Have You Heard The News?

When you devour as much past and present music press as I do, you get very used to cliché. 'We're just making this album for ourselves, and if anyone else likes it, that's a bonus.' 'Success, it's a double-edged sword.' 'You'll either love it or hate it.' The first two may very well be true, but that last one, generally speaking, isn't. It's just dramatic and/or self-aggrandising sloganeering. Most people get by well enough on a 'meh' for (e.g.) the latest My Morning Jacket album.

Yet there are a few exceptions. Talk Talk are very, very, very loved, almost to the point of obsession, by a small coterie. That’s not hard to understand. They have many qualities that inspire devotion: enigma, innovation, rebelliousness, meticulousness.

But hate?

That’s from the NME. (They eventually mitigated that somewhat and gave it a (7), but still called the album ‘painful’ and ‘pathetic’. It was almost disgustingly disingenuous. It basically said the same as the (0) review did, but through a panicked mist of ‘what if we’re wrong and this is actually pretty good?’).

What did the paper think about Laughing Stock? ‘Unutterably pretentious and looks over its shoulder hoping that someone will remark on its “moody brilliance” or some such. It’s horrible.’ The Colour Of Spring? ‘Either Hollis is possessed with an unbearable naïveté or an overpowering intensity, either he’s laughably misguided or studiously determined, but there’s really no need for this cumbersome, allegedly “impressionistic” waffle.’

Yes, the NME hated Talk Talk with a venom usually reserved for war criminals.

 

Mark Hollis wasn’t patient with journalists, including – but not limited to – those from the NME. For instance, I feel for Dave Rimmer, of Smash Hits; in a very early interview (August 1982), he gets the sharp end of Hollis’ tongue after he poses a question about Duran Duran. Reasonable for Rimmer to ask this: not only were Duran Duran ridiculously massive for the Smash Hits readership at that point (as irritating as that fact might have been for a young Hollis), but Talk Talk had just been on tour with them. Rimmer, rather charitably I feel, noted Hollis to be ‘an abrasive character’ and then amiably gave him space to talk about who he would like to be compared to: Otis Redding, Bacharach & David, John Coltrane.

Smash Hits got over the Hollis disdain soon enough, albeit in a very Smash Hits way (‘just because Talk Talk look a complete shambles, [it] doesn’t alter the fact that they have some truly excellent songs’). It was the same story in Q and Vox: largely uncomfortable interviews, while the albums were reviewed intelligently and positively. And as for Melody Maker, they loved them so much they closed their eyes and rolled over on their tummy at every release. ‘If music can ever be said to be confessional and questing, this is it,’ they said of Spirit Of Eden; and ‘Talk Talk are certainly the most individual, possibly the most important group we have’ closed out their Laughing Stock review.

For a flavour of how Hollis was on (probably) a good day, consider these two extracts. The first, from Music Box and with director Tim Pope, is a discussion on Talk Talk videos, with the pair making some very hardcore honest points (in between the weapons-grade piss-taking). The second is a candid talking head, from 1998, that suggests perhaps Hollis mellowed a bit with age, and was – when he didn’t have to do it all the time – keen on exploring serious points about his music.

All that said, let’s go back to the NME. This is from the 22^nd February 1986, around The Colour Of Spring.

 

Unlike with ol’ Dave Rimmer, and your be-mulleted Music Box host, I have absolutely no sympathy with Neil Taylor, who conducted this NME interview. He wastes what – in hindsight – was a rare opportunity. Reading carefully, Hollis was perhaps in talkative mood, because he's volunteering information about his literary influences and song structures. But bully anyone about their work like this, and they will react accordingly. I'd imagine this interview was at least partly responsible for Hollis being wary and reticent with journalists in the future, and eventually withdrawing altogether.

The empire of the powerful inkies is long over, of course. NME went free earlier this year, and Melody Maker – remembered by my interviewees as ‘the better one’, where you might see The Young Gods or AR Kane on the cover – folded in 2000. Melody Maker became sneering and virtually unreadable towards the end and, interestingly, one of their parting shots was to review Kid A in a very similar way to how the NME received Spirit Of Eden.

