Sheet Music: Lispector, ‘Apollo Bay’

New series! Maybe / hopefully. Learning to play songs can be such a good way to absorb and understand them. I thought I knew this one pretty well, but there are clever things going on with the chords I hadn’t appreciated until writing it down today: not just the extended sequence which starts with the instrumental section, but also the move from C / E / F / C at the beginning to C / E / Am / F, the A minor making the key line of the song that much more poignant. There’s something of the sentiment of Lawrence / Felt’s ‘We might as well all stay in our rooms until we die’ here, which I’ve always thought was partially in celebration of one’s own curated world, the books and all the records of your lifetime. Lispector bring a wanderlust to it which refuses to entertain a distinction between travel, and travel in the mind. You can grow beyond a loss with either. Beautiful song.

Aperitif

Howard Fishman: ‘To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music and Mystery of Connie Converse’

[It’s been a long time since I’ve written a book review, and there are a number of reasons for that, but the big two are not wanting to fix what I think about something, for myself, because it reduces it; and not wanting to engage in spurious authoritativeness, because I can string a sentence together. But I’m starting to think that disengagement is worse, and that there is probably a happy medium, a lighter touch. Again, we shall see.]

What I want to demand, and would not be caught dead demanding, was a few swims in the sea of unsaidness. [...] For the best communication, the most satisfactory human relationship... it seems now to me that knowing and being known are prerequisites... Being a complex and inward personality, I have always found it difficult to make myself known. Well, by and large it has never too much disturbed me that I generally conceal my own problems and listen attentively to those of others; that, indeed, without enjoying your apparent lack of inner conflict, I often turn toward the world a face much like yours - serene (or at least strong and cheerful) and imperturbable. But with you two, whose affection I value so highly, I wish to be known better and to know you better... [...] Love - Sis. (Chapter 23)

This is Connie Converse to her brother Phil, and his wife Jean, in 1957. Her relationship with Phil is one of the central pillars of this wonderfully generous, curious, detailed biography. There are a few dark hints here and there, and the odd moment of great tenderness and real connection (the above sparks one such). On balance, it seems he did support and encourage her in life, and champion her songs after her disappearance, but he also destroyed a lot of her papers, which, when confronted by the author, he admits but does not attempt to explain. He’s the best source Fishman had, but he’s ambiguous and not a completely reliable one.

The papers are where he starts: Converse left Phil a filing cabinet with an inventory, containing her life’s work, as well as letters and other documents. By the time Fishman saw it, many items were marked ‘dumped’ in Phil’s handwriting (so it’s not even as though he was discarding secretly, or - presumably - for space, since the filing cabinet remained the same size. Was he concealing something specific? Or curating to leave the best material?) What remained showed that as well as being ‘a great unknown songwriter’ she was ‘a polymath - a talented illustrator, painter, thinker, published political cartoonist and essayist, poet, photographer, and aspiring novelist’ (Chapter 6). Apart from the songs, the filing cabinet itself was a remarkable act of organisation, and that is a theme: the major work of her post-songwriting life was ‘The War of All Against All: A Review of The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1957-1968’. This journal was one she edited, run from the University of Michigan, its name a deliberate avoidance of the word ‘peace’ in order to keep suspicions of communism at bay. Fishman recounts a video conference with some academics, the better to understand what she had achieved with this. ‘Research expert’ Ivan Bojanic skims it on the call and can’t quite believe what he is reading:

‘Um, you guys?’ he interjected after some time. ‘This is not what I expected. I thought it would essentially be a synopsis of each article, in chronological order. But this is analysis, this is personal perspective... [...] She took all these disparate pieces of research, from people who were studying a million difference nooks and crannies of this nascent field, and tried to create a single unifying narrative out of it!’ (Chapter 28)

But I am skirting around the main event, the songs, which I don’t want to pin down or reduce. I’ve got a lot of exploring left to do, is one reason. They swim in unsaidness, not infrequently turning it inside out. They are punctuated with pauses (‘fermata’) and tempo changes. Converse wrote nearly all of them while living in New York, and had a small but enthusiastic following who heard them performed at house concerts, some of them able to remember great chunks of the songs when interviewed for the book over 50 years later, without having heard them since. A recording of one of these performances is what makes up the bulk of How Sad, How Lovely. There’s a digital-only release of her home recordings, Musicks, with about twice as much material. Then there’s Connie’s Piano Songs, a set of more arty, ‘through-composed’ (as in, melody keeps evolving and doesn’t repeat) songs, left behind mostly as sheet music, and eventually released in this version, by Charlotte Mundy and Christopher Goddard (Phil wasn’t too keen on these, not that he had any duty to be). I’m in love with the line in ‘Trouble’ that Fishman took for his play: ‘A star has burnt my eye’. Even more in context, actually:

My bed is made of stone
A star has burnt my eye
I’m going down to the willow tree
And teach her how to cry

As he points out, this predates Johnny Cash’s ‘Now I taught the weeping willow how to cry’ from ‘Big River’ by eight years. He wonders if he could somehow have heard it. How influence can work when the original has failed to enter the big river of popular culture. Which he questions as a way of going about things:

How many more Connie Converses are there out there - marginalized talents waiting to be heard; artists and thinkers lacking the emotional tools, the encouragement, the self-esteem, the community, needed to thrive? And what price do we pay, as individuals and as a culture, by continuing to use fame, wealth, property, and power as our primary metrics for success? (Afterword)

Good questions, and I’d like to know what the alternatives are. Perhaps fragmentation is a feature rather than a bug, and we should just give up on the notion of a culture everyone can be assumed to have access to. Perhaps that was always an imperialist idea.

Whatever Works

Release day for the Mayfly Two album we trailed with the ‘Anti That’ single a few months ago. It’s baroque electronic indie pop, or something along those lines. The songs are warm, weathered, soft, sharp, comic, cosmic. They can cure you or skewer you, depending. They inspired the best arrangements I’m ever likely to make. We hope you enjoy them.

