DEATH GRIPS/ COLOUR OUT OF SPACE WARM-UP (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES CONTINUED...)

DEATH GRIPS

Coalition, Brighton, Fri 3rd May

Shortly before the band came on, I observed the typical Death Grips fan to be a youthful hipster, busily texting and tweeting while sporting ironic facial hair. “These young people of today,” I thought to myself, my mind imagining their idea of watching the gig would consist of updating their live feeds while waxing lyrical of hardcore gigs of old.

Scant seconds after the band came on, a huge wave of arm-flinging energy erupted across the crowd - which didn't seem to abate until well after the whole thing was over.

Good for you, young people of today.

If I were so foolish as to reduce the live Death Grips experience to a sound-bite explanation, it would be something like 'hip-hop and drum-and-bass beats, cross-bred with full-on noise then set to attack mode.' Though it's not at all the same type of music, they chiefly reminded me of another band I saw in this very venue – Sunn O))). There's the same single-minded dedication to taking one frontier of music and pushing at it, never pausing even for such a lunch-is-for-wimps moment as a gap between tracks. There's the same deranged decibel level, music so loud your bones almost shake along to it.

Except Death Grips' accessory of choice isn't dry ice but strobes – fired at us pretty much incessantly, and perfectly matching the abrasive, rapid-fire beats. The performing duo are backlit to the point I'm not even sure they actually existed in three dimensions, the singer a perpetual motion machine of aloft arms and jutting elbows.

Live they're considerably less sample-centric than on record. Tracks are stripped right back to their elements, much the way robbers do with shotguns. But there's also a deranged kind of invention to it; things will become almost psychotically metronomic, only for some curve ball to be thrown in. Much like Fucked Up they throw such a dizzying punch live you can't imagine it working on record. Yet when you try them on record you find they're richly rewarding.

Things climax with a good few minutes of squalling white noise. Then the first thing my punch-bagged ears pick up on stepping outside is a security guard talking to another. “They had more rabbit than Sainsbury's.” Which they did.

Like so many styles of music before it, hip-hop went mainstream many moons ago. Rappers present a puffed-up parody of black street life for a mostly white audience, while name-dropping brand names for product placement cash. But at it's inception it was about taking music forward by taking it apart, reassembling it then giving it a kick out of the lab door. (In methods not so different from Krautrock outfits such as Faust.) And it's alternative acts like Death Grips, far from being some wayward offshoot, that are keeping that spirit alive.

In what seems an increasingly common step for hip-hop acts, the 'CD stall' held no actual CDs – just T-shirts and hoodies. (Like Fugazi in reverse.) Their first release, 'Ex-Military', put up on torrent sites, opened with a Charlie Manson quote calling the music biz “a bigger jail than I just got out of.” (On a track appropriately titled 'Beware'.) I didn't believe the promoters' claim that this had become the most legally downloaded piece of music, and yet it seems it's so. After signing to Epic and being told their next release wouldn't appear for over a year, they promptly torrented that as well. (They are, to no great surprise, no longer signed to Epic.)

The first one being free and all that, you could do worse than check it out. This is the opening track with that Manson intro...

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE WARM-UP

West Hill Hall, Brighton, Sat 4th May

These warm-ups/ fund raisers for the (hopefully still forthcoming) Colour Out of Space festival seem to be becoming stalwarts of the local scene. (Though the bohos were too cool and laid back to plug the night even on their own website!)

As usual, things were pretty unusual. Tuluum Shimmering played a succession of folk and ethnic instruments, laying each upon the others like some totem pole of sound. It probably rests upon a formal feature of folk instruments, that their open tunings are closer to drones than modern instruments. Which means each new layer could grab at your attention, as if bursting into the room like a surprise witness, only to quickly flatten down into the shimmering sea of sound as soon as it was usurped. It was like you perptually felt yourself at the pinnacle of something, only for the totem pole to grow another step higher.