Of course, criticising the work – and calling Hollis, or Yorke, or whoever, out for acting like a dickhead – is essential. It’s no good to have a bland mush where ‘they tried their best, so let’s be nice’. But if you are prejudiced toward an artist to such an extent that you compromise the entire structure of an interview or fill up a lengthy review with unsubstantiated bile, then you are in the wrong job, and time is unlikely to look kindly upon you.

Take It With A Grain Of Salt

One of the major structural decisions I made over the summer AND YES THESE ARE ALL AGREED WITH MY EDITOR WHO SAYS THEY AREN’T is to end my book in 2001. There are a few reasons for this (and I’ll reveal some at a later date) but my resolution also tallies well with the seismic changes in the consumption of music and the democratization of recording that occurred in the noughties. It’s always nice to neatly sidestep a squirming and squealing can of worms.

The 90s were boom years for physical product, and for the independently-minded (in [post-rock], that’s pretty much everyone), this often meant insisting on a firm link between aesthetics and music. Many designed their own iconic covers; some went even further. I had a very agreeable chat with Jeff Mueller (Rodan, June Of 44, Shipping News) the other week and, among the music natter, I also found out that he was a letterpress practitioner, something dating from the first June Of 44 album.

 

I was looking for ways to package my music that were interesting, and less plastic-y, I guess. I liked the idea of a paper, or cardboard, package, on recycled stuff. […] I felt that when you got that first Tortoise record, when you got Shellac’s At Action Park, or when you got the first Rachel’s record, it was packaged in something that was so careful, and so conceived, and so realised, I felt that might inform how you might open it up and listen to it.

 

This set me off thinking about formatting more generally and, in particular, about the sequence of Tortoise 12”s released in 1996. Anyone who frequented independent record shops that year is sure to remember their die-cut yellow splendour. Interestingly, prior to then, most of the Tortoise singles had been 7”s and the first two, especially, fit in with the US underground aesthetic of the time – coloured vinyl, wraparound poly-bagged sleeves, retro-tinged artwork. The difference between their first single, and the Djed/Tjed 12”, is acute.

Each of these 12”s offered subtle-to-radical reworkings of tracks on Millions Now Living Will Never Die, or new explorations, often in collaboration with more electronica-identified artists whom they strongly admired. Putting this material only on a 12” – there were none of the usual accompanying CD singles – seemed to be making a statement about the group’s current ambition and, perhaps more pertinently, what they didn’t want to be identified with.

In my efforts to understand the 12” in this context, I recalled listening to this somewhat rambling documentary on the 12” single. Yes, it’s got everyone’s favourite rent-a-bitter-quote Paul Morley ‘presenting’ and self-aggrandizing, but the standard of punditry is high – Tom Moulton, Lucy O’Brien, some bloke who presses 12”s – and Morley generally lets them witter on nicely. One line from it, early on, really remained with me: Morley says to a somewhat piqued New Order that they’ve made a single (1983’s ‘Blue Monday’, natch) with ‘a prog rock length…’ *pregnant pause, as Sumner et al seethe through the radio silence* ‘…which is also the perfect length for a disco track.’ 

I don’t think Ver Order really forgave him, judging by how swiftly they moved on to talking about the record sleeve, but Morley made a good point, and I found it floating up in my head when thinking about Tortoise, and the associations of the 12” single. The links with prog are for another time, but many of the tracks are long, and unless an artist is particularly keen on the James Brown-ish ‘Part One’ / ‘Part Two’ of a 7” (and happy to put up with the inferior sound quality), or has a track that’s even too long for one 12” (Four Tet’s ‘Thirtysixtwentyfive’, Insides’ ‘Clear Skin’), it’s the obvious route. The 12” single, with its rich history in mixing, scratching, disco, dub, and 80s pop remixes offered – above all else – space. Quite literally. Grooves were wider: tracks could not only be lengthier, but bigger in sound, offering greater scope for extremes and subtleties of antagonism, fragility, tension and bliss. And let’s not forget that the visual canvas of the 12", whether busy or stark, offered way more impact.

