Bright Eyes
Lifted or The Story is in the soil keep your ear to the ground

Fopp has closed down now. Sometime (May? June?) all the shops in Bristol (and there were three of them) and presumably all over the country (even if Bristol feels like all of the country now) ghosted themselves out of existence almost overnight. Jack and I pressed faces up against the glass in horror, at the same time kind of marvelling at the beauty of the empty shelves. I had read in the newspaper that HMV had taken them over, but only for the internet sales.

Somewhere on the first visit to Edinburgh when we were searching for flats, or somewhere in the first week or so when we were searching for meaning, we all wandered up Cockburn (pronounced “co-burn”, we were disappointed to learn) Street, the cobbles etc; Veronica pointed it out to us (she knew Edinburgh better than we did) and said that it would be our new favourite place. And yes, we went in (together? Separate?) and it did become certainly an important place. I poked around in there at some point and saw a new member of staff being shown around the shelves. The manager was explaining the deal behind having certain albums at £5 each; “If you don’t have these in your collection, there’s something wrong and we can help”. I fell in love with Fopp. I became infuriated with the Bristol one when they started to reorganise the CDs into categories like “alternative pop”, “singer-songwriter”, “pop” and “alternative rock”. Although I would love to have sat down and worked out precisely who was where, and what, and why.

I was in Edinburgh Fopp one day and this album was playing. The first track is nearly ten minutes long. It’s incredible and remains so. I do get tired of the idea of the troubadour, but it is delivered with so much spite and innocence (and really, really, really, because I’m aware of how those are pandered around…). It’s difficult to describe what he sings about, but I’m fairly sure he’s standing on the seashore. The madness is prevalent and he means every word, but it’s more real than it sounds, especially when he sings “It’s cool if you keep quiet but I like singing”…it isn’t quite the silliness of ‘yes I’m mad but I have more inner truth than you’, and the way it stops abruptly, he is a fish lifted, pulled and plucked to the sky, you can almost feel the hook going into the side of his mouth and ripping him way from what he knew.

There is something of the valley in his voice, and I mean the idea of the American one…he does sound like something of a spoiled California child…he was very young (his name is Connor…?) when this came out…22? There is an urgency to it, this second song. Soon, I will disappear. He skitters his voice unevenly around the stresses and patterns of what should be spoken – that maze of memories…when he sings about being on a swing…I can’t not imagine feet dangling in the corner of a screen as the camera pans away from the empty and tragic room. Are singer-songwriters trying to be beautiful and sad? Give me all your pity and your money now; all of it.

They retain a mistake…how realistic is it? He tells us in the second song they need to keep a record of their mistakes as well as their love…but the trumpet glissando that runs down before the recording stops and a female says “Oh., I’m sorry” and that’s ok, and 1-2-3 1-2-3 it begins again…does it sound too false? How false would it be to falsify a mistake?

I saw them play in King Tuts in Glasgow with Dan. It was a January or February, it was 2003 and we caught the bus from Edinburgh. I’m sure I got in trouble for saying the wrong thing on the way back, but it was an amazing gig. I understand King Tuts is quite an established venue in Glasgow. We went in, I remember only the back room now. It opened further, darker and deeper than I thought it would…I’m sure we only thought it was a tiny venue…there were trumpeters and cellists there within the Bright Eyes band (is a band? Are they session musicians? Is he the brains? The beauty? Is there a difference?)

You Will? You will? Such a callous love song…I completed you and that’s why you’re here, how awful that must feel…you are the reoccurring kind. A boomerang, they say…you do wonder about love, about the nature of eternal return, the nature of taking people granted, the nature of exploitation and love and the difference between the two (it took so long to figure out). It sounds like a Scottish Christmas, when all the happiness floods the room, and for that reason, I feel the cold air and see the bright lights all at once. What is it that’s so comforting about that? A statement becomes a question becomes a statement. And then sinister of “I want a lover I don’t have to love” – and we’re back to those sad singers who “play sad”.

