Vic Godard & Subway Sect, Edinburgh (Citrus Club) and Dundee (Dexter’s), 12th and 13th March

Story #1: We last saw Subway Sect in December 2009, though I didn’t write about it, as the set was much the same as the previous one, in 2007, and two years on from 1978 Now there were still no new songs. (Apart from ‘That Train’. Like most songwriters ever get near to a ‘That Train’). At the end, being pushed for time, Vic asked what we wanted for an encore, giving a list of three or four Sect Mark One incendiaries. One was ‘Chain Smoking’, a song S. and I love, and, positioned at Vic’s feet, we screamed ourselves hoarse in its favour. Chris joined in with the screaming; I think A. might have been a bit embarrassed. And we got our ‘Chain Smoking’ – the punk version, obviously, given the context, though I admit I’d been hoping for a dramatic switch of register at the last minute, to the tender, world weary lounge version. I still think those switches are the key to Vic.

This time the circumstances were, wonderfully, quite different. Apparently from nowhere, but perhaps drawing on the momentum of 1978 Now and its attendant shows (Vic suggests as much in Andy’s interview for Manic Pop Thrills), We Come as Aliens is the perfect contemporary Subway Sect record. Drawing on their earliest sound, but not slavishly, the album is brim full of joy with its own clatter, and brings its wayward voice (© Brogues) to bear on just the kinds of thing you’d think a fiftysomething punk turned postman would be concerned with. It is not trying to relive adolescence, it is very much a logical progression, a bemused but uncompromising survey of now. Before they came on in Dundee, Chris remarked that, enjoyable as Edinburgh School for the Deaf and Spectorbullets had been, they were also supremely ridiculous, which made them an odd choice to support the most sensible band ever. Make that ‘grounded’, and I agree.

Story #2: Support at the Edinburgh gig came from the Sexual Objects, another ridiculous band, of course, and a great one. Davy Henderson paid tribute to Vic’s parents for giving birth to him, ‘what a beautiful thing’, his mid-Atlantic, intergalactic patter perfectly pitched as always. Their set was raw and crunchy, especially the heavy opening instrumental, I wanted to dissolve into the PA. There was an aftershow party just down the road, at which Spectorbullets played, oddly mannered, but with interesting rhythmical shifts and some killer guitar lines (others admired the bass playing, but I don’t think I’m capable of admiring slap bass). They were followed by a thin blonde Swedish woman who pounded an acoustic guitar, bright-eyed and relentless, looking as though she would have been better placed in a workout video. That was exhausting. And it was hot, humid, late. I sat down, but that didn’t help. Finally giving up, I rushed to the toilets and threw up. Freshening up at the sink afterwards, I rested on my hands, looked in the mirror. Probably I have looked better. As if by magic, looking immaculate, and a good fifteen years younger than he had any right to, Davy Henderson was at my side, with some sage advice: ‘Hey, don’t snort the Carex’.

There was nothing wrong with the Edinburgh gig, nothing at all. It had the Sexual Objects in it, after all, and Subway Sect were enjoying themselves enough by the end to edge gently past the 10 PM curfew (in place to make way for a club night), delivering a playful stop / start version of ‘Music of a Werewolf’, and a rollicking ‘Chain Smoking’. But the Dundee show was better. Kicking off with ‘We Oppose All Rock and Roll’ roughly twenty four hours after leaving the stage in Edinburgh, they soon settled into a far more relaxed set. More chatty, too: Vic gleefully explained that ‘my missus’, who had gone home the previous day, doesn’t like him talking too much on stage, because ‘people want to hear your songs, not a comedy routine’. With her out of the way, he was free to tell us all sorts of nonsense, beginning with a malign hint (connected with this, I expect) that he walks past Vince Cable’s house twice a day on the way to his round, and that unlike his office, it has no police guard. We also heard of his plans for a 1982 Now album, to coincide with his retirement (still quite a way off, surely?) so that he can book a world cruise and croon the days away, with all the Songs for Sale material (but what is wrong with Songs for Sale as it is? Wonderful record. Newly re-available too, if only digitally).

