Anthony and the Johnsons, I am a bird.

OK, and another album one after the other. This is the first time (so far) in no skips no shuffles where I’ve run out specifically to buy an album just in time to listen to it. The New Year jet-lag I experienced back from Japan left me with a terribly virtuous sleeping regime, which meant early starts, cleaning and essay-writing, then off into town to wander around the shops. Anyway, I bought a clutch of CDs, and when I realised I was coming up to listening to the first Anthony and the Johnsons album, I needed the second one.

Dan bought this on recommendation from someone or something. And what a lovely and amazing album. More polished than the first, I think, and this is the one that seemed to get the band noticed everywhere…everyone I met that spring had heard of them, and they played in Bristol some December which we failed to get tickets for…

It’s beautiful, there’s nothing really more to say. All the songs are structured so perfectly. I can’t help but thinking that letting Boy George to duet with him in “You are my sister” was a bit of a mistake, although it does highlight how gorgeous his own voice is when he comes back in. Rufus Wainwright, on the next song is probably a more equal match for his voice (Rufus Wainwright got around a bit didn’t he? He duetted with David Byrne on Grown Backwards, and as I’m sure I’ll mention again, even though his and Byrne’s voices were mismatched, it worked well in that duet…David’ Byrne’s singing too high and straining for the notes but it sounds great, while Wainwright pours his voice over the secondary line…)

I’m not writing much about this album. It reminds me of John Street and driving in Wales. It reminds me of green and blue in the air together, of working on the Wasteland in one room, with this playing just outside my headphones in the next. It reminds me of wonder of new music discovered, of a tolerance from record shops I thought had long gone and I could only retain by dipping my hand into the past or the unfashionable. Of softness and elegance not mocked. Motown and Mozart sit on the same sill and the cars trickle past. Again, I am writing about poverty and redistribution discourses, and the Thatcher-led disintegration of moral responsibility to one another, the oroboros of zero-sum exchange systems and all I can do is sway and smile. I love this album and I welcome it back into my possession.

Anthony and the Johnsons, The Cripple and the Starfish

The first album, the one I never really listened to before. Dan discovered the second album in Spring 2005, those last few months of OK-ness, typified by listening to this, to Joanna Newsome, to Rufus Wainwright, Elliot Smith, Panda Bear, Animal Collective, everything right-on and interesting enough to sway the tides of doubt coming.

Anthony and the Johnsons seem to be an acquired taste though, I fell in love with the man’s voice (only him and Jeff Buckley in “Lilac Wine” seem able to conjure up feelings of Nina Simone), and the completely unashamed “musical” style of the singing…there is no chasing of the cool here, clarinets and throbbingly emotional climaxes in the songs belong more with spotlights and velvet curtains than they do “gig” venues, radio-play and “this week’s most wanted”.

His voice and his songs remind me so much of Iffi. The tone of voice, all that chocolate and whisky (although he doesn’t tail off for those free-form cat noises the way Iffi does), and the songs showing that curious mix of old time blues refrains “I said my momma…” with a very English precision “…for quite some time now…” (is this band English? They must be…won the Mercury and I think you have to be English for that. Are they cursed? People talk about the curse of Mercury winners).

Actually I do recognise more of the songs than I thought I would do. There’s something chamber about them. I will say though, in “The cripple and the starfish” I find some of the words a bit too clunky…I suppose they’re supposed to be naïve, they sound clunky…and I would have rather not had a saxophone solo in the middle. Poor old saxophones, so cool for so long, and then not. Certainly not saxophone solos in the middle of songs…I have no patience with them. Hmm, and actually “Hitler in my heart” is sounds too clever-clever for me, and that’s unusual because I am normally seduced by such things, but there’s something about the quirky chopsticks piano opening, which falls straight into an open-mouthed “soulful” chorus, where emotions are so strong there are no words…maybe I’m of the school of “If there are no words, don’t make a sound” (Something I’ll go into later when I reach the Pet Shop Boys, but one of the best things about Neil Tennant as a singer is that he NEVER seems to feel the need to sing “ooh yeah” or “woah-woah” like other singers, and he is all the better for it).

Stylised emotion is a funny thing. This is very stylish with it, and there is nothing made which is not styled after all, and I’m sure Eliot would agree with styling more than framing what is already there (oh and is there a difference)…this music is so emotional, and like I say, this and a few more albums are so tied up with a time and a people and a place that it’s difficult to dissect the music from how you feel about the accessories…but yes this is so emotional and people who connect to the emotion and applaud it for being so honest and raw; are they not the same people who then look away when real emotion happens on the street – they who endorse brands of “coping” and “looking on the bright side” and “speaking with a calm and measured voice” are the first to highlight the lack of this in their art and man, they’re in touch with their emotions, there’s nothing sterile or clinical about them. Perhaps it’s a new dichotomy of where you show it, where is acceptable to leak between lines and where is unforgivable.