Instrumentals

Mayfly Two also have some instrumentals up, which could do with some ears if you would be so kind. These have been really fun to do, swapping loops or melodies and messing around with them. Me on guitar, both of us on beats and synths. Free to download at least until we decide it’s finished.

Anti That (Rock Version)

Not sure where to begin with this. Perhaps in April 2009, when Anne Bacheley and I collaborated on a track, ‘Anti That’, named after Stephen Pastel’s review of her album Headquarters:

Another record that we’re loving is Anne Bacheley’s Headquarters, a self released CD-R. From Poitiers, France, Anne looks like the secret third member of Melody Dog, and makes winning old-school indie music that lands somewhere between Holly Golightly and a less chaotic Comet Gain. Anne’s voice is perfect and imperfect, her playing primitive and gallant, her melodies true. It would be so great to see Anne get a record label to help out but maybe she’s anti-that.

It was finished but untitled when I heard the demo, and I suggested that title, but it could well have been written as a riposte to the very idea of getting help from a record label. I thought I heard something of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ in it, a certain worthy strumminess, that I set about unpicking with a beat pinched from Can and some very un-strummy Spanish guitar lines. And then, at the climax of the song, which literally cries out for power chords, I cut away almost everything but the drums, and let the vocal do the talking. Which it did, easily: it’s a great tune, and a great chord sequence, which only needs a light touch to do its work. It turned out really well, with this weird, lean, pop sound (like something on Morr Music, Anne always says). It didn’t rock though.

So anyway, I sent her my Morsels set towards the end of last year, which was not a little inspired by the playful hyperactivity of her anneemall EPs, and we – finally – ended up collaborating on more of her songs. It’s been worth the long wait, they’re so good I can’t tell you. And the reason I can’t tell you is that we’re looking for a record label to release the album we made of them, because they deserve to be heard. Don’t worry, when it’s time to decide we won’t compromise. And we probably won’t even find one. But! In the meantime, here is the opposite of that first version, played almost entirely with power chords. Rockism / Poptimism – who cares anymore, why not be both?

Morsels part four

Photo by Allan Gray.

Other gear / sound credits: Hologram Microcosm for guitar glitch and reverb; Boards of Deluge for the melting synths; Meat Beats’ Juno Works for more conventional but very useful sounds.

Morsels part three

Morsels part two

This actually may be a bit more focused. Fewer very short bits, anyway. And I wondered: should I have mentioned the Deluge specifically? I don’t want this to be about the gear used to make it. It’s also a bit unfair on the Loupé looping pedal. On the one hand, they’re great bits of kit; on the other, who cares how?

Morsels

I haven’t been writing much the last few years, but have been trying to make music quite a bit of the time, without really finishing anything, so here’s a thing I might do: gather the fragments as I go, and put them online. Last month I got my Synthstrom Deluge back from having a new screen fitted, which is what caused this particular burst of activity, and is I think why there are so many different techniques in use here. I worked out how to record guitar loops on it, synchronised to my looper pedal. I tried using a volume pedal for the first time, to fade notes in, à la early Tenniscoats. There’s some cacophonous FM synthesis, and a harpsichord. There’s all sorts. Future installments may (possibly) be more focused. Drums crackle a bit as they’re from the lovely Vinyl Drums From Mars sample pack.

Robert Forster – ‘Grant & I: Inside and Outside The Go-Betweens’

It feels terrible to admit this, but I never got on with Grant’s contribution to the final Go-Betweens album, Oceans Apart. My first impression, which stuck, was that his songs were empty, prettified confections (which was maddening, as Robert’s were all brilliant). His ego, kept in check on the other two post-comeback LPs by the modest, as-live sound, inflated like a soft balloon in the vacuum of Mark Wallis’ ornate production, which failed to come close to his work on 16 Lovers Lane. This impression built on an idea of Grant as humourless and conceited, thinking of himself as a rock star, as opposed to Robert, who always had his tongue in his cheek. Then he died. What bad timing: the man who wrote incredible songs like ‘Bye Bye Pride’ and ‘Apology Accepted’, left the world with this nonsense? And why was the consensus all the other way: that he died when his life and his art were at a high point? I didn’t understand. This book is a good counter to that way of thinking. I’m unlikely to change my mind about the Oceans Apart songs, but the story Robert tells about Grant shows how fragile he was, and gives reasons for the bluster that you’d have to have a heart of stone not to forgive.

Here’s an early description of Grant at university, where the pair first met:

Outside, the world was whirring, people were doing things, conducting business. His contribution: reclining in bed in the early afternoon […] reading the latest edition of Film Comment. […] He seemed remarkably unattached from the start; his connection to the world, I was to discover, was through the things he loved, even as they disconnected him further from the world around him. (p. 29)

Nothing too tragic there, you’d have thought, and Forster says something similar of himself, imagining returning from tour with a suitcase full of books and records: ‘Well-stocked seclusion – my favourite position in life’ (p. 236). But where he settles down in later life, marries and starts a family, McLennan almost always lives in shared accommodation, a perpetual student without the discipline of study. His first serious relationship came quite late, with bandmate Amanda Brown, and the big trauma of his life was her leaving him on being sacked from the band, a consequence he had not foreseen. He spent years trying to get her back. He didn’t have the worldliness to think through the consequences, or to deal with the fallout. (Forster: ‘I wanted to say, You’re the innocent one. You’re the one left in the house crying’ (p. 219)). So he drank, and he acted the rock star. It seems likely that what could come across as arrogance was a defence mechanism, because he didn’t know how to deal with the world. And then, too, there is Forster’s bleak assessment of the underlying reason for Grant’s heart attack, and the careless living which led to it: ‘the sour condition of Grant’s soul’ (p. 330). How on earth can that be squared with his ecstatic reaction to hearing ‘Finding You’ for the first time?