  

I got excited by my emergent little theory, and I probably expected Ian Crause to say something fitting it when I asked him why Disco Inferno released a series of 12" EPs in the early 1990s. After all, they have (albeit retrospectively) been afforded a consistency similar to those Tortoise 12”s: collated as The 5 EPs and the subject of a Pitchfork oral history.

In fact, Crause told me, yes artwork was extremely important to DI, but the formatting was largely practical. Because the band had amassed a lot of material during the period late ’91–early ’92 (when DI regrouped, and drastically changed their sound), EPs were a good way to keep the momentum flowing and increase anticipation for the forthcoming album. But after DI Go Pop, it was a different story. Crause says

Everyone expected DI Go Pop to be a critical hit and get us an audience, which it didn't, so Geoff [Travis, of Rough Trade] suggested holding off on the next album and making more singles for a year or so. […] Of course from the point of view of record labels, an EP is far cheaper to make and promote than an album, which is a far larger undertaking.

The lesson with [post-rock], again and again, and even with something as seemingly innocuous as formatting: enjoy constructing theories, but never, ever, make assumptions. I love writing this book.

Summer's Last Sound

I have a theory, concocted with my dear friend Nik, that how we are as a teenager is how we are. We might (might!) get better at moderating the outer excesses; we don’t feel things less floridly.

  

Hence this summer. The summer where I may as well have been that creature above again, watching Why Don’t You? and shoplifting, for all the work I’ve done. (I’ve actually spent quality time with boyfriend, friends, cats, The Age Of Innocence, Dragons' Den, Demi Lovato’s ‘Cool For The Summer’, prosecco, Sunn O))), London parks, and the urge to give up veganism). For me, there’s something about August that says laze and laze some more; I remember one year I desperately tried to get into the Ryder Cup rather than do anything productive.

Part of the reason for the [post-rock] lull was a natural rhythm change. As I mentioned before, I’ve consciously tackled this book differently to Seasons They Change; I’m trying not to interview people haphazardly, but instead figure out patterns, see how people knew one another, work out the different factors and dynamics in and between individual groups and ‘scenes’. In July I felt the bulk of my British interviews of the late 80s and early 90s were in the bag – although transcribing them is a different matter entirely – and I’d done a shitload of research on the influences that fed into [post-rock], as my blog posts up to this point testify. I’d also made some strong decisions as to the shape of my book: moving away from a strictly linear approach into something organised more thematically.

Didn’t I deserve a break of a few weeks? Wouldn’t it improve the book if I did so?

As Nicki Minaj says, playtime is over, motherfuckers! I’m listening to Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord Is Dead and getting my head back in the game. North American [post-rock]: I’m coming for you.

Confusion Is Next

 

A phrase from my last blog post has properly bothered me over this past couple of weeks.

It utilised a similar painstaking but punishing guitar deconstruction (which in itself had forbears in the Sonic Youth of Evol and Bad Moon Rising), balanced with a dour jazzy syncopation, and punctuated by whispery introspection.

‘Guitar deconstruction’. I know what I’m getting at with it, but it reads to me now as clunky shorthand, without adequate contextualisation. (This is the reality of being a writer. If all the usual life horrors aren’t enough, you get this shit waking you at four AM).

I think I meant that the bands I was discussing – Slint, and Sonic Youth especially – radically changed the parameters of the guitar, but not through accepted channels or gimmicks such as making it faster, slower, louder, fiddling with tunings and guitar effects, etc etc. They may very well have employed any or all of these techniques, but it was more in their philosophical attitude to the instrument. They took apart – deconstructed – its usual ‘rock’ purpose but they did not destroy it. They sought change it at its very root. The music that emerged was, at least partly, an inevitable consequence of this attitude. It’s linked to what Simon Reynolds talked of in his original definition of post-rock: that the guitar was used to facilitate texture and timbre. Reynolds cited Sonic Youth as a key example of how the guitar was un-rocked, and this Wire essay by David Stubbs further expands on the theme. I’ve also been listening to the No Wave artists that immediately preceded and inspired Sonic Youth, like Glenn Branca, and Rhys Chatham, whose ‘Guitar Trio’ (composed in 1977) was performed numerous times in the ferocious underground venues of late 70s-early 80s New York.

