on Another Day On Earth); Saint Etienne’s sadly wise realisation that all those Subbuteo catalogues and Gibb Brothers 45s ultimately count for nothing in the face of destruction (can anyone listen to "Side Streets" now and not shiver at the thought of 7/7? "I’ll probably get it tomorrow/’Til then…"); Antony’s mutation from boy to guhl; Rufus and Martha trying to redefine the pods from which they emerged; King Britt bringing Sister Gertrude Morgan back; the Arcade Fire bringing EVERYTHING back; Bill Fay being brought back – somehow it is all summed up in "A Coral Room," especially in that deathly pause between Bush’s first "What do you feel?" and her calmly tearful "My mother. And her little brown jug" (again a childhood nursery rhyme echoes in the collective memory, sung here by one Michael Wood, who may or may not be the television historian). When Bush sings "See it fall" it sounds as though she has plunged 30,000 feet into the abyss. Her tiny cry of "Oh little spider" also reminds us of Cat Power’s reading of "Crawling King Snake." At last, she turns to you, to me, to us, and her voice soars with choked emotion as she demands "Put your hand over the side of the boat. What do you feel?"

The centrepiece, the lynchpin, of this entire sequence of music is of course "Bertie," Bush’s ode to her son, arranged and performed by members of my favourite group the Dufay Collective as a 15th-century estampie realigned by John Dowland. Note how she cannot allow her larynx to let go of the downward cascade of the word "sweet" in "Sweet dreams" and the words-are-really-no-good-for-this-kind-of-thing inarticulate genius couplet of "You bring me so much joy/And then you bring me/More joy," worthy of Marvin Gaye purely because of how she sings it. But the medieval roundelay is minor key throughout, and sometimes she sounds as if she’s weeping. Has her displacement of time meant that she has seen forward to Bertie’s death, or her own?

"How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet."
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves, whose prelude should perhaps not be read until you’ve heard the album, as it pretty well gives away the entire plot)

Suddenly…there is colour. A beneficent lightness. A child’s voice. "Mummy? Daddy? The day is full of birds. Sounds like they’re saying words."

"A. Sky. Of. Honey." Or, if you twist your ear to 45 degrees, "Don’t. Go. Oh. Bertie."

Even as the sun and the piano and the birds of "Prologue" rise upwards and ever upwards, Bush is already foreseeing transience and non-existence. "Every time you leave us/So Summer will be gone/So you’ll never grow old to us," even as the piano magically unfolds in ascending scales and arpeggios, and the bass, drums and orchestra make discreet entries, even as Bush has to switch to Italian to express what English can’t quite ("Like the light in Italy/Lost its way across the sea"). Just as in "A Coral Room" the patterns of the melody echo the thoughts of Bush’s voice; they come after her words, as opposed to merely erecting a framework for them. Bush’s melodies will go exactly the way Bush wants them to, and at the speed which she decides – slow and patient.

"Some dark accents coming in from that side…"

Now it is nightfall, and the childish joys of that "lovely afternoon" become distinctly carnal and not a little pagan. "Sunset" is an exquisite scribble of Euro-Tropicana which wouldn’t have been out of place on the stunning Nine Horses album (Snow Borne Sorrow, or David Sylvian Was Right All Along). Bush sings wondrously of colours ("The most beautiful iridescent blue") but again worries about the horror of non-existence – that pause which comes after the first delivery of "Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust – Then climb into bed and turn to dust," and which amplifies its pain in the lines "Keep us close to your heart/So if the skies turn dark/We may live on in/Comets and stars." It’s an ECM samba for the end of the world (and distinctly ECM, as Eberhard Weber and Peter Erskine are the rhythm section on this track). However, after the last "climb into bed and turn to dust," Bush turns her back defiantly on mortality and ups the tempo to a Balearic house rave-up. "The day writes the words right across the sky/They go all the way up to the top of the night." Running up that hill again…to encounter a brief and astonishing episode ("Aerial Tal") where Bush suddenly gives us some vocal free improvisation in duet with the blackbirds, which obviously makes me think that, apart from Virginia Astley and maybe Messaien, she’s also heard the Evan Parker With Birds album, but even this is but a mere prelude to…

"We went up to the top of the highest hill. And stopped. Still."