Forster doesn’t let the tragedy of the end dominate the book. It’s a detailed and fair assessment of The Go-Betweens’ career, filled with period detail and wry comment. Like this thumbnail sketch when Grant moved flat:

The landlord was known as the Man with the Movable Wig, who upon discovering you were a musician would insist on playing you Switched-on Bach. (p. 82)

Or this summary of 20 years in the political wilderness for his home state of Queensland:

Like most politicians who preach God, Joh [Bjelke-Petersen] had tolerated shonky business deals, had no regard for the environment, and naturally no interest in the arts. (pp. 243-4)

On the music, he judges Before Hollywood, Liberty Belle, 16 Lovers Lane, The Friends of Rachel Worth and Oceans Apart as good records, the other albums wanting. The account of the session for Tallulah’s singles is particularly dispiriting:

With costs high and deposit paid, the best we could do was slink off to a backroom and rehearse the B sides, to be called out one by one over the next four days, like witnesses at a murder trial, and feed our parts into an unremarkable churn that were to be our singles. (p. 174)

The tug between pop potential and the actual sound of the band is one that led to some awful recording decisions, starting with 1984’s Spring Hill Fair, where the drumming which held together Before Hollywood was substituted for drum machines, and the piecemeal approach Forster describes above (I love drum machines, but they aren’t Lindy Morrison). The to-ing and fro-ing between record labels, for which the band could have been named, had they known in advance, was part of the reason for this, as was the era in which they lived, which was in thrall to recording technology (the multi-track, the sequencer) in a way which ours, curiously, isn’t. Although the catalogue is uneven for this reason, it’s interesting, too: there is always jeopardy, the possibility of being dropped by the label giving a hunger to proceedings. When this happened to Forster after his solo LP Warm Nights in 1996, he relocated to Germany with his wife, and he reflects:

As I strode the medieval alleyways in the cold, pull-the-collar-up weather, a new persona was born. Self-preserving, forgotten, withered, proud, discarded – glorious emotions, for how you imagine yourself to be is as important as talent when writing songs. (p. 276)

‘The Frankenstein Phantasmagoria’, Dundee Congregational Church & The Howff, 24th November

From Wikipedia’s entry on the Phantasmagoria:

a form of horror theatre that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images such as skeletons, demons and ghosts onto walls, smoke or semi-transparent screens, typically using rear projection to keep the lantern out of sight. […] Some shows added all kinds of sensory stimulation, including smells and electric shocks.

Shocks and smells aside, that is a fair description of the second half of this magic lantern show by Jeremy Brooker, assisted by his wife Carolyn: they used mirrors against the lantern’s lenses to project spooks around the church walls and roof, and the previously flat screen was drawn back to reveal several more layers, including a semi-transparent gauze, a rainbow-shimmering, swaying surface which turned out to be bubble-wrap kept moving by a fan, and at the back the contours of a body topped by a skull in the centre of the screen-space. The effect of the projections on this was quite dazzling, much of it softened by the layers so that it became purely a visual pleasure (shoegaze for the eyes, cathedrals of light), but scenes came and went too, making the body and skull more or less obvious. Alongside this, Timothy Didymus played an instrument made from twelve glass turntables and wine glasses, a kind of reverse-engineered glass armonica, but softer-sounding, as (he explained afterwards) he had leather pads pressed against the sides of the glasses, producing the sound. It was a beautiful, immersive experience: memento mori ameliorated.

The whole event was immersive, actually. It began at the nearby Howff, a graveyard in the centre of Dundee with graves from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Guide Eddie Small met the audience there, in the dark and in the rain, wearing a black cloak and accompanied by two assistants dressed as friars, with lamps, who herded us this way and that, out of the way of the traffic. Small started by explaining something I didn’t quite catch about the Howff and Mary Shelley (she dug up bodies there and made a prototype monster, perhaps?), before going on to explain that James Bowman Lindsay, inventor of the incandescent light bulb, was not buried there, but in Dundee’s Western Cemetery. What the Howff did have, was an open-air mortuary (‘people were dying to get in’), and none the people buried there had a funeral, because, he said, there were none in Scotland for four hundred years prior to 1920. Is this really true? It doesn’t pass the quick Google test, but who knows? It certainly created a nice ghostly feeling, which was only intensified by walking down a dark side street to the church’s back entrance, past a large back-projection of the reanimation scene from Bride of Frankenstein in one of its windows. In the church hall before we were permitted access to ‘the other side’ (the church itself, where the performance was), organisers Keith Williams and Matthew Jarron wore white lab coats, and the darkened room boasted an impressive array of grisly medical equipment from the university’s collection, the better to consider the way of all flesh, bone and sinew prior to the main event.

The magic lantern show, as Brooker explained in a talk afterwards, was not a re-telling of Frankenstein. Rather, it explored themes relating to the novel, using a combination of genuine Victorian slides, copies, and entirely original slides. He told us that there are no Victorian magic lantern slides telling the story of Frankenstein, so he had to be inventive, adapting and recontextualising. He said he had made seventy slides for the show (one was of the entrance to the Howff), which is an extraordinary amount of work: I hope it survives in some form, either a recording or repeat performances (there were just two over the weekend). It would definitely bear repeat viewings.

Here are some of the slides which stood out: a woman in profile, full length, looking through a door at a body against a black background (more like a medical diagram than a ‘real’ body), I think a skeleton to begin with, then with layers of muscle. Similar but more horrific was a woman in medium shot, holding a black mask in front of the top half of her face, with just the eyes showing through. All set for a masquerade. She moved the mask down, so you could see her face. Then back up, and down again, and the top half of her face had become a skull, as though the flesh of her face were itself a mask. It made me think of Mark Fisher’s discussion of horror and pornography in his essay and blog post ‘Let me be your fantasy’, which I read recently in his gigantic posthumous collection k-punk:

‘Why stop with the genitalia?’ Baudrillard asks, ‘Who knows what profound pleasure is to be found in the visual dismemberment of mucous membranes and smooth muscles?’ Cronenberg’s early work – from Shivers and Rabid through to Videodrome – is an answer to that very question. Cronenberg famously posed his own question, ‘why aren’t there beauty contests for the inside of the body?’ (Mark Fisher, k-punk, p. 64, and online here.)