While I’ll be going more into No Wave and all this un-rocking in my book, what has started to fascinate me is deconstruction itself, and how it seems a fundamental principle of [post-rock]. When I tossed off that phrase in my last blog post, perhaps I unconsciously had in mind something Rudy Tambala said to me:

We didn’t want a guitar to sound like a fucking guitar. And I think that song [‘Sulliday’] really encapsulates it. You might think that’s a power chord, but it’s not, it’s just smashing a guitar against something, dropping it, and then going over and having a smoke, or whatever. But it was really, let’s try and tear away, aggressively, any aspect of rock and roll. […] There was this desire to destroy, even the groove. I think eventually we ended up thinking we’ll keep the groove, keep the bassline, even if we deconstruct it, keep the groove going, and just go fucking out there.

 

What is deconstruction? Let’s turn to the Sonic Youth of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida.

From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.

We are all trapped by this, us poor sheep; we’re only able to create or analyse anything through ‘signs’ – which dominate everything from language to the unconscious – and think in set responses that (a) predate our existence and that (b) we’ve internalized throughout our lives. Signs are not a route to free expression, but a limiter of it; words, for example, only work in relation to other words. The idea of ‘logic’ dominates Western thought and shoehorns us tighter into those expected channels.

Deconstruction – as I understand it – isn’t just about fervently searching for these signs then, when we find them, holding up our hands and thinking ‘oh well, life’s a done deal’ (see Structuralism). Instead, deconstruction says that we have to look, and look really fucking hard, for everything dictating our responses. But another mode of seeing is possible. And once we’ve accepted that we have to go back to the roots of everything to find this new way, then we can deconstruct those signs, those structures.

In short, deconstruction doesn’t destroy, with all the nihilism that implies; instead, it studiously takes apart, analyses, and then carefully, radically (and threateningly) reorders, using the same materials.

This is highly relevant for [post-rock] guitar, but it’s also an underlying theme in numerous other aspects of the [post-rock] sound and aesthetic. What I’m finding as a recurrent topic in my interviews is a fixation on destroying cliché. And it’s waaaaaaay more than just the usual ‘we’re doing things a bit differently’ statement within every musician's interview arsenal. The torturous recording process of many key albums bears testament to this.

 

The first time something is played it is at its finest, and the minute you try to recreate that it becomes an imitation of something that was originally better. But… the problem with a lot of improvisation is that it meanders away from the point too much. So the thing that this time [studio sessions for Laughing Stock lasted for seven months] afforded us was to go in with people that we wanted to play with almost from an attitude point of view, give them absolute freedom in terms of what they play, so that everything they do play is free form, but then to construct an arrangement by taking little sections of that and building that up from there. But that takes a large amount of time because… ninety per cent of what you play will be rubbish. If you’re improvising, if you get 10 per cent which is any good then I think you’re doing really well. I think you’re doing amazingly well if you get half a percent!

                                                                                                            (Mark Hollis, Talk Talk)[1]

There’s plenty of other gold in the deconstruction hills (challenges to authority; listener comprehension; critical interaction) that need a lot more thought on my part, but with a pretty free July, I’ve got time to give it. And although I’m bastardising Derrida’s notions somewhat (or rather ‘deconstructing’ them HAHAHAHA) to help interpret the works I’m considering – I think, after months and months, I’ve found the first definite thread bringing my [post-rock] peeps together.

That it’s a subversive and nebulous one in itself is entirely, entirely fitting.

---

[1] Hollis was interviewed c.1991 by John Pidgeon for a promotional cassette; this quote is via the excellent Quietus piece by Wyndham Wallace http://thequietus.com/articles/06963-talk-talk-laughing-stock

The image at the start of this post is from the installation Six String Sonics by Gil Kuno (2011). In this fully playable sculpture, Kuno reconstituted each of the usual six guitar strings into a separate instrument, effectively making six guitars with one string each, which can be played simultaneously by six musicians. More information, and watch/listen here.

Protorat

We’re building something here, detective. We’re building it from scratch. All the pieces matter.

