The Pastels – ‘Slow Summits’ (Part One)

It’s up! I was wondering when and where that would happen, but the press release I wrote for the wondrous new Pastels album Slow Summits (out in May) is now online on a brand new Pastels website, here. Huge thanks to Stephen and Katrina for asking me to do it.

Part Two will feature some of the things which got discarded along the way.

Ian F. Svenonius — ‘Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ’n’ Roll Group’

First off, this book has a great feel. I was talking a while ago about how what the internet really lacks is any kind of friction, and although I must admit I did buy this book on the internet (it was so easy), the moment your hand hits the cover it is slowed down by its texture, which is more like velvet than your average paperback. You just have to pause to paw it. Its diminutive dimensions (107mm x 174mm x 12mm) are a good fit for my left, book-holding hand (98mm x 200mm x 30mm) and it recalls, in form and function, a 2002 reprint I have of Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond’s The Manual [How to Have a Number One the Easy Way], which is only 147mm tall, but otherwise much the same. It features much better proof-reading than some of Bill’s books, some cute hand drawn illustrations, and what is possibly the best author photograph of all time. It’s very well written, too, as you’d expect from such a witty songwriter, and yet... This is a ridiculous accusation, really, but it feels — once you’re off the texture and into the text — a little too scattershot. Its polemical thrusts are isolated (mainly accusing the US gov’t of fascism), and there is the problem that, since The Manual came out at the height of the music industry’s monetary success, there has been such a change in the ‘greatest thing in the world to be’ that — well, a pop star certainly isn’t it, anymore, let alone a member of a rock ’n’ roll group. In 1988, it was obvious why a manual explaining how to have a number one single was a good idea; in 2013, though, why would anyone who doesn’t already know all about groups want to find out how to make one?

So maybe scattershot is inevitable if you’re starting out from the endpoint — the group — and trying to justify its continued relevance, but Svenonius has plenty of interesting ways of arguing the case. For instance,

In a country alienated from national feeling such as the USA, where individualist, capitalist ideology strongly dissuades identification with the group and instead encourages sociopathic selfishness and greed, subcultural bonding is a radical act. Without rock ’n’ roll, it is virtually impossible. (pp. 64-5)

This is kinda great, although it doesn’t really follow that because Americans are encouraged by free market rhetoric to be selfish, rock ’n’ roll is the only way to be community spirited. Though it certainly is a way. And it’s interesting that ‘national feeling’, here, is seen as a positive thing — in the UK, of course, it is usually shorthand for bigotry. It is also interesting that this argument arrives hard on the heals of its opposite. As part of the string of seances which make up the first section of the book, the spirit of the still-living Paul McCartney has the following to say, via the medium of light-bulb Morse code. He is responding to the question, ‘Was the British Invasion a conspiracy?’:

Yes. It was a brilliant ploy to reconfigure the popular street-club model into a commercial enterprise which would harness anti-social tendencies and teach fealty to market values. (p. 51)

Maybe context is enough to make sense of this: when rock ’n’ roll was popular enough to generate stupid quantities of cash, it was an instrument of capitalism; now that it can’t, the sword-stick has become an umbrella to huddle under. It’s indie snobbery, it’s common sense, it’s Tony Wilson’s idea that possessing wealth is a sin (think he nicked that from Buddha to justify the Factory table). It’s the ruler of the universe in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, living with his cat in a remote shack, embodying the idea that nothing makes a person unsuitable to rule as much as a desire for power. It’s Orson Welles, who became great as he lost his worldly position, and was infinitely preferable as a maverick, a Hollywood pariah. Svenonius echoes what Welles has to say about greatest things in the world to be:

All art is, after all, a failure until the circumstances of history change and somehow that kind of expression, for whatever reason, cannot be replicated any longer. Then it is perfect and therefore dead.(p. 70)

He also relates rock ’n’ roll to the industrial revolution:

Once the machines had taken over, humans were off the hook. They no longer needed to do laundry, thresh wheat, or stamp dies. They were saddled with the oppressive ‘leisure time’ paradox. Not coincidentally, they — for the most part — abandoned their former hobbies such as painting, poetry, and writing, and focused on creating something as brainless, self-satisfied, and repetitive as their masters. First they tried modernism; then abstraction, collage, avant-noise, and existentialism. Eventually these experiments were retired with the discovery of the most devolved mode of expression ever. It was called The Group. (pp. 165-6)

Now that’s a theory. Ominous not only in its biblical intonation, but in its suggestion that now, through and beyond industrialisation, we have reached a stage where we can replicate anything. And if nothing can die, nothing can ever be perfect again.