There was nothing explicitly sexual about the magic lantern show (though there was a slide featuring a suggestively growing nose), but perhaps the peeling back of flesh for entertainment necessarily entails a sexual element.

There was also the fascination of: how was that done? All sorts of trickery is possible, between the magic lantern’s three lenses (allowing superimposition) and the manipulation of individual slides. But at the same time, it is all done live and there is nowhere to hide: everything is visible, blown up to screen size. There was an arctic section, with a ship in silhouette moving like a ghost from slide to slide. There was a whaling scene in which the sea went red with blood. Brooker said that this was his modern sensibility: Victorian whaling scenes tend to be heroic rather than horrific. There was a section on acrobatics, which I think was there on Brooker’s previous visit to Dundee, when he put on a Christmas show at the university. That was magical, because, to an audience used to video and computer graphics (and no longer used to overhead projectors), magic lanterns represent an entirely different way of manipulating images. It has a nostalgic feeling to it, sure, and the Victoriana is part of the appeal, but it’s also alien to see movement on a screen without Frames Per Second. The whirling phantasmagoria of the finale to this show, with its textures, layers, and its sprites and brownies darting around the periphery of our vision was something else again. Near the end of this sequence, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Death is not the End’ was played, like a pilot announcing a landing, signalling that we had strayed well beyond a story about science and the reanimation of flesh, to the territory of the soul. The screen, the entire place, was haunted.

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The Frankenstein Phantasmagoria was part of the Being Human Festival, and timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the novel’s publication.
Jeremy Brooker is chair of the Magic Lantern Society.
Timothy Didymus’ Kosmiche Glass LP (this is also the name of his wine-glass instrument) is available on Bandcamp.

The Onion Club – ‘American Apocalypse Now!’ at Hospitalfield Arts, Arbroath, 27th January

In the week that Mark E. Smith died, we ventured out for (I think) our third winter Onion Club show of recent years, at the best venue they play, a sort of mini-castle with a chandelier and a huge oil painting (or at least its frame) visible through a first storey window, and rooms with curved walls which snuggle together to make a courtyard. The room where they play, on the ground floor, has a low ceiling and tastefully lit stone walls. I imagine they probably live there all the time, playing non-stop, and every so often have the public around to see how they’re getting along. Which era they’ve reached, what spin they’re putting on things. As previously reported, their touchstone era is the 1920s, and they interpret songs from other times and places as though all times and places were the Weimar Republic. I am reaching the end of my historical tether here, but a quick search throws up:

Like few others, the names Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht are synonymous with the radical politics and cultural innovation of the Weimar Republic. Most famously with their hit Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), but also with numerous other collaborative pieces, the duo represented everything that the Nazi regime declared its enemy. The Jewish Weill and the Marxist Brecht were thus some of the earliest and most obvious targets of Nazi cultural oppression. (From holocaustmusic.ort.org).

In taking on the State Of America And How It’s Going To Kill Us All Before Trump’s First Term Is Up, via a cabaret show, The Onion Club are connecting with a powerful moment of twentieth century history. When the public got to choose between glitter and gold, and chose the wrong one. Clearly the public has not learned a damn thing, in the intervening years.

Opening with a mournful, shattered take on Rufus Wainwright’s ‘Going to a Town’ (‘I’m so tired of you, America’ the dominant refrain), they embarked upon a more sombre apocalypse than might have been expected. Much of the tone of the show, though there were plenty of fun moments, was quietly regretful, the big surprise for me how beautiful they made Radiohead’s ‘Lucky’: I’m not a fan, but it was great, funereal, lost, delicate as dew. And, as, S. pointed out, ‘pull me out of the aircrash’ works as a retrospective 9/11 reference. I’m also not a fan of Depeche Mode or The Doors, but wonders were done with ‘Personal Jesus’ and ‘The End’, for the first of which Pauline became a hectoring preacher, here’s a bit of her intro:

The bad news is you are all damned to eternal hellfire and perpetual torment on account of making diabolical deals with the devil who is walking among us on this earth, who is among us this very evening in the so-called hallowed halls of the arts, which as we know is a breeding ground for lefties, liberals, lesbians and pinko faggots [delighted yelps from the audience here]. The good news is, ah can save you. […] You just need to form an orderly line and get your CREDIT CARDS READY, ALRIGHT!

Stephen pared back his piano playing to thumped notes, and added some extra bass fizz with the Microkorg at his elbow. The preacher bluesed it up for all the cash he could charm or scare out of his congregation. Meanwhile ‘The End’ was a plink plonky vamp with a chilling interlude in which New York was glimpsed, after the bomb. No, wait, after the Martians’ death rays. Of course.

As well as the Microkorg, there was another synth stage left, just past the angel wings, used for helicopter noises after ‘Crack of Doom’ and in the run up to ‘Lucky’. This was quite a radical departure for a group that is usually hard line piano, singing and dressing up. That, and the fact that none of the songs in the set (as far as I could tell) pre-dated the 1960s felt like a shift of approach: facing up to a more modern world, perhaps. After the heavy stuff, and the religious stuff (‘God is in the House’ and ‘God’s Away on Business’ remained from previous sets) Pauline donned an American flag and a big gold star for Randy Newman’s ‘Political Science’, its jokey tone horribly close to the actual political discourse of Trump:

We give them money, but are they grateful?
No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful
They don’t respect us, so let’s surprise them
Let’s drop the big one and pulverise them

What followed as an encore was anything but jokey: John Grant’s ‘Glacier’, a stately and defiant unravelling of the order of things (specifically, the straight, theocratic order of things), a plea not to blindly follow, to trust your own convictions. The personal a rejection of the political (at least, as politics is now). The image of the glacier as pain, ‘carving out deep valleys / And creating spectacular landscapes’ is beautiful. I didn’t know it, clearly I need to listen to more John Grant. In a prolonged instrumental section at the end, Pauline handed out some felt pens for people to write on her arms and back with, bringing the audience in directly at the end of a vulnerable song. I guess this was a counter to its individualism: once the ‘fuckers’ of the lyric have been rejected, it’s important to rebuild too. After the rejection, or after the apocalypse.

