No skips, no shuffles

2008-02-11T09:20:00.000Z

Kate Bush
The Sensual World

I will admit it, like a dirty sinner – I’ve skipped and I’ve shuffled. And I loved it. In my defence, the ipod is a seductive demon and I have been weak, but I have tamed it and overpowered it by plenty of Pet Shop Boys and Wings (Sam tells me that I don’t mess about with listening to crap music, I zone in for the core of crap).

But I did begin listening to this album on a long bus ride from Bedminster to Speedwell. I got half into it and then I saw some-one I knew so had to take the telltale white earphones out and have a quick conversation. So I listen to it again now on a monstrously lazy day, having danced for hours at the hatchet wearing a top hat and sunglasses. Veronica told me the opening song is related to Ulysses, and that’s another thing I need to finish off, I got halfway through it and became waylaid by the wasteland instead…will return to it, I loved the sketch of the amputee watching fireworks…

I confess I hardly know this album, maybe three or four songs have embedded themselves in my head but perhaps there’s always going to be a kind of anti-climax after Hounds of Love…it sounds in a way as if there’s some kind of tepid maturity after the water-rebirth…have been reading Jung again and thinking about his interpretation of the Oedipal myth, and the two Piscean fish swimming away from each other, Jonah and the Whale…a little piece of rope won’t hope it together…it’s so deep you don’t think you can speak about it…

The sound is slicker already, 1989…that represents quite a pause between Hounds of Love and this one…the Celtic vibes to the whole thing stay…but there’s a lot of heavier guitar surrounding it, I hope I’m not sulking just because the previous album is over (which I guess we’re all guilty of) but the lyrics even start to sound like the dreary “trust in yourself and you can achieve anything” philosophy I remain so suspicious of…at least she laughs at the end of the song. The idea of “I’m all grown up now” disturbs me a little, maybe it’s supposed to, just put your feet down there because you’re all grown up now…maybe it’s the child-like aspects of her voice that render it so disturbing to me; I’ve not worked it out just yet but it raises discomfort in me when placed with the same flaky feminist sentiments expressed previously… there’s definite landscape in this, rolling strings…I read the lyrics, swimming, feet on the sandy ground, her father speaks – that’ll be my discomfort. Imagine your father calling you “child” – am I jealous or outraged? And something else hidden in there possibly. I’m glad the song ends when it does but that’s more for me than the CD…

Actually, this album takes a lot of child/parent images on its way. There is something of that dreadful late 80s “we are the world” crap seeping through, despite the presence of the Balanescu Quartet. There’s something about the rhythms she employs, so scattered…not quite (or even remotely) breakbeat, but although they do become cohesive eventually, there’s a certain time of a hall-of-mirrors with beats chasing beats before they arrive as some kind of concrete, walnut-shaped whole… I think of Chaplin in The Circus. And then of course I think of Chaplin dancing in The Great Dictator (dancing with Hitler being the theme of the song) – “Madame, your dancing was exquisite… wonderful… amazing… very good…good” as if the truth of the matter lay in the diminuendo.

This is one of the songs now that’s always hit me, Deeper Understanding, about a woman’s love affair with her computer, the computer sings to her, offering love and deeper understanding. I imagine a dark room, and the light coming from the screen the woman huddles around being brighter than the light of any Jesus currently available…until my family found me and intervened…there was a story about a Bristol City Council tenant who had died and lain undiscovered for 8 years, I think of Maya Angelou writing in Africa, and a friend wailing because a corpse had remained unclaimed in the morgue for two days…sunglasses being the privilege of secularism, change the light, make it evening when it is morning, turn to your computer in little rooms up and down the land and rejoice in freedom, voices surf from liquid crystal and graphics forgive. Computer-controlled Cognitive-Behavioural-Therapy programmes, your computer will cure you and mould you to serenity – is it so unfeasible to see the computer as a god and a lover? I hate to lose you.

But now, clumsy rhythms, dialogue-style lyrics, wailing recorders and some West-Coast guitar to try and cling it all together. Two songs have gone past, and now Rockets Tail fills me with the absurdist Kate Bush I so love, so much more than the one who languidly dissects (carelessly) relationship misunderstandings…the story of a woman who dresses as a suicide bomber to understand the feelings of a firework soon to explode, lonely and frightened while the crowds cheer below…Veronica and I sat in the kitchen the first time we heard this, purple walls, black and white tiled floors, she sat, smoking and laughing at the big cock-guitar solo. When I first came to Bristol I peddled a couple of compositions to the Gasworks choir, the woman and her husband liked my music very much and invited me to come to a rehearsal but I was still too timid and post-Edinburgh to carry it out. She played me a recording of their choir singing this, an exact copy…even the wailing of the Trio Bulgarka (similar backing techniques to the early Kate Bush – why did she abandon almost completely that side of herself? The more guttural voices make it so much more interesting than the wistful lace-clad witch and earth mother she seemed to style herself as after that…)

This Woman’s Work retains special meaning for me; early March 2004 an event brought me nearer to and further from different kinds of life, and while I acted and reacted rationally and sensibly and felt, really no sadness, sometime after the song gave me, and still gives me moments of silence I can’t really understand or explain. I don’t like hearing it on that NSPCC advert, it feels too holy for that.
And oh God, after that, what a terrible song to end with “He thought he would die but he didn’t”…the bird noises neither help no rescue it. Calling out for middle street sounds more like wandering aimlessly in the middle of the road.

2008-01-23T13:46:00.000Z

Kate Bush
Hounds of Love

I need to start writing before it begins. This is the huge, huge album. My sanity and a sticking-post for the end of 2001 and much of thereafter. Two halves – Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave. Elements of both appearing forever. Calvary. The video, the dance (Debbie and I performed on a tube speeding away from London and Rosie’s funeral). Tell me we both matter, don’t we? I heard this first as “the most 80s song ever” as described by Veronica. Adam has shown me a 12-inch Spanish version of the single. The dogs on the cover are called Bonnie and Clyde – none of this scratches the skin of it, the purple, grey, white, drowning in a sea of copied faces all marching towards an exit – you won’t be unhappy. Walking to see Dan when he lived on the other side of Edinburgh, I would put this on my Walkman, the album lasted long enough to take me to Stockbridge. This would get me to the traffic island where Jen told me she had to get to the other side before the green man started flashing or her family would die – I would make a deal with God. The screams, the twisting voices beneath – if only I could. I listened to this album with my head in the fireplace again and again and again. This album, more than anything else apart from the stuff I was writing at the time (and I heard how a woman could conjure up the land if she needed to) is the orange streetlights and chain-smoking of Edinburgh.

The excitement, the fog around ones ankles is the start of Hounds of Love – the video, a desperate handcuffed chase into and out of a sombre New Years Eve party. The strings, Eleanor-Rigby like, provide the regularity the nearly-melodic drums fail to give, they stumble and the strings lift. The fear and the long-coming rest. The canal behind Gilmore Place, the brewery smelling of vinegar and gravy in the morning. The Big Sky – being amazed at the handclaps and talking about how they were recorded, maybe in teams. Noah, Ireland. Perhaps now in the evening walk I’d be at the Lyceum, the big hotel with the fountain in front of it where I worked for an afternoon before escaping with full and empty lungs. You never understood me.

This album shows more than any other I can think of that the whole is more than the parts – for me the quality dips with this and the next song. This would have been side 1, Act 1 before the bigger, weightier themes of the Ninth Wave appear, the big death and resurrection game suggested in her Ophelia pose. A party – the end of the world. Astronauts and Elephants.

Mother stands for comfort – the broken glass again that vexed me so in Babooshka. The meandering bass line again. An inconclusive point, line and story. It never rained in my head when I heard this, just a feeling of curtains being drawn temporarily, going through a tunnel and looking at one’s watch. The pun at the end “Mother will stay Mum” did nothing for me then and does nothing now. The warped recorders at the end charmed me, but the beginning of Cloud busting is like the morning.

The strings, have always in that style been bread and water to me. Martial and glass-like. The regularity attracts me – I know that something good is going to happen, I don’t know when. I understand the clockwork and in the video was impressed by the exact footfall of the bad government men in black. The voices of the chorus appear, shrieking, controlled. The sound of the train at the end is only a culmination of the slow and steady warm-up of wheels that begun at the beginning and have been quietly producing steam and air to open the windows with. Here I am at the castle on the corner.

And then the Ninth Wave is about to begin – it tells a story that we debated about, waves of water, images of ice and drowning, stranded at sea. Related to Arthurian legends, a Tennyson quote about The Holy Grail. Death and Rebirth, Finnegan, begin again. And then Kirsten brought up the idea of sound waves – an oscilloscope.

No matter, for now, Dream of Sheep begins it. I learned this on the guitar and played it to Veronica in the kitchen. Floating in a bathtub on the sea (think of Buster Keaton sill resolutely turning on the tap). I hear voices of a lost helicopter searching for her through dreams and fears. With one sweep of the piano, you can feel the sea swelling below. Wish I had my radio – I’d tune into some friendly voices. I can’t be left to my imagination, I knew this at the time my imagination was liable to put me out with the rubbish and leave me to be ground to salt in the morning.

Under Ice gave me the fear one time, I remembered a scene from a horror movie (The Omen?) where some-one indeed fell through ice, I think now of governmental information films that currently obsess me. She paints the picture with hesitant clarity. There is no need to describe how the air smells, just that she leaves behind her little lines in the ice, splitting sounds spitting snow. She changes from the subject to object – she is no longer describing her course but her moving under the ice – we missed the moment she fell.

The voices – not a song but my most beloved Kate Bush song, the voices all telling her to wake that I heard best and frightened myself the first time along Princes Street listening to this on headphones and the voices swimming at 360 degrees around me – shards and snatches of all the rest of the Ninth Wave coming together and meeting in a sleepy soup. As we got to know the album better and better we could isolate and identify each strand, each little light, each stroke towards sunlight – you still in bed? We are all water and the holy land of water – remove the water, carry the water…the sudden change of “Help me baby, talk to me, please baby help me!”, the epileptic struggles of a voice caught behind glass, ice, sleep, and the devil voice alternately calling her “whore” and “blackbird” – the bells are playing and not in celebration. Waking the witch – bless me father for I have sinned, her breath goes in, she has been punched, help this blackbird, there’s a stone around my neck. A near-death, is this in her mind? Wings and water. Curses and crowds, the helicopter appears, get out of the waves, get out of the water – what business did you have being there anyway? Get out.

Dripping, sodden, she returns and is invisible, you suppose she must be dead. I should have been home hours ago – you hear of her life outside the calamity. I’m not here. Her boyfriend? Mother? Friend? Some-one is waiting for her, but the trapped and silent figure she has become, perhaps not recognised for what she was or should have been is only “watching you without me” – the measure of love being loss, again. I’m not here. The radio searches for her. Spirits appear, singing backwards, the voice breathlessly, please help me, listen to me, talk to me baby, please baby help me – how are my arms? Am I talking loud enough? I developed a stutter the summer of 2001 and quietened myself down to hide it from those who would know.

The Jig of Life – I heard it first as medieval rather than a straight Celtic example. The Irish arrangement by Bill Whelan, who later did Riverdance so I guess that’s pretty authentic. I wanted to find the mathematics behind it, the reducing numbers in the circular pattern, how many times round did the riff play in the major before those clashes? Come on, let me live – Chris said maybe it’s not “arrangement” in the classical sense and that’s what gives it the power, but there are arrangements everywhere, the whole Fibonacci thing taught us this; there is maths in the curl of leaves, in the fact that trees continue to exist and I know it’s here in this song too – every time I try and count the drum beats that pull my shoulders up to my ears in an ecstasy, my feet work in counterpoint, wherever I’m sitting, however I’m standing and analysis breaks down – holding all the love that waits for you here. We are of water and the holy land of water.

Voices reappear. Have they been looking for her? Hello Earth, Earth as a baby, I think of the Bundle from The War Plays – shall we give the world a nice clean face? I can blot you out of sight, a one-handed eclipse. I could be driving home with you asleep on the seat. At this point I would nearly be at Dan’s house but would detour so I could get to the end of the album by the beginning of the Water of Leith. We have heard voices of deep men, far below the surface. Can’t do anything, just watch them swing with the wind out to sea. All you sailors (get out of the waves, get out of the water) All life-savers…all you cruisers…all you fishermen, head for home. Go to sleep little earth, I was there at the birth, out of the cloud-burst, ahead of the tempest…All you cruisers – that hits me the hardest. Edinburgh – the water’s edge, those schizophrenic and jagged skyscapes of the castle, Arthur’s seat, the sea. The dark, the cold. All I could think about. Winding – a slow descent into the blue with one hand still held open as the keys changed, go to sleep little earth, unknown words in a dark place.

Once upon a time I walked along Princes Street listening to the last track on this album, having survived the fear of drowning. A bagpipe player coincided exactly with everything else I was hearing and I danced on the street – little light, I love you better now. I’m falling like a stone.

2008-01-18T11:16:00.000Z

Kate Bush
The Dreaming

So we were walking past the doctors surgery in Edinburgh, we were going somewhere new to drink, sometime early on and Veronica linked my arm and we walked on ahead and she told me about a Kate Bush album she’d just heard about all based on dreams, some good, some bad. She was discovering Kate Bush just a couple of steps ahead of me and oh how excited we felt to think about it. This is this.

Apparently this is the album that fully made people view Kate Bush as a freak, weirdo, kooky, however else such women are described. A bizarre opening song certainly, the weird backing, the fucking odd video as she sits, ballet-dressed performing a weird tribal dance surrounded by minotaurs on roller-skates and Ku Klux Klan members. She looks like Susie in the middle section. What is the song about? I want to be a lawyer, I want to be a scholar but I really can’t be bothered. My cup shall never over-floweth, it is I that moan and groaneth. We drew a cartoon with Steve Norrie as Kate Bush. We said the video was Dada. The song about the botched bank job. I love it – this is the first complete album of hers I love. Jen was paying back Veronica some money once and V was delighted to hear her say There goes a tenner, hey look, there’s a fiver. I’m having dreams about things not going right.

How long until we worked out track three was about hand-to-hand combat? Indigenous tracking and hand-grenades. I have heard Kate Bush mentioned so often by feminist artistic friends, does she count as a feminist? Or is hers just a particularly feminine way to write about issues of warfare etc? I’ve read about the Greenham Common protests and how the feminist movement coincided so well with the anti-nuclear stuff of the early 1980s and the focusing on continuation of life as opposed to strategies, which is apparently a traditional male dominion. I’m not sure I agree with that argument though, surely it’s just more of a humanist standpoint? Not necessarily feminist. We’re not ones for busting through walls, but unless we can prove that we’re doing it, we can’t have it all – can I have it all now? Between you and me, she don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere.

Leave it open: I remember forgetting this from early listens to this album, but it’s amazing, so strange and freaky. That weird flanger effect on the voice. So noisy and painful, reminding me of that weird “radio edit” version of Hyperballad that knocked me over for so long.

When Veronica made me a random CD of random Kate Bush stuff (Pull of the Bush she called it, after a bit of backing from this song), she included a backing-only version of this song (The Dreaming). Sadly, it was too late for me to consider pulling it out at Yo Sushi to fuck with the hen-party diners who expected Son of a Preacher Man, Fame and Puff the Magic Dragon as they choked down Udon and Ramen, maki and nigiri. I would have loved to have done this, just to say I had done it (in the same way, being able to revel in the memory, if not the artistic product of myself and Kirsten rapping to Play that Funky Music White Boy in hayseed Scottish accents), but it’s another damn weird song, I’ll never pretend to understand it or even like it that much, the voice of the face buried in the sand at the end, in truth, scared me a little. The strange bridge section which glues together this and Night of the Swallow is a thing I love very much though. Night of The Swallow is incredible. I remember when we “got” it, and latched on the “Give me something to show for my miserable life” – you can hear the Celtic stuff coming to the fore, but it’s not in an overblown way, just in the clashing of sticks.

The first time I died was in the arms of good friends of mine – that was a lyric that stabbed me at the time, but it feels churlish to mention it now, now that those things get further and further away. This is another one of those stop-and-start songs, the Danny Thompson bass keeps it in the wandering style. Houdini always stayed very beautiful and full of love, but images of young men hitting the water freaked me out, even though I thought of myself in no way like Rosabelle. I could see the séance, all dark furniture and reflected candles.

And of course, Get Out of my House (which we sang as we went to Ikea, never dreaming it was such a long taxi ride away). It’s like a dark film, all twisted and angled, running with the camera, unflattering lighting and badly-built sets. I sang it as I helped unpack glasses at the new-look Bentleys, all cocktail glasses and leather seating – my home, my joy are barred and bolted. The idea of oneself as a diseased property seemed beautiful, but the stains were not for moving. I can hear the spite and joy of neglect and the importance of retaining mistakes (oh, like Bright Eyes again, are mistakes wrapped in glass necessarily errors?) In refusing entry, she is more controlled and sane than she has been when cataloguing her misfortunes. Her “change into the mule” is so much more demented than his, and more terrifying for it. He retains a tune and fits with the music – where he is embroidery and she is a weird potato-stamp that matches nothing she is more effective and memorable. The voices meld into Indian drum-talk as they disappear and you can imagine that the dust has gathered arms and assembled itself along the sidelines to watch.

2008-01-16T17:25:00.000Z

Kate Bush
Never for Ever

It starts with Babooshka and I see the wonderful video in my head, remembering how Veronica and I laughed deliriously in Kirstie’s bedroom (did we move Jen’s TV there?) the first time we watched the video – the double bass and bizarre dance and then the weird warrior princess. I think I remember Therese liking this song too, and I sang it at some big Folk House concert last year, last Spring, and I think it was the night that things cemented with me and Jon when I played my old trick (I’m afraid) of asking him to hold a bracelet, a watch, something while I played the piano and sang so that when I came back he had something from before and after. There’s something of the cunning in this song, a definite story. The broken glass doesn’t seem to have much to do with it though, here and in my own history.

Delius is a strange one, the weird Bontempi-kinda drums with weird Indian style scales and singing to glorify this very English composer, who I always tie in with Finzi in my head (and know very little about either, but I liked Finzi’s settings of the Shakespeare sonnets I heard Paul sing). I remember when we discovered this album too, and Veronica laughed (so much laughing) at the cover and all the monsters…she would say “Look…all those monsters…are flying out…of her vagina” and then flip the CD round to do an impression of Kate Bush’s bat face. The next song becomes that meandering magic I don’t normally like, but something today makes me enjoy it a little more than I have done previously.

All we ever look for wakes me up. The pizzicato strings rising help. The section where she opens and closes doors and hears variously religious caterwauling, birdsong and applause knocks me into my childhood where I did, on some level, hope that the world shown in Yellow Submarine was real somewhere, all those doors with the train speeding towards you, the All-American statues of beauty queens and cowboys, the concert-hall where one stepped out of, having caught a bouquet – all of that was present and correct somewhere. I see Kate Bush tip-toeing around behind the changing colours of that car. The Wedding List continues the nicely masochistic story-teller role. I like listening to the string counter-melody that appears as her voice becomes more and more guttural, and I think about the disco-style of such things, the second string melody of I will survive and how I related it to Dowland-style lute and viol songs, that was what I wanted to do with one of my songs, This is your Disco was supposed to be Elizabethan but it never ended up that way.

Violin is a peculiar one, fairly heavy music for the time (1980) I suppose, especially coming from the kind lacy-froth-witch that Kate Bush was putting herself across as. It’s a funny thing to be singing such a song about, I’ve seen her do a live thing (on video or something) where a violinist, dressed as the devil, dances around her as she sings. Her tone of voice when she sings “Whack that devil” is another thing that made Veronica screech with glee. And also how the vocal outro replicates the tuning of a violin.

And now a very beautiful and very disturbing song about a woman confessing to sexual feelings about a baby boy. Form overriding content maybe? Because it’s such a polite, chamber arrangement, the menace and disgust is missed. She is not convinced though when she sings “Let go, let go”, and the move into Night Scented Stock, a weird little vocal piece never convinces otherwise. The voices build and build, Lego-like into ungainly Berio-style chords.

Army Dreamers – some-one told me recently this was their favourite Kate Bush song. A vague Irish accent creeps into Kate Bush’s voice in this song that sounds strange – I’ve heard her speak in some interview from the late 80s and she’s got a weird Sloane-y kind of cockney voice. I have read that the user of the Fairlight sampler in this album comes from her association with Peter Gabriel (who I don’t get outside of Sledgehammer), it’s only a very subtle use when you hear the clicking of a gun providing a tiny part of percussion. I think of the video, where she creeps out from behind a tree with her gun, three times, to encounter nothing on the path in front of her. Camouflage gear. There’s something sad, every time you expect her to find something, or some-one.

Oh, and Kate Bush’s nuclear song. Breathing. The video, she is a foetus rolling in a womb as the lights reflect on her face from the world outside, then she is born to chaos and zombies and fallout. I love this song, the breathing-out-in-out-in-out scared me at the time as breathing steadily had become both unattainable and overrated. After the blast, chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung – I love my beloved, and I think about love and family, and how the concept of a steady and solid (nuclear) family is so much a construction of history rather than a standard – thinking of Ruth and her unnamed daughter as they till the diseased fields and the daughter doesn’t know to hold Ruth’s hand as she dies, an earlier incarnation of Ruth weeping and trying to make bread, and still earlier of her browsing in Mothercare, and the journey from one to the other. A voice tells me things I already know about the reality of a mushroom cloud, but the music conjured over it is comforting rather than alarming, and the voices “What are we going to do?” suggests we can at least do something, and at least the voices are still singing together. It is strangely melodic for the end of the world, but the long and drawn-out bass note, a long time in the coming, that freaked us out in Edinburgh will suggest bright lights in the sky and Kittyhawk sunk once and for all.