Pull Down the Future: Lawrence and Go Kart Mozart at The Poetry Club, Glasgow, 23rd February

Davy Henderson began the Q & A after the screening of Lawrence of Belgravia by dedicating his performance to Kevin Ayers. It was news to Lawrence that he had died, which fits a certain idea of the man as disconnected, off to one side. Of Lawrence, I mean, though the obits on the news and the web made Kevin Ayers seem like he might have shared that (must investigate). It revealed a second not-very-surprising thing, too: everything Davy does is a performance. Some interviewers might choose to cede some of the limelight to the interviewee, but that isn’t Davy’s style. And though I’m sure I would find his kind of pseudo mystic mid Atlantic free association unbearable coming from anyone else… This man made Cucumber, so he can do what he likes as far as I’m concerned. Here’s his first question:

Davy: The reviews that I’ve read from the film one was, ‘An enigmatical disclosure of a resplendent world that exists within the frontiers of infamy and dirt.’
Lawrence: Where was that written?
Davy: That was Joseph Conrad that said that.
Lawrence [Suspicious]: About what?
Davy: About the movie. He was reviewing it from his grave.
[Pause, nervous laughter from the audience]
Lawrence [Relaxing]: OK, I know what this is going to be like now.

Actually Davy was pretty well prepared, and got Lawrence talking about the lyrics to ‘Spunky Axe’ (by reciting / singing them to him). Where Stuart Murdoch was genial, respectful and almost excessively well balanced asking the questions last time this film came to Glasgow, Davy showed Lawrence in a different light by being so weird that he appeared perfectly normal in contrast. ‘Weird’ and ‘normal’ are relative terms, of course, but Lawrence of Belgravia is so much about Lawrence’s eccentric ways that it makes it a little too easy to put its subject in that crazy box where he can’t do any harm. I wondered, during the interviews Lawrence does with fanzine writers and bloggers in the film, whether Paul Kelly actually used a two-camera setup, or whether the reaction shots of the interviewers looking dumbfounded are merely sleight of hand, inserted to heighten the ridiculousness of some of the things he comes out with.

It makes a difference that On The Hot Dog Streets, the album made during the protracted (eight year) filming of Lawrence of Belgravia, is out now. It came out last summer, and though I can’t claim to have got totally to grips with it, it’s probably brilliant. It’s such a strange world, and I haven’t put in the listening time, but I can see myself loving it at some point soon. Saturday certainly made me want to. Before the record came out, the film was the story of the afterlife of an ’80s indie legend working through some pretty serious personal problems (drugs, debt, eviction, mental health issues). His claims that On The Hot Dog Streets ‘has all my best songs on it’ and was bound to catapult him into the big time because ‘no-one else has come this far, and failed’ seemed guaranteed to lead to disappointment. But it’s out, it didn’t go to number one, and he doesn’t seem particularly disappointed. Of course, it was always too grotesque, too jokey, to be within a million miles of crossing over, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t great. The question is, though... Sod it, let’s quote Morrissey, that

Everything depends upon how near you stand to me

How should a listener situate him / herself in relation to On The Hot Dog Streets? If it’s great pop music (and I think it might be), you’re going to have to get so close that you occupy the same space. If it’s outsider music, you’ll need to keep your distance. It doesn’t sound like outsider music to me, it sounds as though it knows exactly what it’s doing. In the Q & A, Lawrence was definitely the one in control: Davy did his best, but in his own sweet meandering way. Several times Lawrence had to interrupt in order to infer a question to answer because Davy was nowhere near one, and it was Lawrence who opened the discussion up to the audience — Davy was too busy looking at the stars from the gutter to be much interested in engaging with people at ground level. And although Lawrence still talked about fame, he didn’t sound delusional about it, or even, really, very hungry for it. He wants to make an album that, like Bridge Over Troubled Water, tops the charts for a year, but on the other hand he doesn’t want to play large venues because they make him feel small. How does he square the two? ‘Charlie Parker managed it’ — a smart quip, but I wondered: mightn’t it be that saying he wants to be a megastar is something that should be seen as part of the pop-reconstruction he does? And shouldn’t we assume that he knows that, and not take it literally?