I learned “A bowl of oranges” for those early Bristol gigs…there’s something breezy about it that worked well with the wooden floorboards, excitement, summer and fireworks of that time…each person I encountered, I couldn’t wait to meet. Some have gone now but I feel a different emotional connection to this album now, and to that time. When the song finishes, with glorious words about loves uneven remainders being the fractions of a whole, and the story told from the fault-lines of the soul, there’s a weird meandering piano line with “noise” and wash, funny little guitar licks in the acoustic vein…I missed this part off when I put the song onto a compilation (to be played in the orange kitchen of John Street, to be followed by Annie Di Franco, discussing gasoline, 9/11 and the train-lines)…Dan always said that it was the most important part of the song…I’m not too sure. Rather like the end of James and the Cold Gun, I thought it was just adding a kind of “look, this is serious” to a thing that was serious anyway.

Something happens in the next song…he whines about meeting his friends in a bar, about selling his soul for a bag of gold, which one of us would be the foolish one? I lose patience with him here. Sounds far too much like a teenager storming off to his room, bleating and calling his Mum a fascist. Screaming instead of meaning, calling in the marching drums to bolster up his complaint.

How much of music is sadness? Whenever I hear these kind of anti-folk, “underground” (and well-beloved by the surface) things, I wonder about the permanency of music. I love watching music videos when I go to the gym…watch the videos and dissect, analyse…I saw one involving a car, a toy car, a man, a toy man. When they were making it, did they consider it an archaeological piece…did they hope in years to come it would be plucked out of vaults and held up as “classic” – maybe no-one tries for classicism anymore. Bright Eyes is singing about varying tableaux of lives, made of paint (they remind me of cars in motion, watching people as if they’re within a zoo) – this will not last…there is something of the confessional here, all his art is a waste of paint. It is becoming rather like Eliot’s grim warning of pure self-expression being heralded as art, when anyone, the madman, the fascist, the football hooligan, the miserable can stand screaming on the street corner and legitimately call it “art”.

I do like the list of “my wrinkled map, my chart of stars and that compass crap”… it’s like Bob Dylan with 25% added extra music.

David Bowie
Ziggy Stardust

I’m doing it – this feels brave. I have been told for so long how much I would love David Bowie, and repeatedly, I have always said I don’t get it. It took me long enough to get Kate Bush when people did that trick with me (walking home after rehearsal with Lucy Jubb past the Kwik Save)…it’s so English…all the stories drifting through…like a musical or a magazine. It seems to be halfway between the artless feelings of punk and the pomposity I’m used to associating with that kind of glam/prog rock…and still somehow related to the BBC and the rain…

This is supposed to have some kind of story, right? I feel amazed; this is so much more intelligent and interesting than I thought it would be…it leads me to ask myself how much of this was written by Bowie? What’s his role...? I know that Brian Eno and Phillip Glass became involved as Bowie became “established” but I don’t know if he wrote everything/sang everything/I have no idea. Because he’s so show-y (and of course my formative experience of him was Labyrinth so really…how seriously can I have taken him previously? A couple of times when I made Jon a cup of tea he called me “Little Wonder” and sang a bit of the relevant song, which I remember from my last few years in Bolton too…that seems to be it for Bowie references until we skip forward to Bristol and people reeling in horror when I say I’ve never really listened to any).

I was talking to Sylvia, my counselling supervisor about Susan Faludi, this feminist writer from the 90s. We talked about the anger inherent in the 1970s/80s model, and how quickly it dated, and how easily it became a target for further abuse. OK, it’s ironic to see that even the feminist movement should be quiet, gentle and not make any trouble, but we talked mostly about how quickly zeitgeists date…the lyrics of the last song “Freak out in a moonlit day dream” rumbled in my head as dated, in the truest sense of the word I think I’ve ever thought if it…reminded me of the closing bits of Easy Rider…there’s something about the sound of the guitars as well, but that dates classically for me, like columns.

I’ve found another Bowie reference, I realise I know more of him than I thought…my first disastrous boyfriend (that reads accurately both ways…) had some greatest hits CD that had this “Starman” song on it…I feel less impressed, I remember always being bored by this song, among other things. Not sure how much of it has to do with the weird creepy Christian rhetoric that goes through it or the campy piano, but my appetite for Bowie dulls on this song. Something about invoking children in a song (even Brian Wilson…even…is guilty of this) strikes me as unforgivably cheap.