____________________

Appendix

Links accumulated writing this review: The Tiger Lillies – ‘Crack of Doom’, Kurt Weill bio, Laurie Anderson – ‘O Superman’, Allen Ginsberg – ‘America’, Father John Misty – ‘When the God of Love Returns There’ll be Hell to Pay’ (lyrics), ‘Pirate Jenny’, Randy Newman – ‘Political Science’ (lyrics), John Grant – ‘Glacier’ (lyrics), ‘Glacier’ (Guardian piece & video).

Misgivings: Is it fair to pile on the links to Weimar when there were no songs from that period, and their sound has moved on? Probably not. But also, in the opposite direction:



Goodnight, Mark E.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham, 28th September

My sister and her husband went to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on Thursday. She and I were always fans, and the way she describes the concert, it sounds like practically a religious experience this time around. The videos below (not by her, but of the same concert) look like nothing so much as a huge gospel gathering. It looks intense. It looks amazing. Over to her:
____________________

We went to see Nick Cave last night, R. and I, in Nottingham and it was just the most incredible experience. It was at a large arena, similar to the NEC. Browsing the merchandise before the show, which consisted of the usual ‘Loverman’ tea towels, some recent records and a selection of accessories including a rather hideous Nick Cave doll, R. purchased a leather backed Bad Seed keyring to replace the fabric O’Neill one he’s had for the last decade or so. Wow, I thought.

We sat waiting in our plastic seats with trays of chips that cost four pounds each. I was on the end of a row, which meant I could swing my legs over the side of my chair and perch my feet comfortably on an aisle step. We were quite far back but happy enough with our spot. Why would you, when you’re over a certain age, want to stand up for two hours, hot and uncomfortable, we mused? I’ll tell you why a bit later on.

It was dark. The stage lit up. The Bad Seeds took their places. Warren Ellis’ violin started screeching ominously. My hero was coming.

Here I come now, here I come
I hear you been out there looking for something to love
        (‘Anthrocene’)

There he was. The sharp tailored suit. The hair combed back like a raven’s wing. He sat briefly for a few gentle piano chords but then he went straight to his crowd. And there he remained for the majority of the night, leaning in to the fans and holding their outstretched hands.

People shouted to him, wanting to engage him in conversation, but he said very little. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said genuinely. ‘I’m shy.’ A group near the stage broke into the happy birthday song. A quick Google search later and we realised that six days ago Nick Cave had turned sixty, which was hard to believe. He accepted a card from a fan, opened it and put it on the piano. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very kind.’ He wasn’t shy in his stage performance though. During ‘Stagger Lee’, he stage dived into the crowd arriving nose to nose with a group of burly men just in time to scream: ‘I'll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get one fat boy's asshole’! A different skill set, I suppose.

It must be a wonderful thing to look back at such an expansive career and pick out songs for your set list. R. had said to me before the show that Nick Cave is one of the only musicians he can think of who has got better and better. I take his point and when immersed in the beauty of ‘Distant Sky’, with stillness across the arena like a collective quiet intake of breath, you know that this is as good as it gets. But then, it can’t get any better than ‘The Ship Song’ or ‘The Mercy Seat’ or ‘Tupelo’ either. Old songs, new songs, violence and tenderness: an eclectic mix of brilliant music that flowed seamlessly.

The encore was incredible. It started with ‘The Weeping Song’, in which Cave encouraged rather ridiculous fast hand clapping from the audience and then stopped and started it like a conductor. He disappeared from view several times, diving into the crowd. He finally reappeared like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, leading hundreds of fans onto the stage by the power of his music. He then performed ‘Stagger Lee’ which, of course, they all went crazy for. That’s why it was a good idea to buy a standing ticket!

The very last song of the night was ‘Push The Sky Away’. He abandoned the fans on the stage at this point and, to my delight, came our way. He leapt around the arena from empty chairs to steps. Could this man really be sixty years old? The standing area was quite empty towards the back, especially now that there were a good many folk on the stage. ‘C’mon, c’mon,’ he beckoned urgently, gathering a new crowd at his feet. I jumped up of course and rushed down to him. I looked up and it was the closest we had ever been. He stood above me, his arms outstretched singing:

And some people say it’s just rock and roll
Oh but it gets you right down to your soul

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The Pastels and Ela Orleans, The Glad Café, Glasgow, 1st September

There was a song I half-wrote once, which never got any further than:

I took a long vacation
In the wilds of the outback
And I may be mistaken
But I don’t think I’ll be coming back
’Cause there are birds and a sky
And a blue in your eye
And a truck on a trail
And a wind to set sail
So fuck these corporations

That last line capsized it, I must have had a particularly rubbish job at the time. The ‘truck on a trail’ bit was a Pastels reference, of course, and last night Stephen took a swipe at the indie rules of old by congratulating the audience for being enthusiastic about two slow songs in a row, in contrast to ’80s audiences, who would heckle even one slow song and demand ‘Truck Train Tractor’, indignant that they may not get a saleable high-octane bootleg out of the occasion. Tascam recorder in hand, obviously I had to shout out for ‘Truck Train Tractor’, but a slow, gentle ‘Boats’ demonstrated how bad an idea that would have been. The most extreme point of The Pastels’ journey into gentleness and calm was probably the 2007 set of ‘quiet music’ I wrote about for Tangents, best represented on record by the Two Sunsets LP. Since then there has been a definite re-introduction of a rock element to their music, with songs like ‘Night Time Made Us’ (an all-time favourite, and amazing last night) and ‘Wrong Light’. In the small back room of the Glad Café, they sounded fantastic, particularly on a rejuvenated and extended ‘Frozen Wave’, with Ela Orleans contributing some wild vocals (and, between songs, a hilarious non-apology about ‘coming over here, stealing your Pastels’). Another nice surprise was Katrina singing ‘Thru Your Heart’, her own song, but one Stephen usually sings.