2008-01-07T11:24:00.000Z

Kate Bush

Lionheart

This is the strange one – the one I know the least, apart from Aerial, about which more later when my venom is up. Consensus has it that this album was “rushed out”, and certainly few people mention it when talking about Kate Bush. When Veronica and I made up our great and glorious Top 20 Kate Bush lists, I think nothing from this came up in it.

It was Veronica’s birthday at the end of November, when the Kate Bush wagon had got well underway. Myself, Kirstie and Jen found this in a second-hand record shop on Lothian Road (which just briefly turned into Bury Road in my head as I remembered it) as the one album she didn’t have. A song about Peter Pan - thinking of Sylvia again, she and I spoke about Peter Pan last time we spoke, and she talked about the sculpture outside the Bristol Children’s; Infirmary, saying that she’d prefer a fountain with a Peter Pan statue it, clear jets of water, rather than those weird loops and silver bends. She wonders what they do at night and now so do I. If I think of a Peter Pan statue I think of the statue in London that you see when you come in on the bus to Victoria, past the Albert Bridge, all sugar pink and blue - the boy who holds onto the fin of the dolphin as it dives into the pavement. Is it outside Sadler’s Wells? The first brave trip I took to London by myself armed with a map, a bottle of Kalms pills that rattled reassuringly, and a compulsion to at least find the offices of Faber and Faber, Queens Square (I dream of Faber and Faber) – I thought of buying two tickets to a ballet, Dan was so knocked out by the two ballets we’d seen in Edinburgh I wanted to continue this for him. Now when I think of Peter Pan and London, I think of Rosie and her close boy’s haircut as she morphed into Roh. I never knew Roh as well as I knew Rosie and I wanted to ask her but that was cut short. This time last year we were still hoping she’d come to our New Year Eve in Bristol I read some Jeanette Winterson today where a similar death was described in the space of a sentence. It seemed more and less horrifying than the experience so many people scattered across the world now know as part of their history, and the culmination of someone else’s. I thought of her just before Christmas in the Duke of York as a friend of Andy’s, a nice guy called Alistair talked about his father’s death. Wow, I think you’re unbelievable. The music’s nice but it isn’t doing anything for me beyond that.

But I don’t remember hearing Fullhouse before, I like the idea of “Remember yourself”. But truth – nothing else hits me until Coffee Home Ground and Hammer Horror – these are the ones that seem to change from the wistful and pixie-like meandering of so much of the early Kate Bush stuff. She is beginning to be a narrator rather than a singer, and I know which my aesthetic prefers. I have more space and tolerance for characters than I do heroines.

2008-01-05T12:42:00.000Z

Kate Bush

The Kick Inside

For my great and glorious love affair with the Kate Bush catalogue to begin here feels strange but not unwelcome. I remember now listening to this in Gilmore Place and explaining the time signatures to Veronica, I’d said something about the shifting time of it and she’d butted in with “I didn’t do a music degree so I don’t know” (they all, all these lovely people who I loved, seemed defensive and odd about my choice of degree…people seem to be afraid of classically-trained musicians and remain so and I hate it still) so I explained why I loved so much the switch from 4 to 6 and how it spanned simplicity and complexity at once, made you do an extra step as you swayed but accept it.

Anyway, the Kate Bush story for me is that the viola player from my string quartet (mine) in York walked back with me one day and told me how much I’d love Kate Bush, but I didn’t really take it in. I knew the name, the vision of Kate Bush, growing up in the 80s I think you had no choice. Then I moved to Edinburgh and together, Veronica and I began to understand.

These are all still very much song-based, rather than the soundscapes that were to come, and I prefer, but I am so pleased to hear these again. I am back in the kitchen in the small hours sharing a joint, a toastie and some vanilla tea as we sit on those canvas chairs, enjoying this, Kirstie and Jenny watch Eastenders or are out with their boyfriends. Maybe Veronica and I sit in her little primrose yellow room and hunch over the laptop, dropping our cigarette ends in that funny ashtray with the pink tyre around it we bought from Ikea.

There is slightly too much of the witch around Kate Bush at this stage in her career for me to love as much as I will do later. But it was at this time of night that my panic attacks would abate and I would be safe to come out. The theatricals are all here and you bump into a friend you haven’t seen for a long time. How I would love to see Veronica again.

Now Kite, the first one on this album that made me sit up and has rooted forever what I mean by Kate-Bush-reggae… and then The Man with the Child in His Eyes…a number of people say this is their favourite Kate Bush song…I suppose there’s something of that kind of Gershwin torch song in there but it never did anything to me. Kirstie’s Dad wrote a novel I believe that was all about Kate Bush, or some-one who loved her. It was published and I understand it focused on this.

And Wuthering Heights – so much in this song to tell about. When I sang it at Queens Square in the Autumn of that terrible year but when things had started to shake down. Rosie, Sam, Jack, Sofia and I’m sure some others all sat in the grass with many many others as I sang with Jesse Morningstar and the rest of the assembled band, no rehearsal – I’d rehearsed the moves drunkenly at Hayley’s goodbye party the night before as Matt and Ed waltzed around the living room at Albany Road and broke through the tulip paper chains we had. That Saturday, Sofia wore a bracelet of matchbox cars she’d made. I started singing in the lower register because I was nervous but broke free. People danced in front of me, waving their arms, and I learned later that Irma got married the same day. It was a wonderful day. I’d sung Nightbus and another to the assembled crowds before. When I was working at Bentleys and heard Alistair, the terribly gruff ex-marine landlord singing it to himself in the kitchens below. Talking to Dan about how some songs can’t be covered by anyone else, and this one begin an example. The wonderful and terrible video. Dancing the dance with Veronica in…that part of Edinburgh where I sang once with Alaric’s band…the Pleasance. We sang it post-debauch, sitting in the courtyard and doing all the moves shrieking with laughter at ourselves and how lovely it was to love this song. Red flowers. I still haven’t read the book.

And now James and the Cold Gun which I sing for Hmna Andy on special request and practised for hours in my sea-green room at Gilmore Place…Veronica hearing me and impishly reporting on my progress. I sang it busking in Edinburgh in those early days too. I loved busking but am too responsible now, I suppose. The Hammond Organ. Those high As still impress and I still love to sing them, even if I’ve never got the chords 100% right. And the backing (a-chu-chu, a HEE-YAH!) I sang to myself when I worked at the Corn Exchange, mixing drinks, opening cans and serving cocktails for the various functions, kissing once a wine waiter called Michael and dancing in a nightclub with the other bar staff the one and only disastrous night I ever drank lager and enjoyed it. That walk from Gilmore up Home Street, perhaps going up the curve that led you to the old hospital, where I would learn to decry Edinburgh as at once seedy and imperious. I’ve always had little patience with the ending of this song.

I don’t like the next one so much, I remember feeling irritated by it at the time. But Oh to be in love hit me badly at the time and still does – the sensation of drowning. I could’ve been anyone – and it makes me think of everything that’s recently been in front of me and dancing around, shifting and running away at the point of contact – how do you decide what love is? Is it a form of protection? And to balance the binarism in my head – or survival? Chemicals or history? I’m no closer to knowing in all my twenty eight years.

Them Heavy People always makes me smile, I believe it’s about getting away from the academy, but understanding the continuation of progress (rolling the ball to me). And when she sings “Whirling dervishes”, I have a memory of Veronica cackling with laughter and imitating it a second later, maybe going to skip the CD back to the second or two she wanted to hear again. Maybe a combination of dim lighting, failing eyesight, smoke or simply being stoned, I always thought this album was called King Incense. The last song put me right, but apart from that “The Kick Inside” (the song) made little impression upon me previously. There’s heavy rain outside – recently rain has begun to make me feel nervous. I think about the ceiling caving in. I cleaned so much today, I dusted the photo frame that holds a picture of me and Chris as toddlers wearing matching Spiderman masks. I see the early-80s telephone and think of Threads. I hear Kate Bush singing about women and wombs and I think of Sylvia, my supervisor from the helpline and I think about the journey from girl to woman and I wonder where my Spiderman mask is.

2008-01-02T14:06:00.000Z

The Buggles

The Age of Plastic

Somewhere in my third year at University, I bought a CD of greatest number one hits ever, or similar. I was falling in love with songwriting and recording as opposed to composing, and thanks to Steve was thinking so much about Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and reconsidering my beloved Beatles. I was interested in the idea of form and shape and structure in pop music, and saw this CD of, arguably classics, as a bit of a text book – how do hooks work? Choruses? What renders them most memorable? And in it I really discovered Video Killed the Radio Star.

We used to have barbecues at Temple Villas, Chill-out weekends and parties. I remember sitting in the conservatory with everyone and playing this song, going crazy for those high syncopated strings and Vicky saying to me (placating my mania I suppose) “I do like it, but I’m not hearing what you’re hearing”. No matter. I found the album and bought it in Edinburgh to hilarity. It amazes me how much the first rack sounds like Abba. Were they ever a serious band? I’m aware of how many different side projects Trevor Horn (really, who is the other guy? Only a face with a plug in the neck) had on the go at any one time, so is this the limit or the piss-take?

Anyway, Video Killed the Radio Star appears soon enough. I worked out a pretty acoustic version early in Bristol. Most wonderful and sad song. I don’t care how “cheesy” this comes across, it’s beautiful. I feel a night of music I love coming along – I sang Elvis Costello to myself as I walked back from Tescos with milk. It’s such a wonderful song, the arrangement, the sentiment. The rest of the album could never match up. And I’m not just being wilful or kitsch, it’s gorgeous, and the funny little fadeout only adds to it.

Lines from Kid Dynamo come and hit me – call me if you ever feel like letting go. Our minds will not change, only our cars. I love you Miss Robot, the only other song that’s stuck in my head from my initial listening of this album – thinking you can hear Daft Punk and all of that coming…Cool is cool but how can anyone not love this? OK – the next one’s shit (Clean, clean) but does seem to have something to do with the vague “concept” that seems to be surrounding this (A character called Johnny? There’s even a reprise which is often tell-tale of such things)

Oh, but how I love the introduction to Elstree, even though I laughed as I imitated it to Heppell, Kirstie and Dan in Colville Place as we ate that weird custard apple I bought, split into four, and celebrated each of us the securing of each of our first flats together, them above the chip shop at the top of Broughton Place, us on East London Street, down the road and round the corner, equally down the road and round the corner from Adam, Tim and Jen. Action. Perhaps it owes a debt to Video Killed the Radio Star in terms of chord progression which is why it sits comfortably in my head. I have read about James Mason orating at Judy Garland’s funeral; “Time does not remember the entertainers”.

There does seem to be a point to all of this, even if it is obscured by time and fashion. Let them be lonely and say you don’t care. Let them be broken and say you don’t care. I am beginning to love this more than I thought possible – even I thought I had this in my collection as more of a curio but I am entertaining thoughts of teaching myself these songs. Perhaps these things are better when they are more reflective than heroic. “Oh my-my, you are so sci-fi”

The start of Technopop is so joyous. It does make me laugh tho – I wonder what was in her mind, was I really so unkind? I lie back and turn the radio on – TECHNOPOP!! That’s pretty hilarious actually, I have an urge to tell Jack. I wonder if that was the end of the album originally (I hope it was, an amazing ending) because surely the Johnny on the Monorail (a very different version) is some kind of bonus track…All we cannot see we call invisible. They call him “Johnny Rascal” and I can hear parts of I love you Miss Robot reappearing before the album disappears into guitars.

2007-12-31T12:16:00.000Z

Tim Buckley
Anthology

I am contemplating buying an ipod. Post-xmas stocks are down but I’m going to strike – and I wondered today, might I give in to shuffling? But then again, it has taken me over a year and I’m still only up to Tim Buckley…maybe the ipod will speed me up a little – I blame the MSc and nuclear proliferation.

Tim Buckley is one of the musical souvenirs I hold from my relationship with Dan – I remember talking to Adam about Bob Dylan recently, he is steadfast that my warning systems set against the man relate to the learning curve to wall-to-wall Dylan instilled by the poisonous academic, and that if I could get out of the context of that, I’d really understand Dylan. I do understand Dylan, and truthfully, subterranean thingy is enough for me, although I did always like the clothes line saga. I know enough to join in with the hmnas when the red wine evenings turn that way.

Tim Buckley ticks all those troubadour boxes I should despise and sneer at. I think it’s his voice that trembles me elsewhere, I much prefer it to Jeff Buckley, and I hear again the icons of different generations jostling in my head. On the live at Sin-e EP I bought for Dan with the amazing version of The Way Young Lovers Do, you could hear the ghost of Tim Buckley crowing through the upper register of young Jeff as he warbled in those late 80s coffee shops. I drew diagrams about why I preferred Tim Buckley to Jeff Buckley, but I couldn’t describe them now. I do know the diagram appears in my drawing diary from 2004, and the other picture I drew that day related to when I went to pick up my new reading glasses, and outside a computer shop somewhere in the backstreets of Morningside was a notice next to a dog saying “Please walk me”, I went in the shop to check if they were joking, and no, they were stuck with dog-sitting and were all too busy so put the sign up and hoped for honest dog walkers to pass by. I was listening to the new David Byrne album and was listening to the bizarre brass-band hymn thing about post 9-11 Imperialism and walked in late Spring with a novel-borrowed dog by my side as I went to Spec savers and back. Around my picture of myself with this dog is a series of dots and dashes which (I remember now) related to Tim and Jeff Buckley, something related to just the words, and the extraneous, Baroque-kinda flourishes. I think my musical and literary brains fight together sometimes, and I have little patience with the padding many vocalists go for. Although beautiful, and truly the ending of Jeff Buckley’s version of Alleluia is incredible, I want to know the thrust and the jist of the song.

I know most of these songs by their shape rather than their content. Not enough to identify them outside of Blue Melody or Song to the Siren – but looking again at the titles I recognise Sally go round the roses, Moulin rouge. I remember this one too, the dramatic piano, “Pleasant Street” and the guitar stabs I love so well myself. Wow. I have been reading Slouching to Bethlehem by Joan Didion recently, and this makes me think of all those alarming stories, five-year olds an acid, wearing white lipstick, but presenting as a typical five-year-old. Was she really on acid? It sounds too frightening. It must be said there are elements of the self-conscious time-signature changes that annoy me. Hallucinations, it’s almost too narrative, and in the same way I get annoyed with the Oooh yeahs that fill in spaces in the music, I can only take so much of the music being forced to hop skip and jump nervously to accommodate the skittering and fussy words.

There is something so sunny about this music. I think of his young man asking “Will you ever remember me?” and I want to tell him that those yellow sunny afternoons weather well, and even in the pain of memory the idea of keeping your head above the storm and seeing the whole view (am reading JB Priestly again) renders it benevolence rather than decay. I will remember you, but remembrance alone is no guarantee of anything (check every November). The piano in the next song is incredible. Morning Glory. Angels. I can’t come in, it’s too high a climb. I loved the sloppy choirs in that last song, but here in Goodbye and Hello I can hear it becoming proggy, and I don’t like it…folk-prog is a prog too far…I wave goodbye to speed and smile hello to a rose…reminds me too much of Hair, the age of Aquarius…hippy prog does me no good, I want the digital end of this. It’s fucking regressive, this urge to de-evolve back to mud huts and medievalism. The way the music stops and starts and stops and starts (I wave goodbye to Mammon and smile hello to a stream…wonder how many units that little couplet shifted…?) speaks of episodic desperation. There is nothing helpful written about this huge song in the useful booklet. The song feels like a manifesto of sub-Tolkien daisy-woven masturbation. His voice remains amazing though. I’m hanging tighter onto those amazing tones and waiting for the song to creak itself to an end.

The vibraphones of Buzzin’ Fly are such a relief I may need more coffee. You’re the only one I talk about, the only one I think about. I like so much the way his music stretches and relaxes into jazz, like one of those catching yawns when the extraneous of the party disappear and it’s left to a favoured few and cups of tea and open arms.

As I struggle with trying to install those damn lampshades I bought in July and fail (I give up, I think they’re the wrong shape, or something) Tim Buckley sings his first live concert in “this country” – I can ‘t work out the MC’s accent. Is Tim Buckley English or American? The useful book tells me he was born in Washington DC on Valentine’s Day.

I had intended to do a jaunt up the Gloucester Road, but the rain and the cosiness are keeping me inside with another cup of coffee and the second CD. But since I’ve been looking at photos for the duration of the CD up until track 5, I must confess I haven’t been paying attention, but the music has swept around in a rainy-afternoon-way. I realise it’s Friday evening creeping up and hope therefore that those of my friends who are a) returned post-xmas and b) back at work already may be inspired by the Friday-night for a bit of humorous drinking tonight. This is cosy, corduroy music and I am reacting accordingly. I even ate toast and marmite. It’s incredible to listen to his voice – you forget that half of these tracks are recorded live, and the control and finesse (although that is a stupid word) are staggering…Blue Melody and Moulin Rouge feel like coming home.

I have to stop the dusting and the cleaning because Song to the Siren is on. I remember how I felt when I taught myself the chords, walking round the corner to the Watershed and thinking of the deliciousness of the change from F to F7. I knew the acoustic version first, then this, the electric. I remember Dan saying how he grew to prefer to electric, and Hayley saying the same – wasn’t it in Lost Highway or something? I love to sing this song; when I sing it, swinging around the wide beige living room of Picton Street it seems to open my throat in a way few other songs do. I think of Talking Heads and their interrogations on the back of Stop making Sense. Why a Live Album? I grow annoyed with the change in lyrics on the electric, the line “I’m as puzzled as the oyster” is a jewel I hold in my hand, in my pocket, and need it to remain the same – even though it holds menace for me, walrus and the Carpenter style.

I want to think more about the song, but there are a few more songs in-between, and it seems that the arrangement of this album requires me to hold off for a while…the weird funk-style which typified Tim Buckley’s late career is making its first appearance, I remember so well the tape Jack made for us that had the weirdest, the most unpleasantly sleazy (Get on top of me woman, get on top of Timmy) song I could imagine this beautiful voice singing, and maybe I was informed by one or other that this was Tim Buckley’s get-out from a contract that was increasingly stifling him – to be as terrible as possible. It is a wonderfully comforting thought when confronted by the tail-end of his career. And it is impressively awful. But, I hear in places the kind of lop-sided smirk that I can hear in the wonderful Iffi from time to time when he sings…I wonder where Iffi takes that from…it sounds like nothing I’d expect him to reproduce from hearing him talk, but then little of Iffi’s’ singing puts me in mind of the style of his speech
But, song to the siren reappears, the live version from The Monkees TV show, of all places. There is so much more dignity in this song than all that has gone before. It’s based on…the Greek story of the sirens, dash yourself on these rocks. The helpful book says the lyrics are so close to the original (Tennyson? I have no idea, should read it again, don’t want to stop) it’s almost no difference. I remember an evening in Renatos with Dan and lots of other people (crowded, sit on the floor and it’s fine, everyone will sit with you) talking about this song, and realising with a flash what it is that makes Prufrock so beautiful and sad and links the two together – while Tim Buckley, brown hair crowning him and moving in the wind, he is the figurehead on this boat, doomed no longer, has the lift of the chin enough to challenge the sirens to come to him instead, Prufrock knows, quietly, that he will never even hear the tempting song, much less turn it on its head. I see them both together, Tim Buckley facing off a sunset and Prufrock walking away, and somewhere behind both of them is Dirk Bogarde sweating and dying on his deckchair with the camera framing a blonde boy standing on the seashore. To have never heard temptation, and to have never been able to refuse it.

2007-12-06T13:05:00.000Z

Gavin Bryars The Sinking of the Titanic/Jesus’ Blood Never Failed me yet

The story of the Titanic held me close to all the panic and unfairness that comes with most tragedies both large-scale and small-scale. I am sure that my faintly obsessive personality (disregarding diagnoses that I variously question and accept on a daily basis) is ingrained and lasting now; I notice how closely they paralleled (and still do) my father’s own obsessions. Once I was in a musical with him, a miniature mini-me Fagin beside him. We sang a lot of duets together, on stage and around the piano as a team. I think that role has stuck with me, for good and bad. He had lots of books etc about this particular maritime disaster. It frightened and appalled me so much, and I kept it fresh in my mind – I see all too clearly these connections; what do you do in those last minutes as life is gasping itself away, and as you need to accept loss? Sirens and icebergs all coming to get you in the night and changing the world irreparably. The dramatic pathos given with all the beautiful and sad stories of bandsmen playing the painful songs they were said to play right up until the last minute as the moon and the earth went down..

This piece by Gavin Bryars is a long and slow death which throws all of those songs “Autumn Leaves, Abide with me, Nearer my God to thee” into the air and they fall and float back and forth while the last recorded voices of those who saw and came back from it all discuss memories of luggage and the cold sea. I never heard this particular piece at York. I studied a module called “text and music” with Roger Marsh, and he played us the second track, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed me yet. Then I found this CD in the James Thins in Edinburgh on the bridges.

I feel seasick listening, I am swaying in my room. This is minimalist, in the technical sense, but it feels so rich with guilt and love it’s painful to listen to. It’s almost too much. I bought this in March in Edinburgh, the first March. Things had started to prove themselves to be going wrong rather than it just being an unnecessary whistling around the back of my ears – mistakes and murders were being set in concrete and the lines were showing the way it was all going to end – I was in love and feeling at least a little in control of the bus routes. That’s not true – I was feeling in control of walking. Bus routes came later. I feel like Alice going down the rabbit hole, with all the descriptions of the furniture rushing up against her, swirling in the air as you descend the slow free-fall. I dreamt about Peter Pan last night, I had to rearrange the chapters into the right order. I read the words and thought how the scanning related to a Symphony. I could hear the relevant music in my head and I remember Cemetery Road where I thought I saw the door to the under-stairs cupboard shaking. George said it was because I was tired. See, memories now rush up against me in no particular order in the same way.

