Laurie Anderson, Strange Angels
OK, I know nothing about this album whatsoever. Jack copied it for me and Dan all those moons ago…ugh, what happened? This sounds like a forward-thinking Christian 6th form play. Strange angels. It’s too Christmassy, there’s those weird Spanish guitar flourishes and twiddles, there are castanets. Are we supposed to feel as if we’re at a particularly good party? One where the hills can be seen for miles around and children frolic with mud on their faces dressed in aggressively non-aggressive clothes from some right-on child designer? And we all pat our backs in happiness for being so damn multi-ethnic and buying from the finest range at the supermarkets?

Fuck, here come the bongos right on cue complete with panchromatic wailing and fucking nose-flutes. Shit shit fuck what has happened to Laurie Anderson? Oh please tell me I have the chronology screwed on this, and this particular album comes from a weird wanky late 80s phase? Here a reference to the Body Shop but at least she qualifies it with a request to have radio fitted into her teeth. But oh dear, a hakuna-mattata-style chorus about the beauty and irrevocability of nature and how beautiful the world could be if we could all live in mud huts. Now a reference to the fucking dice man. NO NO NO. OK, a Creole reading of “swinging on a star” helps me a little but all too soon we’re back to that sub Peter Gabriel CRAP that seems to be “world music” perpetrated by white fakers.

Do you know what? I actually feel like I’m in a tropical rainforest RIGHT NOW and my god, it’s like…way authentic. I can’t wait to tell all my friends in Wiltshire about it, and, like, I really felt in direct communication with nature, man, and the rain bouncing off the leaves made me so, like, grateful for, like, everything. Man, I’m definitely gonna buy some skunk… THIS IS RUBBISH ABSOLUTELY RUBBISH. Argh! The frozen crystal synth noise! Argh! The “walking on broken glass” metaphor! Argh! The driving 80s tom-toms! Argh! The self-consciously “weird” pipe organ middle eight! Argh! The uplifting harmonised version of the final verse!

I feel sick. Genuinely nauseous. I don’t mind use of music of other cultures, but there’s something so peculiarly horrible about the mid 80s use of it…redolent of IT hippies and all the rest of it. Peter Gabriel (and I’m sad to say David Byrne) killed it. What is Laurie Anderson doing serving sandwiches at its wake?

Oh, it’s nearly over. I never expected this when I began this enterprise. I might have to get rid of this CD from my collection. Who do I despise enough to hand it to? Oh it’s always so upsetting when you hear some-one you respect doing something terrible? I had a similar thing when I heard David Byrne’s terrible Rei Momo album of rhumba. Ugh. Oh thank Christ, only one more song. However it’s 6.49 long. What can I possibly do now to wash my ears and my brain of this travesty I’ve just heard? If some-one else had their name to this album I doubt I’d have reacted to strongly…it’s just when you think you’ll be safe with Laurie Anderson talking about canoeing trips and playing odd electro-violin stuff with slow handclaps and German poltergeists, it’s difficult to accustom yourself to this sub-hippy nonsense.

Sofia’s still got my horribly disturbing DVD movie about nuclear holocausts in Sheffield (complete with copious blood, salt and urine, traffic wardens being used as roving execution squads and young mothers entering into prostitution in exchange for carrier bags full of dead rats) – what am I to do instead? Watching the Borat movie will have to be a substitute. And perhaps a cup of tea, although heaven knows I deserve heroin and soothing words after enduring that. Thank Christ.

Laurie Anderson, Big Science
When I first fell so in love with this album I played it to Chris Heppell, or he copied it or borrowed it or something. His reaction was “how was she ever married to Lou Reed?” Now although a relationship with a psychotic carpenter with a predilection for Lou Reed did lead me slightly more in the direction of respect for The-Man-Who-Isn’t-John-Cale, I do understand what Heppell meant. Laurie Anderson is so…cool…in every sense, that she kind of wafts above everything else everyone else does, has done, will do…

I saw her perform in Edinburgh at the Queens Hall in April 2003. She was funny (desperately so, the story of her work experience at McDonalds just for the hell of it is a routine I will employ for years and years when drunk, I’m sure), she strapped this bizarre microphone thing to her jaw and snapped her mouth shut menacingly while scraping on the violin, she actually talked me into a sleep towards the end of her set, and while she talked and talked I saw a plate of frozen grapes slowly drop into a bowl in front of my eyes.