Getting carried away as usual by this virtuous combination, I started to conceive the piece's internal harmony as evoking the ongoing folk tradition – growing like coral, building upon itself. Of course us commie types should eschew such notions of smooth historical continuity, and I should probably have introduced an element of rupture and struggle by invading the stage. Luckily there wasn't one, so I could just sit back and enjoy it. I also loved the way that, after such a mesmerising set, they immediately stuck Slayer on the PA. That's the way to do it...

Another of the edited highlights was Avarus (pictured, but from another occasion), a Finnish free psychedelic outfit with a floating line-up involving ex-members of Pylon. Despite those geographic origins to me they most resembled a latter-day Krautrock act, improvising inventively around a metronomic groove like the spirit of Ash Ra Tempel still lies over us. True they took a little while to really hit their stride, and alas they were restricted to a fairly short set. (The venue is in what's known as a “residential area” so curfews are firm.) They showed every sign they could have kept going all night, something I'd very much like to see. Check some out (albeit from another time, another place)...

'SHOOT THE WRX: ARTIST + FILM-MAKER JEFF KEEN'

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery

”Keen melted, burned and blew up objects around him to realise his art.... [He] revelled in a wild spirit of anarchic play, revealed a fascination with Surrealism and demonstrated true love for pop culture. ”

- Gallery guide

Secret Origins

I thought I knew Jeff Keen.

After all, I'd been there. From the Eighties, up until his untimely death last summer, I'd attended his semi-regular series of gallery shows and film nights. He'd throw up works, crosses between action paintings and graffiti art, often on shaped pieces of cardboard or other extemporised materials. Like some irrepressible force of nature, he'd often churn these out during the event. Once I saw him drawing live on the screen while a film was still being shown.

These always felt like bright bursts of fresh air against the post-conceptual codswallop that normally passed for the Brighton arts scene. If the 'artwar' schtick, the day-glo bursts of popular culture sometimes seemed a little one-note, it was a good note.

As it turns out, I didn't know the half of it.

To see his earlier works was, to borrow one of his recurrent phrases, like discovering his Secret Origins. Pen-and-ink work from the Forties and Fifties, such as 'Agonised Figure in Landscape' (1949) are influenced by Surrealists such as Miro but put through an English filter, like Spike Milligan's Goonish doodles. They look spontaneous, automatic drawings, the framed pieces scarcely different from the open sketchbooks placed by them. Admittedly, those influences are a little too clear-cut for Keen to emerge as an original at this point. But patience, reader...

Poetry in Flames

As befits British culture, it was the Sixties and Seventies that brought colour to Keen's work. He seems to strike at the canvas with every weapon available - the graffitist's spray-can, Pollock's swirling trails of paint, the mass-producer's stencils and his own hand-lettering. Yet the superimposed images somehow never fell into clutter, were always impactful. Check out for example, 'Secret Origins 1' (1967, above). Through using these various media all at once, there's no clear distinction between Keen's paintings and his collages, such as 'Atomic Rayday' (below).

Ever-ambidextrous, Keen was also a surprisingly good cartoonist with a strong and effective line. A work like 'Laff' (1966, below) prefigures the bold iconic style later taken up by Kaz, Peter Bagge or Malcy Duff. It's pure comics – less a drawing than a cutaway map of a figure, displaying a tangle of vibrantly active but entirely imaginary body parts, a spaghetti junction of innards.

Now developing a distinct line, these days that seems the goal of every emerging alternative cartoonist. Yet, while excelling in this, Keen clearly also loves the commercially produced nature of comics. He reproduces the perfect outlines, the bold flat colours, so at odds with the human touch insisted upon by the art world. Commercial comics have a strange interaction between hand-made and mass-produced, perhaps best summed up by the perfect signature - such as Disney's elegant swirl, simultaneously handwriting and act of branding. Notably Keen imitates this in 'Jeff Keen Photoplay' (1972, below).