Has this been done live? When Dan and I lived in the white-red-yellow-green flat in East London Street, we tried to listen to a concert on Radio 3 where an orchestra played a variety of Warp-label pieces. A live version of this was attempted, but the reception down there in the basement was so terrible we couldn’t make much sense of it, if any. I copied this CD for my last supervisor on my last placement, as he and I talked as much about Phillip Glass and Gorecki as we did about housing law and mental health. I think he found it too much. The corridor in my flat is dark, Sam is asleep after some debauch last night. Jack is coming over later. Jeanette Winterson talks about the measure of love being loss.

Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. The long slow arc of becoming and of leaving. I heard this in one of those text and music lectures done by Roger Marsh at York in the spring of my third year, when I was really starting to lay down roots of what I thought I meant about music and myself and people around me. It’s documentary music, I realise now, having made myself survive all those long and horrible strains of Barry Hines and Peter Watkin. You cannot turn away. You can hear voices and footsteps in the background of those who are not caught sitting under a bridge singing to themselves. The old man, who we are to assume is weeks, if not days away from death, sounds so in tune, remains there all the way through the looped and looped and looped singing. Tom Waits recorded a “duet” with the taped man (oh who was he? Does he know?) which I like the idea of, but the reality matched nothing I wanted (I stamped a musical foot in temper in my head, not in appreciation).

I bought this, full of bubbles and excitement that I had finally found it (the knowledge that all the amazing things I had learned and discovered in York could also be bought on a high street in almost any city, even bad ol’ Edbra). Dan, Chris Heppell and I sat in Susie’s flat listening to it – we were bunny-sitting and Whisky and Murphy flopped fatly around. Was Kirstie there too? I have a photo of her impersonating a rabbit in the same page as Chris and Dan both stroking Murphy, the king of all the rabbits. Intense, said Chris, as the music came to a close. I find myself singing along with sincerity.

I think about Charles Kinbote of Pale Fire by Nabakov and the point and pain of academic analysis coming into diseased context with unhappy memories. I love that book, it’s old and battered now in the way that well-loved paperbacks should be.
I think about Maya Angelou’s comment that when things are going badly, the smallest triumph is accorded to the Lord and Saviour, and when things are going well, the Lord descends the list of contributors remarkably quickly and instead individual pluck and grit are cited. That’s the sadness of the song, Jesus’ blood (oh the old-time-red-wine) clearly has failed him, but it’s an inverse failure (is it?) where consolation is taken as triumph. I want to cackle and crow at the man (whose eyes may be cataract-milky and whose hands are probably shaking) “He doesn’t love you, he never loved you, it’s a trick” and go rocking-horse into the night under the bridge, but I know that the bitterness and pain surrounding that is its own inversion, and the stupid ones are probably the happier. It’s nice to ignore things when they prove problematic and happiness is a dangerous business. Oh, choirs of angels. He is drowning in the music and we are watching him go.

2007-12-03T14:45:00.000Z

Bruckner
Motets

I have had to skip back – it’s Sunday afternoon, I thought I would take a break from presentation notes (presentation a week on Monday, the fear…) and drink my detox tea, light a candle, eat a wholemeal pita with laughing cow spread (which I am alarmingly addicted to at the moment) and read the newspaper while listening to this. The first track, the one I know the best plays and I was swept away, again. Os Justi was sung by the Bolton Youth Choir a number of times when I was a member, and we all swooned collectively each time we sang it. I don’t know what the words mean, my Latin has survived enough to pick up the odd phrase only. I have sung it as a second soprano and alto. I know which way the lines move inside it and I know the way it is going overall. Caroline and I grabbed each others hands once during a singing when we reached the “ejus in corde” section and found the lines lapping over one another, round and round and the voices climbing. I remember the big cathedral/performance hall thing at Bolton School (private and posh but useful for concerts) and the town hall in Paderborn and many coach journeys where we also sang it. I sang it at York and was so staggered and overjoyed to find I could say “I know this” (I have always loved recognition in this way). I think of John with the beard who died of a blood clot in 1997. I don’t know any other choral piece that affects me the same way. I want to put my head on my knees and sit in a dark room.

I dreamt last night at “Amen” and “Ejus” meant the same thing, that it meant “I am” and in that way, the resounding full stop of Christianity really falls more into the lap of humanism. It was just a dream though.

I know the next one from performances too, Locus iste, but it never got me the same way. I think of the rehearsal room at Dean School where I ran from the room holding some-one’s remarkably exotic mobile phone as I was told unsympathetically that my Dad had had another heart attack. I wonder now if it was panic. There was no sympathy from anyone, anywhere. I found the abstract lines of these motets a comfort at the time.

Today feels heavy in a kind of gold and velvet way…I am wearing a new slightly glamorous purple jumper and burning a delicious caramel-smelling candle. The shops and the newspaper are full of Christmas and my plans are up in the air again. The heady church-like atmosphere clearly fits the music. Apart from the opening two I don’t really know the other pieces, there’s one I’m sure I recognise from singing at York. I know very little about Bruckner… late Romantic. Removed from the Wagner/Berlioz or Tchaikovsky style sparkling Romanticism – I have Bruckner instead with Brahms in my head, who I know even less about, but I did like his violin concerto. I went to hear Bruckner’s 4th Symphony at York but I heard it only the once. It had the same feel to it that these motets did though, all the cellos deep and wonderful. I sat next to Robin and he sat muttering about how it was all “so over-emotional”. I shushed him and tried to lose myself in the music again – what’s wrong with that emotion? I normally admire the lines and structure so much (and so much more now) in “classical” (I hate that I conform to this HMV classification too) in music; Bruckner feels special in this way for alighting the clenched-fist-eyes-shut feelings I usually feel elsewhere.

2007-11-26T10:45:00.000Z

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.

2007-11-19T09:39:00.000Z

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.

2007-11-16T11:26:00.000Z

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.

2007-11-10T12:31:00.000Z

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.

2007-10-29T16:46:00.000Z

Bjork

Homogenic

OK...forgot to post this when I wrote it...

This is the Bjork I associate most with my brother; the album cover first appearing to me set against the black ash furniture of his teenage room, and that funny trio of artefacts he had over his desk; a crucifix, a lava lamp and a Terry Practchet poster. I have a photo of him sitting in front of his computer with all that in the background, a picture of Nirvana taken from NME or Kerrang or something…my room was light blue and I painted it with quotes from the Beatles that I found…way meaningful…I concentrate back into the song where Bjork sings “I thought I could organise freedom, how Scandinavian of me” and fight back a smirk thinking of Sofia…it is a nice smirk though.

I remember the video for this song; early Edinburgh days when it still felt like a holiday, Veronica had it on her laptop, for some reason…downloaded? Pirated? Bonus material? Computers still felt an unknown quantity, laptops unacceptably exotic. Bork wags her head back and forth on the screen and fleetingly, becomes a blue bear which looks markedly unsuitable for hunting.

I bought this CD in the Bolton HMV in one of those three for fifteen quid jobs…think I bought Gomez and Elvis Costello at the same time. I played this a lot in Temple Villas. I nearly wanted to type “Temple Meads” just then…fresh in my head from an adventure yesterday of having to walk very carefully (social worker coat and bag intact) the wrong way down a motorway on the cycle path, fixing in my head the sight of the towers of Temple Meads, which turned out to be Trinity anyway…anyway.

Joga…and my main memory of this is sitting in Rick’s room at University; he had an amazing hexagonal low table with a variety of drawers on it where he did out the I-ching and painted fairies and demons and the walls, Sisters of Mercy playing and a smell of sweat hanging in the room. We all sat there the night they worked out how to take symmetrical pictures of our faces, Tim looked like Slimer from Ghostbusters, Jen looked like a lion…we listened to this song and I remember Jen singing along to it, very softly. Veronica and I had already begun to talk to each other all friendly like over the topic of Bjork (which would prefigure the Kate Bush orgy that made up the first part of Edinburgh) and Jen was adamant she didn’t like Bjork, but began to concede and sang along in the dark.

I saw the video for this for the first time in Japan when Chris and Hayler got out the Michel Gondry DVD of various videos. I have to say I was disappointed with the video contrasted to others I’d seen. We sang it on karaoke – Japanese selections better that English….or maybe I sang it that crazy Christmas eve wine/beer-fuelled four-hour marathon of singing and tambourines…

I had forgotten Unravel. I played it so much the summer between first and second years. I had forgotten this – the experience of hearing a song one had forgotten for so long is aching…to be fair, there is so much music I hadn’t listened to for so long…co-habiting requires compromised decisions between “what we will listen to” and I have been, despite appearances, passive in many aspects of my life. The time I’ve spent in my own compositions; the wasteland and perfection and the bomb most recently has used up most of my music listening time…there is a wealth of music that has shaped my life which has been neglected and forgotten for too long now, I see this. This song holds such importance in my head; this afternoon we’re going to London to go and sing songs for beautiful wonderful and mourned Rosie; and I have never equated the two planes of reality (knowing this song/being the person whom knew and experienced this song and knowing Rosie) together, feels strange and my head feels opened out.

Bachelorette marks, unfortunately, the start of my demise in this album…it promises much to me but my interest has never resurfaced; although the line about “You will go astray like a killer whale trapped in a bay” brings back all those images of the whale who swam into the Thames to die. What was it that was so horrible and beautiful about that? I wish I’d seen it.

The next song, All neon-like, fills me with the same feeling, an impatience, wanting her to get on with a melody, a hook, a point…the resulting music seems too pedestrian to be properly, excitingly boring (in the style of Phillip Glass or Kraftwerk or whatever) and never goes anywhere to redeem it…it’s a better kind of coffee table music but still that’s what it is…

Alarm call wakes me up (so to speak) – and this was a song that resonated in the summer where, contrary to the lyrics, everything scared me. It goes with that Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach CD I kept listening to; one of the many doctors who met me in A&E as I railed terrified around the building recommended it, and having heard I wasn’t impressed, recommended trying it again, like a prescription. Maybe I was going for the insistence of “It doesn’t scare me at all” and making it real; those experiences were some kind of alarm/exhaustion, and the idea of “Today has never happened and it doesn’t frighten me” must have seemed nice, especially when dangled with love and happiness. I smoked my way through most of that summer and remember mostly the acrid smell of beer as I cleared empty bottles night after night in the Varsity in Bolton.

I’m afraid that this is one of the songs where I can hear the Bjork parodies and the Bjork realities becoming one…”Excuse me but I just have to explode” seems so studied to me, the polite with the anarchic in an engineered way. All those hesitations seem (like Tony Blair’s funeral speech) so studied. Perhaps the juxtaposition is supposed to work in the same way as the Revolution 9/Goodnight clause in the White Album…I know that “All is full of love” which is to close the album is delicate and beautiful. I arranged this for a singing group I was involved in at York…we sang Hildegarde Von Bingen stuff, Sara McLachlan, some Kerry Andrew originals, I think one Liz Kearton original too, and this. Six-part vocals…it was lovely, if I remember correctly. I’m sure there are recordings stashed in a vault somewhere. I remembered this song just the other day, walking home from the gym in that post-exercise rush and chill. Standing at the traffic lights on Newfoundland road and singing it to myself under the noise of the traffic. There are two versions of the song, one introduces drums and euphoric brass. The other is this one, just harps and strange electronic crunching. The other one seems to fit with the video, this one fits better in my head. It feels like a hymn.

2007-10-24T17:01:00.000+01:00

Bjork
Vespertine

Edinburgh – still in the days when we thought it was a holiday. Did we have a couple of copies floating around the flat? I heard one track from it during the summer; there was a free CD with a newspaper and I stood in the kitchen of the Varsity pub chopping red onions and leaning my forehead against the metal shelving, stopped suddenly by the noises coming from the tinny speakers above the noise of the dishwasher.

I listen to this album today frighteningly tired – sleep is eluding me again and I dreamt last night of shutters in a supermarket coming down and catching me by the neck, shop assistants doing nothing to help me while I die on the floor. The sleepy, swimming nature of the music is helping me more now than coffee and a sickie from placement is doing…aquamarine and lace…the conventional wisdom says that Bjork recorded this shortly after completing “Dancer in the dark” with Lars Von Trier…complicated and devastating film. There is orchestral and choir-cushioned comfort in all of this…it shows that she was recently in love. I like the first track more today than I have done ever…

I can hear the influence of Matmos here, in the beats and clicks and static scattered across the headphones. Delicacy and shadows predominate. In these early days of Edinburgh, I got a job at some nightclub…The Living Room? One of those on Cowgate near the Gilded Balloon…we went there fairly early on and I remember Jen and I talking about Bjork in the queue for the cloakroom…I got a job there, but my brother came for a visit, we all drank wine, I forgot the time, ended up having to taxi it down to the nightclub slightly worse for wear and was put on the cloakroom…sat there slightly drunk and chain-smoking, two in the morning I was told the night was over, given an envelope with my pay, a taxi home with other workers and never went got it together to call for another shift…when I returned Chris was waiting for me and we walked the dawning streets of Edinburgh looking for tobacco…not a difficult feat in the city of ill-health…all the boys and girls from the good old days of York had discovered ecstasy recently and I believe my brother had sat with them as they listened to this album on a loop full of happiness.

I was trying to hear Bjork’s music as consolation at this point but unfortunately it helped me feel excluded from a heaven I didn’t really understand…not much of this album stays in my head, although it’s lovely, the loveliness kind of leaves almost no impression…

Undo stays with me because of the experience in the kitchen (with the walk-in freezer I always feared I would accidentally trap myself in) and because I mixed it into my frightening song “Waverly”, written about what would be the final escape from Edinburgh; the visions of the train disappearing as it had appeared…and thinking back to the section of the meadows (was it the meadows? It was behind Bennett’s/Home Street Bar, behind the theatre, near where James with the broken leg lived…all trees) where I lay down and cried once in the middle of the day…later imagining myself on that day covered with leaves and remaining. I’m aware how these recollections sound only morbid and horrible – at the time I had been labouring under hopes and ideas that Edinburgh would be the answer to these feelings which started in York; pressure and pain in breathing and sleeping, which I saw so well last night…I heard and recognised this song first as a comfort for something which hadn’t begun, and when I wove it into the headache of “Waverly” it felt important to remember the seeds of this. The cello supports the singer and each of the bells playing begins a new part. If you’re bleeding, undo – remembering the impact unravel had on me the other day this seems semantically and emotionally to be the second part…thinking of wires and leads tangled and twisted at the gig last night, thinking of the gathering for Rosie and seeing her as real but departed rather than simply dead is all part of it.

Maybe because Undo has always affected me so much; the rest of the album feels like a let-down…in Pagan poetry, the “I love him I love him I love him I love him” is awful…it stays in my head as something terrible and stupid. Too much of this album is like a birthday cake. Perhaps because at the time I was living under the welt of superstitious and primitive crystals, Beltane and Wiccan soap; the mysticism in this album irritates me. Somewhere between the modern things and scientific re-reading of dinosaurs in Post, has Bjork become a slave of this particular brand of conservatism? I’m reading a Furedi book about this at the minute so I’m aware my influences may be poking out of my bag…but as my intellectual/artistic crushes of the last five years or so attest (Don DeLillo, Piet Mondrian, Charlie Chaplin, Brett Easton Ellis, David Byrne and recently baby-steps reading around the Enlightenment) - I am very suspicious of wide-eyed child-like wonder, harps and clouds…I am trying but I’m not further affected or pleased by this album…

It is a very specific place though…the whole album is shot and woven through with the same mood, the same tentative exploration and yes it is correct…I am just very aware that it currently doesn’t match with me…it feels like smoke drifting into a room, like a nightmare of a drug education video…lighting on people and showing them briefly for what they are, moving swiftly on and never settling…in and out of the kitchen (and I see Colville place here with all the ethnic wall hangings and Dylan CDs, the blackcurrant jam and crusty loaf in the kitchen, the chess games between Steve Norrie and Steve Elphick, beanbags, Jung lovers scattered in all the corners and a Scottish winter closing in. We wander the Botanical gardens and pose for school photographs as we investigate the trees and the grass. We are grownups now and walk to art galleries, we work in offices and catch new buses. We have chosen these bars and decorated these rooms. I remember candle wax melted in exact shapes, a CD player connected externally to a stereo that never worked, a salad with apples and raw mushrooms combined, wooden salad fork to serve and that fabulous mirror/mannequin combo at the end of the corridor, a knowledge of three different bedrooms in the one house – the tiny one, the huge one with the slanted ceiling and fireplace where we sat, and the orange one with the piano where I briefly lived with the steps and the leaves and the trees.

2007-10-22T09:40:00.000+01:00

Bjork
Post

This is the first CD I bought. I had emerged from a period of listening to my parents record collection, sitting in one of the shabby yellow/gold/green/used-to-be-brown armchairs that Therese’s mother had brought with her when she moved in (with a kind of knitted patch over the corner of one). I had got so used to the physicality of vinyl that the CD, with the silver-painted-coloured side confused me…I thought the information would be on this “top” side, and that the silver was decorative rather than functional. It couldn’t possibly play…I didn’t know the information was held on the underside of a CD and I put it in the newly-bought CD player upside down. I remember my father buying the CD player and how it seemed risky or indulgent to do so.

This is the first CD I bought, and I loved it all the way from sixth form to now. I play the first track and I remember being so entrance and horrified by the weird video, a gorilla, a dentist, a diamond…I think of my bedroom at Temple Villas, the candles I suddenly discovered I like (Vanilla bean) and the millions of photos I had and loved. My Snoopy lamp. The lilac oak-tree duvet cover which coincidentally matched the curtains. All elements and markers of a charmed life.

Hyperballad confused me, I couldn’t associate the fluttering synth-y sounds with the horror of what I heard and it took me a long time to filter through the noises (and the stupid sonic the hedgehog video which frankly irritated me) to the horrible story of watching cutlery rolling down a hillside and imagining an abrupt and shattered death as the best way to deal with current reality…not quite suicide, even further than that…but as years go by I wonder about an alternate reading of the song, that maybe she revels in feeling safe and enjoys her lover and her house more and appreciates them more, rather than as a consolation against death…perhaps there's nothing wrong at all…?

The string quart version of this that was on…telegraph? Tele something…the blue album which I discovered at Watches etc in York…I worked with an amazingly arrogant guy called Ross who, as Jenny pointed out, had fantastic eyebrows…I think she nurtured a bit of a crush on him but I always thought he was a dick…but he did bring in good bits of music…I heard it there, I found it in Avalanche in Edinburgh. But it was one of the CDs Dan decided “we” should get rid of in the purge he insisted upon every so often. I do wonder if part of the reason Dan and I fell to pieces together was the matching of his very Methodist bread-and-water aesthetic, the kind of dry and pious way he held himself together (and I know he struggled with it) combined with my Catholic upbringing on gilt and guilt, gold and the sacred, flowing, singing ringing blood – incense and self-loathing, of which a taste for gold is the only compensation. The string quartet version of this song on that doomed album combined with a bizarre radio-edit “crunch” version of it, in which the voice was rendered so divorced from the song it was alarming…all three played together one after the other…how much can be done through arrangement and architecture of the song…how much is form and how much is content…

I put together an acoustic guitar version of this in my early months of Bristol gigging. It is the wooden, as opposed to plastic, lace or sheet metal version of the song.

I listen to this album on a walk to the doctors, then up to the university then back home again for a study day, where so far I’ve thought a lot but written not much. I listen to TH Modern Things in the waiting room, there is beeping and the red scrolling list of people’s names to be called and seen. I feel protective towards this song. Track three is a difficult space to fill, when thinking about the grammar of albums (or perhaps thinking of grammar is ungrammatical?) My legs are tired. I love this song. There isn’t much more to say and I’m sure as I pulled deeper and deeper into it, and all the images of giggling toasters and volcanoes crowded into my brain, I fell into shafts of sunlight in the waiting room. And I like the way the term sounds. A pushchair being rolled comfortingly back and forth on the carpet made me think at first it was a new and delicious sound in the mix of the song I hadn’t heard before.

Chris Heppell and I decided this album was plastic. It’s Oh So Quiet is definitely cartoonish, but so much better for it – I heard some Jazz Band at York cover this, the singer was far too hesitant in the “Wow! Boom!” part of the song…killed it. “Enjoy” seems self-consciously malevolent and I’m not sure why…maybe I put too much psychologically into it when I was first listening to it…thinking how dark and twisted it sounded, all the regret and anger of desire.

“You’ve been flirting Again”…such a confusing and strange song. It’s bizarre because it kind of presupposes a knowledge of the narrative already, before the song ahs started…and if you don’t know it, then it doesn’t really matter…it’s a whispered piece of advice at a party but delivered from a pulpit…you don’t know these people really so why are you listening? Isobel also confuses me because my brain is now hard-wired to accept Isobel as the less problematic offspring of ALP and HCE; but I associate her with the moon, the trees and only those that swing over a fighting and rioting Shem Shaun/Moot Jutt etc. Her that turned into the moon as her mother turned into the sea – I can’t quite make it fit with Bjork’s description of “A forest glade dark”, bursting into flames and raising wonderful hell.

“I miss you” is a song I adored at University and played constantly, it seems. I love the skipping of the backing in the middle eight. I have a thing about walking in step with people. If I’m holding hands, linking arms, if arms are round shoulders of even none of this physical contact is there but mental contact is, I feel wrong and uncomfortable, like I’m limping if I’m not walking exactly in step. I often hop skip and jump to make the footsteps match up. Quite a few people I know take advantage of this in a pleasant way, and themselves hop skip and jump so I am forced to replicate their ridiculous steps. It has always ended in laughing, but I am very serious in intent. That part of the song reminds me of that.

The two songs on the rest of the album that kill me are “Possibly maybe”, which I had a version of with a string quartet…not sure if it’s my beloved Brodsky quartet or not, but it’s beautiful – the arrangement and the song. I love the way it shows sexuality as it is – all hair and corners, and that it shows exhaustion and greed as part of the same mix.