We got a new song, with both the riff and the words from The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, one or both of which might need to go when they come to record it; we got ‘That Train’, ‘Nobody’s Scared’ and ‘Ne’er’, none of which graced Edinburgh, and ‘Ambition’, which did. After SP’s recent comment about ‘Ne’er’, I went and checked out the lyrics, and was pleased to find the content as wayward as the delivery:

Oh ne’er, I never wanted it
And suddenly look hey presto
But ne’er, I never wanted to be
Floggin’ me own fake pesto

It was a delight to hear him singing that, and to wonder how many of those listening unprimed noticed the line about pesto, another of those switches I was talking about. As, more overtly, was ‘Blackpool’, which has barely left my head since the EP arrived, and which shows Vic conquering another genre (music hall) with barely a second thought. The main set ended with ‘Chain Smoking’ again, S. and I dancing joyfully by this time, and continuing through ‘Et Même’ and others. Then she shouted out for ‘Chain Smoking’ as an encore, which I thought was a bit odd. Other sections of the crowd were equally enthusiastic, and though the turn out wasn’t quite what we’d hoped, actually there were plenty there to respond warmly to Vic’s songs (especially ‘Ambition’ and ‘Nobody’s Scared’, which had a few old punks throwing great shapes), and to his chat, and to get him back for two encores even though they’d gone through all their material. A very special night, many thanks to Andy and Mike for putting it on, and to Vic for coming to Dundee and making us all feel at home.

Story #3: Walking towards the taxi rank afterwards, S. realised, fifteen months on, that the beserk rumbling thing which goes ‘CHAAAAAAAIN, life is a CHAAAAAAAIN’ is the same song as the elegant ‘Chain Smoking’ she thought she had been requesting, in 2009 and half an hour previously. ‘I’m so stupid!’ Well, not really, they do have completely different tunes, and the words are pretty indistinct on the loud one. But you see what happened there? Vic switched things around on you.

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Chris’ photos.
Some reflections on the Glasgow show.

Claire Tomalin – ‘Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man’

On the preface of Late Lyrics and Earlier, published in 1922:

he refused to be labelled as a pessimist. He was an ‘evolutionary meliorist’, he insisted, who believed that the world needed both religion and rationality, and that they might be reconciled and interfused through poetry. His theories are less interesting than his poetry, and Late Lyrics is not read for its ideas. (p. 342)

I’m glad she said that, because I had been wondering. Hardy is best known, perhaps, for bucking against the trend of Victorian fiction to give characters their moral due. The good rewarded, the bad punished, the good-but-fallen conveniently killed off, to the laments of those left behind. He doesn’t shirk from the third category, of course, but the other two? In The Mayor of Casterbridge, the plot seemed to spring from character: Farfrae rewarded for being easy going and level headed; Henchard punished for being short tempered and easily flustered. Tomalin suggests there is something else at work, citing a passage at the end of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in which Hardy ‘invoked the idea of the President of the Immortals sporting with her’ (p. 221). There is a guiding hand, in other words, though not that of the Christian god:

Later still he saw the Cause of Things as ‘neither moral nor immoral, but unmoral’. (p. 223)

I can’t see how this is different from there being no guiding hand at all, but it is the closest the book gets to explaining the consistently bleak turns of event in Hardy’s plots in terms of an ideology.

The implication is that the ideology is flawed, and that it is pessimism which guides him, after all. Tomalin disapprovingly quotes a moment from Jude the Obscure, in which Jude is sorely in need of encouragement in the studies which have so little precedent amongst his class: ‘But nobody did come, because nobody does’. This, she says, is an instance of him ‘generalising falsely’ (p. 222), because sometimes helpful people do turn up (Hardy is the anti-Micawber). Jude’s position is roughly the same as Hardy’s was, as a boy, coming from a rural labouring family, harbouring scholarly ambitions. Hardy’s parents, seeing that he wasn’t cut out to be a builder, got him started as an architect, which was a step up, socially, and allowed him the move to London from where he launched his writing career. He found people who encouraged him, even before moving away, and the firms to whom he submitted his first book were not discouraging, though no-one liked it enough to publish it. And yet, ‘Reading Jude is like being hit in the face over and over again.’ (p. 254). A character willing to work hard, but dragged down by a lack of opportunity which was not his creator’s experience. Which is OK, it’s fiction after all. But what, besides drawing attention to the plight of the intellectually-inclined poor, is all this bleakness for?

The Time-Torn Man opens dramatically with the death of Hardy’s wife, Emma. ‘He was not expecting her to die, but then he had not been taking much notice of her for some time.’ (p. xvii). She had taken to sleeping in the attic; the two were estranged without either having moved out. Her eccentric behaviour seems to have been partly responsible for this, and there were suggestions by contemporaries (which Tomalin does not accept) of insanity. The estrangement seems to have been partly cultural – it is when entertaining distinguished literary guests that her odd behaviour (which might mean no more than talking too much about their dog) is most excruciating. Her own poetry is dismissed out of hand, and the novel she wrote, The Maid on the Shore, is assessed as ‘not entirely unreadable’. (p. 157)