My lesson of the last couple of years is to beware of people with reasonable voices. Anthony, of Anthony and the Johnsons sings well of pain and joy. Because there are string quartets and well-spaced drum breaks beneath, his emotion is his credit. For heavens sake, let your emotions be reasonable and well-timed or the kingdom will fall.

Animal Collective, Sung Tongs
Rearranging copious notes about poverty and social exclusion into four definitive headings, fending off a sleepy hangover, drinking coffee, listening to Animal Collective on a Saturday morning,

This is a Bristol album…one of those things, those anti-folk, anti-music high-brow lo-fi,
folksy tricksy authentically twisted new things we all discovered Spring 2005. Three
pleasantly anonymous bearded young men sing repetitive nonsense over ukuleles and
wire brushes. Lots of miaows and background noise, running water and whole-tone
scales. The time changes again and again, from a 6/8 to 4/4 and if you don’t know the
difference, you shouldn’t be at the gig, and if you don’t say that you don’t know the
difference, you’re as good as home.

I am writing something else while I listen to this, my eyes are flicking past pages and
pages where words of poverty and deprivation are the most common, while this music
kind of floats past, it’s very floaty music and assures me that everywhere I go, there are
fields and fields and everything is summer. Where the summer has been spent, there are
instead rainy windows and red wine-filled mugs, where we could play music like this
too, this kind of timeless jam (of the spreadable variety), sweet and fresh from the
farmhouse, albeit listened to increasingly on ipods and computers.

The layers and layers of ragged voices, the booming bass drums, the harmonies and counterpoints. This is a gingham-wearing lullaby of tolerance and benign pot-smoking, warm ale and tea, a degree certificate held dustily on the shelf and a job packing boxes or designing killer microbes to defeat fundamentalists, a kitkat from a Tesco lunchbox (bought in a multi-buy) with a sense of guilt of globalisation. The music really does become people you know who listen to it. The voices are backwards, then correct. I do like this, but in a way I feel like I haven’t really heard anything, this is music rather than songs, landscapes again, sounds blown like bubbles rather than stacked like bricks.

I’m reminded of a comment on TS Eliot’s essay on tradition and talent… some-one in the Guardian today was writing about Eliot, and in discussing Eliot’s anti-Romantic stance (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he was suspicious of Romanticism, something I’ll admit to sharing with him…), and said that Eliot espoused a certain kind of professionalism towards the act of creating, rather more than the art; that the objective was to create some thing rather than voicing whims and moods, otherwise every football fan, religious fanatic, or anyone with a grudge or desire could legitimately call themselves artists. I think that’s what I’ve been kind of alluding to, with my rants about faux-authenticity, and new amateurism. Although a lot of the Animal collective stuff here is (very definitely) constructed as opposed to happened upon, it seems to be playing with a riff…it’d be fun actually to study riffs and their evolution, and where the difference between a tune and a riff and a hook lies, because I’m, sure it’s not just semantics. Chance or structure, mouthpiece or architect, inclusion or exclusion and why is always one or the other?

The Andrews Sisters, in Hi-fi

Yep, another one to conjure up lots more histories. This was my de-facto baby song which my mother’s school orchestra played for years and years in a variety of arrangements. It’s also the song that Chris and I did at Marlow’s in Bristol, which made them offer us a gig which then got pulled at the last minute amid managers shouting at each other, locks being changed, and on our part; frantic efforts to rehouse the gig at the last minute, Hayley quickly scribbling new directions on the posters we’d cleverly left all over the city. And ok course we rocked. E minor. I also played it with Therese at the Old Duke on king Street when she arrived once to Bristol with Chris’s trumpet to send it via Hayley to Japan as Hayley was going there to live with Chris forever and ever and ever…

As well as those stories, when I moved into my first Edinburgh flat (with the purple kitchen and black and white tiled floor), we found a tape of Andrews Sisters songs in one of the drawers. I remember everyone was round one evening, sitting around the kitchen table and on the weird natty white sofa which we sometimes covered with a drape thing (and sometimes didn’t). I put this tape on and Adam said “I feel like we should all be in black and white”. That’s one of my last pleasant memories of the York people so I’m grateful for it.

I love the barbershop harmonies here, whether or not they’re technically barbershop; I don’t know, but unless you know the song it’s hard to put your finger exactly on where the melody is…it’s kind of cushioned on both sides by supporting harmonies rather than putting the melody on top all the time.