Yet, however much comic fans will find themselves propelled into his work, Keen was never likely to become a full-fledged comics artist. There's something always slightly off, slightly distorted about he way he takes up their language. And as so often in art, what is wrong comes out as what is right. He sometimes fixates upon the grammar of comics, dividing a work into panels, crossed with arrows and strewn with sound effects - such as 'Secret Origins 2' (1967, below).

The withholding of narrative throws emphasis on the formal elements, which are normally passed over by the reader - as unobserved as punctuation in a novel. Interestingly, this paralleled developments in the then-current world of underground comics, with artists like Victor Moscoso or the early art spiegelman. (Meanwhile, to pursue an earlier argument, an artist like Lichtenstein eliminates the grammar of comics the better to make them appear illiterate.)

And even when he uses characters, they work more like recurrent motifs. A work like 'Dr. Gaz' (below) reminds me of the home-made comics I churned out as a kid; characters ceaselessly invented and as-soon discarded, never quite lined up into storylines. In the best possible way, Keen never really grew up, he was always able to pull up pails from that bottomless well of imagination.

'A Mythic Universe'

Perhaps one of the key underpinnings of Keen's work is his omnivorous multi-media approach. When the show says “he combined film screenings with live performance and poetry,” 'combined' is key. He wasn't a painter and film-maker and zine producer and poet. Like his overlaid images and rapid-cut films you need to take them all together as components of a greater whole. You need to drink deep from Keen, not sip at him.

His paintings worked like posters to his films, his zines spin-offs, and they were often intended as precisely that. Like some one-man marketing campaign for his own imagination, he also produced objects from his characters, mid-way between promotional items and medieval saints relics, such as 'Vulvana's Fingernail' (1970).

In fact one of my few critiques of this show would be the way the films are largely segregated into a room at the end. Though this was probably down to practical limitations, it still doesn't seem in Keen's spirit and has led to me concentrating more than I should on his visual art here.

Yet one feature of his film work which should see mention is how much of it's actually video work. Of course low-budget film-makers everywhere soon migrated to more affordable video. But with Keen there's an extra element. If Modernism was about accentuating the form, finding what could uniquely be done in painting, sculpture or architecture and pursuing it, Keen pursued video - emphasising it's pixellated graininess, it's off colours. It looks simultaneously verite, video being the delivery medium of the news, and murkily otherly. It seems his primary approach was to try out whatever the manual told him not to, an approach programmers call (rather deliciously) 'video illegal'.

Hero-Warriors

Above all, much like Blake, Keen had his own private mythology. And like Blake you would go mad before you gleaned any of it. Comics scribe Tim Pilcher and Keen's former assistant Damian Toal gave a talk at the Museum which unpicked some images and did manage to shed some light into Keen's mind. (For example, the way he associated airplanes with Apollo; look back to 'Secret Origins 1'.)

Yet you'd never get that on your own. You sense it's all there, in the same way something in your ear can discern that a foreign language has more structure than mere chatter. But foreign the language remains. Better to let those recurrent phrases linger with their irreducible mystery - “the breathless investigator”, “poetry in flames,” “the shorthand typist in the wilderness.”

Seemingly paradoxically, that non-approach might even take us closer to the heart of it. Keen was insistent his films should be paced too fast to follow. Having served in the war, he constantly used war motifs, such as rounds of staccato machine-gun-fire as soundtracks. Yet though seeing war might have informed his worldview, his 'artwar' wasn't a commentary on war or of media presentations of it. It was more based around the way we now live in a state of information war, and have learnt to exist among sense bombardments like soldiers in trenches. His art was both response and contributor to that ongoing war.

But mostly, in another reprised theme for this blog, the exhibition shows the sheer inadequacy of the term outsider art. The exhibition comments how Keen “distanced himself from existing movements in the London arts scene and the wider world of avant-garde cinema.” True, he was never an outsider artist in the formal sense, and even attended Art College! Yet his work has so many elements from what we assign to that category, such as the private mythology or tendency to work with the 'wrong' materials such as cardboard over canvas. The show describes him as “emphasising his role as a lone hero-warrior,” taking the two-fisted comics protagonists as avatars, self against surroundings.