She made no progress with her own writing and became one of those wives who regards her huband’s work as ‘our work’ and refers to it that way in public. (p. 179)

Jealousy is part of it, then. Family loyalties too – Hardy’s mother hated Emma, the reason given is that she brought him ‘neither youth nor wealth, small intelligence and no children.’ (p. 172). From 1893, Hardy began to fall in love with other women – first Florence Henniker, then Florence Dugdale, the latter becoming his wife after Emma’s death in 1912. A triumph of sorts for Dugdale, after years of sneaking around, but the death marked the point at which he began to write poems about the early days of his life with Emma. Tomalin sees in the poems Hardy wrote about her in 1912-13 a tenderness and a strength of imagination which was new in his work, and which offer a perfect illustration of the gap between life as he lived it and as he imagined it. Ironically, Emma had been aware of this gap, far more so than Florence was (she hated these poems):

Emma complained that he cared more for the women he imagined than for any real woman, a remark that suggests she understood him better than she is usually given credit for. (p. 197)

Tomalin’s enthusiasm for the poetry is infectious, and makes me want to read more of it (generally I’m not good at reading poetry, but we’ll see). It is in this gap of Hardy’s, between life and imagination, that the reason for Jude the Obscure’s suffocating trajectory can be glimpsed: temperament and pessimism are certainly factors, but really he is just being true to his art. The situation repeats itself in miniature later on, and his future second wife has a veiled warning of what is to come:

[Florence was] further exasperated by the poem he was writing on the death of his cat, described as his only real friend. When she objected that the cat was not by any means his only friend, he explained that he was ‘not exactly writing about himself but about some imaginary man in a similar situation.’ (p. 304)

A dissenting clique, a subway sect

Vic Godard made a record last year, did you notice? His first set of new songs since 2002’s Sansend, and his best since The End of the Surrey People. The artwork is so bad, it’s a puzzle: if this is what it looks like, how much care can possibly have gone into its creation? The songs are so good, though, they make the cover look like sabotage. Which might be a recurring theme: the back cover of What’s the Matter, Boy? is light years ahead of the front, for instance. This week I ordered Vic’s Blackpool EP: the cover is lovely, and a couple of well-designed postcards accompanied it. It’s not like Subway Sect have got no style, but maybe they think it’s worth more when no-one’s looking. Because no-one’s looking? Look up ‘sect’, I guess. Faction: a dissenting clique. We come as aliens. The new album is a rough ’n’ tumble state of the nation address (‘Back in the Community’, ‘Rhododendron Town’) interspersed with joyously offbeat interjections from other planets (‘That Train’, ‘Et Meme’), winding up with the Sansend recap ‘Music of a Werewolf’, which sounds more like vindication than apology. Not that Sansend is anything to apologise for (e.g. ‘Americana → Fire’ is one of Vic’s best songs), but I’m guessing its clunky beats didn’t go down well with all those old punks. A typographically obtuse note on the back of the Sexual Objects’ Cucumber reads:

"6 "WIPE YOUR TAPES WITH LIGHTNIN'%, ...Paul Reekie said that..,.

Maybe that is a tribute (Reekie died last year), or perhaps it takes in the Sect too, because another note quotes ‘Stool Pigeon’:

WE CAN STILL PICNIC
we can still picnic

It also turns out that Reekie’s is the Scottish voice running through Sansend, conjuring up in a few brief clips some kind of radical hard as nails poetry discussion in the pub group. A dissenting clique, a subway sect. The kind of thing Hugh MacDiarmid probably went in for.

What I am getting at is this: Vic Godard and Subway Sect play Dundee at Dexter’s, Castle Street on 13th March. Doors 7:30PM, tickets from Groucho’s. Spectorbullets are supporting, and a couple of plays of their album suggests they are very much worth turning up for too.

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Update: I’ve added the gig poster above (thanks Andy), and should point out that tickets are also available from We Got Tickets.

Garen Ewing – ‘The Rainbow Orchid, Volume Two’