A little – well, a lot later, after everyone had had several hours to ponder the Lawrence / Jim Lambie collage collaboration* (or do that and get some tea), the band came on at last. ‘We’re Go Kart Mozart and we’re from Birmingham’. They were four: no guitar, but an amazing keyboard player who did all those sequenced frills live, not to mention the harmonies, split to form chords through a vocoder (which worked great for ‘Glorious Chorus’). Drums and bass on the left, and Lawrence in the middle, wearing his usual baseball cap, a jacket and a stars ’n’ stripes glitter tie. The room was shrouded in dry ice, it felt like a laser quest place (the last time I went to one of those would have been in Birmingham, it felt right), and later on there were actual lasers dancing through the smoke and on the back wall. ‘Lawrence Takes Over’ was the second song in, setting out their stall. The set drew from all three albums, and was just wildly exciting, you got a real pop thrill from these fake pop songs. ‘We’re Selfish and Lazy and Greedy’, always a good song, was supercharged by the band, and slotted well into the newer material, and ‘Um Bongo’ was show-stopping in its primal ridiculousness. The audience loved it all so much they ran out of songs and played ‘Donna and the Dope Fiends’ twice. I’d heard mixed reports of Go Kart Mozart live, but on this showing they should be touring their album, not playing a one-off exclusive to 100 people. It was a great thing to see. And followed, immaculately, by ‘Tiger Feet’ over the PA when we finally let them go.

I asked a question at the end of the Q & A, which was why, as he’d been living in London so long, he had called his record imprint West Midlands Records? He said:

It sounds completely… it does not sound like a record label. It reminded me of a bus company, something really horrible. In Birmingham we’ve got yellow and blue buses and they’re horrible, and I thought that, that kind of thing.

You see? It’s all deliberate. There’s nothing wrong with Lawrence’s sensibilities: he knows that Television sound beautiful and Mud sound ugly. Anyone can make cathedrals of sound with a reverb pedal, but it takes a special talent to make something human out of loutish glam.
____________________

* The collage was a life / art Lawrence mix: Denim posters, a West Midlands Records poster, censored porn, a poster for a photography exhibition, collected methadone doses, a Steven Wells review of a Royal Trux gig in which they’d rocked but also sucked, various newspaper clippings, handwritten scrawls… all sorts of ephemera. Blown up in size, covering three walls of a room.

Essaying

Essays, then. I’ve accumulated a small library of them, and thought it was time to get stuck in. Most of the books are pretty compact: George Eliot’s and Joseph Addison’s are on what I find is called ‘Bible paper’, so they are thinner from the side than most paperbacks, as well as being shorter and thinner from the front, too (belying their alarming six and seven hundred page tallies). What is the best way to read books like this? They are pocket volumes, with a permanence about them: they are companions to take on journeys, maybe they are so small because they are unlikely to be the only book you do take. Like an actual Bible, for those that are so inclined, they can be dipped into for moral instruction, but also for diversion, entertainment, a quick fix of thoughtful prose to set you up for the day, or to wind you down from its shrill pitch. If diaries are useful to keep mental cogs turning, Addison’s Spectator pieces have a similar intent: like a diary someone is writing for you, they are enough to refresh and pull focus, without requiring a big investment of time. They inform and entertain, like a BBC which knows the (Greek and Roman) classics. They even allow for feedback: the essays are peppered with letters from readers, some real, some invented. ‘The Will of a Virtuoso’, previously quoted from a footnote in Hazlitt’s Table Talk is here too, and is, I hope, a fake. Another one I liked was a response from one Martha Tempest to Addison’s translation of Simonides’ categorisation of women’s character types, as swine, foxes, dogs, earth, the sea, donkeys, cats, mares, apes and bees:

SIR — Ever since your Spectator of Tuesday came into our family, my husband is pleased to call me his Oceana, because the foolish old poet that you have translated says, that the souls of some women are made of sea-water. This, it seems, has encouraged my sauce-box to be witty upon me. When I am angry, he cries, ‘Pr’ythee, my dear, be calm’; when I chide one of my servants, ‘Pr’ythee, child, do not bluster.’ (Joseph Addison, Essays, p. 324)

Not wanting to read too much Addison all at once, I’ve started on the Penguin collection of George Orwell’s essays, too, and reading today his excellent and provocative thoughts on Charles Dickens I came across an example of Dickens’ tendency to ornament his prose to saturation and beyond which seemed familiar. Orwell recalls reading this Greek story at school:

A certain Thracian, renowned for his obstinacy, was warned by his physician that if he drank a flagon of wine it would kill him. The Thracian thereupon drank the flagon of wine and immediately jumped off the house-top and perished. ‘For,’ said he, ‘In this way I shall prove that the wine did not kill me.’