(Lester Freamon, The Wire)

When I interviewed Dave Callahan from Moonshake, he asked me if I’d heard of Chorchazade. Who? I said, straining to catch the quixotic band name over the background pub natter. He spelled it into my Dictaphone, and the following day sent me a link to this track.

 

With all due respect to Socrates, when it comes to music writing, wisdom is not knowing that you know nothing. Wisdom is knowing that certain other people will always know more than you.

Enter Harvey. Harvey Williams is a brilliant singer-songwriter (solo and as part of many Sarah Records ‘outfits’) and my friend. He’s also an authority on Cornwall's musical history, with a glorious blog enriched by personal anecdote and rare soundclips. Harvey knew all about Chorchazade, as some of its members originated from the area; he had already blogged on a pre-Chorchazade act, An Alarm. Harvey is one of the most generous people I know and, true to form, he sent me a digital version of this tape.

 

Goodness me. This certainly was proto [post-rock], but in a far different way to Cocteau Twins or AR Kane, and even to Dif Juz or Glenn Branca. This anticipated Slint. It utilised a similar painstaking but punishing guitar deconstruction (which in itself had forbears in the Sonic Youth of Evol and Bad Moon Rising), balanced with a dour jazzy syncopation, and punctuated by whispery introspection.

 

Chorchazade released a 12”, ‘Crackle And Corkette’ (1985), and an album, Made To Be Devoured (1987). They had one play on John Peel, who bellyached about them having an awkward name (it’s pronounced cork-arr-zade, should you be wondering), they had a perceptive review in the NME...

Made To Be Devoured has no close blood relatives [...] Blurred vocals distort the view, enticing you to peer further into the dimly perceived core. [It] never grins in welcome when it can stand with folded arms and invite you to make the move.

...and that was about it. A thousand copies of the LP were pressed; two-thirds of them ended up in a skip.

They were alone in time and space, were Chorchazade, peerless in both senses. Information was sparse. Although Noel Lane, the songwriter, singer, and bassist of the band had an internet presence a few years back (with some excellent songs on MySpace, as Bunny Dees), he had pretty much disappeared since then. I had no obvious way of getting hold of him. My only leads were only a couple of scraps of information about where Noel lived and the kind of work he did. I fired out a very speculative email based solely on this, and a couple of days later got an astonished reply from the man himself.

Lesson here: however unlikely, always give it a go. Since then, Noel has written me an in-depth, insightful, and very funny, history of the band.

We were all white, thin, physically unattractive and unfashionable, too young to have really taken part in the punk thing. Our audiences were almost totally made up of ugly, short, socially inept, bespectacled young men.

I was far too big-headed (immature and unconfident... paranoid?) to display any interest in what my peers were doing. Perhaps I’m utterly wrong about it all, but that’s the way it seemed.

A troop of wandering Benedictine lepers probably had more fun than we did. It was all, of course, quite wonderful.

(Noel Lane, Chorchazade)

Noel also contacted Julian Hunt, guitarist, who I spoke to on the phone. Julian talked about their musical tastes, which Noel did less of (understandably so: as Julian said, Noel ‘didn’t buy any records. I’d never met anyone who was so outside the bubble, so formed in his own musical world.’) Most interestingly, Julian discussed the influence of soundtracks such as The Man With The Golden Arm, On The Waterfront, Zorba The Greek, and the work of Ennio Morricone.

  

This, this, feels very special. Although I’m by no means the first music writer to cover Chorchazade (Jakob Battick in Perfect Sound Forever, and Andrew Male, who wrote an excellent ‘Buried Treasure’ piece about them for Mojo in 2008), they are still extraordinarily obscure. Although it would be a stretch – at best – to claim that Chorchazade directly influenced anyone else I’ll be including in my book, who knows how unseen ripples disrupt still water? Pure conjecture, of course, but Chorchazade gigged a fair bit. Even in front of small audiences, a band as singular as they would surely have stuck in people’s minds, especially if there were fellow musicians among the crowd.

We played with Pulp in 1986. After the gig Jarvis told me I was a genius to make music like that with guitarists who couldn’t play.