Ela’s own set was beautiful too and, aside from ‘In The Night’, deliciously crisp and devoid of rock. In tone it was most like her Lost album, which is to say, song-based, rather than taking in the sonic tendrils and detours of her two double LPs. Her approach to sampling reminds me a little of Bill Wells, in that a repeated fragment can take on all kinds of colours and intonations from the sounds going on around it. It can also be far more sophisticated, but when used simply like this it is often at its most affecting, entwined with delay-heavy, plaintive vocals. It’s a great balance, and you wouldn’t want to be without either the intricate, curious explorations or the directness of a line like ‘I am lost without you’. It is going to be fascinating to see which direction she takes next.

____________________

I didn’t take any photos, but plenty of other people did.

While we’re waiting for the next one to arrive

It may be the natural ageing process, a helpful Quietus reappraisal, The Mountain Goats’ electric piano-led homage ‘Andrew Eldritch is Moving Back to Leeds’, but more and more frequently it seems to me that The Sisters of Mercy’s 1990 album Vision Thing is one of the most vital records around. It may be those things, but it is also the dire state of politics, headed up by Trump, whose election Eldritch hinted may even tempt him to record again. It would be great if he could bring the venom he oozed into the veins of Bush Snr to bear on the current president. Then again, it’s no stretch at all to simply transpose the album’s title track to now:

It’s a small world and it smells bad
I’d buy another if I had
Back
What I made
For another motherfucker in a motorcade

The narrator in the song shifts between having been paid for (as above) and having paid for (‘Take back what I paid’) the assassination of a US president. It’s obvious from ‘motorcade’ that the allusion is to JFK, but who is to say if he is the target on both occasions? One interpretation of the song could be that the person who made his fortune from a contract for killing Kennedy blew it all having a later president done away with. They’re all just another motherfucker in a motorcade. Some worse than others, with Trump the mother of them all. Typically, ‘motherfucker’ in Eldritch’s usage is razor sharp, and relates to the bad-smelling ‘small world’, which the president intends to exploit for all the oil he and his oligarch chums can get, and is the most surprising turn of this dark, dirty, gasoline-guzzling song: it’s actually eco-friendly. To the bridge:

What do we need to make our world come alive?
What does it take to make us sing?
While we’re waiting for the next one to arrive
One million points of light
One billion dollar vision thing

The ‘vision thing’ bit relates to Bush’s search for a palatable cause during the 1988 election campaign (obviously you can’t campaign on motherfucking, you have to have a cover story). Maybe the wall across Mexico is Trump’s vision thing. Theresa May’s vision thing is Brexit. ‘While we’re waiting for the next one to arrive’ though… the next world? There isn’t going to be any next world. We only have one. Eldritch is pointing this out at the same time as summing up right wing environment policy (‘waiting’), at the same time as drawing Bush’s cynicism across the sky in the only terms he would be able to understand (‘one billion dollar’), and illustrating too the paucity of imagination of a Republican trying to grasp what the good things of life might be, for no other reason than drawing voters in and legitimising motherfuckery. It’s dizzying and brilliant, and once you’ve taken it in, the song’s opening couplet, which at first comes on like macho rock bravado, transfigures itself into a protest against greed and ridiculous consumption:

Twenty five whores in the room next door
Twenty five floors and I need more

This only really hit me in the light of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, which argues powerfully against consumerism and the model of economic growth at all costs upon which the modern western world and free market capitalism are based:

Free market ideology may still bind the imaginations of our elites, but for most of the general public, it has been drained of its powers to persuade. The disastrous track record of the past three decades of neoliberal policy is simply too apparent. Each new blast of statistics about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world’s wealth exposes the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal that they always were. Each new report of factory fires in Bangladesh, soaring pollution in China, and water cut-offs in Detroit reminds us that free trade was exactly the race to the bottom that so many warned it would be.

Deregulated industry is never going to give us the emission reductions we need to prevent catastrophic global warming, she argues: legislation is the only way. Society can change, government can take back control of the things it needs to in order curb the market, and ultimately, this would restore the values we should have had all along: fairness and quality of life over profit. The bottom line would no longer be the bottom line. I’ll return to this book, but wanted to note, for what it’s worth, in advance of the general election this week, that Labour want a state which provides more than opportunity for its citizens, which doesn’t let people down for not earning enough. Money always matters, but wealth is not a moral quality. Don’t vote for a motherfucker on Thursday.

