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.
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!
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.
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.
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
closeblood 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.
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 enoughfor 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 humanisationof, 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 Scummade 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.