Perhaps my expectations which kind of shot up around my ears with the first two songs have let me down; I feel disappointed with the rest of the album…it doesn’t’ seem to do anything, or perhaps that’s because I don’t know it…it seems to have disintegrated into lazy rock and roll/blues kind of stuff…in fact to be precise that’s exactly what it’s done, the next song is called rock and roll star and I lose all patience. To have promised so much with the first two songs, to have fucked around with the time and orchestration so easily and skittishly, and now go into dull and boring moving-right-along COCK is quite a disappointment.

People talking about Bowie as if he’s a genius, but I can’t hear anything (yet) apart from eye-shadow. Ziggy played guitar; as if that’s enough.

The Books
Thought for Food

This comes from that late part of Edinburgh, frogs in the rain no the pavements and cherry blossom falling and the music cabinet we had, draped with Dan’s red and orange cloth – understanding myself more and living through the cold with blonde hair for the first time. Bus number 5, bus number 42. First outside a pottery shop, sometimes outside a church and once the buses were cancelled and I walked the way to Kaimes in the leaves in the autumn chill and I listened to this on a minidisk somewhere on a mix of The Wicker man soundtrack and random Talking Heads at the start of when I loved Talking Heads and at the end of Edinburgh.

What does any of it mean? Jon loved The Books. Did some-one from Edinburgh bring them on an import…some of the drums some-one said were like Nightbus. What does this mean? Here is a woman complaining of a heart condition, someone is wished luck, robots disintegrate and the tones stop. I don’t know what any of this music means, and it moves so quickly through so much…is this like my time of retelling where I thought of loaves of bread stacked up too fast in my head? The shift into seeing words as sounds, going out of your rationality but not to irrational things. Sound. Not being meaningless. The combination of acoustic guitars and beeps and whistles and words in ways I hadn’t heard before…this was truly alien only three years ago. Perhaps more than three years. We’ll say three years and ten months to be fair. And then reduce it to six. Such technology and these ideas have become commonplace now, flitting and flirting between these scenes, I am an insect alighting on no shoulders. There must be this act of faith. What does it mean? The music is so joyfully lacking in destination, but never direction. A strain of something “classical” (in the HMV sense) appears and stops too soon. Are you with me? Are you with me? The scratchy and bored cello and gay couple appear. Do you like my ankles? Yes. You can hear the chopping of vegetables, tersely. All sound appearing.

Where do the Books come from? I notice this track is called “All our base are belong to them” and I look over at the flyer Ghostboy (Jason) did for me during a Great Admirers gig…where did that phrase come from first? He said he saw it somewhere…who knows. This music is more space than object, but what of the space it creates? I don’t know how to describe it. It’s not even a rainbow-like object, I can put my hands on it, but it continues to move. I don’t know what to do about this. I hate fireworks. They go off in the street and make me jump. I hear a whole chorus of them as a small child is looking for his parents. The way the music jumps around adds to this…is it a carnival atmosphere they are hoping for? I feel instead like I’m in a film where it starts and stops too frequently, too many lights all at once and I feel ill. It gets to the point where I can’t differentiate adequately between the music, the fireworks outside, or the sound of imaginary (and hence undefeatable) intruders.

I feel I have little to say about this album and maybe that’s the point.

Bjork
Medulla

All voices. Everything new and dark and early Bristol days – me and Dan going to collect Chris from the top sloping room at Ashley Hill to go into town and him leaping around the room and grinning and “Let me play you this! And this!”

The all-vocal (although not all the way through...it deceives you) nature of the album everyone said reminded them of people like Meredith Monk…so much of my degree seems assimilated and borne out in this…but like when I played Susie a new song of mine and she said “It’s like you’ve escaped from your training”…I am reminded again that in birthing these academic ideas and initial noises into “popular” medium is not to betray or escape it…when in doubt, give…there is a calm here that is stronger than the lace and foam of Vespertine…so many of the voices sound sexual or animal in nature, communicating neither meaning, percussion nor melody.