Johnny Marr – ‘Set the Boy Free’

Through music, the people who follow you have something of you in their life, and in some ways they’re like you, even if they think they’re just a fan. (p. 357)

As a teen with a classical guitar, and some fairly tortuous lessons behind me, I made the transition to playing songs through Johnny Marr’s example. I had the sheet music books of The Smiths and Meat is Murder, and, laid out as they were for piano with guitar chords above, they contained enough clues to attempt reconstructions of the wonders he was up to, just beneath the surface (it was always a disappointment when the piano part followed the vocal melody). Ludicrously, I spent hours grappling with ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ without realising that a capo would have rendered it possible to play. As it was, my fingers contorted into C-shape bar chords that were impossible to move between smoothly. I could play the guitar and bass parts to ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ and ‘Well I Wonder’ simultaneously, after a fashion. The spindly ‘Suffer Little Children’ was another favourite (just the guitar part for that one). It was a great way to learn, and of course I didn’t realise how unusual Marr’s guitar parts were – just as the rest of The Smiths seem not to have done when they tried to replace him in 1987 (you might as well have replaced Morrissey). He offers a few insights into how he arrived at them:

instead of focusing solely on what the guitars were doing I would try to play what I was hearing on the whole record, giving me an accidental ‘one-man band’ approach. (p. 30)

I was finding inspiration in all sorts of music, but mostly I was listening to girl groups. I wondered if the approach on those records could be applied to a guitar band, and I worked on eradicating any traces of traditional rock guitar that might be in my songwriting, while trying to maintain my own sound. (p. 127)

He’s also just the right age for T-Rextacy, which explains the music to ‘Panic’:

In 1972, not long after I bought ‘Jeepster’, T.Rex released the single ‘Metal Guru’, a record I thought was so beautiful, it sounded like it came from another world, yet was strangely familiar to me. I watched him perform it on Top of the Pops, and was so ecstatic after seeing it that I got on my bike and rode off down the roads until I got lost, then had to find my way home when I came back to my senses. (p. 28)

Isn’t that lovely? It’s echoed in later passages when he would run ten miles or so before each show he played with The Cribs, and it links to the book’s title, which amounts to a defence of his career choices. The section dealing with The Smiths’ split places the blame not on any individual, but on the pressure of not having proper management. There is also the decidedly odd session just after Strangeways, Here We Come was finished, which produced ‘Work is a Four Letter Word’ and ‘I Keep Mine Hidden’, in which Marr was made to feel like a session musician in his own band. Towards the end of the book, he says that The Smiths couldn’t have lasted any longer, because of the personalities involved. Those personalities didn’t have to take him for granted though. Compared to Morrissey’s account, which ‘mostly consists of side swipes at Geoff Travis and the hippies at Rough Trade’ as I thought after reading Autobiography, Marr’s is much less partisan and paranoid. Even when the pressure leads him into crazy behaviour like trying to steal the master tapes of The Queen is Dead or driving like a manic when he can’t even drive at all because he’s never learnt to, he just comes out and says it. His book has none of the literary ambition of Autobiography… but this is just stating the obvious. Morrissey wrote a self-absorbed Morrissey book, and Marr wrote a book absorbed in everything but the self: in guitars, the studio, bands, celebrities he has played with. Read both of them and you get the picture.

Damon Krukowski – ‘The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World’

Analog refers to a continuous stream of information, whereas digital is discontinuous. (p. 9)

One of the lectures on the computing course I did in 2003/4 opened with a statement to the effect that everything digital is also analogue, and everything analogue is also digital. The first part is true because a signal containing digital information will itself be physical, and therefore bound to have variations, but within thresholds which allow it to be recognised as a series of discrete values (i.e. as 0 or 1). I can’t remember exactly why the second part was said to be true, but I suppose that any parsing of information involves categorising it, ending up with a discrete value. Speech is broken down into syllables as it is spoken and built back up into sentences as it is heard. Music is built back up into notes, chords, rhythms, words – and noise. Damon Krukowski’s book is an argument in favour of leaving the building-back-up to the brain, rather than outsourcing it to the microprocessor and the corporations in charge of the algorithms which determine what we see and hear. He thinks we need the noise, even if we choose to discard most of it.

It’s not just about the argument, though, and the book is often best at its most tangential. Looking for a passage on the difference between analogue and digital recording just now, I found relevant sections in two or three chapters, in amongst discussions of pianolas, copyright, listening to sports radio along to TV coverage, mistakes and even studio directions you can hear if you listen closely enough to Pet Sounds, quadrophonic sound, the loudness wars, Can getting their analogue studio to play itself, and the accumulation of so much music in iTunes that it becomes impossible to listen carefully enough (‘thick listening’ (p. 119)). This is the closest I found:

In the digital audio workstation, where you are at any moment in the recording is precisely determined by the timescale, but when any given sound occurs is not. All times are equally available to it. Compare this to an analog recording on tape: the tape itself has no absolute time value, but any moment on that length of tape is fixed in relation to all the moments it is not. (p. 188)

That is, unless you splice the tape, which is discussed in relation to John Cage’s dense ‘Williams Mix’, which is in turn compared to The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’:

rather than compressing […] time by cutting it up as Cage had, the Beatles layered over and over the same length of tape, until it was so thick with time that listening to it reminded people of an acid trip. (p. 116)

There is much discussion of plus and minus points of stereo – minus, because it takes music away from shared space and into headphones, effectively de-socialising it. This incident crops up repeatedly:

I saw a woman fall from her bicycle in the middle of the street. ‘What happened?’ I asked as I helped her up – the one car nearby had hardly come close. She took her headphones off and said, ‘I was totally self-absorbed. Suddenly I realised there was a car in the road. I braked and fell.’ (p. 19)

The conclusion drawn is:

She surrendered her shifting analog sense of what is signal and what is noise, replacing it with the digital stream of information on her headphones – a stream that is signal only. (p. 51)

Here, Krukowski pushes his thesis too far. It is fair enough to blame the headphones for the woman’s disorientation, but it is ridiculous to claim that it was anything to do with the music being digital. An analogue Walkman could have produced exactly the same effect. There are a few moments of imprecision like this. He mis-defines crosstalk as ‘feeding a part of one channel’s sound into the other in order to re-create the kinds of binaural clues we use to locate sounds in space’ (p. 51) (this is panning – crosstalk refers to unwanted noise leaking between channels), and proceeds to defend something which was never under attack. He says that mp3s are designed to sound worse than CDs, which would be a lousy design aspiration. And while I am nit-picking, the separation of everything into signal and noise can seem arbitrary. Social media is one of the digital innovations which works by eliminating noise, he argues, leaving just signal, and no way to orient yourself. In a certain sense this is true (you can’t hear the tone of voice in a Tweet, and its brevity maximises the potential for a binary interpretation), but on the other hand, it often seems that social media is nothing but noise.