(Noel Lane, Chorchazade)

There’s even an unsubstantiated story that Steve Albini owned and loved Made To Be Devoured, and played it at his studio, Electrical Audio, during a recording session. This would have been way later than Made To Be Devoured’s release (Electrical Audio was founded in 1997) but who knows how long he’d had it? Albini produced Tweez, the debut Slint album (released 1989), and it’s a charming image to think of the Slint boys nodding their heads to Uncle Steve’s latest favourite album.

 

Fun though this speculation is, in the end, it matters little. What does matter is that Chorchazade created a certain sound several years ahead of others, and that said sound would prove hugely significant in [post-rock], even if they themselves were not. Understanding how they came to do so (and why the world wasn’t ready for Chorchazade in the way it was for Spiderland) is the next task at hand. 

It’s kind of fun, figuring shit out.

(Roland ‘Prez’ Pryzbylewski, The Wire)

Multifoiled

 

I’d never seen anything like it. There was this fucking tape machine and this incredible angel of a woman, and these two guys with big hair, making the most sublime noise.

                                                                                            (Rudy Tambala, AR Kane)

The funny thing about writing a book like [post-rock] is you can have all the fancy theories you want about ‘development of a sound’ and ‘collective influence’ (and so on), but until you actually start talking to the musicians, you’ll get it at least partly wrong.

Before I heard them music was just something I listened to. When I heard their music it was genuinely life-changing. I think partly because I realised I didn’t have to be good to play, it was more about making sound. […] They were revolutionary. Everything about them, the whole set-up, the sound, the singing, everything.

                                                                                                        (Mark Clifford, Seefeel)

 

Cocteau Twins. Like all the best revelations, it’s a complete curveball that, once you’ve caught it, makes perfect sense and you wonder why you were previously so blind to it. I missed it because, before now, I was distracted by the shiny baubles of Cocteau Twins (voice; indecipherability; hypnagogic atmospherics) and, to my shame, had never tried to understand why they sounded like they did.

I started addressing this with 1982’s Garlands. And why not? It was the first, and I knew nothing from it. I was initially surprised that it was indebted to Siouxsie And The Banshees, but the more I thought of it the more it fitted with the picture I’m building up. The Banshees are another area of underexplored influence, since John McGeoch and his delay pedal fashioned black ice soundscapes, something enthusiastically taken up by a strand of [post-rock] musicians.

 

Back to Garlands. This track, this, is currently everything to me.

 

If people know anything about the Cocteaus, it’s Elizabeth Fraser’s voice. They know it’s beautiful; they know it’s hard to understand the words (and even harder to grasp their meaning). What listening to ‘Wax And Wane’ taught me, and which I had not appreciated before, was that Fraser is not difficult to take in because she’s being obtuse, evasive, mannered, or mysterious. Instead, she’s about emotions and situations so intrinsically ambiguous that the only possible way to make sense of them is to deliver her words in a way reflective of that ambiguity.

‘Wax And Wane’ was my entry point into this understanding because, compared to some other songs, Fraser enunciates just enough for some contact between your straining ears and her quicksilver voice.

‘The devil might steady me / wax and wane’.

   - The devil might steady me as I wax and wane.

   - The devil might steady me; his steadying of me waxes and wanes.

   - The devil might steady me; ironically, this steadying makes me wax and wane.

The thought processes ‘Wax And Wane’ triggers off within me are somewhere between an interwar Mitteleuropean novel and R.D. Laing’s Knots. This relationship of possibility between artist and listener is central to my very favourite [post-rock]; that opening up of meaning to such an extent that it can induce nausea, agoraphobia, and euphoria.

As I move on through the back catalogue, I’ve found many hugely impressive moments on Head Over Heels (1983), Treasure (1984), and especially Heaven Or Las Vegas (1990). But, CRAPPING CRAPPING HELL: Victorialand.

 

Released in 1986, during the period when bassist Simon Raymonde buggered off to work with This Mortal Coil and Richard Thomas of Dif Juz was called in on sax and tabla, it is a mindblowingly voluminous work. Guitars so saturated they’ll shapeshift into sodden grass, while the vocals reach for the essence of devotional fervour. It seems – to me – that Victorialand is a primal scream arising from shared unconsciousness. The spaces between the words and the sounds are important, and obviously so; the music concentrates on the liminal zones of life that are usually, sometimes intentionally, rendered imperceptible.