It seems a long time since volume one of The Rainbow Orchid, but actually it is only eighteen months since I read it. The branch of Borders just down the road used to stock it, along with other comic albums in the same vein, and I had fun for a while (until Borders collapsed, three months later) catching up with Cinebook’s reprints of Lucky Luke and Iznogoud. There is an interesting interview with Garen I heard around the same time, which shows the range of his influences. It led me to Edgar P. Jacobs’ The Yellow M, and a volume of Chaland’s Freddy Lombard stories, which was much cheaper in the French edition, and a bookmark reveals that I only made it to page nineteen. But that was far enough to notice that, although the style of art is looser, Freddy looks just like Tintin. There is nobody like him in The Yellow M, but there the art is very close to Hergé’s. The plot is pure hokum, Sherlock Holmes meets Scooby Doo (taking in the crown jewels, ancient Egyptian iconography and mind control), but the artwork is meticulous, delighting in architecture and tailored clothing. T., who is involved in publishing The Rainbow Orchid, was careful to describe Garen’s influences in terms of the ligne claire style, rather than Hergé alone, which I went ahead and ignored in my post (which, er, isn’t very good, is it?) but he was right, of course. The Rainbow Orchid is a bid to broaden British interest in this French style of comic book beyond Asterix and Tintin. It would be lovely to see it happen. You want to help out with that, Waterstone’s?

Volume one ended with our heroes, Julius Chancer (‘historical research assistant’), Lily Lawrence (‘silent film actress’) and Nathaniel Crumpole (‘movie publicity agent’), being flown from France to Karachi in a small biplane by a stunt pilot. They have narrowly escaped the clutches of Urkaz Grope’s henchmen, who must stop them from finding the impossibly rare rainbow orchid. Lily’s father, Lord Reginald, has foolishly bet his title and estate on the result of an orchid competition, and Grope already has a black orchid in his possession. Lord Reginald may have been drugged before he agreed to the bet – there is plenty of hokum in this story, too. With the scene already set, volume two is free to concentrate on the thrill of the chase, and plot developments are more subtle. It is suggested that the military want the rainbow orchid for their own purposes, and there are various dark hints about Grope’s ultimate goal. He doesn’t need the money – crates and trucks emblazoned ‘Grope Bananas’ and ‘Grope Grain’ in Europe and India indicate that he has business interests everywhere. He has the journalist William Pickle kidnapped, then has his growing army of guards dress up in knights’ tunics and gold-coloured masks, like he’s accumulating an army of medieval cybermen. There is some nice character development too – a slight hint at flirtation between Julius and Lily, and Nathaniel Crumpole’s burgeoning interest in animals. He buys a camel, rides an elephant and sneaks a snow leopard cub into his knapsack, antagonising its mother somewhat. No longer the cynical Hollywood opportunist of volume one, he has become an endearingly loopy presence.

The artwork is beautiful, as before, maybe more so. The first few pages take us to the Natural History Museum, where the architectural grandeur of the first two panels slips without dialogue into an awkward meeting between a spy and the man he is following. Stuffed gorillas, fish and dolphins appear to gaze out from behind glass, irrelevant to the sense of the scene but giving it an edgy absurdity whilst gently plugging curation (if the subtext of the last volume was the media creating its own story, this time it is the folly of failing to preserve historical artefacts). The palette, surprisingly, sticks to its muted browns and dark reds across the shift from Europe to India. Most of the Indian action takes place outside, and architecture is replaced with craggy mountains which remind me of nothing so much as King Ottokar’s Sceptre (sorry!) There is a train in India, too, which seems to be a favourite subject of Ewing’s, but here it is shown piecemeal, and from all sorts of interesting angles. Volume one’s monolithic panels of A Train, A Ship, A Car, An Aeroplane, have largely been phased out in favour of smaller panels which do more than one thing at once, and are better at moving the story on. I wonder where it will go next?

Kristin Hersh – ‘Paradoxical Undressing’

Night swimming is mania, wanting to learn everything and live everywhere is mania, feeling warm all the time (the poor band must’ve been so cold), hearing songs, restlessness (my inability to lie on a floor or sit in a chair), a disregard for the future, seeing things that aren’t there, insomnia, racing out into storms, needing to fuzzify the world in order to focus, the Doghouse episode, hating buildings, ranting all night about how bad bad radio is (the poor band must’ve been so tired), thinking I have a calling, that I’m on a mission… these are all symptoms of a long-term manic state. How embarrassing. So what’s left? What’s ‘me’? Anything? (p. 150)

This list, halfway through the Kristin Hersh memoir some of us have been dying to read for several years now, is a pretty good summary of her activities up to this point. It’s 1985, and she’s at college in Providence, where her father teaches, and where he introduces her to the ex-movie star turned mature student Betty Hutton. Betty is 64, slightly lost in the past, and her stories about Judy Garland and Cary Grant could easily be taken for delusions. Kristin is 18, drifting between college, a squat, friends’ floors, and the rock clubs her band have been playing at for several years already. With an endearing lack of tact, her father crows, ‘It’s perfect! Kristin, you’re too young to make any friends here and Betty, you’re too old!’ (p. 16). He turns out to be right: the two are inseparable, studying together (more chatting really) for entire afternoons in the library, locked in the toilet and shouting ‘Occupied!’ in response to every knock. Betty remarks, ‘Singing on the toilet! If Mr DeMille could see me now!’ (p. 17) and it’s pure Sunset Boulevard.