All of which is slightly beside the point. ‘Signal’ and ‘noise’ can mean a lot of different things, but something has definitely been going on with music this millennium, and most of it has been lapped up without question, because it has involved spending less money. The New Analog puts it in all sorts of contexts, and makes a brave attempt to define what we risk losing if we don’t take off our headphones and look around.

One More Time With Feeling

It opened with a talking head in a taxi, a 3D black-and-white talking head, Warren Ellis with his 3D beard sticking out at you, saying how awkward he felt talking about it as he never usually does in interviews, never usually does at all, and before he could get to his subject the right-hand 3D frame went out of focus and the film crew in the taxi stopped filming but the audio continued over a black screen as the scene disintegrated into technical talk and exasperation. Then another messy, behind-the-scenes scene with Cave in a dressing room, preening in front of a mirror, so the 3D was mostly depth rather than protrusion. The camera captured his entrance, and lingered as he combed his hair with deft flicks. The director asked if they could do another take. Why, what was wrong with that one? There was a degree of protest, as there would be, or it would not be Nick Cave being filmed, his vanity and privacy in conflict. Nothing was wrong, everything you did was great, we’d just really appreciate another go at it.

This is a film which does a lot of lingering, and has a lot of interviews full of uncertainty and pregnant pauses. It verges on shapeless and it holds off almost its entire length from addressing its own subject (its only subject, as director Andrew Dominik says in this interview). This works because we all know, as it was in the news, and no-one watching it will not know. I suppose if you didn’t know, you’d wonder what everyone was tip-toeing around, and it would hook you that way. Nick talks in voice-over about going, for example, into a baker’s to buy, say, a loaf of bread, and one of the other customers in the queue says something to him that he doesn’t catch, so he says ‘What?’ too loudly and angrily, and the other customer says ‘We’re all with you, man,’ and he looks around and the whole queue is looking at him in sympathy and he thinks what nice people, ‘but when did I become an object of pity?’ Told not in recollection, but as a speculative scene that no doubt echoed many real ones. Narrative tricks to keep us on our toes. Listening to Skeleton Tree the following day I noticed two references to hanging around in supermarkets and wondered if the bakery had been an invention, an upgrade. I wondered if the place used in the film as the Cave house is the Cave house in real life, but I think it must be: Dominik talks about filming there, and the shutters are the same as the ones on the cover of Push The Sky Away. It’s a beautiful town house, spacious, white.

Why the speculative mode, the ‘for example’, the ‘say’? Why not tell us about an actual visit to a bakery or supermarket? Isn’t this a documentary? It is and it isn’t. Imagination and storytelling must come into play. Those are the things Nick Cave does, the things that broaden lived experience into work that can have relevance for his audience. He surprised me by saying that this actually matters to him: of course it must, but to acknowledge it is a change from the Cave of the ’80s and ’90s, who would never have been so humble. He talked, too, about the shift away from narrative in his writing. He said he doesn’t believe in stories so much now, he’d rather layer things than have the beginning, middle and end of a single thread. Ah, so that’s why the film is so loose. He said that trauma leaves no space for imagination and creativity, still not saying what the trauma was. His wife Susie found the opposite, that throwing herself into her creative work (dress design) helped, gave her something other than trauma to focus on. Nick said he had to forget his previous perfectionism and let lines in that he would normally have discarded, so the looseness is presumably there in the record too. On first listen, the thing that struck me is how much of it consists of Warren’s soundscapes, with only a few songs, nearer the end, having full band arrangements, as though it starts at the bottom of a murky pool and by its end arrives at the surface, just as the film begins with mess and out-takes and gradually accumulates structure, eventually arriving where a more conventional documentary would have started, at a deserted cliff edge.

It’s funny, too. Near the beginning, Nick’s scathing reference to ‘the 3D black-and-white camera’ which is dogging his steps, or objecting later on that Susie is being filmed emerging from the toilet (‘could you at least get the bowl out of shot?’); Warren’s reassurances to Nick that ‘Your hair looks great!’ or ‘Your hair is even better than it was before!’ This is a film about people getting on with things under the saddest of circumstances, and it goes to some lengths to focus on the getting on rather than the sad circumstances. The scene in which Susie shows and talks about a drawing Arthur did of the cliff where he died, years earlier (aged around 5), is not typical, and is more moving because of it. Nick sits at her side, silent for most of this scene. The most profound reflection, I think, was Nick’s description of the trauma as a fenced-off area to which they, his family, are bound by elastic, and they can carry on with life, but they will always be snapped back (here he snapped his fists together). The one doesn’t invalidate the other, but it colours it, changes it forever. There are some things from which one doesn’t, and doesn’t want to, recover.

BAMS 2015: Were we even at the same year?

Now, I definitely wasn’t going to do a list of favourite records this year, because I hadn’t put in the legwork (earwork?) as usual, etc., etc. I apologised to Mike, and he said ‘oh go on’, so I did after all, hoping to bolster The Chills into a good position as I knew he loved Silver Bullets too. And do you know what? It wasn’t enough. In fact, nothing in my list made it into their list at all. Theirs is over there, with lots more on Twitter too; and here are the lovely seeds I cast upon their cold hard ground:

1. Max Richter – Sleep
2. The Chills – Silver Bullets
3. Robert Forster – Songs To Play
4. Four Tet – Morning / Evening
5. Ela Orleans – Upper Hell
6. Rozi Plain – Friend
7. This Is The Kit – Bashed Out
8. Twerps – Range Anxiety
9. Mdou Moctar – Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai OST
10. Flying Saucer Attack – Instrumentals 2015