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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.

Song For The New Breed

I’m Jeanette. This was me, a few years back, reading from my first book Seasons They Change: The Story of Acid and Psychedelic Folk.

 

As you may make out from the picture, Seasons was a whopping tome: it began with Shirley Collins and ended with United Bible Studies. And on page 213, I wrote this:

In 1991, a photograph of four youngish men submerged in the lake of a derelict Kentucky quarry, with only their bemused faces visible, announced a new phase in the American underground. It was the cover of Slint’s Spiderland, the album that began post-rock.

 

Why was I writing about Slint in a book on acid and psychedelic folk music? Well…

The arresting photograph on the front of Spiderland was taken by an actor currently questioning his future. Will Oldham had gained acclaim for his role as a young preacher in Matewan (1987), but the years since had not been kind. He had come to realise that not all roles would be so stimulating; that movie sets in general were not supportive; and that he would struggle to gain creative fulfillment from acting.

 

Will Oldham was hugely important to my Seasons purpose. There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You, the Palace Brothers debut from 1993, was an uncompromising version of folk. It was clearly punk- and hardcore-indebted (or, at least a record that couldn’t have been made without their influence) yet consumed with the brutality of the American religio-folkloric tradition. It sounded modern, and ancient, all at once, with nothing backhanded or ironic in its expression. Shit was real.

 

There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You featured Brian McMahan, Todd Brashear and Britt Walford of Slint. As I was writing about Oldham in Seasons They Change – which was difficult, the man is supremely self-mythologising and inconsistent in interviews – I began to think more about ‘post-rock’. What did the term even mean? Did it describe a sound, explain a philosophy, or was it just something that journalists cooked up ‘to put a label on us, man’? (© every band ever).

I tried to describe 'post-rock' in Seasons (rather clunkily on reflection, as was my earlier blinkered assertion that Spiderland was some sort of 'beginning'):

Post-rock took elements of previous genres and artists – the expansiveness of The Velvet Underground circa White Light / White Heat; My Bloody Valentine’s dream pop; the erratic post-punk of Scritti Politti and Public Image Limited; Can’s Krautrock rhythms; the No Wave detachment of Ut; the belly-fire of hardcore – but did not combine them in any recognisable way. Instead, it sucked it all into that derelict quarry, stripping away clichés and comfort, and left behind a brooding abstraction derived from rock but absolutely aloof from it.

(I made sure PiL and Ut were mentioned, because they have long been two of my absolute favourites.)

AMAZING.

AMAZING.

Anyway. Something about the way I struggled to write about post-rock intrigued me. It meant either (a) I didn’t know anything about it or (b) it was an ill-fitting term or (c) its very elusiveness was a source of fascination to me. I can eliminate (a) – while I haven’t spent the last fifteen years listening to Explosions In The Sky knock-offs, I do have a good knowledge of post-rock dating back to the 1990s. (b), possibly: although (as I shall perhaps explore in a later blog post) I think the term became more ill-fitting as time went on, and I’m largely a supporter of its original intent. Thus, (c) seemed the most likely.

I found my post-Seasons period a chaotic one, both creatively and personally. Eighteen months ago, when the turmoil was at its very worst, it was post-rock that made sense to me. And I think it was elusiveness that was the key factor. Often, the music gave you space but it would also suffocate you with its very potential. As if you were atop a skyscraper, the tremendous city vista below, while coping with thinning oxygen and aggressive vertigo. Like a therapist, the best tracks would always chuck your interpretation back at you. Post-rock never explained anything.

 

Marvellously ironic, of course: I’m now trying to write a book explaining post-rock.