As the Greek tells it, that is the whole story — about six lines. As Sam Weller tells it, it takes round about a thousand words. (George Orwell, Essays, p.70)

That is another extract I couldn’t resist typing out and putting on the internet when I read The Pickwick Papers a while back — isn’t it glorious?

The Habit of Criticism

Do you keep a diary? They’re tremendously useful, to keep thoughts rolling, to keep what’s important in focus. Mine is a mixture, of the things you’re supposed to write in diaries, and quotations from books. The accumulation of the latter is what forms the basis of the book reviews here — which have stopped lately, I know, but I’ll get back to them. My diary, too, is pretty thin for the last six months or so. To adapt Flannery O’Connor’s phrase about art, I seem to have fallen out of the habit of criticism. Ebooks might be something to do with it: they make it too easy to flit about, and — worse — you can take notes just by highlighting, so there’s no need to write down any quotations, and the temptation is to not bother with any accompanying reflections either. There are some, and I thought I’d use this post to catch up with what’s been missing from La Terrasse since last June (when this diary volume starts). From September:

Friction is what slows a physical object, so the whole business of ‘friction free’ online communications and shopping should be viewed with suspicion precisely because of what it is trying to achieve. Writing takes longer than typing, so it is hard not to put more contemplation into it.

A strand of reading I meant to get into in the wake of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader was essays, that’s something I want to return to this year. How’s this for a sentence:

All passions that allow themselves to be savoured and digested are only mediocre. (Montaigne, from ‘Of Sadness’, Complete Works pp 8-9)

Some more miscellaneous moments:

I have no interest in anything that is not real. And you know what I mean by real. (Bill Drummond, 100)

The region is so empty and deserted that, if one were abandoned there, one could scarcely say whether one was on the North Sea coast or perhaps by the Caspian Sea or the Gulf of Lian-tung. (W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, p. 154)

Montaigne again, on his bad memory:

My speech is the briefer for it. For the magazine of memory is apt to be better furnished than that of invention. (from ‘Of Liars’, Complete Works, p. 26)

Lord, how he speaks! The feeling can only be compared with that of someone picking through your hair or gently passing a finger over your heel. You listen and listen — and your head lolls. Pleasant! Extremely pleasant! like a nap after swimming. (Gogol, from ‘The Story of how Ivan Ivanovich quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’, Collected Tales, p. 197)

A learnt language is just a mask, a form of borrowed identity; it should be approached with appropriate aloofness, and its speaker should never yield to the lure of mimicry, renouncing the sounds of his own language to imitate those of another. Anyone who gives in to this temptation is in danger of losing their memory, their past, without receiving another in exchange. (Diego Marini, New Finnish Grammar, p. 52)

That one is all about friction, come to think of it.

More Gogol, from 29th August:

p. 270 — a ‘no nose’ moment in ‘Nevsky Prospect’, in which Schiller, the ‘tinsmith of Meshchanskaya Street’, begs Hoffmann, ‘a rather good cobbler from Ofitserskaya Street’, to cut off his nose because it costs him 20 roubles and 40 kopecks a year in snuff.

Then there was Parade’s End, which I did write about, before returning to Gogol’s tales in October. The context here isn’t quite clear, but anyway — more no noses still!

He used tarred rope and a quantity of cheap olive oil, and that’s why there’s a terrible stench all over the earth so that you have to hold your nose. And that’s why the moon itself is such a delicate sphere that people can’t live on it, and now only noses live there. And for the same reason, we can’t see our own noses, for they’re all in the moon. (from ‘Diary of a Madman’, Collected Tales, pp 297-8)

From 14th October, to finish:

Finished the Gogol tales, I think ‘The Portrait’ might be my favourite ever short story (not having read any Richard Yates lately). It does so much, recalling The Portrait of Dorian Gray for the malign influence both of a supernatural painting, and of having it too easy. Just as Dorian is corrupted by his eternal good looks — to debauchery and murder — the artist Chartkhov loses his talent through incessant, unimaginative, flattering society portraiture. This is funded in the first instance by 1000 roubles he finds concealed about the portrait’s frame when verging on destitution. At first he plans to spend the windfall sensibly, frugally, nurturing his talent in seclusion — but he blows it on fine clothes and a grand apartment, and sets himself up to paint portraits.

I’m a bit disappointed it cuts off there, because there is so much more to this amazing story.