I had heard of O Superman, the “hit” from this album for years but never heard it until one day at Temple Villas (my beloved student house), I saw a TOTP2 Pan’s People dance to it…all the Pan’s People looking horribly confused, rocking backwards and forwards in a kryptonite-type shell (a bit of a rip-off from the Kate Bush “Breathing” video I was to realise years later), walking up and down in a line, just looking rather out of place. I believe this got to number 2 in 1982. It was a funny time, by all accounts.

Anyway, the album starts with From the Air (I bought this album when I lived with Dan in East London Street and was giving up smoking. This was my first non-smoking album reward thing). It was coming up to the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and even though we were living without a TV, the thoughts and reflections of that event were everywhere. The lyrics of “Jump out of the plane…you are not…alone …there…is… no…pilot” and similar seemed unnerving, something continued with O Superman with the quiet confidence in the statement “Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night shall sway these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed round”.

“Sweaters” reminds me of when I was fucked off with everyone in Edinburgh. Tying a baby’s cry to the horrible sound of bagpipes readying for a day of shitty music. I love the “Mmm” that follows her facile observations of “I no longer love the way you hold your pens and pencils”…I can see a bitchy, jutted-out face confirming the other’s fall from grace and the delight felt within. Her lyrics are like atoms. Carl Andre. Carl Andre and all those bricks. Carl Andre and all those bricks that unfold. Carl Andre and all those bricks that unfold piece by piece. In Walking and falling, she turns into the storyteller. The CD case tells me the majority of these pieces have been adapted from her stage shows…I’ve seen one, I have footage of others…the notion of “songs” as pieces, to be built section by section, music as architecture rather than some vain minstrelsy…not to set one up against the other or anything, but increasingly I prefer music of beams and rafters.

O Superman. That guy who wrote the This is Uncool book describes this song as something like the technological nightmare singing its own lullaby. Chris and I played this at the folk house. It was bloody lovely, even if I do say so myself. Completely incredible song. Automatic arms. Electronic arms. Your arms. Your petrochemical arms (bird-song). Your military arms.

While the next song’s “classical” accompaniment wakes and shakes you up after O Superman, the desperation in the voice that croaks “The sun is shining – slowly” is almost as peculiarly disturbing. Let X = X used to bore me, but just then, just listening I felt it as a soothing night-time…but having read the lyrics fully in the inlay card, I skipped ahead to the burning building section and that destroyed what I may of hoped for by way of calm. She’s such a “found” artist…her stories and songs and poems (although I guess she’d be loathe to call them any of those things) are the most pallid observation (ha-ha, the burning building is accompanied by comedy sirens and tubas…she does talk about burning buildings more in other CDs I’m sure)…anthropological, like a hoover.

Then the IT tango and the album is over. Shorter albums are so much more elegant than long ones. Isn’t it just like a woman? Isn’t it just.

Tori Amos, Boys for Pele
OK, I’ve been rubbish of late. Working too hard and sleeping too little. Onto good old Tori Amos, or, as I read Eminem called her once, Torrid and Aimless. I rather like that, even though I sort of disagree, sort of. She’s the Queen of breathing, this lady, as Veronica and I once agreed. Where what she doesn’t sing, and the tailing-off of each note as it disappears into her body is beautiful too.

Tori Amos (along with Bjork and Gabrielle and other female singers) appeared in a Spitting Image video/sketch I remember well from my teenage years, all about eccentric female performers, and how they sang about boring things in increasingly “weird” styles. I think it was called “We’re singing bjollocks” or similar. I did laugh (and to be honest was very tired of seeing the video for “Big Time Sensuality”), but increasingly, I’ve realised that if male performers were doing the equivalent, they’d be greeted by cries of “genius!” Quite a few people at Uni assumed I’d be into Tori Amos, and while I heard and appreciated what I heard, I never felt the urge to acquire any and get really into it, until I hit Edinburgh.

