‘Dexys: Nowhere is Home’, Monorail Film Club screening at the GFT, 25th May

At the Q & A after the film, people didn’t want to ask questions so much as to tell Kevin Rowland how much his music means to them. They wanted to tell him what it’s like, living with this impassioned, insanely well crafted quicksilver, that can ground you even as it soars, pull you together as it explodes. One woman said she felt that One Day I’m Going to Soar surpassed even Don’t Stand Me Down, and asked him which record gave him more personal satisfaction. ‘One Day I’m Going to Soar,’ he said. ‘Massively.’ Against the myth, he thought that the earlier record hadn’t had a bad reception, there had been some supporters, but everything had come right this time around. From finding singer Madeleine Hyland through a friend at a market, to the way songs written over a period of years clicked together into a single narrative, even that the run of shows at the Duke of York’s Theatre fortuitously extended to allow Kieran Evans and Paul Kelly time to put this film together. If I had had a question, it would have been, ‘You know some of us put My Beauty up there with your other four masterpieces?’, because it’s well overdue the kind of resuscitation afforded Don’t Stand Me Down over its several reissues. And he would have said ‘What’s the question?’ as he did when one chap asked about Searching for the Young Soul Rebels being so, so great. ‘No part twos, ever’, he said, when he asked why they hadn’t made another LP like it.

I was lucky enough to see one of the One Day I’m Going to Soar concerts, at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh (there’s a slightly perfunctory review of it, and the following day’s soup, here), and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life, of course it was. The oddest aspect was the burlesque act which opened proceedings, but this, if it was the same in London, didn’t make it to the film (and neither did ‘Come on Eileen’). Instead, it begins with: ‘You know what? I was a no-hoper. Prison was a possibility’, those striking words from the trailer; but in the film they’re not a voice over, Kevin’s head fills the screen, and you think you’re in for some big confession. Then the quiet opening bars of the album play over twilight shots of the theatre and its immediate surroundings, of people coming and going. Then another segment of interview, in which Kevin and Jim Paterson, seated in the stalls of the empty theatre, signally fail to follow up on the prison comment. Then into the second half of opening song ‘Now’: ‘Attack, attack!’, suddenly you’re there in the front row, or onstage with them, as the show kicks into life.

And what a show it is. Where there had been a screen on stage in Edinburgh with a projection of Madeleine Hyland for ‘She Got a Wiggle’, in the film she’s lounging on a divan with a cigarette holder, behind and above Kevin and the rest of the band. Not wiggling, for sure, but the song has a tightrope to tread: to convey how sexy this woman is, while displaying her, wearing a big leather frock and suspenders, somehow without objectifying her. The way the drums lock in to that slow foreboding groove give the imagined wiggle menace, though, and titillation seems a million miles away. The character Hyland plays is about as developed as a Dickens heroine, there is nothing to her beyond her looks and her clothes. I’m not criticising her performance, which is great, but she acts solely as Kevin’s muse, the out of focus flame to his well delineated moth, an ideal with no rough edges, no characteristics beyond a smouldering sexuality, hurt, and a combustible temper when the occasion calls for it. Which it does half way through ‘I’m Always Going to Love You’, the tipping point of the album and the show. Kevin coaxes Madeleine with unconditional devotion, and she joins in, singing ‘I’m always going to love you’ back to him. This registers, and he sings: ‘We’re always going to, we’re always going to love...’. But there is nowhere for the syntax to go, other than ‘each other’, which would be an inconceivably ugly end to the line, so he sings instead, ‘I think I’m going round the bend / Now we must end’. And everything falls apart.

Back at the Q & A, asked about compromise by Duglas T. Stewart, Kevin showed himself to be a little more flexible than might have been expected. He talked about the 2003 shows he did with Dexys, when he was broke and about to get married. He did them because he needed the cash. But he got too interested in them, he got more into Dexys than he was into the idea of getting married; and anyway, he said, they spent so much on rehearsing and staging them that they didn’t make any money. In the film, he talked about how he didn’t want to be too chummy with his audience: if you’re a fan he’s not your mate, he’s not on Facebook chatting and stirring up a buzz. He wants to make the records, perform the shows, and that’s his audience interaction, the fact that he’s paid us the compliment of making something that’s good. So good. Again and again, five times now (is it six? I must track down The Wanderer). It’s scary that this is so far from the norm as to sound like a revolutionary idea, but I think he has hit on an important truth. Work can so easily be diluted by marketing, and marketing is no longer the preserve of corporations, any more than releasing records is: everyone’s at it.