Betty is overbearing, if fond, and her criticisms of Kristin’s lack of ‘sparkle’ provide an illuminating contrast to Kristin’s actual intention as a performer: not to entertain, but to disappear, to make way for the songs. It is a staple of her interviews that the songs come to her from outside, sometimes as unwelcome physical manifestations, and that all she does is transcribe them – which she must, to get rid of the wolves (‘Mania’), mechanical bees (‘Buzz’), and especially the snake (she doesn’t say, but – ‘Cottonmouth’?). She takes a detour backwards from 1985 to explain how the songs came about. A car knocked her off her bike and drove away; Kristin ended up in hospital. The accident sounds horrific, and is described… dispassionately? Not exactly. It’s hard to describe the description. There is a weight to it, at the same time she’s cracking jokes, taking notes: ‘Flying through the air in vivid slow motion, thinking, so this is what this feels like.’ (p. 74), or ‘I’d never seen blood pour into a sewer before (it looks really cool)’ (p. 75). Zero self-pity, but all the same an unblinking acknowledgement that she is messed up: ‘The front of my head was hamburger and blood with two blue eyes staring out.’ The same balance applies later on to a breakdown that leads to a suicide attempt, and medication. But those terms are crude, I feel bad for using them. Kristin’s account is precise, it is only what it is. She won’t even allow that suicidal people are necessarily sad: ‘Couldn’t we just be finding solutions to our own personal equations? Writing the end of our stories?’ (p. 149). The songs, anyway, began after the car / bike crash, like this:

A few days later, lying in my hospital bed, I heard my first song: a metallic whining, like industrial noise, and a wash of ocean waves, layered with humming tones and wind chimes. (p. 76)

For days she’s sure the sound is external, from the TV next door. It’s only when she goes next door and hears the TV making a completely different noise that she realises, ‘The noise is mine’ (p. 77). It brings colours with it, too. The songs are intensified by the ‘Doghouse episode’, a brief stay at an apartment with ‘Doghouse’ painted on the door. The building is normal, but somehow evil, and it infects Kristin’s songs. She doesn’t live there long, but carries the experience with her. And then one day, walking down Angell Street in Providence, she is accosted by a mohawked student with pamphlets, who ‘stopped me to talk about “killing God”. I was intrigued. Killing God is way better than saving whales.’ He continues:

‘Did you know that religious wars kill more people than political ones?’ I didn’t answer; I wanted him to hurry up and tell me how to kill God. ‘Well… they do. Historically, that is. And it’s because we as a species have yet to rise above the church and take responsibility for our own actions.’ I waited. Kill God, c’mon. ‘For example, say you’re a smack freak –’ (p. 118)

So this is how my favourite song got started! A ‘fake song’ at first (I think this means a consciously-written one), that was supposed to be funny. ‘The fake part attached itself to a piece of Doghouse evil and took off, came back horrifying’ (p. 129). Presto, ‘Hate My Way’. Come the recording sessions at the end of the book, Gil Norton is similarly astonished at the genesis of the only song in the world which could possibly follow ‘Hate My Way’:

        ‘My roommate, Vicky, painted some cool stuff on a box when she was moving and some of it turned up in a song.’
        He looks stunned. ‘Really? “Vicky’s Box” is a song about Vicky’s box? A box owned by someone named Vicky?’ (p. 290)

Gil is lovely, and goes to great lengths to get the astonishing performances of Throwing Muses out of Kristin (comforting, understanding lengths). Gary, who produced the demo which interested Ivo Watts-Russell at 4AD (AKA The Doghouse Cassette), is lovely too, providing support, transport and sustenance through the post-breakdown days of lithium-shaky performances and then pregnancy. Loveliest of all though is Muses drummer Dave Narcizo, who enters into all… well quite a lot of Kristin’s foibles (not wearing glasses in order to ‘fuzzify the world’, not wearing a coat because she was ‘warm all the time’), and tries sometimes to reign her in:

Dave unzips his coat to show me how it works. ‘See? We can still wear T-shirts but if we wear our T-shirts underneath coats, winter won’t hurt!’ (p. 93)

I was trying to imagine what this book would be like for someone who doesn’t love the songs. Then I stopped because I wouldn’t want to be that someone. Thank you, Kristin. Keep them (and the books) coming.

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Newly-performed Throwing Muses songs to accompany the book are here.
See Betty Hutton in The Perils of Pauline.