It’s amazing what this woman does with just a piano and her voice – I’m guilty of over-layering songs to death…but then I’ve got quite a Baroque sense of arrangement, thanks to good old Steve in York. Her piano playing is rhythmic and chunky in places, but the lines are still there. The lyrics are very sexual and her voice weaves and winds in those feminine ways (is it true that “female” songs tend to do that more than “male” songs where every syllable fits a note? Italian vs. German?)

Oh God, and Father Lucifer. This is the song on this album that kills me more than anything else she’s ever done. I don’t know if it’s the tune, the words (How’re the Lizzies? How’s your Jesus Christ been hanging?), the trumpet that arrives like a
Cathedral in the middle section, the many voices tumbling over each other…the fact that it’s so short and you want it to carry on and on? Some dizzying combination makes this one of the songs I dream and sing around the house and wish I could sing live, but without the other three mini-me cohorts I currently crave, it’s frankly impossible. All those Catholic notions of guilt and paternalism hit me particularly hard and make me bury my face in my hands and spin me back to a bus-stop in Edinburgh near the hospital where, as I remember, Gordon brown’s baby child died one January when I was walking to work in the rain and the darkness, and the buses sigh and growl their way past traffic lights and walking through those Edinburgh meadows near all the steps and the whalebone arch that I never knew existed until a blossom-bound May.
And then a harpsichord begins a heavy sleaze of professional widow, which I knew better as the dance version (which I know is coming up afterwards) which, in turn, puts me back in GCSE art class with Holly, Suzanne, Helen and Laura, drawing sailboats, dragons and teddy bear faces, weaving silk, making paper, hearing about the Dunblane massacre on the radio and wondering what 6th form college we’d all end up going to.

So, a remix…how a mix or arrangement can totally change the whole song. I think that was one of the great lessons that this song (and quite a lot by Bjork) successfully taught me. And how weird that, at the time I looked down my nose at this song, only realising when I heard the original “acoustic” version how they were related…isn’t that terrible? Says something about the calibre of a producer/dj that they could hear the original and imagine something like this. Tori Amos has now changed from a wounded and articulate lady at the keys to a bizarre malfunctioning robot in the centre of some dancefloor.

Interesting that now she repeatedly asks you to “bring it close to my lips” and insisting that “It’s gotta be big”, rather than the huge discourse on Judas, peaches and cream, suicide and the running of Congress. I’m sure it shows all the reading about feminist analysis I’ve been doing recently but (sorry) how fucking typical that a man encounters a woman singing these mind-blowing poems and has to turn her into what he does…as if the only way a woman can be comfortable with her sexuality (and for a man to be comfortable about this) is to be a slut. The lyrics are sexual enough in the original version…while musically I really like the remix, you do have to wonder about the way he zoned in on and repeated only the nudge-nudge sections. It’s empowering to be slutty, apparently.

Mr Zebra; this delicious brass band arrangement…the only time I dig brass bands. God, this is why I did this exercise – two songs now (Marianne and Caught a Lite Sneeze) that I know because they’ve been on, suddenly present themselves as important and perfect as the ones I already know…beautiful and original and embodying (as far as anything can) an ideal I look for of outspoken and halting. I’ll have to take a stop in listening to this (need to eat and ready myself for a helpline shift) but I can finish listening to this when walking there and back.

I listen more walking to and from Uni in the drizzle on a Monday. It’s difficult to hear the man in the post office telling me how much the envelope weighs when I send off form my new passport, but even more difficult to take the earphones out of my ears. However, on the way up to Uni, I feel saturated, both by rain and weaving and hesitant lines…where’s the detail? Where are the riffs? Plenty trouble for you – thinking about the Joycean ideal of a woman; all wavy lines and circuitry, expanse and horizontal landscapes. Then realising that after a while, all landscapes look the same… too many Constables spoiling the broth and where are the trees amidst all the light and colour? As soon as I’m done thinking this (and certainly understanding Eminem’s criticism of her as Aimless) something amazing happens and the threads are tied together again. Completion is the new love? She does go on a wee bit…