 

Now, when was the last time I had an eye-opening musical experience like this, one that made me look at life differently while trotting out ornate phrases like a sixteenth century court poet? Oh, yes. This man.

It happened when I was writing Seasons They Change, and it was at exactly the same point in the process as I am with [post-rock] now. Unaware of much of his music, I’d dismissed Tim Buckley for two childish reasons (I didn’t like Jeff Buckley; I didn’t like the group Starsailor) and one genuine one (his music wasn’t obviously psychedelic or even, in many cases, folk). But as soon as I started to talking to musicians, the influence was clear. Tim Buckley freed folk music from expectation and structure and, in doing so, he let all kinds of crazy shit into it. His musical children, the best ones, didn’t sound like Tim Buckley. Instead, they took on his ideology, and filled folk music with loads of crazy shit of their own.

And that’s why Cocteau Twins are important. The relationship between [post-rock] artists is not wholly, or even primarily, sonic. Instead, it’s about something far less tangible. And something far more intoxicating.

Don’t Bend!

Saw Godspeed You! Black Emperor last week. Here I am in my T-shirt.

 

They were, predictably, phenomenal. They played for close on two hours and the set incorporated both the punishingly physical and the wholly cerebral. Comparing this act to other music is a pointless exercise indeed; rather, their peer group includes blistered titanium and a solar flare. Here’s an obligatory someone-recorded-it-on-their-phone clip from the night and, although clearly ineffective in conveying the set’s majesty, it still makes my muscles convulse.

 

GY!BE are appealing to me, as I’m sure they are to others, for more than their music. What might broadly be termed their political stance is remarkably consistent: against ‘the man’ (but without the dollop of naïveté that usually accompanies it); questioning corporate culture and the inequalities that follow in its wake; uninterested in self-aggrandisement. This statement, following GY!BE winning the 2013 Polaris Music Prize for Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, is a good encapsulation.

Right down to the Fair Wear Foundation label in my t-shirt, GY!BE are seemingly exempt from the foibles and contradictions that beset the rest of us poor sods. This lack of cracks seems almost beautiful to me today, UK election day, when I feel optimistic for change and hopeful of the majority's goodness.

 

Like their music, GY!BE’s standpoint is defined as much by space as by presence.

We were proud and shy motherfuckers, and we engaged with the world thusly. Means we decided no singer, no leader, no interviews, no press photos. We played sitting down and projected movies on top of us. No rock poses.[1]

If we can break down image into three parts – how it is conceived, expressed, and then received – the GY!BE approach is worth thinking about a little bit. Artists (and I'm talking of independent artists here) can usually control the first; they can often direct the second; but, although they might influence how their image is received, they can’t control it. GY!BE didn’t want the Polaris Prize, and their felt their work was at odds with everything it represented. Yet they still won.

As the quote implies, GY!BE probably didn’t conceive image in the way we usually understand it. For them, image seems a by-product of their philosophy, as opposed to something at least partially contrived; and the GY!BE philosophy is so staunch that a strident image reflecting it was inevitable. The interview embargo was the perfect way of expressing it, too. The law of human averages suggests that not all of GY!BE are equally proud and equally shy motherfuckers. Someone amongst them will inevitably be chattier, or ruder, or more magnetic, or harder work, than the others.

 

What we are left with, then, is the almost-unique situation of GY!BE’s image largely being constructed by fans and commentators, but pretty much controlled by the band, even though the band seldom put visible energy into it. When they are not received how they wish (i.e. the Polaris Prize), they do spring into action; but usually they don’t have to, because attempted assaults upon their image won't even dent its steeliness, especially since the fans police such attempted assaults for them. For instance, if I was to put that above photo of me on Twitter, or in The Post-Rock Appreciation Society, with #godspeedselfie attached, I'd be mad. At least some fellow fans would take a very dim view of it, thinking either I ‘didn’t get’ GY!BE or was trolling, rather than genuinely being on a high after a fantastic show by a fantastic band.

From me comparing them to 'a solar flare', to the famous 1999 NME cover…

...to this, images of England v Norway set to ‘The Dead Flag Blues’…

...to even this massive cuteness...