The film continues beyond the One Day I’m Going to Soar material into the encores, including the beautiful, slow version of ‘Tell Me When My Light Turns Green’, and climaxes with a full-length ‘This is What She’s Like’, which automatically makes it a brilliant film. The interspersed interview doesn’t slow the show’s momentum, though Kevin is quite guarded (he was a bit less so at the Q & A). There are some deft directorial touches, like the screen test style shots of fans outside the venue towards the end, standing still, looking into the camera; or the startling shot of Hyland looking into the mirror after performing, close to tears. For the most part, though, this is a concert film, documenting a spectacular stage show, and coming closer than should really be possible to matching the live event for thrills.

Richard P. Feynman — ‘The Character of Physical Law’

‘A’ hates his mother. The reason is, of course, because she did not caress him or love him enough when he was a child. But if you investigate you find out that as a matter of fact she did love him very much, and everything was alright. Well then, it was because she was over-indulgent when he was a child! By having a vague theory it is possible to get either result. The cure for this one is the following. If it were possible to state exactly, ahead of time, how much love is not enough, and how much love is over-indulgent, then there would be a perfectly legitimate theory against which you could make tests. It is usually said when this is pointed out, ‘When you are dealing with psychological matters things can’t be defined so precisely’. Yes, but then you cannot claim to know anything about it.

The person who recommended this book did so at least partly, I suspect, because of this attitude. He has amusingly little tolerance for psychology, and less for history: they’re bullshit, because they’re made up, or not sufficiently provable, just as the cause of ‘A’’s hatred isn’t in Feynman’s scenario above (though he is attacking vagueness, not psychology as a whole). Usually I would have just as little tolerance for someone who writes things like ‘the reason is, of course, because’*, but this is a fascinating book of lectures, and the speed at which it powers along in this occasionally ungrammatical vein is really helpful if you’ve never read a science book before and all of a sudden here is quantum physics. It’s something of a high wire act, breaking down extremely complicated ideas into explanations and analogies which make sense to the non-specialist reader. There are very few equations, and there is plenty of repetition of key concepts that you might have forgotten from earlier on: if he is developing a concept, he doesn’t assume you remember what it was, which is a help if you hadn’t quite grasped the previous explanation. For example:

This is called the principle of relativity, that uniform motion in a straight line is relative, and that we can look at any phenomenon from either point of view and cannot say which one is standing still and which one is moving.

And:

If we are unable, by any experiment, to see a difference in the physical laws whether we are moving or not, then if the conservation of charge were not local only a certain kind of man would see it work right, namely the guy who is standing still, in an absolute sense. But such a thing is impossible according to Einstein’s relativity principle, and therefore it is impossible to have non-local conservation of charge.

It’s a little unfair to quote these things out of context, precisely because they do work by accumulation. Feynman elucidates gravity, angular momentum, relativity, the laws of conservation and symmetry, winding up with the movement of electrons as both particles and waves, and a discussion of how physics might develop in the future (he’s talking in 1965, so there’s no Higgs Boson, but CERN exists, and he does talk about discoveries happening through high energy collisions). There are some dazzling asides, like his explanation of how carbon can form in a star, when the only other elements present are hydrogen and helium, and how this happy accident is likely to be the cause of life as we know it. He also explains how it is that there are two tides for every one rotation of the earth, and how it might be possible to communicate with aliens in terms of physics: he can discuss dimensions, because he relates them to hydrogen atoms, but because of anti-matter he doesn’t have a way of distinguishing left from right. It also turns out that he doesn’t hate psychology or history after all:

all the sciences, and not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds, are an endeavour to see the connections of the hierarchies, to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man’s psychology, man’s psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways. And today we cannot, and it is no use making believe that we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other, because we have only just begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy.

 ____________________

* Actually it seems that the lectures were never written, only transcribed, which makes this more forgivable.

Open Culture has the whole lecture series online.