I prefer listening to music on headphones, something about the way music hits the space of the room can either kill or emblazon it. Currently I prefer headphones and appreciate the intimacy required by this, the last song on the album. The clicks, moans and whispers are part of the road.

2007-10-15T15:32:00.000+01:00

Bjork

Debut

Following an unfortunate concurrence where I was reading about The Moomins (darker and more beautiful than I could have hoped) and my thinking about this album, I had days where all I could think of was “There’s definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to Moomin behaviour…) which I still rather enjoy.

Chris Heppell and I had some night in Edinburgh of smoking rather a lot of weed and delineating each Bjork album according to what material it reminded us of., This was wood. The others will be told as they come.

I’ve mentioned Bjork already in the context of vocal production and scope of lyrics and the unfortunate way people have of regarding such people as “kooky”, meaning of course “women”. The textures of the arrangement, even once one has gotten over the many different and bizarre things she can do with her voice (how much of it is not being a speaker of English as a first language? As Sofia says, am I Swedish or interesting?)

There’s a big smell of mid-90s dance to this tho…it’s on this album where this is most prevalent that the amazing landscape she builds (for me) collapses and meanders…what’s that quote about David Byrne about “in his quest for irony he rushes to the brink of irrelevance…”? I agree a little on this and I certainly think Joanna Newsome is guilty of this too…”It’s a hot day and I’m dressed lightly…” – there’s a song on some advert at the minute in which a female singers breathlessly confirms that she is waiting with cho-co-lates and…dan-de-liyunnnns

Venus as a boy seems the most sing-y so far, a certain element of world music, the middle eight bit full of those Bjork-isms Chris K and I know as the “Chairman Mao” refrain…I love the celebration in here…the next song (There’s more to life than this) was one of my earliest favourites…I love the idea of her running our (live at the Milk Bar toilets) to a bathroom where little microphones wait for her…her vocal delivery was always going to be fodder for people to laugh at though…Sofia showed me a French & Saunders thing which is pretty funny and yes, pretty accurate…that bloody video for Big Time Sensuality (coming up later) had a lot to answer for, and I think maybe made her a figure of fun…not helped much by the big It’s oh so quiet thing…photos of her with swans round her neck etc…it’s still so dance-y…that was the time so it’s OK, not a criticism, the backing vocals here are cheesy but good.... it’s interesting how the 90s sound historic now…

It swings gently into the Rodgers and Hammerstein “Like some-one in love”…hearing this song made me re-think ideas about cover songs being evil, terrible, lacking in originality…shows here that context and form are all, the unexpected is always upon us…in the same way as “Till there was you” on the With the Beatles album, a sudden step backwards in time is cool, in the sense of a breeze. This song seems to have the quality like “It must be love” by Madness; of the physical and mental sensations of love – an opening of space and clarity. Not many songs can do that.

The arrival of Big Time Sensuality disappoints me, this album seems to take a downturn for me at this point until the last two songs. I went out to a ukulele night at Mr Wolf’s recently, the first band on was a rock&roll tribute kinda band…playing all the old pleasers (I’ll admit I was happy to hear Johnny B Goode which has taken on thrice-played nuclear weight for me I’m afraid; heard on the radio as a young couple watch the planes go by, heard again as the first public safety announcements begin, and then one last time in the post-nuclear world, a ghost on maybe the last radio alive as our new heroine picks her way through the landscape of bricks and the dangling feet of lynch mobs –who knows why? Who cares? – to give birth in an abandoned hospital) and everyone dancing dancing dancing…I don’t like rock and roll much at all, and was particularly displeased that night (wanted ukulele action) and so could only hear the music as a series of signals, building a further signal of rebellion…the baseline going up and down and up and down, the lyrics as formulaic as you like…all to me sounding like a code for “Dance you fucking monkeys…this is having a good time and you are having it…dance”. Dance music seems to be “dance you fucking lab monkeys”…dance music (like all music) has all these codes running through it, it is nowhere near as simple as a nice tune and a rhythm to dance to…if we’re stuck in our post-now world then everything has a meaning and we run through the museum (smash n grab) messing up the exhibits but never losing them…although I start to realise these songs I had written off in my head have more to them than first thought…I recognise one from an advert which disturbs me…the words resonate for me especially at the moment and I think of Bjork in the same way as Evelyn from American Psycho…that amazing section of “This was the bone season for me and I needed a holiday. I suggested summer in the Hamptons and Evelyn, like a spider, accepted”. I note the use of tabla pretty much everywhere in this album and want to comment on it, but I remember I may have overused them in songs I wrote around this time too…The Anchor Song was another early discovery of delight, and I’m pretty sure it stayed in my head when I wrote a certain section of The Wasteland…even before that I was held by the call and response between the voice and the instruments…the clashes of notes, the clumsiness…

The last song, Play Dead is so grand, dramatic. I have a strange anecdote attached to it…when I worked at an autistic school in Edinburgh, I worked with a teenage boy who asked me in his special robot voice to make him a tape of “dance-music-from-the-late-80s-preferably-87-through-to-1992”. As he loved this music so (and I recently acquired some old CDs of it, now unfortunately stolen by evil ex-housemate who as well as screwing us on the rent and bills managed to make off with a selection of her favourite souvenirs from myself and the two girls who also put up with her…I saw her rifling openly through Rosie’s pile of clothes once for a scarf she decided she wanted…) I was able to use the promise of music as a behavioural tactic with him. He unfortunately went through a phase of being “inappropriate” with a boy in his class. I was asked to talk to him about it, and he said “It’s like that Bjork song, play dead. It is sometimes just like sleeping” was the only answer I could get from him…it was an interesting subterfuge if ever there was one to avoid answering difficult questions. It also lent the song a peculiar perspective forever in my head…

2007-09-21T09:43:00.000+01:00

Luciano Berio
Sinfonia

In that long and weary conversation I will have forever, where I ask myself if I belong more to academic or pop music, I find the “modernist” stuff I studied and loved so much at Uni acts as a grateful gap between the different discourses…where I find myself having been too concerned with enjoying luscious tunes and arrangements or looking for a little more depth – I am not alone in this and being boomeranged in my head from one to the other suits me, despite growing maturing realisations that binary is no way forward. I sang a Stockhausen song cycle with Paul, he lent me a CD of Stimmung – I remembered well those avant-garde bits of Beatlemusic I had loved and tried to emulate as a teenager (microphone out of the window on fireworks night) and somehow in my first year at University I found myself in a avant-garde vocal ensemble. I set some choice bits of Macbeth (with varying success, although it led me to a still-held interest in sign-language), and then a few of us were asked to be the singers in a University performance of Sinfonia. Roger Marsh gave us all access to the enormous, huge A2 score and a CD.

The University department had a listening room, and one day in March I went with the CD and the score to put the headphones on and try to work out what I would be singing. I was the second alto out of eight singers and only just getting to grips with new methods of notation demanded by this scary music I was finding; Cage, Maxwell Davies, Marsh himself…I was going through big personal changes at the time anyway and this piece underlined how far I was coming and changing and learning…

The third movement always the most glorious, family members didn’t understand or appreciate it, friends at the time didn’t get it either, but the singers were all hideously involved and full of it – I have memories of Roger Marsh leading vocal rehearsal with the eight of us and managing to perform each of the parts. The mixture of singing, speech, bizarre noises and grunts…frightening snippets of texts (somewhere in the waiting you never realised you were waiting all alone)…and that amazing part where the strings play col legno, the singers all whisper a solfeggio part…the sea-sick feeling of it – the most tuneful of all your Romantic fudge suddenly clashing with parts of Beckett, the 1968 Parisian student slogans, Levi Strauss (who I still haven’t read but keep encountering the book in question, le Crut et le cruit in other texts…I tried The Unnameable – or at least a part of it in France, cribbed over Dan’s shoulder – he was reading that while I was finishing Finnegan’s Wake – if this noise would stop there would be nothing more to say).

The first movement is unsettling, the second attempting a stretch of calm…the words “Martin Luther King” stretched out almost unbearably across bars and bars and voices and voices (they don’t know who they are either – somewhere I have a recording of this, me singing, pointing, laughing and weeping along with Sarah, Kerry, Rachel, Paul, Hugo, Steve and…I fail to remember the other bass singer’s voice…but somewhere in the noise I scream out “Say it again – LOUDER!”) – the fourth, weakly, the fifth, long and unsettling piano solo…scribed in my memory for its impossible time signatures…Roger Marsh (again) led a composition module I took part in, and for a never-performed song-cycle I wrote I remember him instructing the drummer that the rhythms I wanted were something feel rather than intellectualise – funny that this seemed the only way through this piece…to intellectualise Sinfonia is a deeply troubling experience (all of this can’t stop the wars, can’t make the old younger or lower the price of bread can’t erase solitude or dull the tread outside my door, but yes it’s true, there’s no need to laugh, to point…if tomorrow we hear “another piece” made the tulips grow in my garden or altered the flow of ocean currents, we must believe it’s true) – it seems that, maybe to people outside the cocoon of academic music, it must seem overly-intellectualised, in itself, part of itself. Perhaps it is the emotional connection with such music that makes it possible is the more difficult to grasp – it is a strange emotional connection based as it is, initially, in mechanics. How do you become emotionally attached to a series of signals? And yet we do – although the ice-pick-nature of classical music has long held me in place, it is an emotional reaction nonetheless. Architecture = frozen music etc.

The fifth movement, I remember now, is made of elements, memories and ghosts of the other movements. Kate Bush does a similar thing on (maybe) my favourite song of hers ever…although it’s not a song…the part of Hounds of Love which constitutes a heavily-sedated tour of the album thus far and yet to come. The ending of the third movement has always frightened me of being a memory from an early nightmare…I remember stories of long-legged, hairy monsters, long arms, walking across a desert landscape towards a camp-fire where our heroes or protagonists are settling down for what they think will be a quiet night. My nightmares and fears have always focused around the concurrence of a natural, elemental disaster and the mistaken belief of a quiet night safe from such harm.

2007-09-06T11:31:00.000+01:00

Love
The Beatles

This came out last Christmas, right? George Martin got it together and mixed and juxtaposed all sorts of Beatle stuff…in a way it’s the perfect end to the Beatle binge (which I’ll confess had a huge gap and pause within). At first I had thought this would be a real mix, in the style of the Gray Album (DJ Dangermouse? He’s part of Gnarls Berkely I think…) in the sense of “new” songs being made from the remnants, and to some extent this happens but not everywhere…it’s more like the same songs but with embellishments taken from others…I’m sure the tracks have been cleaned up a little too. Or like the version of Strawberry Fields, the mix of which I recognise from that amazing South Bank Show/George Martin thing where he sat and mixed and remixed all those songs we knew so well to bring out this part, or draw attention to that line…I think that taught me an awful lot about how to mix a song, even though I’m constantly catching up with machinery and the more tech-y aspects of it all…the elements of music, the Lego blocks of it stacked and regulated in the right colour at the right time is always the starting point of it all – I’ve been mixing nuclear war songs at the mo and thinking about how tempting it can be to disguise or hide a weak musical moment or element with effects. The technology that allows the act of recording in the first place is, I suppose as ambivalent a force as all technology (Edward Bond)…I mean this isn’t to turn into a good or evil weighty thing, it’s just bloody Beatles songs remixed (not in the style of stars on 45 which I have had much fun reading about over the years in a book about the history of sampling which, in honour of Jive Bunny, titles the chapter about such party mixes as “Myxomatosis”) and it’s so nice the way that the chronology is artfully fucked with…hence you get “I want to hold your hand” coming after “While my guitar gently weeps”… Strawberry Fields is incredible again (so many of these songs are in danger of being dulled to nothing but jingles through overuse) and nearly overwhelms me to the point where I’m late for work on one of my morning walks to Southmead. It seems strange that this should be so good, it should have been terrible by the law of whatever these laws are…

2007-09-03T14:23:00.000+01:00

The Beatles
Abbey Road

The blues appear again…the Revolution in the Head statement about inability to turn music history backwards and return authentically to the origin…that must be where development comes in. That must be how genres and styles mould themselves. I used to sing Come Together at Yo Sushi and it became more lounge than expected previously. What a strange opening song really, I expected it to be “Something” first…I’m tired, this album isn’t exciting me. The harmonies and strings sound so sophisticated though, and I feel that (although I’m taking my time over it admittedly, surely this was the point of this whole chronological/alphabetical binge in the first place) I understand the growth of George Harrison’s songwriting all the way from “Don’t bother me” to this…

While as ever I admire the use of language and sound of the words in Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, I feel irritated by everything…perhaps I’m too tired to write about this now, but I can also understand (also, perhaps for the first time) why people don’t like this. I hope the feeling doesn’t last. I’m also aware of a little Moog counterpoint going on. That irritates me too. Just because you have a new toy and all…although part of genius is genius losing its way, part of genius must involve not being a fucking prick about things…and then Oh Darling appears…fight the urge to take headphones off…what is the attraction to this song? This style? Lyrically…musically…I would have to walk out of a gig if some-one played it and if a suitor began declaring his feelings in this way I would have to close the door. And I want you…I’m not enjoying this…and I have to confess the next few songs disappear in a blur until You never give me your money…I find the music making little sense now…is this the outcome of too many albums of theirs so close head to head and back to back? Golden Slumbers is glorious. The shortness of the songs…is it a virtue? Is it not being hung-up on some golden three-minute rule or is it just turning them out? I don’t know how I feel about short songs and wonder if the desire for more is sometimes the point. This is a short entry.

2007-07-22T11:42:00.001+01:00

The Beatles
The White Album

Strangely, my computer doesn’t want to play this CD, although it will play Singing in the Rain. Walkman agrees to play it. The White Album’s a strange one – bloated, it’s been called. There’s a kind of decadence to it, if only in the fact that it’s so huge. Am realising how tricky double albums must be to pull off even if there’s some kind of proggy trick in there, some narrative or structure…and yes people must have written about underlying structures of The White Album, but to be fair it just sounds so schizophrenic, and I suppose that’s part of the fun of it.

Even though I was late to get into buying CDs, I think I waited well, as this was my second CD purchase, after Post by Bjork. And I remember singing Dear Prudence when I went busking in Bolton. Even one song in, I find myself reaching for an aesthetic at work here…you can tell it’s The Beatles (was it every possible to make that distinction though, seeming as how now we know them as we know fairy tales and nursery rhymes, which is not imply it’s a childish pursuit) but they sound so tired. Admittedly I’ve missed out Magical Mystery Tour (another album I was instructed to get rid of…) from the Beatle Cannon so I imagine having that in the right context would join the gaps that I can hear between here and Sgt Pepper.

Perhaps this is where my disenchantment with the blues, rock and roll etc (apart from selected Chuck Berry in very small doses) – already Glass Onion sounds like what it is – a quasi-groovy riff with horribly disjointed “surreal” imagery just for the sake of pulling together what it pulls together…or are all those self-references terribly clever? Was anyone else doing that kind of pan-career referencing? It’s difficult to know the difference sometimes. Am reassured by Obaldi oblada…oh Christ, what does that say about me? Will remember (again) Steve Newcombe telling me that meant I was truly a child of the 60s, as Lennon was too 90s and obvious. Why this constant partisan attitude, even in my head?

There are some songs on this album which make no sense to me though, Wild Honey Pie…yes the guitar sounds are interesting, it’s terribly daring to have such a short song with such minimalist lyrics, but really is it not just four scousers fucking around? If there is humour in this album (and I think there is) it’s pretty warped…the characters are ever so slightly more peculiar in this album…lots of different vignettes in Beatle music, and while Eleanor Rigby, Lucy in the Sky and Billy Shears have an undercurrent of…something sad in their stories…there’s something more neurotic, less wholesome almost about Prudence, Bungalow Bill and Rocky Raccoon…the most stylish one so far is obviously going to be While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which has almost been destroyed by ridiculous acoustic versions of it…there’s more viciousness in it than the title might suggest, there’s the idea of a steady-rising rage, or a fist clenching, something controlled (and if I may…”Ice, ghosts, aliens. How do you spell mogul? M-o-g-u-l…”), and then is the tragedy of something wonderful coming undone. From the 1917 disappointment to the current death of radicalism into new spaces of consumerisms, this is a horribly recurrent theme. Perhaps it’s realising the death involved and the necessity for ambiguity, the burden of living under such doublethink which creates the cynics and those who simply don’t fight.

That said, there is now a beautiful piano song about a sheepdog which I was obsessed with for many many months as a teenager and arranged it for the flute choir I played with. The strings obviously help, the piano riff. There isn’t a lot more to say, except that then with I’m So Tired and Blackbird the album raises itself into the stateliness it is often credited for. Youan and I were talking about Beatles albums the other night, how impossible it is to choose between them, but why do you have to? We both agreed we love Rocky racoon. Oh, the piano in this song. Paul McCartney is a genius. It matters ot how many dreadful songs he’s written since (and yes. I heard on T4 yesterday, while simultaneously avoiding and thanking builders coming in and out of the house, a version of “Jet” – and last night, did I have dreams about the Beatles ice-skating in terrible jumpers? With alarming haircuts and all…anyway, “Jet” was terrible). Genius genius losing its way and spaces between raindrops etc. In the name of democracy I’m glad Ringo was allowed to write the next song all by himself, but goodness it shows. Very pleased when it’s over…but not too happy about “Why don’t we do it in the road” either – blues, bluster and macho swagger have never done it for me, musical or otherwise. But I must laugh at myself a little as I’m happier with “I will”, which I will admit is fairly sappy…but there’s something nice about the vocal bass-line…am thinking about the guy I see occasionally at jam nights in Bristol who appears with a recorder and manages to beatbox and play recorder at the same time. Miles away from this. And I realise that “Julia” is a very emotional song, and having never lost a mother to death there may be elements to this song I just can’t grasp, but apart from learning the finger-picking pattern which Dan taught me from it (which has kind of become a default, tempered only by a campy straight rhythm), I don’t get much from this song, it may be the way his voice kind of lingers (self-consciously? But then shouldn’t all singing be self-conscious? Some kind of act or performance?) around each word…my respect for John Lennon diminished the more I heard of his solo output…that dreadful “Mother” song…and then seeing footage of him singing it at the piano at a gig, drugged or inebriated in some way, making a mess of it, giggling through his mistakes at what was supposed to be an emotionally draining song, playing and singing terribly, turning round to his backing band occasionally to confirm that they were all still there, and the band waiting patiently playing their dreary backing to cushion the giggling King. I didn’t get it and I never will.

It’s often said that “Happy Birthday” is the most sung song in the world ever…it seems a little odd that only two attempts to rewrite it (to my knowledge) have been made…the Beatles version and that one from the 80s (Altered Images?). Birthdays are strange…they seem to do more with it in other countries, celebrating existence should be a bigger deal than going to a different pub for a change. More (yer) blues. Do I dislike it because it’s so relentless self-centred (funny that, coming from me…) – I this, I that…Eliot, traditionalism, individual, multitude, observational, confessional, landscape, portrait, horizontal, vertical. Or do I dislike it because it’s boring and shit? And you can hear the edit (clumsy?) back into the main section where obviously the jam didn’t work out as they’d planned. Although full of love for the idea of the city (any city), after yer blues am very happy to have Paul McCartney with a brass band singing about how nice the countryside is. Even though I can’t quite deal with the countryside aesthetic (Milan Kundera makes a nice point about this seemingly-conditioned response we have that makes us feel “A sparrow! How lovely!” and relates it to clockwork mechanisms and erections gone wrong. And Gilbert and George do a nice film about “The English Countryside” wherein two country gents sit in their tweed, chewing their pipes thoughtfully, occasionally looking over to each other and exclaiming “How nice!” while the big famous bit from “Morning” by Grieg plays and swells underneath).

Am glad for Sexy Sadie because it restores John Lennon to somewhere I love. You can hear the velvet and the smoke in this song. Obvious to point to Helter Skelter as an early start to heavy metal. Am very glad the voices remain intelligible, and the backing chorus changes it. This may be where the album changes from unwholesome to sinister, and then takes its own fairly frightening turn at Revolution9.

Speaking of revolutions, I realise that Rwevolution1 is blues in form, but there’s something the deranged and dilapidated cabaret artiste playing to an empty house of red velvet chairs, leaving feathers lying around the stage and they exhaustedly go through the motions on the stage with dead eyes, but the lyrics underneath still seem vital with disappointment. To say “Yes I’m lonely, wanna die” seems too simple, too straightforward. There aren’t enough veils of layers and what-ifs, and what-elses to keep me interested.

And now absolute sincerity of 1930s parlour songs…this must be the most historically-accurate one (recording techniques notwithstanding) – previously all the other McCartney songs in this vein contained elements of 1960s, combined them together, but this one is pretty exact. It must be the clarinets (or maybe the admittedly horrible spoken break in the middle 8 – it SHOULD NOT BE DONE). Although it reminds me a little of that amazing “You know my name, look up the number” out-take included on the anthology…My mother tells me that she breast-fed me in front of Pennies from Heaven by Dennis Potter, and I can see how it has jelled my mind into a Kundera-sparrow-clockwork admiration of such music. I love it still.

Savoy Truffle, nary a finer song about dental decay was written.

Now, Revolution 9 is very strange. As a horribly precocious adolescent, I’m afraid I expressed a love for it I’m sure I didn’t really understand or feel, I was just aware it was bizarre. As part of my GSCE music course we were asked to bring in a CD or tape of something we loved and explain why. I brought this is just to be an arse I’m sure (everyone was an arse at that age so I think it’s OK). I also tried to make my own versions of Revolution 9 – my first bit of recording equipment was a weird karaoke machine given to me when I was 12 and liked to sing songs with my friends. I learned how to use the tape-to-tape facility to record layers and layers over songs, recording terrible early songs of mine with each layer distorting the tape quality further and further…anyway, I got into the habit of pressing “record” and playing with the radio frequency to pick up random extracts from the airwaves, when it was raining I hung the microphone out of the window one fireworks night with lots of distortion and reverb to pick up traffic noise and airbursts. I twisted up old tapes I didn’t care about and played them backwards. The results were, typically, terrible but interesting. I blame this piece.

