Basement Jaxx
Remedy

Will this age? In the way of Daft Punk might do too? Maybe it has and I haven’t noticed. It’s aged in that there’s a time I went dancing in nightclubs in Bolton to this tune and now I don’t. They’re a strange band; I loved Red Alert (on this album thankfully) but apart from that I’m not sure how much I noticed them (and really noticed them in a good critical kind of way rather than “Oh yes, I know this”, which I’m sure informs a lot of love of music and everything else) before “Where’s your head at?”. My friend Steve Elphick was learning how to DJ when we all lived in Edinburgh and I remember him playing around with that album (Booty? Rooty? Something like that) on vinyl in Tim, Adam and Jen’s flat near Tescos.

Shortly after I started this noskipsnoshuffles binge, Sam came back from shopping with this album for me. It took me ages to realise that the front cover was a variety of bodies laid out end to end. I’ve just learned how to sample “properly”, rather than just hitting “record” at the right time and hope for the best. I’m hearing the clinical neatness with new appreciation. Lots of vocoder. There’s that kind of Rahzel vocalising going on here, but it’s been copied n’ pasted rather than him doing it “live”…oh, and there’s another master’s topic I want to do one day. What is “live” in recorded music, by definition, that it ain’t, but is the opposite of “live” necessarily” dead”? I’ve had that many conversations with people about “if it’s not performed live, it’s not music”, and like I said, I thought that too, but something happened in the intervening years. I found myself today earnestly coveting a necklace of gold writing, but I want it to say something apart from “Princess” or “Superstar” and all those hideous words. Maybe “Specific” or “Architecture”. Thinking of architecture and maths as a beautiful thing rejigged the way I saw music. TS Eliot, constructionism, tradition. Humility. Fuck romanticism, it’s crass and indulgent. All those edges which blur are irrelevant and untidy (I speak as an untidy person. I aspire to living instead in squares). Never mind, Satie lived in filth.

Guest vocalist, lots of “Jump and shout” suggestions. There’s that party command again. The idea of a “crew”. Future coming. I like this, it limps along in more of a snake-fashion than the promise of a cops-and-robbers chase; it dodges instead, and feigns death where they may only be pause. When in music did it become necessary to drop in the band-name at the beginning of every song? A little slice of an advert beak, they even call it Jaxxalude, before (hooray…) Red Alert kicks in.

This might have been the first time (apart from Born Slippy) where I listened properly to the words in dance music, and found the juxtaposition between dance-good-time-y’all-welcome-to-paradise-sound that became so part of it all and the content of the words – it became easy to imagine a fire, a large-scale disorder, problem or disaster going on (such I have begun to account for in my dreams in bar charts, counting how many times the disaster is threatened, impending, ongoing or historical) in a nightclub. Having worked in a couple myself, we had all been drilled into how to evacuate buildings in case of emergency. We were always told to ask a group to move twice. If they still refused, you were to leave them to burn. Would anyone notice?

In my first year University I sang in Berio’s Sinfonia, and part of the third movement involves the 8 singers variously shouting/singing into their microphones “Stop!”, “Keep going!”, and “Stop”, time and time again (it’s wonderful). I have a vague memory of one rehearsal, where the first tenor’s microphone sputtered and died, meaning that the rest of us couldn’t hear these important cues over the huge orchestra. We had to shout to the conductor “Stop!”, but as I think I remember (or this might just be a twisted poetic memory, in which case it’s even better) he just beamed and carried on conducting, maybe giving us a thumbs up for the tremendous realism we were bringing to the piece.

Would anyone notice? Thinking politically as I’m doing at the minute anyway, who gives a fuck about Trident, increasingly alarmed polar bears waving their last from a disappearing iceberg, and the small matter of people freezing and starving to death in ugly and frightening lives here in the enlightened UK – if you want to worry and be concerned, how do you do it first without becoming part of the cogs that ensure the cogs survival? Underground becomes mainstream; Myspace, Isaiah Berlin, Bolshevism and the exclusive “you”.