The Space Lady, Dundee Contemporary Arts, 5th April

There was a singalong during Saturday night’s performance by The Space Lady, which she introduced as a song by The Space Manager, the man standing at the entrance, who had encouraged us all in his friendly American way to come closer at the beginning of the show. She mentioned that they had been together for six years, which made me wonder about the husband she talks about in the Space Lady’s Greatest Hits CD booklet, who wrote songs for her in the ’70s and ’80s. It had a modern hymn type tune (when I say ‘modern’ I’m thinking back thirty years to primary school), and words about everybody being light looking for a place to shine, and love looking for a place to be. It was catchy — I can still remember it, no recording equipment involved — but the sentiment was too generalised for me. She then answered the question she had left hanging by introducing the next song, ‘Humdinger’, as being by Joel Dunsany, her late husband of thirty years, and the father of her children. The specifics crowded in, in a gently humorous, self-referential way:

Street singer, that’s a rock ’n’ roll show
Hot speakers, woofers and tweeters
Electric reverb stereo sci fi space echo
Keyboard Cadillac with a Vox Jaguar
Atomic Wurlitzer flash
A souped-up Casio

No disrespect to The Space Manager, but if you ask me, that’s love.

Frànçois & the Atlas Mountains – Stereo, Glasgow, 29th March

Is it really four and a half years since Frànçois put in this incredible performance in a tiny student theatre in St Andrews? Apparently it is, and I’ve continued to be as hard to please by his subsequent records as that review shows I was by the earlier, lo fi ones. Probably it’s a compliment, not wanting him to be spoiled, because he has been so special. Still is so special. But I want him to prove it, again and again. The move from Fence to Domino has brought with it a bigger sound, and E Volo Love was a step outside the Tindersticks-ish beauty of Plaine Inondable to something less sombre, more in love with life, and the new Piano Ombre… It’s too early, I can’t tell. My first impression was that the new version of ‘The Way to the Forest’ is overdone compared to the one on the excellent Brother EP, which must be the pernicious influence of being on a label people have heard of, right? I do think that the new record gives itself less space to breathe, sonically, than Plaine Inondable: it is more of a producer’s construction than a record of the band’s live sound, as the earlier record gave the impression of being. But like The Notwist, whose amazing Mono show the other week I managed not to write about here, the Atlas Mountains’ live sound is now so expansive that a straightforward recording would almost certainly fail to capture it adequately. Both bands stretched out their songs in exhilarating and imaginative ways, tailored to a live audience.

Support band Barbarossa had a singer whose voice S. identified as the one from the theme song to The Bridge, or very close to it. Very high, unashamedly emotive. Then she got more generous, suggesting Arthur Russell. I countered with Chris Martin, and she backtracked and said Terence Trent D’Arby. It’s not the kind of singing I ususally get along with, but they were good, considering. A two piece: the singer behind a small bank of synths and gadgets, and a drummer who verged on drum solos in places, which was actually a good counterpoint to the vocalising. On one song his timing seemed to go all to pot, so much that it may have been deliberate. The singer modestly suggested that they were but the putting-on-make-up stage of Saturday night, compared to the main event of going out clubbing. Then, concerned that he might appear too cool, he clarified that it was OK if people ‘do it with your parents too’, his syntax getting the better of him. ‘I’m sure he means well’, said S.

‘Showtime,’ said Frànçois, somewhat more directly, when he hit the stage. The Atlas Mountains numbered between four and five for this show: two drummers, sometimes three, including the fabulous Amaury Ranger, still with his water drum and bongos, still playing like the world will stop turning and all its plates will crash to the floor if he stops gyrating as wildly as possible. I was wondering how they would adapt to the confines of a raised stage, especially one crammed with so much kit. The colourful fabric-covered mic and guitar leads were encouragingly long, though, and within seconds they were into a synchronised dance routine, jumping 180° and back again, and all doubt was gone. Like a proper pop band, except, in all my years of going to see live pop music, I’ve never seen that (maybe the Pet Shop Boys’ dancers did it in 1989, but I can’t really remember. Jens Lekman did something similar once, when he got his band to be aeroplanes for a bit). It could’ve looked silly – well, it did look silly – but it was as much a declaration of faith in Pop as sliding on his knees into fairy lights was in 2009. This stuff matters. It works because Frànçois is such an energetic performer, as animated as Amaury but more elegant, constantly in motion, never on one part of the stage for long, jumping when he can fit it in. The constructed drum attack of Piano Ombre found its live counterpart in an irresistable onslaught which was impossible not to dance to, to smile to. I’m reminded of Orson Welles’ idea that the cinema screen is a dead thing, so you have to go all out to grab your audience at the beginning of a film. A CD, too, is a dead thing, relying on technique and trickery to make a bid for your attention. A live performance doesn’t have that problem, and songs from a record which was going to take some time to absorb came into colour there and then, it was wonderful.