You can admire it bit by bit, piece by piece, there isn’t a structure or overall to love in it, more passing elements, like you’re on a train, now the robot fretting in the corner, now the little bits of slightly alarming dialogue (As time went by everyone got a little bit older and a little bit slower) – the crowd screaming, a very Elizabethan almost trumpet, a sudden sense of urgency. Whatever else can be said about this piece (and it is a piece, rather than a song and surely that’s the point) – although of superior quality, it’s hard to imagine another boyband doing anything like this (although the Monkees did that movie Head which I would very much like to see, I’ve heard about it). The burning and the strings are still scary. The continuity falls down when everything stops and John Lennon says “Take this brother, may it serve you well” – the piano chords that follow make you presume the ending is coming down in monotone and blocks of colour like a Rothko but it changes – there is a shift in the works. The first section hangs together like some-one staggering through a rather frightening party (like the bunker shown in Downfall, the last days of Hitler where Nazi guards are shown drinking champagne while talking about how best to kill themselves. The part that follows it is more like the bedroom the morning after the party, where you are full of acidic remorse. Goodnight, following Revolution has to be the most unsettling juxtaposition ever in pop music. It’s hideous. And only Ringo could have sung it – it’s rather wonderful. It is horribly unsettling though. I’m starting to wonder what I need to do to right myself after listening to those two. It is beautiful, but in the chloroform sense of beauty…the angels surrounding you will soon be drowning you. There is something deeply warped about The White Album.

2007-07-08T14:15:00.000+01:00

The Beatles
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Tune-up, audience noise. When it first played, how must it have felt? The way Paul McCartney sings the word “style”. The French Horns. How must it have felt? To hear it for the first time and not know it as a picture, a Mona Lisa, a top, best, greatest ever…even though it may well be, and I’m a ware of how fashionable it may be to say otherwise. There’s even something wonderful about the frighteningly-polite sentence structures “I don’t really want to stop the show but I thought you might like to know”…and even when it segues perfectly into “A little help from my friends”, I’m reminded of hearing John Lennon speak somewhere, saying “It’s called the world’s first concept album but it doesn’t really go anywhere…” – I don’t know what would be the world’s first concept album…being prog through and through allegedly. Maybe Sgt pepper is the concept of a concept album, which is as silly and beautiful as Adrian Mole’s novel Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland in which his writer (Jake Westmoreland) writes a novel called Sparg from the Kronk, about a caveman writing a book with no language called A book with no language.

Tangerine trees, Ethel Merman (as previously mentioned in confusing her voice with John Lennon’s when I was a child) and the animation of those paint brushes becoming dancing skirts, the way that the chorus is never quite as euphoric as you hope it will be, but a little more and more expectation arises…being used to stereo throughout on all and realising what more can be painted with just the drum or just the bass in the left or right…always listening to things on headphones gives you the grain of the music up close, and maybe there’s disappointment therein…when you see that Picasso (three mademoiselles? They’re in a crucifix formation, one has a mad dripping mouth and they’re on a balcony) and you see the lines go over, the rough edges of the painting…it was all I could do not to rush up and touch it. Another reference to artworks in this writing – is there any other way to think of Sgt Pepper?

I remember when I first heard “Getting Better” and “Fixing a Hole” as a teenager, I was desperately disappointed, having heard the recognition/love of the opening three (triptych?) which we all know/love…increasingly appreciating the repeated note at the top, the anticipated hi-hat and the harmonies in the vocals…and the tamboura (I think) that opens the third verse…reminds me so much now of that horrible ALL-IS-WELL noise that kicked off the Protect and Survive videos…and it’s a cliché to say that the mix of “It’s getting better all the time/it can’t get no worse” displays the Lennon/McCartney dialectic…but as I’m sure we all know, a dialectic ain’t a binarism and for every Revolution 9 there is a Goodnight and for every Martha my dear a Helter Skelter…but that’s for another album…(I still hate guitar solos which kind of mark time…no-one is innocent of them).

I remember some music teacher telling me that his favourite Beatle song is “She’s leaving Home”…I couldn’t believe it at the time…why choose that song, on that album…? I suspect I may need to revisit it, the arrangement is unusual (all those half-tone scales, the Lego-like building of the chords in the chorus), but the voices going over and round each other are amazing. Around the Sgt Pepper time, I’ve read that Paul McCartney composed music for that BBC drama Cathy Come Home (I think) – in this you can really see the action happening, the vignette, very English. It’s odd that this is a rarity, you’d think there could be no such thing on such a Universal-type album…but in the second half of the album are others too…it’s an odd song. Made odder by the juxtaposition to Mr Kite, which is truly incredible. I like the way John Lennon mixes between being extremely precise with the words and almost slurring them, lurching between them. On an old South Bank Show documentary about the making of…George Martin plays the underlying tracks of some of the songs to illustrate his points about Beatle-genius…and pulls out the chopped-up madness of the various steam organs, calliopes and early Hammond’s etc…having been some days in preparation…

I’m sure once upon a time in my life, when thinking about all the lovely songs in the world I’d ever love to sing live, I thought about Within You Without You as a heavy and wide abstract piece, bass flutes (I was playing bass flute at the time and loved it) with alarming reverb, and as I get older the idea of it stays but the drums change; it would make use of the ascending cello line. I analysed this piece for my A level music report and thought about the modality and the mixture between traditional Indian and Western instruments. The voices would trip over each other in the second section (“Try to realise it’s all within yourself”). Normally I despise hippies and religious types (and I do) but I think that what is spoken about within the McBuddhism I have read about so far owes as much to physics as it does to religion. Small is big, big is terribly small and edges and boundaries reduce on each examination… I’m surprised I like this as much as I do but then again I’ve always been surprised by that song.

When I’m 64 is just gorgeous and goes like toast and marmite. You cannot argue with me about the loveliness of this and I will have none of it. When I was at primary school, in true Lancashire/retarded style, every school year ended with a concert featuring all the little boys and girls amusingly dressed up in flat cap and knitted shawl as appropriate, singing Victorian Music Hall songs, and this. I realise how it worked, but then hearing the same song (or vice versa) as part of Yellow Submarine as the Beatles bravely sail through the seas of time and relativity becoming young and old, stuck in that frightening cycle of rising and falling clocks, watching numbers going past and seeing who could spot the Blue Meanie first…I can’t relate one to the other. Chris and I sang it a capella at the Folk House that glorious day.

I love Lovely Rita – it may be almost my favourite Beatles song, if such a thing is possible. It may be the brass. It may be the maracas. It may the slightly outlandish North-West accent used. It may be the coda. Or possibly the use (again) of over-politeness “May I enquire discreetly, when are you free to take some tea with me?” – It may be odd to realise it but I do find linguistic prissiness terribly amusing and attractive (witness). I’m sure that’s why I could never live abroad where they speak “Foreign” – I would miss pretentious puns. Although I will say I prefer the coda out of headphones…wonder what the word may be for it.

To repeat – what must it have been like to be within the first listening public to hear this – it’s extraordinary…it’s not just that it looks so 60s and “psychedelic” – it’s so English (and I know I keep saying that but I love it), the structures, the lyric content, all are so strange. And yet at the same time, not a big ol’ hippy freak-out.

It’s long-acknowledged that the Sgt Pepper reprise may just be the best single unit of music ever produced in the world (apart from maybe that section in Born Under Punches where David Byrne turns into a robot and back again several times).

A Day in the Life, I realise, is responsible for tying together three large parts of my adult brain. There’s a book called Revolution in the Head (Ian McDonald?) which is a huge analytical book of all Beatlemusic. In discussing A Day in the Life, it invokes The Wasteland by TS Eliot. Also, the last chord was described as being “reminiscent of an eerily settling mushroom cloud”. Hence Beatles – TS Eliot – Nuclear paranoia are all neatly tied up. This song is something like a crucifixion. I have nothing else to back that up with, but it’s so integral and painful. Proper use of an orchestra. Even when the jangly McCartney piano comes in, it’s frightening…like the guy who sings “dem bones dem bones” at the end of The Prisoner…you can’t work out what he’s doing in the middle of this…the everyman and the dreamer…Ralph and Simon…and whose reality etc…philosopher dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a philosopher…a swimmy, drunken roll-call of holes in the ground. Horrifying. The closing “I’d love to turn you on”…the whole song is like a deeply troubled and troubling person you meet at a party who rambles incoherently but something stays worrying in your ear and later the fruition of vinyl and overtones suggest something else untouchable.

Sgt Pepper is such a strange and yet obvious thing to write about…you can almost understand, how could anyone have gone on, gone further from that?

2007-06-29T12:05:00.000+01:00

The Beatles
Revolver
Everyone in the world should have a fabulous brother who sends presents from Japan, truly it’s a fabulous thing. Xxx

Taxman begins with that old cough and 1-2-3 and straight away the whole thing’s got so much more energy than dreary pot-ridden Rubber Soul…the cover’s so bizarre as well, I remember being a teenager and really getting into listening to the Beatles albums on vinyl…weird cartoons of people and Beatles struggling in cartoon hair...

It’s good to hear this on headphones, and to hear precisely how each track is placed on the stereo field…drums on the left, guitar on the right, main vocal and harmonised backing vocals in mono, but why the little textual bits (ah-ha Mr Wilson) in the right speaker? Taxman’s a lot wittier (musically and lyrically) than one would expect, maybe it gets buried under the impact of being side one track one.

Eleanor Rigby appears and immediately dictates how I think of string quartets forever and ever. It’s amazing how everyone knows exactly what I mean when I say “Eleanor Rigby strings” – it’s almost become the new Allegro…remember when the Beatles Anthology came out? The strings-only version of this also incredible. And all those really, really sad opening images of lonely people in yellow Submarine, the women eating chocolates repetitively and the match-girl dropping her head in disappointment as we are told that “no-one was saved” – it always frightened me as a child.

I remember when I was young (still related to yellow Submarine) I thought that when John Lennon was singing, it was a woman, like Ethel Merman or similar…he does have (on some songs) a really peculiar voice, scratchy and whiny and slightly effeminate…I’m only sleeping demonstrates it along with all those backwards guitars…this album seems to do a perfect mix between arty and fun things…

Outside of the music, I’m reminded of the first time I owned this album – in Bolton Chris and I were walking up past Ritzy’s, past Sizzles and past X Records. It was a week before my birthday. Chris dropped into conversation “Oh by the way Liz, what’s your favourite Beatles album? Is it Sgt Pepper?” “Actually”, said I “It’s Revolver”. “Right” Chris nodded. “And you don’t have a CD player yet do you Liz?” (in the olden days and all) “No, just tape”. “Right” said Chris. Then he stopped. “Oh” he said “I’ve just got to go back to X-records for something, won’t be a minute”, went back and came out of the shop about a minute later carrying a bag with a tape outline in it, patting it and saying “I’ve got your birthday present in here! Bet you can’t guess what it is!” Chris is brilliant. Love you to is very Indian and not in a way that makes you want to gash your eyes out. I like the Indian one on Sgt Pepper too but I’ll rant about that alter.

For here comes “Here There and Everywhere” which will always, always, always kill me. There’s isn’t any more to say, it’s just so perfectly, perfectly written. I know that good people always belie and escape their origin, but it’s quite difficult to believe that the people gliding up and down those harmonies are four scally drop-outs.

Yellow Submarine. I suppose you need to give drummers something to do.

She said she said…it’s getting trippier and trippier but, obviously having done his singing bit, Ringo Starr is more awake for some amazing drums…maybe he’s not given the credit he deserves, this really is one shit-hot drumming bit…(even though the songs loses its way with the ¾ section, but it’s held together by the guitar mirroring the vocal line as a kind of continuity) – I suppose it’s a nice song but it’s a bit of a brain-fart too…

Good Day Sunshine is better (I’m firmly in the McCartney camp and always will be) – I have a vague memory of Fozzie Bear from the Muppets singing this dressed as a giant flower. As discussed with Sofia at different times over the last week, I suppose there can be something irritating about the artist/singer/composer/writer who consistently write things to the effect of “Gosh, flowers are nice and so are little birds”. There’s always the danger of Paul McCartney stepping into that territory, but in the spirit of pluralism there’s always something there…

And your bird can sing (speaking of little birds) – as said, always wanted to do this as a super-classical-Mozart-stylee string quartet…it is unfortunate this being a record from the 60s that “…and your bird can swing…” has different connotations than just dancing…

For No-one was covered by that Sofia Van Otter (?) on the lovely chamber album she did with Elvis Costello. I’ve been singing this around the house in anticipation of sitting down and listening to the whole thing. The French Horn is similarly gorgeous…if Beatle history is split into two, then this really has to be the start of Paul McCartney moving in properly to introduce all the little classicisms (probably that George Martin had an awful lot to do with it too) – not just in terms of instrumentation but the structure too – overall structure and harmonic…

Oh fuck, Dr Robert. Yep, just plain awful. Will repeat to myself as a mantra “Part of genius is genius losing its way. Part of genius is genius losing its way. Part of genius is genius losing its way. Part of genius is genius losing its way. Part of genius is genius losing its way. Part of genius is genius losing its way”. It works for Van Dyke Parks it can work for this. Tee hee giggle giggle we take drugs how cool are we? Tee hee Dr Robert is our drug dealer shhhh don’t tell anyone. We’re that cool. Drugs are cool. They give us insight. We’re so much more aware and better than we were and by definition better than you. Tee hee. If only you knew.

Marginally better but not much – they let George Harrison loose to whine over a ploddy bass and a piano that can’t make its mind if it wants to be boring or rubbish. Doing more and more bass-playing with hmnahmna, I’m aware of how much a walking bass can disguise a lack of invention. Perhaps there just isn’t that much to do with this song, makes me think of some itchy adolescent. The hand-claps help but handclaps are usually sent from God to bind together half-written songs.

Now, got to get you into my life…McCartney McCartney….everyone says “Tamala Motown” for this but I think the harmonies are much more complicated…not that I don’t love Motown but this sounds more like the wacky late-60s complicated brass sections in things like Pufnstuf (which I’m trying to rediscover via Sofia’s current Mama Cass obsession). Again, it’s a different experience listening to it on headphones that it is on speakers, I think I prefer it on speakers, the sound washes around the room better,. It sounds almost a little clinical. In the Beatles Anthology there was an early version of this that’s almost reggae…bizarre.

Tomorrow Never Knows is, as is accepted, a mind-melt of weird noises and jarring drums…allegedly this comes out of St McCartney beginning to experiment with tape loops, and running them back and forth and back and forth until they saturate and distort themselves…of course it’s great but it does also sound a little like Sooty and Sweep having an argument. The last lines remind me of TS Eliot: Play the game existence to the end of the beginning. The text for this song comes from the good old Tibetan Book of the dead (which I checked out of Bolton library when I was fifteen after hearing this for the first time but couldn’t make head nor tail of it and feel rather damaged and disparaging of such hippy sentiments now to have another go – would rather read about geometry) which must have made everyone terribly happy and mystical at the time. It’s an amazing song. That’s a proper collage…integration of materials rather than juxtaposition (like in later stuff like Revolution 9 which is great just for the fact that they actually did it)…synthesis and all that jazz.

2007-06-09T11:51:00.000+01:00

The Beatles
Rubber Soul
Am loving the current Beatle binge I’m on. It fits in well with the end of the summer term, end of placement, all that. The wit and the darkness of the Beatles comes out more in this album, the first two songs are all about deception and revenge. I love “you won’t see me”, especially the harmonies that lead each verse into the next one. Actually it was the first song I put on my stereo in Temple Villas. Am writing up research methods notes at the same time so this may become disjointed.

Oh, Nowhere Man. I still love this song, in my head I see that particular bit of Yellow Submarine where they come up over the rainbow as if it’s a rollercoaster with their hands in the air while poor old Jeremy Hilary Boob PhD sits in that ever-decreasing (vinyl?) circle. That whole “video” I think has informed my visual aesthetic for years now – really stuck on black and white with bits of red, green, yellow and blue. Very basic colours. The messiness of later psychedelic video-sections for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, for example left me cold. It’s horrible when the skirts all turn to smudges. The backing vocals are perfect and simple…something about that “ah, la-la-la-la” stayed with the rest of musical history.

There’s something drier and more wooden about this album than I remember, I’ve not heard it for a while now – it’s funny...Beatles albums like Revolver (which I don’t have anymore unfortunately…), and then the next three I have coming up (Sgt Pepper, White Album, Abbey Road) do suggest themselves to playing through and all the way through, Rubber Soul is less so. It still sounds like a collection of songs rather than a “piece”.

Have happily decided to ignore my notes on Research Methods. Most of the lectures were so crap that the notes I took were rather useless (evil French lecturer). Anyway, essay’s done and the Beatles are far more important.

Michelle – strangely enough I find this one ridiculous. I think it’s that terrible “I love you, I love you, I love you…” It always reminds me of that bit in Singing in the Rain where they produce the terrible version of the Duelling Cavalier and Gene Kelly does some unfortunate improvising.

Christ – now a Ringo Starr country atrocity. Am yearning to both skip and shuffle. Why the continued vogue for country music? It is not good to be a redneck and to be happy about it! I’d love to hear a country song where they hang their heads in shame and mourn their status as shaved apes. Extreme possibly but I’m happy in how I feel in the music I love and following quite a few years of being marginalised and ridiculed I’m loving the freedom to be opinionated. God, I don’t enjoy this album as much as I thought. They’re definitely starting to smoke pot in this album…the tunes go nowhere, there’s very little excitement anywhere…or maybe they’d save them for Day tripper and Paperback Writer (both wonderful).

OK, here’s a bit with “I’m looking through you”. Much better, the magical tambourine re-appearing to drench everything in wonder, as discussed previously. And of course “In my life” is always terribly nice. When I did some recording with the great Stephen Newcombe in York, he always told me that a song should be moving towards something – there’s really something of that in this song, the melody line seems to combine the old vertical horizontal dichotomy, using both the travelling tune and the shifting foundations…and then the final little misogynistic song that does admittedly bring in the tambourine again.

I feel quite enlightened now – I used to think “Oh, of course Rubber Soul’s a great album”. It is an advance and a change and obviously it’s the Beatles so it doesn’t do to be too churlish…but I like it a lot less than I like the holy three of Revolver, Sgt Pepper and White Album. Oh, no Revolver for me to write about, full steam ahead to Sgt Pepper. Must obtain a copy of Revolver with first temping agency paycheck this summer.

2007-05-31T13:57:00.000+01:00

Help!The Beatles

Now it moves onto the more colourful bit of Beatle History. You can hear it coming as they depart from the more Rock and roll kinds of songs, where the form is almost all the song, and instead there’s all those great Barbershop harmonies coming through whenever they can. I wonder how much that’s to do with four-track recording…I’m going to guess that EMI had access to better machines than that…maybe it’s to do with four people in a band then…anywhere, somewhere between tracks and bands I always think in terms of one lead voice and three backing voices…wonder if that came from here.

Anyway, the first half of the songs on this album come from the film, much sillier that A Hard Day’s Night which was more sly than silly. “You’ve got to hide your love away” is famously described as Lennon does Dylan…but it’s so much better. John Lennon can sing, and the flutes at the end that have nothing to do with the rest of the song (I love it when songs do that)(. And a George Harrison song that doesn’t drone and drear its was to its end…and I hate to say it, but most of the McCar5tney songs on this album are pretty crass…The Night Before, Another Girl…my favourite on the first side is still “You’re gonna lose that girl;”, I don’t know if it’s the backing, the bongos or the piano (probably the piano) but it kills me still. OK, Ticket to Ride. Maybe this is John Lennon’s best album…, all the best ones here are his. Knowing these songs so well from the movie you can’t (or I can’t help) seeing the “video” that goes with each song. This is the part of the film in the snow, so the song feels crisp and shiny…and I don’t know how much of that is to do with visual memories of that or the tambourine (described recently in a pub by some-one as the magical instrument that immediately makes any song brilliant).

I remember seeing a clip of the Beatles singing this on some documentary, and they sing it live, sitting in armchairs and it sounds almost exactly as it does on the record, and some important talking head saying that that’s the mark of an amazingly tight band. I’m sure I wrote some essay about that experience when I was at Sharples, and my English teacher/form teacher Mr Diamond (who I understand now was a pretty hard-core socialist and smoked cigars) disagreed with me, saying it was the mark of an amazingly boring band who couldn’t be bothered to do anything new or different. On a performance level, I disagree as I know the difference between a recording voice and a singing live voice (I used to prefer singing live, I think I prefer recording now, I’m currently interested in the little cadences and subtleties of sing/speaking into the mic…), but I sort of agree somewhere…maybe if you’re singing live you’re performing your own cover version of your own song (that’s presupposing that the record is all, and this was the decision the Beatles began to move towards…is it this album that begins to introduce session musicians that would eventually lead to a philharmonic orchestra and rendering touring impossible?) you need to do something very different. In the same way you’d do some thing very different from a cover of some-one else’s song…

The songs on the second half seem to get a little lame…that terrible “It’s only love” and a country cover to begin with. In fact there’s a strong country feel to it. I’ve never understood country. I believe some of them are supposed to be witty (alright, I quite like some Dolly Parton) but largely it leaves me cold and furious at the same time. As if there’s something desirable about being illiterate. All the lyrics seem a bit crap here. There’s a lovely one (pretty trite/universal lyrics…brilliance is local, David Byrne knew it…) called “Tell me what you see” which I like very much. Lennon and McCartney sing together in unison sometimes, sometimes in harmony the others. It’s a cliché to say that the fulcrum of the Beatles was the interplay between the two main songwriters but it’s true, and helped me develop my vertical/horizontal idea of music. Lennon being vertical (if their works were scored classically, the interest would be shown going down the staves with chord changes shifting under a static melody) and McCartney being horizontal (a travelling melody over staid chords).