Syd Barrett, The Madcap Laughs

I was talking about Syd Barrett last night, drinking nasty wine in a friend’s back garden. Talking about amateurism, democracy, punk, free will. Syd Barrett’s charming, sweet, interesting, fragile, but having heard what I’ve heard about him, there seems something exploitative (in some way) about these recordings…I can’t rid myself of the idea of a man going mental in the corner and some-one shoving a microphone in his face. Thinking about music therapy and the creative impulse and how they feed into one another, is therapy art? Is this therapy? Would he have gotten away with releasing songs like this if he hadn’t been so documented as “mad” or “damaged”?

Actually Sam and I were talking about drugs tonight (while we ate hot cross buns) – I’m starting reading for my next essay and encountered an unwittingly hilarious book about crack cocaine use in the University library (I mean that’s where I found it rather than where it generally occurs…don’t think the sloaney types who parade around there would fancy slumming it to that extent…). This book is wonderful, I don’t know what it’s doing in the library (although that speaks of me excitedly piling books and books into my arms and failing to check them properly before trotting down the steps with books for teenagers)…but seriously what was it doing in the library anyway? No matter – it’s wildly unscholarly, all the quotes are unreferenced (my favourite one so far is “If the Russians wanted to destroy our country from the outside in; then importing crack cocaine would be the way to do it” – published 1987. EVERYWHERE!) and there’s a wide variety of photographs of trashed people with alarming haircuts. No matter. We were munching, butter running down chins and everything and reading out sections to amuse ourselves with. We talked about space-cakes, speed, ecstasy; I remembered seeing the York/Edinburgh people on ecstasy for the first time and being so alarmed at them dancing for all that time in the living room in Stockbridge; the feeling of that instant cementing-sensation you get with space-cake, the dirtiness of it all…does one feel angry for a drugged experience? Or grateful? Interested? Like I said, although I only ever experimented with the silly drugs (and not very heavily at all, fairly standard), and by and large I had a lovely time with them, I feel a big grip of fear, the loss of control implicit in anything more than mushrooms. I don’t want to follow a hyperbolic road of DIRTY JUNKIES but it does worry me…I think I can see how people need/want escape clauses, it’s something I need to learn more about anyway…I did a display about drugs for the kids at the unit I worked at previously. My best poster I made for them had a picture of a huge fat person looking glazed and dazed at the camera and put a caption at the bottom saying “Warning: Smoking weed makes you boring and fat”. Like that “Talk to frank” government initiative that’s everywhere at the minute, not quite harm-reduction but glaring realism is probably the best way to educate people, rather than the scare-tactics that currently exist.

Would Syd Barrett be an anti or pro drugs warning? That’s my meandering question…everyone’s heard the Bill Hicks thing about “throw away all your favourite records then, because all those musicians were fucking high” and yes it’s true (as some other comedian said; Paul McCartney on drugs = helter-skelter. Paul McCartney off drugs = the fucking frog chorus) but only to a point. Some of these Syd Barrett songs are wonderful, shining and glorious. I still like the love-you-ice-cream-excuse-me song and the one Dan used to sing to me (“because of this tune, what a boon, this tune…”), and somewhere else, I swear blind I remember hearing the octopus song from my childhood, but I’ve sung it to Therese trying to trace where I know it from…I don’t know if George would have listened to Syd Barrett, but I did trace some continuity between what I vaguely remember of his music collection and Dan’s (that’s the problem with losing a parent, it’s so much more difficult to trace and find reasons, strategies, explanations and caveats for present demands and problems) or if it was ever played in Hawthorns in Bolton at an appropriate time. I suppose that creaking door will always creak. I recognised Syd Barrett as soon as I heard him for the first time, but I have no idea where it comes from.