The second song talks about forgiveness for misery, for having “lost faith in myself and giving up my own interior to inferior forces” – the shame is endless. The phrases and arrangement are so much like a happy confession in an empty church. There is a freedom in here despite the darkness, the rhythms of “Where is the line” snake and escape as would be expected, and the octaves and choirs catch you unexpected…it feels like a continuation of the philosophy expressed first in “Army of me”…perhaps these are long-term discourses Bjork works through…songs sometimes representing return and renewal as well as revelation…I am elastic for you…

When I bought this, and took it back to the wooden room I shared with Dan in St Werburghs, where the garden dripped with gooseberries and mint, we tried so hard to read the inlay card, the words and the background the same colour so only by endlessly squinting and turning it to the light could you even make out some of the lyrics… Dan sat up at the computer and laboriously typed out the lyrics, arranging the text in varying patterns of right justified, middle justified, left justified…dark mornings, herbs and spices at Scoopaway and ushering at the Watershed, taking it in turns to listen to the CD on walkmans and rushing home each night to talk about it more. So much of the album is Icelandic and it doesn’t push the listeners away. You are invited to a new language.

The next song to appear in my language is one I sang a lot in 2006…I changed it from the purely vocal dance/dub-scape to wallow in to a piano-based two-step…I was rehearsing the Wasteland and Prufrock and the Folk House a lot, and enjoying those first early and exciting days of seeing Jon…thinking of those early positives and myself as a new person…and the dangers of urging likenesses…For this reason the album has pushed me forward from Autumn 2004 where there is so much moving that the whole world is shaking; to Spring 2006 where there is snow and tequila and lights on the water. Thinking of all those things, I particularly like now the slow and considered breath that constitutes the end of each percussive phrase…feeling that those experiences were the last gasps of a system of me in decline, and for good reasons…

The next song pushes me back to 2004…this and Bright Eyes and Animal Collective and Panda bear and everything else surrounding me and everyone at the time led me to messy, chopped-up voices, tiny incongruent and pluralized vocals tripping over each other…Submarines clustering in the sea. We are not all that scientific.

An urgency around the desire to make it right. Gods worrying over their actions. Repeatedly. A table with multiple singers, held at varying distances away from the microphone. Shouting. And thinking of Gods; the seashore being a witness to everything from Grecian myths and planet of the apes…Yves Tanguy landscapes and singing trees; differing time-scales – all worries, deaths and joys are contained here. The waves end abruptly and takes me to the juxtaposition of the seas of Mull, Calgary Bay, Tobermorey and Craignure then Silverknowes with the Irn Bru bottles bobbing in the grey and my last picture of the Edinburgh people sitting with their faces to the sky and their backs to me. And whoever wrote the poem that comes next, “if this should be, I say, you of my heart send me a little word that I may go unto her and take her hands saying ‘accept all happiness from me’. I wish I had known before I had got myself so sad – there is happiness everywhere and I feel I need to shuffle back to track two.

The noises of wolves at doors permeate the next song…but there is a piano playing inside and voices melting over each other to distract from the coming teeth, or to persuade them to pass by with only a taste of blood…this is complicated and frightening but it washes out and disappears. It is still in the process of becoming another story.

It is interesting that “Mouth’s cradle” makes mention of “All those Bushes and Osamas”…Dan was so delighted at the idea of Bjork becoming political…it seems to be the one thing she’s not…I wish I still had the print of those lyrics so I could analyse it with the knowledge I’ve found for myself in this area over the last couple of years. I will say it makes to think of the scene from metropolis where Freder sees the M-machine briefly as the open mouth of an Egyptian funeral pyre for unwilling sacrifices, led up the stairs by unsympathetic foremen who feed then unconcernedly to a keening fire below. Freder clears his eyes and sees the machine again. Personalities and icons then being the fuel of hate on both sides? We close instead with a party and celebration of biology. I am surprised I can listen to the words as closely as I do; previously those descriptions of the pipes, pumps and valves of the human body would have horrified me and left me speechless and weeping somewhere. I feel proud to consider myself as a series of compartments these days. To see oneself as full of joyful oxygen.