I must interrupt this to shout with joy because it’s “I’ve just seen a face” – is it countrified? I have no idea but it’s wonderful. Anyway. To think of the horizontal/vertical dichotomy in terms of each composer’s main instrument (rhythm guitar and bass respectively) adds more foundation to it, in that the rhythm guitar is more concerned with changing chords and the bass more with moving the piece forward. Lots of piano on McCartney/s part too, and in quite a boogie-woogie/dance hall style too. If Lennon had a literary heritage and McCartney an Elgar/Duke Ellington one, then that also makes sense, as you always get the sense (outside of nice little parochial lyrics that are incredibly English) that McCartney’s words are kind of there to mark time between the tunes. And all of pop music history shifts back and forth between that as a guitar vogue (rock and roll) gets overtaken by a piano-led vogue (Spector-stylee girl groups/Merseybeat stuff/Procul-Harum harpsichords rule/trippy psychedelic stuff/camp 20s knock-offs /glam rock/disco/punk /electro pop/stadium rock/dance/grunge/more girl-boy groups/Britpop/R&B/fucking emo…)

Then it finishes with Dizzy Miss Lizzy. Fucking hate it.

2007-05-21T14:45:00.000+01:00

The Beatles – With The Beatles
OK, maybe this is a bit of a cheat, this isn’t an album of mine, it’s one of Jack’s which seems to have turned up on my shelves amongst all the recommending and house-moving he and I appear to take part in every few months or so. But finally I’ve arrived at The Beatles, who I loved feverishly as a teenager, and still are a kind of home in my head where I recognise and know and love.

I did a mini-study of The Beatles catalogue for my A level music, focusing on Sgt Pepper. Actually just writing this I feel rather excited and looking forward to all the Beatle albums yet to come. All the other CDs I’ve written about so far are ones that I own but don’t necessarily know or love as well as others. This seems to be the first clear run of adored music in my collection. As some-one wrote (who? Who?) the connection between amazing music and the letter “B” has never been adequately explained. But back to my A-level study…it managed to split Beatle History into two distinct phases; one where John Lennon dominated, and the other where Paul McCartney did. I adore Paul McCartney and always will; recorders and harpsichords go better in my head than harmonicas and blues. But I do love this album, which comes much more out of the boots & suits end of the Beatles repertoire.

The music’s so black and white…I don’t know if that’s subliminal reactions to the record cover, or memories of watching “A Hard Day’s Night”, which uses a few songs from this album as incidental music. George Harrison’s sole song for this album appears, and it’s such a strange mixture between quite Latino rhythm and a really plodding blues-y feel to it – his earlier songs (before the Indian influence really happened) weren’t that different from his later ones, there must be a connection between Vedic and Mississippi folk (“It’s all folk music ain’t it? I never heard a horse do it yet!”).

I think this album is 1963 (Oh no, the song “Little child, won’t you dance with me? I’m so sad and lonely, baby take a chance etc” – that wouldn’t pass these days…example#2 of the lonely and miserable singer stylings of this time…). I’m working with a very old lady at the minute, and as I only have horrifying experiences of old people in the past, I feel like I have nowhere to start. I’ve begun trying to imagine myself as her, and have worked out what year it would have been when she was my age 27. I think I worked out that she would have been 27 in 1963. I can’t imagine being my age and The Beatles being around, being the biggest hottest greatest fabbest (etc)…it’s hard to continue that train of thought because “Till there was you” appears, and a schmaltzy corner of my soul becomes terribly happy and overrides any kind of sociological thought in this matter. I think it’s the delay and the blues note between and of “in sweet fragrant meadows of dawn…and dew” that kills me. There’s something quite camp about the covers chosen, ditto Besame Mucho which I also love.

Quite a few covers on this album, Mr Postman, and I remember that “Money” and “You really got a hold on me” appear later on. There’s probably further thoughts about the ratio of covers to originals at this time in Beatle history – tours etc…but all the covers are so thoughtfully done. All the Beatle-lore of Mach Shau (so well known from many books and biopics in the crassest possible taste) clearly results in almost automatic brilliance. I picked up enough to see me through lesser pursuits of busking in Bolton and Manchester, and singing endless Dusty Springfield covers in that old Edinburgh sushi bar…

This album always surprises me because it’s very Rock & Roll (in the most traditional sense) and by the time I get through the first side (I knew this album first on vinyl – Therese had them all, dog-eared and fabulous – and I’d play them, limit myself to maybe two or three an evening and use the record player in the music room to sit on one of those mustard-yellow tatty armchairs wearing the headphones and read the front and back covers of the record sleeves endlessly) I’ve fallen in love with it via Roll over Beethoven. I suppose there’s something primitively satisfying (without wishing to sound condescending) in the simplicity, the call and response and the strict patterns that everyone knows, even if the lyrics are trite (and they are). There’s something pretty joyous (I must remember also that I’m really fond of 20-flight rock by Eddie Cochran, for the ridiculous story of the horny young man whose girlfriend lives on the top floor with a broken elevator, so by the time he’s climbed all the stairs he’s far too tired for sex and is increasingly exasperated but continues to make the climb) in it all.

Then it’s “You really got a hold on me”, which I used to sing with Sarah Falzon while we were waiting for the bus in the morning to Sharples High, swaying and clicking to a slow can-can outside Woolworth’s. It’s quite a sexy song really, thrown into sharp relief by the fucking DROSS (and I’m sorry but it’s true) of that stupid “I wanna be your man” (distrust anything that flouts mis-spelling as a positive feature). I’m sure this one is supposed to be The Beatles “do” the Rolling Stones. Sorry, but the Rolling Stones are fucking ridiculous. I’m firmly with the North on this one. Am tempted to skip. I last till the end, with that famous Aeolian cadence like good old Mahler’s song of the earth…oh lovely times.

2007-05-14T12:11:00.000+01:00

The Beach Boys
Pet Sounds

I love the way this opens, that meandering little line and then the huge Spector-kinda drums and vocals. I’m so glad the Beach Boys are now a by-word for production awareness, or at least the later stuff, or everything post-this. My proper introduction to them was Wonderful Steve in York who I’ve lost touch with and still miss, and still “check” my own songs out with him while I’m writing them, to wonder what he’d say about it. We sang “Wouldn’t it be nice” at a wee gig at the Grapes in York, before it got flooded and re-done. When I went back to York for a wander around en route back to Edinburgh at a strange time in my life (in the snow, another life), I went to the Grapes, but didn’t go in, just walked past it.

When I started hanging out with Steve, I’d have many afternoons (usually Thursdays) where he and I would sit in his flat, smoking, drinking tea, eating this amazing coleslaw he made (with radishes and walnuts) listening to endless different versions of Beach Boys songs. He had the studio session box set of Pet Sounds, and would talk me through each vocal line, explaining how they all slotted and locked together. There’s a very Baroque feel to the arrangements of the Beach Boys songs which Steve demonstrated to me. The music must always be moving towards something...

Of course the glamorous and tragic story of Brian Wilson’s demise (Steve went to see him in a gig, where the first song was “Staying bed like Brian Wilson” by Bare-naked Ladies, covered by the man himself and all done through that weird halfway smile he has…) adds to the “legend” of this album. When “Smile” was finally released (oh we have a long time till we get to the on No skips though…), there was a documentary about the album, and of course it made reference to this (it’s impossible not to, it’s one of those albums; any writing about pop music requires it). I remember Chris at the time asked if he could borrow the album, but he said it disappointed him, he was expecting something more. I can understand that, so much is made out of the “innovation”, the “ground-breaking” nature of the album, so without knowing the songs and appreciating the mix and arrangement, I don’t think it’s possible to see beyond the l’il bike bell in “You still believe in me” as a marker of this innovation…

Some of these songs were covered by Sofia Van Otter (not too sure of the spelling) and Elvis Costello. Unfortunately it’s one of the many albums an ex-boyfriend mocked until I disposed of it humbly agreeing it was twee and shit. Or, to rephrase it, it’s one of the albums I carry in my mind for when I’m in second hand or cheap shops to reclaim… but the arrangement that was done on that covers album made use of a light operatic voice, and arranged each song in a “Chamber” way, reduction to a cello and a piano; and approaching each piece as if it were Schubert or Delius…it’s almost depressing in a way though, it wasn’t just Dan, I remember reading a lot of reviews of the album at the time saying similar things – as if people are frightened of music out of its usual context. Arrangement is all, and I know I’m a Virgo but it’s still true. As a species we pay so much attention to environment, and to re-imagine a piece we know, but to address it differently, afford to it the gravity normally reserved for dead composers…well it’s wrong isn’t it? The fact remains that the songs are beautiful, the woman’s voice is beautiful, and there’s nothing separating musics from each other apart from ignorance.

The daring involved in such a sweeping orchestral instrumental number in the middle of it all…it is kind of the intermission point – were they thinking in Act 1/Act 2? Now the Sloop John B song…I know this is a kind of sing-along happy song, but it still frightens me. When we were tiny small kids, if our holidays overlapped, or we were ill, we usually had to go along to Therese’s school and sit quietly at the back of whatever class she was teaching. As a result I have a lot of memories of her singing folk songs with her class from these books with green (book 1) and red (book 2) covers, bound with those white spring-things at the side. Songs about the Titanic, about “Oh my lovely Nellie Gray, they have taken her away and I’ll never see my darling anymore”, Henry the Eighth…and the Sloop John B. It sticks in my mind, I’m sure I was ill and felt tired and bored and young and frightened with all those big Salford kids tearing around the place, but the lyrics of abandonment and hopelessness in Sloop John B terrified me, and I still remember the sea-sick feeling of lurching between the lovely music and the horrifying words. I’m sure that’s an aesthetic that stays with me.

And then God only Knows. When Steve began playing me the Beach Boys, I’m sure I said “Oh yes, I know them”, but only really sat up and listened when this appeared, I’d never heard it before. I’d read about it, but never heard it. Of course I rather fell for Steve within this period, and the song took on other resonances. We did sing it at a few gigs together, but when he got together with a South African born-again Christian, she took offence at us singing it and abruptly we dropped it from the set list. And shortly after fell out of touch, but I still remember him beaming in his flat as the voices and voices and voices tumble over each until the fade-out comes (he hated fade-outs and always told me off for my reverence for the Hey Jude fade-out) before leaping across the room and saying “Let’s play it again!”

I do love the Beach Boys. I’m also grateful for when Van Dyke Parks was unleashed into their world, and everyone else’s as a result. Minus Heroes and Villains. I’m sorry but that’s an awful bloody song. Some of the lyrics here are interesting, but there’s still a boy-girl/boy-girl feel to them, rather than the great and glorious “Come velvet overtaken me, dim chandelier awaken me to a song dissolved in the dark” of Surf’s Up…watching Eurovision last night, and the Top of the Pops special about previous Eurovision entries, we were listening to a guy whose name I can’t remember, but he sang in a rather Tim Buckley way about how lonely and sad he felt…in a similar way “I just wasn’t made for these times” and “In my room” (a different album but which one?) bring in a brooding that’s not related to any rebellious heroics, but just a miserable guy who wants to close the door and have everyone leave him alone…there was a surge of that in the 60s, not now, that’s gone. There’s that neo-liberal optimism. There’s another dissertation waiting to be done – charting the dominant emotions of popular music and comparing them to political events…watching a happily roller-skating couple from 1982, or a trio of green-tights-clad ladies singing happily in 1984 when I know now more and more what was happening in that scary era…are the inane songs a reaction to wide=spread terror and economic chaos, and are the miserable leave-me-alone songs related to increasing social freedoms and rising prosperity? Or is that too simple?

It’s so sad to watch a sweet thing die, could I ever find in you again the things that made me love you then…there’s still a boy-meets-girl flavour of these songs but maybe it’s more about (as some-one said…where did they say it?) the pain of discovery of pain.

2007-05-07T15:20:00.000+01:00

Basement Jaxx, The Singles
I’m not too sure about ideologically how a “singles” album fits into the noskipsnoshuffles programme, but this album certainly propelled me towards Temple Meads station with extreme efficiency. Every week as part of my course I have to go to the Bath office, and I still don’t have a clear mental picture in my head of how long it takes me to walk to Temple Meads…music always helps me turbo my way there, and I seem to arrive a good twenty minutes early with plenty of time to sit on the platform and read. Last week I listened to the Hungarian (?)/Japanese song Chris, Hayley and I sang to karaoke in Tokyo last Christmas. This week it’s Basement Jaxx, and it begins with what I suppose is the radio version of Red Alert, there’s a huge difference in the mix between this and the one from the album.

Where did it all begin, the use of bonus re-mixes, or differing arrangements? I’ve probably said before how I was struck by the difference between three different versions of Hyperballad by Bjork, and how when I was a music student I’d wanted to make a different album of Revolver by the Beatles…I’m only sleeping as Dixie, Taxman as a barbershop quartet, And your bird can sing as Classical string quartet…I have always had a fascination with musical arrangements, and noting the difference the arrangement can make. The acoustic/chill-out version of Romeo was a revelation when I first remember hearing it, in Kirstie’s yellow bedroom in Edinburgh, pre-going out music. In my last year at Uni there was a sudden explosion of these “chill-out” albums, that track featured heavily and the trend continued into adult life. There was an amazing song called Daydream in Blue by a group called I-monster which routinely appeared on such things and then vanished.

Anyway, Basement Jaxx steer me to the station, past coloured houses, tall white churches and squares of green in Bristol. I walk past the Jamaican café, the way I used to walk to St Matthias when I worked with all the young badduns…the particular smell of Jamaican cooking still a novelty, I would always lift my head when I walked past the window of the café, and the chef would always wave and say “Good morning” – flick back to the Edinburgh I remember first hearing some of these later tracks (Bingobango, do your thing etc) and switch the scene to those tall grey buildings, all four floors of stern frowning and, crowds of people pushing and shuffling. Certainly no-one smiling. Certainly not me. I wonder where Basement Jaxx come from. OK, I did walk past a number of vagrants on my way, and not everyone was smiling, but the music speaks of a party coming. I notice how autobiographical this is becoming. Maybe there just isn’t that much to write about Basement Jaxx. Good music though.

2007-04-19T15:34:00.000+01:00

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”.

2007-04-14T16:04:00.000+01:00

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.

2007-04-11T12:16:00.000+01:00

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?

2007-03-19T14:00:00.000Z

Angelo Badalamenti & David Lynch
Fire walk with me (Soundtrack)

Already I can see some heavy and red velvet curtains, the stripy floor, the white horse that appears in the bedroom; the smell of sawdust and the knowledge of hard and alarming drugs gather somewhere in my memories of the film, and in my half-seen memories of the bits I half-saw…

I would like to know more about Twin Peaks – I grew up with Chris watching it a lot, talking and thinking a lot about it. I feel like I’m aware of the strands of story, as you grow up aware of King Lear, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catch 22. Never having read any of those though.

The music is lovely, stripped away from the film, it always was. The theme from Twin Peaks was almost everywhere at one time. This is very much wallpaper music, and the muted trumpet solo reminds me so much of Chris, not just him-as-trumpet-player, but it’s his style all over – there is a beat in there, some form of control and organisation, but it’s very hidden in layers of smoke and wandering.

It’s so stylized, but I guess that’s the point – let’s tie up the strands I remember from the movie, it’s very much set in a redneck/American Dream brace-neck of industrialised but never-quite-made-it, everyone is tired and beneath the chintz and wall-to-wall carpets and high-school sweaters is some weird shit going down, whether it’s all those trips to the lodge with the wee midget guy, or a simple matter of nasty S&M parties with smeared lipsticks and negligent angels – it still looks damn 80s. But then 80s mixed with a film noir sensibility…certainly that’s where the jazz-lite music would appear to come from…there are vibraphones, ride cymbals shuffling along nicely and meandering fretless bass solos everywhere…it must be said that I have limited patience for this kind of music…they have a boring kind of theme, which begins to get somewhere, then they improvise, again it starts to get interesting then they finish on a 6th chord…

Thankfully here comes the “Sycamore Tree” song. Here, still, are elements of chance, spontaneity outside the printed page of music (oh god, those bass tremolos kill me), but it’s within some discipline…and you imagine that the music will last outside of the performance (could do without the fat saxophone solo though, it’s already been said, hasn’t it?)

I was starting to get a little tired of this already, thinking that without the movie the music didn’t seem to be much…but I’m liking “The Black Dog runs at night”, not as a piece of “music” to listen to, not as an adjunct to the movie but as art to listen to…there’s not much in it but it seems to have a little more discipline in it than some of the “This is what I like the sound of “ jazz stuff that was going on earlier…as I said, I have a limited tolerance of jazz, it’s not quite as bad as the way I feel about Christians and Hippies, but it’s somewhere shortly afterwards…

I don’t know what I think about this, I started it thinking a higher opinion of the music than I do now, but I’ve had a few peaks and troughs within listening to it, just as it starts to irritate me and I think about wishy-washy jazz-backgrounds, something interesting happens and changes my mind. Maybe that’s the trick David Lynch plays with all of his films, they nearly tiptoe into cliché so easily, and just as you think aha…cop show/sex scandal/murder mystery…I’ve got your number, something happens to make you put those thoughts down and stamp on them.

2007-03-15T14:18:00.000Z

JS Bach, the Art of Fugue

Another one of these clean-up days. After a night of toxins with Iffi, I feel clean and it’s a shame the house doesn’t look it. B, finally. B-licious, b-lovely…
Fugues…all those interlocking parts and how to take them apart. I’d love to write like this one day. What to say, really. The music for putting things in their rightful place. Music for Winter. Something too stately to relate to the sunshine that's coming outside.

I like very much the way Bach called this the art of fugue; maybe it’s something to do with all of those dry harmony lessons as a teenager that I built up an inbred-dislike of Bach. I would also argue that his flute pieces never grabbed me. What was I looking for in their stead? What did I get from Debussy or Faure that I liked better? Is it something to do with growing up, and those free-flowing bubbles and ripples of “loveliness” seeming to be not freedom now, but indecision instead?

Something happened that bizarre and horrible summer of 2005 where I started doing sudoku puzzles. All the distractions of “I think…I feel…” which had previously helped and chided me where necessary suddenly could only leave me weeping on a sofa, or lurching around St Pauls at three in the morning going out for more wine (the fabulous Tasties…probably best approached when one is drunk, I fear). Instead, putting numbers in a box in the right place at the right time seemed to help, and since then it seems to have become an aesthetic of mine. And I did love the high-rise offices I saw around Broadmead on those new walks to work (the one I loved best has gone, but I got a photo of it before the wrecking ball came along), and I watched the traffic lights closer and I half-closed my eyes and imagined the cars as animals instead, and little by little I stretched out comfortably into these feelings and sights and loved more vocally than I had done previously the sights of repetition and clean lines. I went to the Tate Modern at some point in this time and saw a Sol Le Witt picture, instructions on how to draw a triangle. And I love Magritte, always will, and know it’s for the clean lines he does. Mondrian and Bridget Riley began to feature clearer in my head, and I suddenly got it. Freed up, I think, of scorn and ridicule about the plasticy things I loved dearly, I felt full of it, feel full of it.

That’s not to say that there isn’t passion or depth in there, nor contrast or blood. The tones from the bottom of the cello are amazing, almost like a bassoon. Not that I can in any way call myself “a violinist”, but since starting to learn it myself, I see this kind of music so much clearer too. I see how a minuscule shake in the wrist at a crucial point can ruin or redeem a note, and how one can bend and stretch the sound , and what an emotional instrument it is – that is sobs almost. Pious.

Somewhere between buying a Usborne dictionary of science (which explains in glorious diagrams how mid 1980s computers work) and imaging a future prosperity, my own flat and three motherboards from wherever I can find them mounted on the wall; I have learned to love Bach and understand the resolutions working themselves out like paperweights.

2007-03-08T13:12:00.000Z

The Avalanches, Since I left you
You go back over enough history, and there are things in there to dismay and alarm. I know certainly that I feel a physical pain when I remember earlier incarnations of myself. I am pleased (roughly) with what I am becoming, but oh Christ, the years and years where I remained hating and hated, ridiculous and ridiculed. Debated or not, certain syndromes have been put on my lips, and I can see perhaps how I’ve woven them into myself (anyone want to know the mortality difference per British mile of a ground-burst vs. an airburst?) and done well with them, it’s still a sticky time in my head with too many dusty and gloop-y pages in-between.

Anyway, the point of that was a cringing at an earlier musical incarnation of myself who declared “If you can’t play it on a cello and an acoustic guitar, it’s not music”, which speaks acres I think of the person I was. OK, the only dance music I’d encountered so far at the time was Fat Boy Slim, Prodigy and Faithless (or anyone else who entertained sweating Boltonian types in Ikon where I collected glasses before going to University) so perhaps my aesthetic was ahead of the race (har-har)…Fat Boy Slim resonates particularly in my head as one of the York/Edinburgh people (a dance teacher/History graduate from Rossendale) chirped in the pub one night “As a dansurr, I feel I understand Fat Boy Slim on a much different level from most other people”…which kind of says all you need to know…

Something must have happened to my music taste at University…I arrived knowing precious little outside of the 60s and the Oasis/Blur/Pulp corridor everyone in Bolton I knew listened to…there were forays into Sultans of Ping FC, Elastica, Bjork, and of course, coming from the house I came from, a fair amount of classical-lite stuff, and (I see now) vaguely progg-y stuff my Dad listened to…and I left loving the Divine Comedy, Chemical Brothers, Elvis Costello, Portishead, Talvin Singh and Nina Simone. Or maybe music history changed with me. Music tastes anyway.