Frànçois declared perilously early that they were on to their last song, ‘because it’s Saturday night’, but it must have been a joke against club venues, because they carried on for ages, playing most if not all of Piano Ombre, and encoring (without leaving the stage) with ‘Les Plus Beaux’ and ‘Be Water’, both stretched well beyond their recorded forms, the latter unrecognisable for three or four minutes at least, and featuring some... I don’t know, Turkish-style singing, possibly? in the intro, before it morphed into a song which used to be so light on its feet, but made for a great, epic set closer. Stereo was packed, but people danced as best they could, it was so much fun. S. looked at me at the end saying, ‘One of the best ever’. And it was.

Philip Hoare — ‘Leviathan; or, The Whale’

Threatened sperm whales will stop feeding, swim to the surface, and gather to each other in a cluster. Assembled nose to nose around their calves, the form a tactical circle known as a ‘marguerite’, bodies radiating out like the petals of a flower. They present their powerful flukes to any interlopers, protecting their young in a cetacean laager. In an alternative version, they touch flukes, heads out and jaws at the ready. (p. 78)

This reminded me of the behaviour of musk oxen, as described in Barry Lopez’s fantastic book of nature writing, Arctic Dreams. Both animals form a defensive circle around their young, and both make themselves vulnerable to man by doing so. Leviathan contains far less nature writing than Arctic Dreams, as it is more of a cultural history, examining the way in which mankind used whales during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as industrial product (oil for lamps, baleen for corsets); and also the hold that whales and whaling have on the human imagination, primarily through Moby Dick. The variety of uses that whale product was put to grew over a century and a half until by the 1960s, it was everywhere:

Their bright shiny faces were washed with whale soap, and having tied their shoelaces of whale skin, they marched off to school, past gardens nurtured on whale fertilizer, to draw with whale crayons while Mum sewed their clothes on a machine lubricated with whale oil, and fed the family cat on whale meat. (p. 340)

This miscellany of uses is reflected in a rather miscellaneous structuring of the book. By and large, it is chronological, so the international whaling ban which took effect in 1987 comes near the end, and early chapters skip around between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. For roughly half the book’s length, I was wondering when the section about Herman Melville and Moby Dick was going to end: interesting though it was, it didn’t seem to be constrained by chapter boundaries, and this is, after all, not a book of literary criticism or biography, is it? But it is, some of the time. Which had a rather peculiar effect on this reader: while the book never lost my interest, I find it hard now to say what its cumulative effect was, or if it really had one. Appropriately for a book which repeatedly gasps at the scale of whales too big to be perceived (or, more gruesomely, weighed) in one go, it is hard to sum up. W. G. Sebald springs to mind, except, except...

Except that Philip Hoare is not the writer Sebald was. The first thing that struck me about his writing is that it can be imprecise. On page three, in a paragraph about school swimming lessons, we are told that ‘I never did learn to swim’; the following paragraph has: ‘It was only later, living alone in London in my mid-twenties, that I decided to teach myself to swim’. One of these things cannot be true. On page 418, Hoare swims ‘eye to eye, fin to fin, fluke to fluke’ with a whale ‘bigger than our boat’ (p. 417), and it’s a nice phrase, but sadly impossible, even if you allow the equivalence of pieces of swimming gear with parts of the whale’s anatomy. These examples are symptomatic of a certain low-level sloppiness in the book’s language that I found distracting. How can you trust writing which disproves itself? There were smaller stylistic problems, like the over-use of the word ‘cetacean’ when anthropomorphication was being committed. There was missing information: in a section about how captivity truncates the lifespan of orcas, their natural lifespan was never mentioned. But you can look it up on the internet (Wikipedia gives it as 50 years on average, up to a maximum on 80-90 years. Captive orcas live ‘usually less than 25 years’). Leviathan feels like a very internet-age book, in fact, with all the jumping around between subjects, and the copious, well chosen illustrations.

Talking about the section on orcas reminds me of a nugget of information about their name: that ‘killer whale’ is a mistranslation of their Latin name, which actually means ‘whale killer’. This is clue, perhaps, to the way Leviathan works. It is less an Arctic Dreams about whales, than an elongated QI about them. By the end you’ll have built up your store of whale facts, and they will pop up in your memory, triggered by other whale facts. And you’ll feel as though you know these great creatures just a little better.

SPOILER ALERT: It does also completely give away the ending of Moby Dick.