He sets “Goldenhair” by Joyce to music. It’s very repetitive. The Divine Comedy set a poem by Wordsworth (“Lucy”) and I loved that, but both songs seem to only use one musical phrase, repeated again and again, does it suggest musical gravity, all this repetition? I was arranging archived files of mad n’ naughty kids at St Matthias when I heard he’d died and went rushing from room to room (kids at the zoo or something) trying to find some-one who cared. Surprisingly, very few people did.

Bagpuss, Songs from Bagpuss
Bagpuss, Bagpuss, big fat furry cat-puss. I was considering writing this as a parody of the song of the flea, or the row, row, row your boat song where the poor wee mice end up getting gunked with “revolting stilton cheese” and then sticky with orange squash (I wonder if that song being played and sung through our childhoods led Chris and I to despise orange squash yet both be rather ecstatic about the idea of stilton cheese…particularly since he relocated to the orient…

I had a night of silliness and pink wine with Sofia recently, and when the Spinal Tap DVD we’d hired decided to stop working (I think it knew somehow that Sofia’s terribly Nordic brain wasn’t really digging the songs about fat arses) we decided to play around on Youtube, her trying to show me a translated version of Pippi Longstocking and me digging out clips of Chorlton and the Wheelies and Pufnstuf (have to find that soundtrack…). I found her the opening titles of Bagpuss and yes, we laughed all so happy at whatever the lines are “Emily thought Bagpuss was the most beautiful…the most wonderful…the most fabulous…saggy old cloth cat in the whole world”. Oh God, it’s so nice though. This is another part of my recognition/love thing (that will become a doctorate one day I’m sure, once I’ve stopped worrying about nuclear paranoia and the cold war…and yes I know how out of date I am but being of obsesional mind it’s not like you choose this or anything…) - is there anything intrinsic in Bagpuss that is wonderful or is it that I remember it? And recently remember finding the CD in the Meadows branch of Avalanche Records in Edinburgh, and remember buying it for Chris that horrible Christmas, and he capering around in delight bursting into spontaneous song of the flea? Or perhaps Sofia laughing and being charmed by it too, having had no memory of it in childhood is proof that there is something intrinsically wonderful? Oh yes, I can hear Chris doing that “Ooooh!” noise he makes when he has been given something particularly nice.

The mice, the mice, the mice…the song they sing is “Sumer is a-cumin in”, allegedly the first piece of music printed outside of monasteries etc…fit for populist consumption outside of all those dark and cold churches, to be sung on the street (or in homes) instead. They sing it at the end of the Wickerman too…and goodness they manage to look jolly pleased with themselves as Edward Woodward burns. Although it still sounds very sweet when the wee mice sing it, I haven’t yet decided if I think of Bagpuss when I watch the Wickerman, or think of the Wickerman when I think of Bagpuss. Neither way is catastrophic, although I think I would rather see Madeleine set on fire. She seems to occupy the “Soo” territory of the female character who needs kicking in the face…only one female there and of course she has to speak in that hideous voice and melt niceness and prettiness on every situation…how depressing. Revolting simpering bloody female. What does it say about me if I reveal a soft spot for Professor Yafl? And yes I’m sure it’s spelled that way because there is a certain Yiddish quality to him. When I was with Jon and we talked about Bagpuss (because everybody, but everybody does, except those bloody people who have him on wallets and folders and cheapen and destroy all that is good and pure in the world) he said he always liked Gabriel the Toad. Ugh. Gabriel plays his banjo very nicely I'm sure, but he’s bloody boring, I much prefer the way Professor Yafl twitches over to peruse whatever treasure has been found and gets in arguments with the mice… Bagpuss reminds me of Jasper, a fabulous and wonderful cat we knew when me and Chris were growing up (He lived in our house and was lovely and fat and black and jolly, and then as he got older, very dignified and gracious).

I’ve hardly mentioned the songs, they are very nice and funny except when they’re twee and annoying. Christ – did they precipitate Joanna Newsom?