So I went through a phase (would still like to if I could afford it…) of buying random CDs for an interesting cover. I liked the cover on this, but I don’t know why. Looking at it now it reminds me of Monet, and I’ve never really liked him (too many reproductions on umbrellas and souvenir trays). I bought this in…May? June? 2001 anyway. I was going out with a blonde barman called Mike. I’d been hearing what I soon realised was the track “Frontier Psychiatrist” all over Channel4. I bought this, put it on, quite liked it, and then some amazing monumental “click” in my head of realising I was with a wave of something, that the CD I’d bought randomly had the zeitgeist-y tune that was everywhere on it. I liked the cardboard fold-over of the CD. I will admit to being a CD fetishist and loving seeing them lined up like books, to touch and uncover. Maybe the cardboard case looked like an innovation at the time, I can’t rightly imagine if they’re passé or not now…

And during the summer, where I started unravelling and not noticing things so much, pavements looking too bright and people talking too loud, I kind of forgot the CD. I lived in Bolton, in my grandmothers empty rooms, all oriental blue. I smoked freely in my bedroom. I worked as a cook at the Varsity in town. Irma took me out for lunch and told me I look depressed and I needed to eat. I forgot this album, I listened to other things (did I write Riverwild around this time and listen to it constantly?)

And we moved to Edinburgh, and early in the first couple of weeks we went to Henry’s Jazz Cellar, looking for some live jazz, or more likely, looking for this good time we’d imagined when we were alls cared and lonely and dark and cold. Or was it just me? Anyway, we all went. Live jazz a no-no; we drank wine and some-one played this album on a loop, again and again and again, offering apologies and yet no apologies for this lack of live DJ-ing, the live DJ-ing already done on the pre-done album (there’s an MA in there I want to do one day) and there was wax peeling down the neck of dark green wine bottles and everyone sat and listened. There was a hum around the room, and track ten (with the distorted and bending piano) staying particularly fresh in my head.

They were the big thing, the huge thing – there were articles in The List (which I would now refer to as the Edinburgh equivalent of The Venue, where it used to be vice versa) saying they were playing in Glasgow on 10th November (I remember that because I’m sure me and some-one else talked about going…or did we just miss them?) Anyway, I remember wondering how they could recreate all that live…they use the samples as instruments, as lines and contrapuntal arguments. As I’ve heard more and more music I recognise fragments of each song (they seemed to use Cabaret) quite a lot, and for myself, I sampled part of them for the opening of “Waverley”, my song about arriving in, and then leaving Edinburgh.

This is dance music as velvet, honey and sawdust, rather than plastic, burgers and lager, which I associate with the late 90s stuff I used to turn my nose up at. OK, I’ll hear things I like in them now…I used to get annoyed saying that “Selecting isn’t creating”, but reading and seeing and being and breathing postmodernism now, I suppose I can see it. Selective selecting, curating rather than consuming.

2007-02-22T15:39:00.000Z

The Art of Noise, Who’s afraid of the Art of Noise
Trevor Horn. Genius. I’m pretty damn sure he was involved in Yes, he was the functioning side of The Buggles (and I know how shameful both of those bands are but I rather love them both, regardless of pitying/contemptuous looks I may receive in Fopp), he had a lot to do with Hounds of Love by Kate Bush and he produced the recent Pet Shop Boys album. I’m fully aware of how camp a lot of my musical taste is but dammit, the man’s doing SOMETHING right. Alternatives: Red Hot Chilli Peppers? U2? REM? COLDPLAY? RAZORLIGHT?! I rest my case among musical wallpaper. Beethoven, Side 1, Track 1…

Anne Dudley. She wot wrote the lovely music for that old TV series of Jeeves and Wooster. When I played bass flute in the Bolton Flute Choir all those many moons ago, Maxine the conductor always wished aloud that she could find an arrangement of the piece and never could. It had all those great muted trumpets and plucked double bass in it. And like “Get Happy” (sung by Judy Garland, I have no idea who wrote it); it’s one of those pieces where you can see the bones of the song, all matchsticks and Perspex - like my adolescent nightmares of the house I lived in, and my current adult thoughts around relationships - and the science of the song unfolds itself simply, like one of Mondrian’s boogie-woogie pieces, or a paint-by-numbers without implying factory assembly.

Trevor Horn and Anne Dudley both have an awful lot to do with the Art of Noise you see. This was another cheap vinyl discovery, and when I was with Jon, he and I listened to this an awful lot. The music he wrote was very tech-y and bleepy, and this seemed to fit into his aesthetic. He wrote amazing music. Anyway, this is a vinyl, and it crackles satisfyingly as I begin to play it. The initial beats are so awkward; then they become some monstrous futurist march (witness the label is Zang Tuumb Tuumb)…no-one put this on to be cool, right? It’s difficult to imagine house parties going on to this, but then again it was 1983-84 that this album was done, and we all know what the world was like then…THIS IS IT! The 1980s as such a scary time and all that reflecting itself so perfectly in the music…how much of the 80s music is GENUINELY radical, rather than the “I wear flares therefore…” rhetoric of the 1960s? Oh yes there’s a lot of stuff going on either way that’s completely proving and disproving me either way (that being the beauty of existence n all…); something in me is obviously attuned to the nightmarish early 80s. I understand fully why people would panic and break out into a rash of pinstripes, and my beloved Patrick Bateman is the epitome of all that. Where have I said it that Patrick Bateman is Holden Caulfield who came into his parent’s money? Don’t let’s forget that the Caulfields were a moneyed lot. Bateman is completely aware of how hideous existence can be.

I like the Art of Noise. They are warm and cold in all the correct places. All the joy of technology used properly, none of that burning here. Those synth voices that were everywhere at this time sound so strange now, although I remember as a child in the late 80s how they seemed filled and fuelled by some power one couldn’t quite point to precisely.

I remember when learning about Sonata form and Symphonic structure that I felt an impatience with these forms – I felt more tuned into Romantic pieces, all yer Mussorgskys and Borodins and the like. I’m sure I wrote something about preferring an episodic structure to music, rather than a formalised one. I’ve begun to really appreciate formulised “arguments” within music…is it something to do with growing up a little? Or being able to understand it? You can’t like what you don’t know, and while I’m not saying that if you don’t like it therefore you don’t understand it, I’m aware of how my increasing understanding of musical theory has increased my appreciation of music…and also applying musical theory outside of music…seeing where a ternary or rondo form may fit into a pub conversation, or seeing a concerto in a cyclist winding their way through the traffic.

To say “think outside the box” or whatever it is they say implies a box of some kind and sets up things to be defined and defied. It’s too simplistic to say “just think” (because with thinking entails non-thinking…bugger me this thinking is difficult) people seem to worry too much about “what” they’re thinking, or what genre it fits into…I remember a girl I knew briefly in Edinburgh who told me that the best thing I could do for my “musical career” would be to perform at a folk festival. I believe I wrinkled my nose. She said “Oh, are you more rock/pop?” Ugh. I shudder at the memory. TWELVE WESTERN-DEFINED NOTES PEOPLE!! That’s all! Millions in-between and as Cage and La Monte Young proved, not playing is playing in itself…sorry, I’m reading about existentialist social work just now. Which means in years to come then I will be able to visit people experiencing horrible problems and say “Not having a problem is, of course, a problem within itself…” at which point they will set dogs on me, and with good reason.

I heart the Art of Noise.

2007-02-19T14:31:00.000Z

Aphex Twin, Retail Item

I can’t do it. I’m having an anxious day and the first five seconds I got through are too much for me. I’m fucking ill dammit, I shouldn’t have to listen to Aphex Twin on top of it all.

No come on then, just turn it down low and it’ll be OK. This is what I feared previously. This might as well be the prodigy or something, I could be in a field with sweaty thugs all crawling over each desperate to prove themselves something, finally, chemically TRANSFORMED into something worth talking about for once.

I was talking to Sofia about scary music the other night; my current songs about nuclear war are making her and a few other people tell me not to be so ghoulish and morbid, but I think the way they’re shaping up shows a humanistic concern with all the factors involved, it’s more existence, non-existence, belonging, identity and all the other stuff that goes with it in a cloying soup of metaphors and megatons. Anyhoo…musically they’re teetering on the side of whimsical at the minute, although may not too much, I don’t know. Anyway, she suggested I write “something happy” to balance it all. I concede that it’s odd to be writing about such frightening things as nuclear holocausts and the ensuing chaos of local governments in the aftermath, but what’s the alternative? Fucking bunny rabbits? Or, screaming “spookily” into a microphone “Come to Daddy” and “I want your soul”? Seriously, this might have dated worse to me that it has done to other people, this is terrible, I might as well be a teenager drawing anarchist signs (and not understanding it either) onto a yellow canvas bag from Army and Navy stores, and YES I KNOW THAT WAS THE SORT OF TEENAGER I WAS but that’s why I grew up and started listening to Radio 3 dammit. And reading the Guardian and thinking about TS Eliot and loving Coronation Street and being selective in my choice of herbal teas (I hate the fruit ones – you might as well be drinking hot squash in a nasty little Church hall in Bolton). OK, I’ve given up smoking and drinking recently…does it show? Am I a wanker yet? It’ll come…

Second track slightly calmer. I’m on my fourth cup of “tranquillity”. Supposed to be writing things about the recovery model of mental health (Ha fucking ha) and I note all pleased that my clothes feel too big for me. Bit of a bummer I can’t quite afford new clothes to show off a thinner frame, but if governments want to keep us in poverty, that’s just what they’ll do. At least they’re not blowing us up or poisoning us (yet). I signed a petition against Trident this morning. Who wouldn’t shoot themselves if you heard sirens coming? Yes OK, maybe a song about bunny wabbits…

I recognise this from when Bjork DJ’d on Breezeblock. Or at least the backing line. This is a remix it says…who remixed it? Aphex Twin? There’s something more intelligent in restraint rather than out and out BE AFRAID OF THIS. I don’t want or like coffee table music though, no matter how much I like coffee.

2007-02-09T16:49:00.000Z

Aphex Twin, Richard D James UK

This starts more beautiful than I imagined. More kind of ethereal than the aggressive loyalty Aphex Twin seems to inspire in people and all those bizarre and scary videos. This is like a peculiarly attractive computer game of shifting colours and levels. Why does electronica always come across as threatening? I’ve heard bits and bobs of Aphex Twin on and off for years, and I’ve always liked what I’ve heard, yet I’ve never felt an overwhelming urge to go out and buy it or copy it until I copied this and the other one from Jon a few months ago.

There’s something drippy about it all, I don’t mean that in a Christian kind of way, rather like globules of oil paint, one of those Damien Hirst paint spin-y things, a Blue Peter painting that turned out wrong. Not quite the Lego of other musics I know, colourful all the same. And almost not much to write, what’s that all about? Is there any sense of a person in this music/ Maybe it’s because I know fuck-all about him. Him him him. And would it make any difference if I thought he [played all these bit by bit on a synth the way I do or if he sampled it from historical sweetie bags, or if he played it all for real, kosher and acoustic? If there is a stately mansion somewhere of Aphex-minions or if it’s knocked up in a poky bedroom and why one confers authenticity (and I’ve been reading about that again) and one screams SWINDLE.

Exhaustion may be getting the better of me today, I’ve been lying and sleeping and sleeping when I should have been learning about housing benefit. This music is like running under patterned sheets and cobwebs where the light is constantly changing on the outside. It’s never a headache but it doesn’t let you rest. There may well be crowds out there.

2007-01-11T16:28:00.000Z

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.

2007-01-10T16:58:00.000Z

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.

2007-01-08T19:58:00.000Z

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?

2007-01-07T12:05:00.000Z

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.

2007-01-02T11:02:00.000Z

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.

2006-12-26T10:14:00.000Z

Laurie Anderson – Life on a string
I believe this album is related to Moby Dick in some way. I’ve tried to read it twice now, once borrowing Heppell’s beautiful edition of it with the weird engravings in blue on the front., the other time with a shitty copy I picked up for 20p in the Amnesty bookshop on Gloucester Road.

The first time I got to the chapter about different kinds of whales. She begins now singing about one white whale. The fact that it’s white (as I think I remember) is something to do with white as purity, a theory of colours that enlists white as a truth-teller. Joyce talks a lot about colours in the third section of Finnegan’s wake, a congregational prism coming to listen to white. In a way, I’m afraid of reaching the end of the book if I ever pick it up again (and I will), reading that they kill the white whale. I have heard somewhere that Moby Dick has lots of postmodern (in the sense of decentralised truth) premonitions or shadows.

Anyway, Laurie Anderson. This is my last album of hers, I’m going to hit a stream of vinyl soon, will have to try and get rid of it before I go to Japan. This must be the song of Quequeeg…a song about coconuts and beans in a hollow gourd. I copied this to put on a tape to take me and Dan from Edinburgh to Bolton. She’s pictured on the cover with a violin but there’s been no sound of a violin so far… but the old Laurie Anderson spoken-word comes in soon enough. It must be so difficult to carve out a style and not have it become a straightjacket.

My shadow typing on the wall looks like I could be playing the piano. Laurie Anderson slips back into the old sprechgesang, and I’m entirely grateful after her singing on the last last album…
Here are the wonderful treacle and tar strings of Van Dyke Parks now…everything should be so polite and fringed with pearls when his players start to play, but there’s no semblance of a repeated tune, regular time signature or anything, it’s like being elegantly drunk where the pavement sways and buckles with caramel and smoke.

There’s quite a number of breakbeats used in this album so far…she almost gets away with it…probably does entirely. I wish I knew the story of Moby Dick properly, or even if this album is following it…

She seems to catch in this album a halfway between her Anderson-style unsettling comments and a kind of misty dinner party glow. That head-nodding sleepy and shiny vibe. Life on a string that is very seductive and hints at some different way of knowing but really delivers nothing and fades away with canapés and candles.

2006-12-09T16:51:00.000Z

Laurie Anderson – United State 1984 (live)
Ah, this is much better. I actually listened to this about a week ago, walking to iffi’s house for Sunday lunch (where we jammed for ooh, half an hour on the piano and I discovered “knots” by R.D Laing, which I went all a-searching for in bookshops on my way to work that night, to find it was out of print and would cost me £95 to acquire, before finding it a week or so later for £2.99 in an Oxfam bookshop). Anyway, I got up Nine Trees Hill on my way to Cotham. Laurie Anderson playing her violin like a guitar and singing about dogs and Dolly Parton. I must have got these albums mixed up (big rap on the knuckles from the Angel Gabriel of no-skips-no-shuffles).

Today I’m tidying up again. Law exam soon. She plays her violin like a pipe organ. So much more interest and control over “sound” rather than “song” (a back-and-forth that I’m sure began with my listening to Tim Buckley and then Jeff Buckley and thinking about all the spaces between notes and lyrics… is the music the forefront or the voice? Is all music reducible to such a dichotomy – THE VIOLIN HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A PIPE ORGAN – and must we do that? I think maybe it’s something I do.).

Actually, jack and I were talking about the new Joanna Newsom album, with string arrangements by Van Dyke Parks. I’d heard a wee bit in a bookshop and told Jack I thought it sounded like her another album did after a few listenings…ok, maybe it’s a little unfair, but there is an element of meandering wishy-washy-ness after a while, but then as soon as I write that I think about songs of hers I love…anyway (I’m not writing much about Laurie Anderson am I? She’s very good and the relief to hear her talking in robot voices about circuits and luck and the law is overwhelming after all that rainforest shit)…we talked about JN and VDP, right? And how she “wins” in the first song, he “wins” in the second and the third is kind of a draw. In terms of aural dominance I suppose.

See, now she ties together the lost dog idea, the beginning of the opening of Big Science (from the air), and part of the show I saw her do in Edinburgh in 2004. Stories of aeroplanes, teenage girls, digital love affairs, stuffed rabbits. She tells the story of the girl and her computerese language, and displays that weird middle space she occupies between poet, musician, comedian. How quickly she changes the tone too, the audience laugh at her story of the guy who was constantly in “a bad mode”, but at her assertion that “current runs through bodies, and then it doesn’t”, and the damning assertion that “you don’t want to see this. Close your eyes. Have you lost your dog? Jump out of the plane. There is no pilot”… and now a whispered plea “Please don’t hang up, we have your number”.

2006-11-27T11:25:00.000Z

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.

2006-11-16T11:41:00.000Z

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.

2006-11-09T13:34:00.000Z

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…

2006-10-30T11:20:00.000Z

Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Going Places
This is one of the records I bought last summer when Jack and I went on a bit of a cheap vinyl binge. We discovered (Ok, I’m fairly sure Jack knew it existed long before I did, and certainly patronised it before I did) a shop called Plastic Wax in Bristol that sells second-hand CDs, tapes, DVDs etc. But the joy of joys has to be found in the vinyl section, which ranges all the way from Jesus-Christ-you-know-about-labels-and-types-and-makes-and-everything section to the eight for a pound section. We chose the eight for a pound section and delighted ourselves with amusing album covers, silly names and sheer out-and-out wanky artwork. Many good things have been found this way. We ran into Chris Heppell was we went to the pub for a gloat over our greedily-collected crap, and he went straight over himself to find similar things. Then that night they both came over and we drank much wine and listened to as much as we could.

Therese had this album in the house when I was growing up. The second side opens with a song called Walk Don’t Run, which her school orchestra used to play. Chris (brother) and I played it on guitar and trumpet for our one-and-only-so-far gig at the Folk House in Bristol.

It’s quite a silly record already. Silly but very good. I grew up with two trumpeters/brass players (since they both play cornet too and I’m pretty damn sure Therese teaches tenor horn as well) so I can appreciate a good tone from all the players. It’s that very frantic and determinedly Technicolor Bacharach-style cha-cha-cha feel from the very beginning.

Everything is very neat in this world, phrases are tied together, instruments are tightly wired. Even the cheers and whoops have been organised. The first side’s over very quickly, what’s that all about?

Then Walk Don’t run. I have to fight the urge to want to play it again and again even before the second theme has appeared. I was going to start organising my Social Work folder into different sections of critical thinking; anti-oppressive practice etc, but as soon as I lowered the needle onto the second side I had to rush over and start typing about this song.

That’s the problem with no skips no shuffles, you have to ration the enjoyment, no more greedily playing a song over and over and over again as I am guilty of doing with a number of things. However it’s that methodology that’s led me here…I’ve never listened to about half of my music collection if I’m honest, and doesn’t the lack of repetition make glory more glorious?

I was talking about vinyl with Kez in the pub I work in last night. She’s a reggae fan and told me that she prefers vinyl, and will only buy vinyl, even if she likes the music and it’s available on CD. That kind of purism, though admirable and admittedly related to my current project, is a bit weird, no?

The last piece on the album is that Zorba’s dance thing, used so well in many a gangster movie and family wedding. The introduction is so bizarre, stripped away hihat and bass drum opening, so different from the rest of the album, if I had the technology I’d thinking long and hard about using it for something. There must be some way. What is it about the slow and inevitable speeding up of this piece that is comic? Why is that a comic musical technique? Growing frenzy…I remember swimming at Easton pool ages ago now…there was a mother and baby group in the little pool and each mother was dangling a child (each one resplendent in armbands) in the water, all going round and round in a circle while the pool assistant sang “The Wheels on the bus”. The penultimate verse to this undisputed classic is sung very slowly, with the final verse increasing in speed. The mother’s actions reacted to the speed of the song, and as each child was wobbled around in the water faster and faster, they all laughed and gurgled etc exactly as you’d expect them to. Is it something like that? A physical notion of going faster and faster as music does, and if so, why is it comic? A weird juxtaposition of suddenly speed when there was none before? Humour and music are funny things.

2006-10-19T16:58:00.000+01:00

Air, Talkie Walkie
Listening on headphones is always interesting; you become much more aware of the stereo mixing. Why the guitar in the left and the handclaps in the right? Was music designed to be listened to in dialogue? I’ve heard really interesting effects done with this, Kirstie MacColl’s Brazilian album (which I was shamed and ridiculed into giving away by an ex boyfriend. I miss it) did something really amazing with a small repeated guitar riff in the left, then the right, then the left…getting closer and closer to the centre with each repetition. Here, the guitar and the handclaps in the first track of this album are unified by strings in the centre, which dodge and disappear, giving shadow and shade where there could have been none.

There is something of the easiness of Moon Safari here, less of the angst and pain, maybe the adolescent jaw at an angle of 10,000Hz Legend. Cheery blossom girl – love is easier to be blasé, cool and Gallic about than loneliness and genuine desperation. Not love even, a kind of lingering thought. Cherry blossom which blooms and is blown away by a robust and decaying Autumn. Try to be true.

Those tiny record bumps Bjork has used so well…a very computer noise. Singing in megabytes. At once chilled and twitchy. Fear in repetition. Full of sex, but with no tone involved. We should be grateful – this is modern.

The next song reminds me of Corn Rigs and Barley Rigs from The Wickerman (my favourite musical). Like Moon Safari, there’s something 70s and Sunday afternoon about this. Bach now wakes up and shakes a finger at electro music. Mathematics made audible, architecture being frozen music, it’s all here now. Robotically generated – if the Baroque artists could have done it they would. Wasn’t there a vogue for mechanical this and that during the baroque? A time of artifice and gold has a lot in common with the virtual world. If all those strings and pianos were served up in a concert hall, or on a CD with unnamed musicians, or without the little beats behind it, which add very very little to the mix, would all the groovy 20 and 30-somethings dig it in the same coffee-table laidback way they do? Those beats are short-hand for “This is cool – do not worry”.

