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.

G

I studied History in the mid-2000s. Like every other academic discipline, History is subject to fads and fancies. One of the less sexy ones (and which unfortunately coincided with my period of study) was that historians shouldn’t focus on change. Historians should focus on continuity. Thus ‘The Industrial Revolution’ became ‘Industrialisation’; ‘The Reformation’ changed to some bland ‘series of Reformations because you can’t use the definitive article, oh my goodness me no’; and all the literature on The Wars Of The Roses stopped being about exciting internecine fighting and tower infanticide, and started being about peasants tilling the field.

James Franklin, a pioneer of this type of thing in his 1982 essay The Renaissance Myth, sums this worthy-but-dull attitude up nicely.

           

Granted that one of the purposes of history is to supply us with picturesque and instructive anecdotes, it must be insisted that this requirement cannot override the obligation on writers of history to keep to the truth. […] It is no longer possible to ascribe the course of events simply to the ambitions of great men or to class hatred.

Franklin is of course right: ask Marianne Faithfull whether she is remembered for her excellent 1965 folk album Come My Way, or for an entirely fabricated story about a Mars bar. But I think his emphasis is also wrong. It is an equal obligation of historians to pick out (true) ‘picturesque and instructive anecdotes’, to foster understanding through identification. Lecturing people that ‘change’ seldom changes anything is boring (and wrong). What historians should do, I think, is of course ‘keep to the truth’, but within that, use narrative to increase humanisation of, and engagement with, the past.

What has this all to do with post-rock, you may well ask?

I’ve been thinking a lot about continuity. The genre name itself strongly implies it: an evolution of rock music rather than rupture from it. Post-anything, by definition, only exists because of what preceded it. Whether it then develops its own standalone meaning (postmodernism is a good example of this) is more debatable. I would like to – tentatively, for now – argue that post-rock very quickly gained its own significance as distinct from rock, and that seismic change was at its heart, especially in its very earliest days.

Clearly, there is continuity with previous subgenres of rock (I listed some of these in my previous blog post), but there is also a hell of a lot of rebellion against rock, even if it’s not entirely obvious. That many of the pioneering bands came out of, or were heavily influenced by, hardcore or thrash is telling. The first band to be tagged ‘post-rock’, Bark Psychosis, included Napalm Death covers in their earliest sets; and the drummer of Napalm Death, Mick Harris, released some important records that touched on the genre (notably as Scorn).

 

Bark Psychosis’s iconic 1992 12” single shares a title with Napalm Death’s debut album (although this was not the reason for the name). Says Graham Sutton:

There were a few reasons for the title SCUM. There was the Society for Cutting Up Men [Valerie Solanas’s 1967 radical feminist tract, SCUM Manifesto]. The film Scum made a lasting impression on me. And there was the idea of stuff floating to the surface. But, mainly, it looked good written down. At that point I was an angry young man and I liked the idea of making a record with SCUM written in big letters.

 

Bark Psychosis, to quote Sutton again, ‘were on a burning fucking mission. With a few notable exceptions, we always felt pretty alienated from everybody and everything, really.’ They were politicised and hated most other bands of the time (who, Sutton spits, ‘just wanted to be the fucking Beatles’). The group dynamic was intense, and their desire for radical change in music (at least in part) drove creation of the 1994 masterpiece Hex.

A quieter, yet sharp, comment on the standard formula of rock comes from that lot pictured at the top of the page. Who are they?

I’ll have to hurry you.

Look, here’s another picture.

 

One of the hardiest myths about post-rock, and one I’ve already come across many times when telling folk of my book, is that the bands are ‘anonymous’. I’d argue that, if true, it is a deliberate strategy: much perceived post-rock anonymity has little to do with individual shyness and more to do with a sardonic riposte to the cult of personality in rock music. Record covers, and even inner sleeves, seldom feature band pictures. The most loyal genre fan would be hard-pushed to recognise all but the most well-known artists from band photos alone.

Which reminds me. Have you got that band yet?

It’s Labradford. My favourite album of theirs, E Luxo So, doesn’t even feature track titles.

 

The lack of naming on E Luxo So (and the use of capital letters as titles on Labradford's previous album, Mi Media Naranja) could be seen as creating a space for interpretation; that they want their music free from preconception and persona, a strike against being 'the fucking Beatles'. But with Labradford (as with Mogwai) I’ve always sensed an element of piss-take. By that I don’t mean making anything other than beautiful, serious music, nor do I mean laughing up its sleeve at the audience. I mean – by the late 1990s, especially – that they were playing with image, and notably with the expectation that post-rock bands are faceless. Look at those E Luxo So ‘non-track titles’ in full:

1. Recorded And Mixed At Sound Of Music, Richmond, Va.

2. With John Morand And Assisted by Brian Hoffa.

3. Dulcimers Played By Peter Neff. Strings Played

4. By Chris Johnston, Craig Markva, Jamie Evans,

5. And Jonathan Morken. Photo Provided By

6. Leta O’Steen. Design Assistance By John Piper.

Labradford also curated the Festival Of Drifting: a name and a flyer that, surely, has more than a whiff of satire to it.

 

I’m a firm believer that humour, especially irony, in music is often overlooked. Whilst not writing a forced laugh-a-minute book, the last thing I want to do is write a dry narrative about time signatures and release dates. The interviews I’ve conducted so far have been full of picturesque and instructive anecdotes. From a Moonshake track being played at the wrong speed on The Chart Show, to the identity theft of Talk Talk's Lee Harris, the people who made this music are reflective, funny, emotional, humane. Maybe there is some myth creation involved. But that, in itself, is part of the story.