And – again, like stout Cortez from whose notion of the Pacific I can never seem to tear myself away – Bush discovers…the eternal (or Joy Division’s "The Eternal")? "Something In Between" is the first of Aerial’s supreme one-two punch which gives me…just what I always wanted? Deep oceans of synthesisers, whale guitars and subaquiline bass suddenly but gently veer into view as Bush sings of being not quite this and not quite that. "Somewhere in between/The waxing and the waning wave/Somewhere in between/What the song and silence say…/Sleep and waking up…/Breathing out and breathing in…" Between man and woman, between jouissance and ennui, between life and death, between boy and guhl…

"Oh I’m scared of the middle place, between life and nowhere"
(Antony, "Hope There’s Someone")

But Kate Bush isn’t scared; she’s simply awed – that trembling sopranino sustenato of a note to which she clings throughout "Oh how we have longed for something that would make us feel so…" Words are really no good for this kind of thing, but the thing is, the twirls and curlicues of the arrangement set beside her voice, the echoes of a generation ago when I did feel so…but I’m thinking of a marriage between the Cocteau Twins’ "Ribbed And Veined" and Boards of Canada’s "Peacock Tail" and Björk’s "All Is Full Of Love" and, most deeply of all, Billy MacKenzie’s "At The Edge Of The World" because something here makes me hear that Kate Bush has become the new lead singer of the Associates and unless you’re a 1982 child like me you won’t know how that makes me feel, though you could make a decent guess and perhaps realise that Kate Bush becoming the new lead singer of the Associates is for me an infinitely more infinite prospect than Madonna becoming the new lead singer of Zoot Woman. And those gentle backing vocals, provided by Gary Brooker, the voice of Procol Harum, the co-author of "A Salty Dog," promising us that we can never really truly die, capped by the tender double meaning and let-me-die-now-poignant punchline which I won’t spoil for you, suffice to point out that it transposes the spirit of the closing two minutes of ELO’s "Mr Blue Sky" into the closing two minutes of George Crumb’s "Makrokosmos III," and unless you’re a 1978 child like me who waited 27 years for the two to come together…well, guess with a kiss.

And then, incredibly, there is "Nocturn," the song of the year, maybe of the century, possibly of the millennium, not that I anticipate personally living long enough to ratify either of the two latter options. The "sweet dreams" refrain returns, and out of tempo Bush oscillates as wildly but as gently as Julie Tippetts at the beginning of side three of Keith Tippett’s Frames.
"Everyone is sleeping. We go driving into the moonlight"…

"Could you see the guy who was driving?"
(Kate Bush, "King Of The Mountain")

…and then the most delicate and most gorgeous bass and percussion line you’ve ever heard eases its way in like the first tentative wave as Kate sings as tenderly as she has ever sung, quiet and wondering. "Could be in a dream/Our clothes are on the beach," and you can’t quite believe what’s happening here, now it’s Judee Sill singing Propaganda’s "Dream Within A Dream" and did you think you’d live long enough to witness that? The song gently ascends with that slow patience, not hurrying to reach ecstasy, and yes…"No one, no one is here" (even though everyone is) and…OH MY FUCKING GOD…"We stand in the Atlantic/We become PANORAMIC" and it soars above all of us, climbing higher and unbelievably higher, as if trying to drag Varese and Meek down from their clouds, "The stars are caught in our hair/The stars are on our fingers/A veil of diamond dust," and then you notice that Joe Boyd is thanked in the sleeve credits and fuck me if Kate Bush, who NEVER stopped believing in the Incredible String Band, is trying to make 1967 live again as the eight-year-old Kate Bush imagined she remembered it. The washing machine now long gone – "The sea’s around our legs/In milky, silky water" – they sink into ecstasy ("We dive deeper and deeper") until the unreal sun comes up and a sudden dawn chorus howls in rage against the dying night ("Look at the light, all the time it’s a-changing (Bob Dylan!!)/Look at the light, climbing up the Aerial") because it’s fuck me yes yes yes a thousand times yes Oxford London Toronto YES

AND ALL OF THE DREAMERS ARE WAKING

She’s up, and she can’t come down. Finally, "Aerial," the song itself – and it’s Frankie’s "Relax" in 6/8, a thumping sex beat as Bush finally cuts the strings of restraint and screams as only she can except up until this moment on Aerial she hasn’t actually done so but she screams "I’ve gotta be up on the roof! Up, up on the roof! In the sun!" and then the scream turns into a laugh and she turns into a bird

and then the guitarist, Danny MacIntosh, who is actually Bertie’s daddy, who has so far kept a similarly reticent profile, suddenly erupts with Hendrix lava, interacting with, fucking, Bush’s cackles ("Come on let’s all join in!") and she keeps laughing, is it at us, or with us, and it’s frightening, or it’s liberating, and then suddenly there’s nothing except the dawn chorus of the blackbirds and the now distant echoes of laughter because they are now ghosts and they are happy and life continues anyway.

"The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside."
(Woolf, The Waves, from the Prelude)

Or, like me, you might prefer the following option:
"And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one."
(John Donne, "The Good-Morrow")

For L.G., who should have heard Aerial,
And for L.F., who thankfully can.



posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink
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