I went to a blues gig last week for my friend Iffi’s birthday – although I don’t really dig the blues or similar at all, I rather like the way it follows the same structure in song after song after song and still manages to come out with discrete, separate units of (almost) individual song. However, the singer kept doing those annoying call and response type things: “Say yeah if you like the blooooooz!!” and the like. Irritated the fuck out of me after a while, watching everyone whoop and holler in that choreographed way, all wearing the same blue jeans and easy T-shirts, knowing that they belonged and the musical code being given allowed them entrance into the club of people who like the blues because it’s laid-back and cool and authentic and unpretentious and allows them to go “Woo-hoo!” and “Yeah!” and “Alright!” like seasoned hillbillies before smiling it all off as kitsch or whatever and donning suits or similar to go to similar jobs on similar days where all the music and the electric lights are a little bit…similar.

I’m not saying I’m above all that, I’m guilty of belonging to the eclectic club who identify each other by having wildly diverse record collections (and doing things as geeky and self-absorbed as this blog for instance), but I do like to think I’m aware of musical code within the culture. How much do those beats on that Air track denote knowingness and distrust of classical music? It would be so interesting to play some-one that track without the bleepy beats, and then play it with. But to that without one listening being influenced by the other, you’d need a time machine of some sort. As I realised during my ill and panicky days, once you know or see or hear something, there’s no un-knowing it, no un-seeing, no un-hearing. You’re marked.

A seashore closes the album and I’m done with French electro-pop for the time being. Some of theses albums I own, I truly haven’t sat down and listened to as one would watch a film, since I acquired them, if at all. I wonder how my writing and thoughts will change when I get to an album I know intimately, rather than assessing these albums as if I was at a party and they were offering me canapés. I have enjoyed listening to Air.

2006-10-12T13:00:00.000+01:00

Air, 10,000Hz legend
That’s unusual;, that I can hear two albums by the same artist in the one day. Rain and a shower before getting ready for the big night out put me in a sitting still and listening mode. This is heavier, darker already. At the time I think this was said to be a more techno-type album, as opposed to the candyfloss and lounge fudge of Moon Safari.

The lyrics I’m hearing can’t be real…I want to bash my soul on your brain, put hands on both your heartbeats…I think I’m hearing it wrong, I hope I’m not. That bloody C64 robot voice got everywhere didn’t it? Radiohead, Air, 2 many DJs…I’m sure it was used in other places. It sounds hoarse and desperate here, although whether that’s the pleading text and angelic choir behind I don’t know. God, this is gorgeous. Rather wish the female robot voice hadn’t chided about giving up smoking at the end, made the whole lovely song into a cheap joke.

There’s something a bit glam rock about this, what is it, the harmonies? The sense that you’re in some kind of opera? Now a complaint about the politics of Radio One. This is a very different Air from that of Moon Safari. You become slightly more aware of their personalities in this (I say “they”, not even knowing the names of the two musicians), whether this has anything to do with the fact that Moon Safari was their first album (was it?) and we’ve gotten more used to the notion of Air-as-a-group, or if they seem to be singing more on this. Voices and singing denote personality in a way that instrumental music doesn’t. Is this part of the rise of popular culture and celebrity/? I’m pretty damn sure that in terms of distribution and audience, vocal music now wildly outnumbers that of instrumental, is that really the case or is it how I perceive it? And what about sampled voices? Is it still vocal music? Does presence of voice alone denote “vocal”? This is part of my idea for an eventual postgraduate study in music, about the relationship between “live” and “recorded” and the cultural currency and value awarded to both. Talking Heads interrogated the listener of Stop Making Sense (and also the reader, the record cover screams as much text as the average magazine) “Why a live album?” How can an album of plastic, shiny or otherwise, held in mortal hands or stacked in rows in shelves be “live” like a spider or a baby? Lots more to play with, but back to vocal music - am I using filters of the West in terms of amount recorded vs. amount given for free in fields, backyards, huts and riverbanks? A recording studio or a mother’s arms? What are the statistics here? At what point did the scales tip? I’ve heard that Mozart and Purcell in particular were the equivalents of Elton John or Neil Young in their time, did people listen to The Marriage of Figaro in the same way I can listen to My life in the bush of ghosts?

The album ends twitchy and foreboding. I need to eat soup.

2006-10-04T09:13:00.000+01:00

Air, Moon Safari
Today is a cleaning up and partying day. I’m not entirely sure that Air are going to make the best cleanup soundtrack in the world, but if I’m following the rules I have to listen to them next, and while I am working on some new songs, I’ve listened to them so much as a thinking exercise or as a default from the alphabetical list that I’m a bit sick of them, even though they are clearly works of genius (wink wink).

It really is getting things done music though, albeit in a calm and measured manner – there’s an expectancy that of course you’ll do what you need to and all in good time.

This was kind of ubiquitous in 1999 or thereabouts, wasn’t it? I became aware of “Kelly Watch the Stars” on a Brits 97 compilation though, a boyfriend at the time said it was rubbish, boring, just went round and round and round without doing anything. It’s only in the last couple of years I’ve started to realise how much I like that kind of music, and while I’m not holding up Air to Steve Reich, Terry Riley or even the great and glorious Donna Summer, I can see a link here. That’s what happened to the avant-garde, it put on some glitter heels and had some fun and came back to us as disco and dance. I’m sure I’ll go more into that on another entry though; enough of Air is “traditional” soul song writing that it wouldn’t support too deep an explanation of that particular point of view here.

I know that Air is comprised of two French blokes, who are the singers in-between? What do Air do? Are they the orchestrators? Something happens halfway through the album to lead you into that lovely song Ce matin la, with its really filmic strings and that rather fussy trombone solo. I remember hearing this song somewhere when I was a student, what in it was to convince you that you were living in the 1990s? It seemed instead like something from Glen Campbell, or some theme from a terribly old soap that a grandmother would watch, something on at three in the afternoon featuring lots of blonde dependable women she still wished herself among the ranks of. Probably set in the rolling countryside, where sexual relationships amounted to an understanding look or nod as children ran in long grass. The wah-wah guitar does pull you out of all that rather…

The album’s over, all of a sudden. It lulls you into a calm, this sense of all-in-good-time and yes as the album finishes, I finish vacuuming, dusting, putting things in their proper place and am almost ready for another coffee. You are held in a security then woken up. Quite a cruel trick really.

I read recently an article about Mark Titchner, who did those great Orwellian posters I saw at the Arnolfini a while ago, and heard him refer to his earlier works as “ambient paintings”; in that, as he explained, you didn’t’ really notice the painting, it just lent something to the room. There’ll be more room to go into this when I reach the Brian Eno end of the CD collection currently controlling me. Perhaps that’s what happened with listening to Moon Safari, except Kelly Watch the Stars and Ce matin la have wormed they way into my head by dint of repetition and beauty and envelope me in their ambience. My room is clean now anyway.

2006-10-03T14:31:00.000+01:00

Adam and the ants, Prince Charming
These guys are so damn weird. This is a fancy repackaged version I bought to accompany a fancy dress party for my 27th birthday. We all dressed up and looked fabulous – the visual “comedy” of this era can often override the music. Although the ants look bloody uncomfortable, like B&Q operatives who wandered into a fancy dress trunk by mistake – it’s obvious that “Adam”, as the front man is in his element. I suppose he is value for money – I only put the photos in for developing today, I have no idea if I lived up to it (clearly I was the queen of the birthday…)

The track listing on the CD is bracketed into what must have originally been side A and side B of the record (exactly five songs per side. Nicely symmetrical). There are bonus tracks of early demos and unreleased songs. This is the interesting point of bonus tracks, to see the workings out of what was finally given.

The lyrics are thoughtfully reproduced. They’re bloody odd, a lot of surrealism and campy references. Diana Dors, Picasso and the Planet of the Apes all jostle for attention. Although postmodernism is a very over-worked word, there has to be something of it here…what else was the weird appropriation of all the regency-style wear that typified the average New Romantic? Now a country idiom, now aboriginal pomp and splendour (seriously – what IS the structure to Prince Charming all about? It must have been a novelty hit even then, like O Superman, Ernie the fastest milk cart in the west and the Mike Flowers pops version of Wonderwall. Some novelty songs remain incredible).

I remember reading somewhere that 80s pop icons were far more interesting than the icons of the 60s…I’m sure I’ll go into this even more when encountered with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Talking Heads and The Buggles. The 80s is such weird era – the cold war, hyper technology (microchips tasting both sweet and sour in the economy of the time) – people wanting to become robots or robotic in their working/living habits, bowing down in fear and worship of the machine, going against the visceral ugliness of the punk era, regaining elegance but keeping the democracy of it all going. Obviously there are crests to ride with every new generation of musicians and artists who appear; and having grown up in this era and not the 60s (the 90s were my era of being a teenager, which was again subject to fears, changes and notions political, economic, cultural and personal which will have filtered the way I see/saw music from the time, at the time and now), I’ll view them differently from some-one who saw the 60s when they were new and not old hat. None of that coffee-shops and “inner truth” crap they put about then – it’s all fairy-tale highwaymen in deadly earnest.

It’s all very multi-layered all this stuff, lots of different lines falling in and out of each other. Odd to hear in the Ant Rap that they might have coined the phrase “Naughty North and Sexy South” – that seems to be so much of a Heat magazine style utterance I can’t quite equate it with Prince Charming…that’s the difficulty with postmodernism, you can’t tell who appropriated what first.

God I really like the last song. Bit of a soundscape going on. Vocalised the ownership of sex. Nothing coy or lascivious. Height of the AIDS epidemic and all. Never tells you what sharing your body should be like though.

2006-09-29T13:27:00.000+01:00

Ace of Base, Happy Nation
In 1993, the school I went to at the time (Thornleigh, a hideous catholic factory in Bolton) played host to a couple of French exchange students. They were Year 8, same as us, and were touted around each French class for us to practice our French on. A girl called Caroline asked them "Quelle t’on musique prefere?" (or whatever it is in French) and the two boys replied simultaneously "Ace of Base". Their French accents twisted the words we were used to hearing all over TV and radio in a way we hadn’t been expecting and we all fell about laughing.
I think this was the first time I had considered pop music being listened to by anyone who wasn’t English. I think I was aware that Ace of Base were Swedish, but as they sung in that vaguely Americanised form of English that so many singers use, it wasn’t too evident from the vocals that they were Swedish. With the memory of those French students in my head every time I heard Ace of Base, I suppose in a way this was my introduction to "World Music", in the sense that it wasn’t English or America. But then again, that does seem to be the definition of this rather patronising term, a neo-colonialism often forgotten by all those aficionados who trek to womad etc every year.

The banghra version of All that She wants adds more evidence to these feelings – the banghra-ised version includes nothing different (apart from massively-depleted lyrics) but a kind of Indian-style drone (very quiet, almost unnoticeable) behind the original song. I don’t think it would shake Bollywood, somehow.

In another nod to the pan-European state of this album, the fourth song on the CD is "The Sign", which I used to sing when I worked as karaoke-singing sushi/cocktail waitress in a Japanese restaurant in Edinburgh. It has all those great English-translation lyrics such as "under the pale moon, where I see a lot of stars", "is enough enough?" and "How could a person like me jump for you?" which although sound clunky do have a small poetry within…a bit like Take on me by A-ha which has lovely lines like "Needless to say, all odds and ends I’ll be stumbling away" – I know this isn’t "proper" English but is still an endearing and interesting turn of phrase or two and casts a new light on idioms I thought I knew.

Ace of Base did come back, I remember they had a couple of songs out when I was either at late 6th Form or early University, one was called "Always have, always will" and was much slicker than anything on happy Nation, whether that’s down to improvements in technology or the mode of the day, I don’t know. It was quite a 60s song. Also they had a really good song called "life is a flower" which I liked for a long time. Happy Nation is so much of its time, the sounds, the short refrains, every geared around dancing dancing dancing, love and sex. Every song is upbeat. There’s no journey in here. Only a very half-hearted early 90s syncopated keyboard riff on every other song. That particular rhythm (and I know you know it) relates to the Latin 8/8 beat…was the lambada and La Isla Bonita by Madonna responsible for more of the rhythms of the rave scene than we give them credit for?

Bonus tracks on this CD. The bonus track is so different from the hidden track – they are advertising their hitherto untold depths. More of the same, only different. Re-packaging of old LPs onto CDs must be the start of all this bonus track stuff. We become interested in the alternative architecture of the song, we want more, we want orange flavoured kit-kats, we don’t want wispas or caramels, we want dairy milk with bubbles or dairy milk with caramel. Dance, or fade out, but have an acceptably good time while you’re at it.

2006-09-28T10:54:00.000+01:00

2 many DJs, Original CD (title unknown – that’s rubbish, I could find out if I wanted)
This was the thing that started it off, Tim copied it for me in 2002. It was withdrawn because they hadn’t been cautious enough in securing copyright permission from something. The Peter Gunn/Basement Jaxx opening. The original fear of “Where’s your head at?” (probably amplified by the scary as fuck video)gets diluted by its new coupling, or as Peaches says it a minute or two alter “Fuck the pain away”. Having being thinking about the cold war and the escalation of the nuclear threat, I have to wonder about the rise of MTV, something must have come along to cushion us from that paralysing fear, something needed to elevate us to buying and fucking and bitching about other buyers and our competition and/or targets in the other category. Lou Reed just in time with his flat voice. John Cale was always cooler.

Interference, I truly don’t know anymore if this was designed interference. CD cloggy, take it out for a clean and start again. How did it get so dirrrrrty?

There are elements here, in this 2 Many DJs first public work, that found new homes on the Soulwax sessions I heard previously. Recycling and appropriation as creation too. How beauty becomes keep-fit overnight.

Perhaps a hangover, a nap and a day of walking around lovely greenery and eating pie has dulled my responses to this. I’m really not sure what of this I’ve heard or not heard before in other 2 many DJs sessions; I mistake Blue Monday for Vogue; songs I knew as means to dancing are rendered as weird and knowing sexscapes and the evening is becoming darker outside the blinds. Shadows of music appear and disappear before I’ve had time to see the nightmare collision or laugh at its humour. Not the actual songs, but almost just the first smell of their perfume as they waltz round the door, and angel-style recline into cruising mobiles.

It’s interesting to see how Independent Women prove such fertile ground for these audio plunderers. Pirate DJs. While the men make wish-lists of height and violence, and demand we ask what’s that sound and that we look what’s going down, the women seem to get on with working 9 till 5 etc. More enquiries about where are your children? Can they all be accounted for before Blue Monday comes round again?

2006-09-27T11:26:00.000+01:00

2 many DJs, Soulwax sessions volume eight
5th generation rock and roll. Amateur poetry in a middle English voice. Floating and left-wing. After one session of Soulwax already, my mind feels like a catalogue. I don’t know either of the songs mixed together and I have in front of me a can of Pepsi full of drink and a can of coke half-full of ash. The computer (Microsoft, nearly micro-frost) recognises coke and not Pepsi. Don’t pick up the wrong one for a cheeky swig.

They say we had beautiful girls. Is this kind of music beautiful on the radio and in person rather like an uncle at a wedding rooting through their favourite greatest hits? Editing and editing; creation through choice is a truly consumerist music. In this exercise, I know I’m going to be listening to a glut of an artist at a time… the alphabet is all but what if you get just too much of a person? Like a love affair you wear down to dirty socks and improvised breakfasts of contempt and familiarity? And there the singer confirms it with “Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, don’t let the bedbugs bite”. What if I acquire a new love? It’s impossible to have a monogamous relationship with music. It will lead you into tawdry rendezvous’ with architecture, history, maths, engineering, literature, art and technology. It’s ten o’clock, do you know where your teenager is? The party of bpm never stops and too many djs in control.

God, I haven’t recognised a single sample or track so far. That might have been George Harrison asking me, Liz Kearton, how I feel but I’m not sure.

An amateur choir, children, singing away mixed over a very electro-stylee backing…how is the listener supposed to recognise that? If recognition is the game? Or is this how 2 many DJs have evolved…the new superstardom where one works actively towards amateurism and mediocrity? It’s not fashionable to say so but Daniel Johnson, over-rated and beloved of those who chase “authenticity”, lacking it themselves... you could say his whole canon of works espouse this…is this where punk led us? People who are shit and are applauded for being shit? Who write hokey little songs that follow no structure, no pattern of the brain or the eye and are instead stream of consciousness with nothing save gratification? But then I love Finnegan’s’ Wake which is the ultimate in this format…

Punk and democracy – that terrible tag-line for a broadband/cable company that says “If you can, you should”. What if you are untalented but you still want to? And the people listening support that anti-oppressive, liberal get up and have a go, anyone can do it idea? Then the gates are open and the act is whored for the sake of doing it. Very little responsibility is taken for the musical animal who is birthed from this then, everything can be justified by “because you’re worth it” and similar. In the world of art, we can’t discriminate against those that have no talent. We are all shoppers now. Music as therapy and self-expression certainly but like all that free jazz that just goes on and on and on, you have to ask if the music there for the performer or the listener? I know this feeds well into John cage’s inversion of the triangle of composer/performer/listener and it’s healthy to challenge preconceptions of the structure (and politics of the structure of )music, but the danger of it turning into musical masturbation of a sort is always there. Therapy’s not a bad thing, but do you then publish it? The risk is there then of disenfranchising the skill and art behind confession, and I’ve seen at first hand the distrust, contempt and even hate at times of a trained musician.

I’ve found something on the shelf I know now, a familiar brand. Beats International featuring some-one I forget. Dub be good to me. Why do I listen closer now? I’ve seen an old friend with a new haircut; older and embittered, showing that the new is preferable. And now linking and loving with another on the tip of my tongue…what is this one with the heavier, decadent beats? Serge Gainsbourg begs me to listen to him while he sings a requiem (I can’t be sure, I have no French on my shopping list today). Is the recognition the highlight? A DJ has saved my life (again) and I do have to get up and get out, but not for an hour or so before work starts.

2006-09-25T16:02:00.000+01:00

2 many DJs, Soulwax sessions volume one

You start with numbers before letters, right? Susie and Al copied this for me. I’d heard them before in Edinburgh. Obviously this is terribly clever stuff, and I don’t mean this is in a facetious way, even though they themselves are very playful and knowing with the songs they combine. These tracks are like hurtling through a music supermarket, you know this, you’ve seen this, you’ve heard it, you know some-one who owns this song or you used to, and they all collide monstrously, and it works no matter how much you sometimes don’t want it to. Here I’m hearing Blue Monday with “Sweet seduction in a magazine”…who is it singing? Are these 2 many DJs now the performers or weird ringmasters herding all these great songs together to cavort and sully each other in a fabulous mix? The old producer/performer debate is one that struck me even more with The Avalanches’ first (only?) album. I dreamt its title last night, it was called “Heidi wants one”. That’s not right, is it?

It’s interesting that when Sgt Pepper appears, these djs who render so many things unrecognisable and unexpected hardly do a thing to change the original Sgt pepper (reprise), and how “funky” the Beatles were, outside the other contenders of the 1960s. In the fade-out to Lovely Rita on Sgt pepper, the Beatles seem to have this weird direct injection through to a very Rn’B style current/contemporary/modern style. Listen to it and you’ll know what I mean. The DJs need do nearly nothing to render the Sgt Pepper reprise of a part with The Chemical brothers, Peaches, Madonna and all the other songs and artists weirdly coupled and babied with each other.

What is the deal with this? Is it like those old megamixes of the 80s? Jive Bunny and all that? The Wasteland by TS Eliot has often been accused of being something of a literary megamix (ditto Ulysses by Joyce), and this mosaic nature to the book is cited often by its detractors (who, I think, are usually afraid of missing a reference within the book and being marked as that which they most fear and so hold the book in contempt – we see a mathematical or scientific equation we don’t understand and are vocally awed and humbled by it. Confront the average person with a work of art, music, literature they don’t understand and they react with anger, claiming you’re trying to make a fool out of them). What is 2 many DJs work, but constant referral to the slipstream of music from the last four or five decades? Is it better to listen knowing each and every song? Or to approach each one as “brand new”?

The mix of God only Knows by the Beach Boys and Billie Jean by Michael Jackson is the thing that made me sit up about this album, when Susie played it me, happily moved into her new place in Exeter, the whole conversation stopped, everything stopped and still now when I try to describe this to people, they can’t understand it, and when I play it, it’s incredible.

2006-09-24T16:19:00.000+01:00

What am I doing and why?
Having undertaken the weary and wonderful task of categorising my entire music collection (across all formats – CDs, pc-based stuff and vinyl) I’m going to listen to it all in alphabetical order and write a log of this time.

The grammar of albums and music is being lost bit by bit, pick n’ mix n’ piecemeal. When albums were pressed onto wax or shellac, we would listen to them in their entirety. From having read memoirs by George Martin, I know about the though that went into where each song goes in the running order, to construct “a novel” instead of a matchbook of singles…which of course hit a peak with Pink Floyd, Kate Bush etc, with the side A and side B of each record being approached as a first and second act in an opera, or movements in symphonies.

Then the CD became (I guess) the kind of beginning-middle-end Caulfield-style long rush of On the Road or similar – to just keep on driving but to construct the drive around peaks, troughs and witty juxtapositions. And now we put ipods and everything on shuffle and are just constantly looking to be surprised by something which is roughly the same as the rest, the surprise of position and not of content. Justin Timberlake next to Johnny Cash next to Jesus Christ. How much postmodernism and consumerism converge here, I don’t wish to comment on. But I know I’m always looking for new music, to find something new or to write something new myself, and I know fine well there’s a wealth of music on my shelves that I largely ignore. So. A No-Exit of sitting down with my friends, the CDs, LPs and computer files I have used and abused when I needed them, which I have taken and made work exactly the way I want them to for a party, to create a mood, to cheer myself up, to take me out of myself or to research styles, patterns and chord changes for my own musical gains; they’re now going to sit me down and do the same to me.

The rules are: No spoken word, No individual songs that don’t “belong” to an album, No compilations, No original work of me or my friends. No skips. No shuffles.