There’s such a rainbow inherent in this kind of music, all the excitement of the orchestration, the layers, the playful um-ching (trochaic?) bass-line and piano jumping around with each other. OK, that was a vinyl jump but I know the rest of it’s intended. I really should be reading about globalisation and the retrenchment of the welfare state but frankly the fact that I’m still conscious with my bizarre jet-lag sleeping pattern is admirable. This is my mid=day slump and I’ve a long way to go before anything bangin’ can wake me up…jazz piano in the style of Snoopy will have to do (Drinkin’ rum and coca cola…)

Don’t sit under the apple tree…their voices are amazing, really strident, totally in control of each note as it appears no matter how unexpected (and some of the notes in these harmonies and melodies are rather unexpected), but without any of that horrible training I spent my academic years as a musician railing against which makes women (particularly sopranos) sound like hens with a particularly tremulous grievance. Altos are exempt. They just sound like tenors who look in the mirror slightly less often.

Julie Andrews, Star Soundtrack

Oh how I love this. This is the soundtrack to one of the films I grew up watching my mother watching. The story of Gertrude Lawrence, the muse to Noel Coward and early diva-style super-star. Songs, the roaring 20s and all that with Julie Andrews stomping around in a variety of outfits and saying “Bloody” with amazing Cole Porter, Kurt Weill and George Gershwin songs. This is one of the few completely perfect things in life. Alright, it goes on and on for about three hours but it’s completely worth it. I watched A Star is born the other day, with Judy garland and James Mason, which similarly is bloody over-long but still feels amazing to watch.

Some of these songs are ones I’ve grown up with forever… One which goes “she’s got a pair of eyes that speak of love, n’ everything…” was apparently one of my many baby songs. I like the fact I had these very old-time-y songs (as Holden Caulfield would say). They’ve followed me too, I’ve sung any number of the songs from Star at gigs, both University-based and café-based…with strings quartets, pianos, guitars…

It’s odd writing about something I love as unreservedly and completely as this…I have nothing critical (in the reflexive sense) to say. There’s something relaxed about these songs, as if there’s all the time in the world for it to unfold, that the listener will bear the patience to sit with the song as it gently reveals itself, that the song doesn’t have to audition itself and prove itself in front of a jaded and mistrusting listener, searching for hooks, samples and recognition, searching for an hour of their life that the song will fit into, wondering what shoes and perfume will fit the mood of the song, which page it would go into on a Britannia music catalogue, and most of all, what listening (or not listening) to the song will “say” about their personality.

Oh God, The Physician. One of the funniest songs in existence. I’d love to do it again (better) with a full string quartet. I did it in York to piano accompaniment with some friends of mine filling in the “chorus” parts. I wonder why we want to cover songs we love…I imagine somewhere in my head I’d love to be Julie Andrews leaping around in her turban and pointy-toed shoes, winding wool from an orange sheep and kicking the gong at the end with a smirk on her face.

Jenny, the Kurt Weill song. When I got this on vinyl I played it to Jack and Heppell. We’d all bought records that day and were taking it in turns to choose (fuelled by red wine, I had to listen to the Top Gear theme played on acoustic guitars for seemingly an age…). They complained at first when I excitedly said “Ooh, Julie Andrews!” but quickly learned to be quiet and take it. When Jenny was over, and alter when I played them Limehouse Blues, I think one of them said something like “Yes, but that’s like…real music, ours is silliness”…drawing some distinction between real jazz and silly jazz. Jazz. A silly term. This isn’t jazz at all. That’s not a criticism of them. They were impressed by Julie Andrews which earns them a place in heaven forever.

But anyway, the story of getting and losing and losing and getting is tightly wound up in this album for me. We’d ALWAYS had it on tape, ALWAYS. My mother’s mother died on December 27th 2001. I’d had a horrific panic attack on Christmas Eve that year, an accumulation of months of terror and whisky in Edinburgh where I’d gone days without sleep, wandering the streets of a new city till the sun came up and relying on the orange streetlights until then. Anyway. The events of Christmas Eve that year were, essentially a nervous breakdown. With the news that her mother was dying, my mother had gone up/across to Bradford where the rest of her family were. I sat up with my friend Tim on the other side of Bolton, breathing unsteadily into a paper bag. Nightmarish time. Her mother died. My mother came home and found out she’d taped over this precious video and wept. A weird night. I found it on DVD for her in Bristol a few years later. No harm done. I think we had the soundtrack on vinyl but I believe my father took that when he left. I found the soundtrack in Plastic Wax in Bristol, where I found so many amazing records the summer I was kind of homeless and my plans to study Music Therapy were sucked away by an ex-boyfriend. I bought a record player off Heppell. Jon put it onto CD for me along with some others. I didn’t intend a personal diary to appear out of writing about Star, but it seemed like that’s what happened.

This is what they mean about music as a soundtrack to one’s life. This album takes in my childhood, my traumatic transition out of University, my mother’s mother’s death, the end of one boyfriend, the end of particular career plans and hopes, all those promising possibilities of another boyfriend. It’s New Years Day.