...the vast, vast majority of coverage by fans and journalists is respectful, serious, even opaque.

The vast, vast majority, yes.

But let’s just see what Mr. Agreeable thinks.

---

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/oct/11/godspeed-black-emperor-interview-full-transcript

Say What You Can

One of the genuinely complicated and conflicting things about writing, especially writing non-fiction, is this: what to do with a blackguard.

Writing my book in a vaguely linear fashion, this week I embarked on my first chapter: looking at music that anticipates, inspires, and generally provides the context for [post-rock] to develop. John Martyn was a pioneer of delay; and ‘Small Hours’, from 1977’s One World album, features his Echoplex heavily. It also contains a subtle dub influence (recording followed a trip to Jamaica, during which Martyn jammed ‘n’ nattered with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Burning Spear, and Max Romeo). ‘Small Hours’ is lengthy and ambient, recorded on a farm under the influence of opium, with sounds of the lake swirling and geese rambling. It is an immense thing, with many sonic elements that prove important later on.

Like most battered wives, I was too ashamed to tell anybody what was happening. Only the doctor in Hastings knew the full extent of my injuries […] At times I thought I was going to die.

The above quote is from Beverley Martyn, who details in her harrowing autobiography Sweet Honesty the cruelty she suffered while married to John. The abuse was emotional and financial, too. It was not solely that he hit or threatened her when off his face or wound up (although he seemed to do a lot of that). It was a deliberate and systematic stripping away of her selfhood.

Before her marriage to John in 1969, Beverley had a promising career. It’s not fanciful to think she may have developed into a Vashti Bunyan or a Carole King (or, indeed, a John Martyn). This is a great early self-penned B-side.

Stormbringer! was going to be her debut album. Beverley was already working with Joe Boyd, while John was a hired guitarist on it (isn’t that nice, they’re newlyweds after all, how lovely to play together). But the record was meant to be her voice, her vision. Hers.

Instead, it was the start of the John Martyn show. Stormbringer! soon contained more John than Beverley and, unbeknownst to her at the time, he took 75 per cent of the royalties. With the second John and Beverley album, The Road To Ruin (released later in the year) the same trick was performed and intensified; John blatantly used it as a leg-up to his solo career.

There’s no doubt the music world has benefitted from John's behaviour. The brilliantly innovative John Martyn album run for Island throughout the 1970s is often compared to the classic Tim Buckley stretch (Happy Sad to Starsailor). But what did Beverley Martyn do during this time? She stayed at home, looked after the children, lived under a blanket of fear and violence. Her own formidable creativity was smashed.

 

One might, and people frequently do, try to circumnavigate all this. You’re judging the art, it is argued, not the life. This is seen in (re)assessments of Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, and Roman Polanski. In 2006, when Heather Mills alleged Paul McCartney had been violent towards her, and withheld the help she needed as a woman with a disability, she was mostly vilified and written off. Not our Macca! Let’s just listen to ‘Paperback Writer’ again! Ahhhh. That’s better.

Is it the business of critics to condemn the behaviour of artists? I’d say it is not, and I'd wager most critics who aren't Richard Littlejohn would say the same. But the awkward fact remains: by ignoring something, we can tacitly approve of it. What often happens then is firing at easy targets in order to prove we're not massive bastards. Simple to pass judgement on people like Gary Glitter and Ian Watkins, right? Their crimes are huge and their music is awful. It all becomes a bit like this: drug use and/or mental illness = good artistry! Paedophilia = bad artistry!

 

Domestic abuse = let’s judge depending on what we think of the music! James Brown’s multiple arrests for domestic violence are seldom brought up in critical commentary. However, although Chris Brown sells by the truckload, he’s not the critics’ pal. Thus, his attack on Rihanna is frequently mentioned.

 

Here’s the thing: we can’t have it both ways. If we’re fascinated by how Ian Curtis’s depression informs his work, we can’t step away from how John Martyn’s abuse of Beverley informs his. What drives people to great art can be the same as (or at least linked to) their drive to cause pain in their immediate sphere.

We should, at least, give Beverley the respect to acknowledge that.