It seems strange if not downright disrespectful to suggest someone's death might contain an upside, but at the same time it's retrospectives which tend to put the art world in gear. Keen's already had a film-showing at the Tate's Tanks, and there are rumours that this exhibition might go on to tour. Let's hope all this is a springboard to him becoming better-known. Shoot the wrx!

JEFF KEEN vs. ROY LICHENSTEIN (aka WHEN IS APPROPRIATION APPROPRIATE?)

“The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.”

- Lionel Trilling

”Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.”

- Guy Debord

Sometimes these things have a way of working out.

Back in June, after Brighton-local maverick artist and DIY film-maker Jeff Keen died, I posted a short, somewhat-hastily-written obit in which I commented his work was “not pop art in the Lichtenstein sense of isolating images from pop culture and making them contemplative... there's an engagement with pop culture, even if sometimes a critical one.”

Then what should happen but Keen receive a retrospective at Brighton Museum at almost exactly the same time as the Tate devote a show to Lichtenstein!

Lichtenstein's appropriation of panels from American comics into his paintings has traditionally had us fans in uproar – and this has been no exception. At a specially convened panel at the most recent Comiket critic Richard Reynolds and artist/designer Rian Hughes took him to task, while David Gibbons has produced a parody of one of his more famous works (both below). Comica's Paul Gravett has provided this handy summary.

In general I feel that comics folks correctly smell something off about Lichtenstein - but are not always great at converting their gut feelings into words. Keen provides a useful comparison for, while his work also made frequent use of comics panels and motifs, I don't think it would produce as hostile a reaction.

In some literalist sense, both Keen and Lichtenstein are plagiarising the work of others. Of course it's true that comic artists took from each other all the time. Yet we're no longer talking about jobbing artists swiping the easier to hit deadlines, the equivalent of borrowing a fiver until pay day. Lichtenstein (if less so Keen) gained cash and acclaim for his copycatism.

To which I'd counter with Led Zeppelin, who infamously stole numerous old blues numbers which they reaccredited to themselves. While it was common practise in blues for practitioners to pinch licks and filch lyrics from one another, it's clearly another for a million-selling white rock band to turn up and claim to have written those songs.

Yet this is an ancillary critique - of the band's business practise alone. It doesn't prevent blues fans such as me likingwhat their music actually did when it took up those blues tunes. We just wish the credits on the cover read differently. Meanwhile, I have not the slightest intention of seeing the Lichtenstein show in London. Not while there's something so much better on here in Brighton.

To see Keen in the same light as Led Zeppelin, let's try taking Pop art at it's word. Meadows and haywains aren't really part of our daily life like they once were, so art has to respond to what's replaced them. Pretty much every day, I must walk into a newsagents. So pretty much every day I'm confronted with a cluster of magazines, each using dynamic layouts, gaudy colours and shouty fonts to try and win my attention. Its an ever-escalating arms race.

Lichtenstein abstracts one panel from that melee, and blows it up on the gallery wall (above). He puts it somewhere safe where it can be contemplated. (See this comparison site for how he systematically drained the dynamism and expression from the images he took, the very things which you think might draw someone to comics.)

While with Keen, let's look to the covers he produced for his “secret comic”'Rayday', for a kind of shorthand summary to the direction of his work. No. 2 (below) is dynamic enough, peppered with starbursts and sound effects. Yet look ahead to No. 4 (below below) for the gutters between text and image to be well and truly burst, a riot of overlaid images. Keen's work is about looking at that vibrant, cacophonous display and saying “let's make it louder, let's make it faster.” He's not cool but fevered, his foot's on the accelerator not the brake.

There's an old Wodehouse story where Bertie Wooster sings a blues song in his strangulated English, correcting the grammar as he goes. And we've all heard clueless clods singing the blues that blues-less way. Similarly, Lichtenstein drains all that is blue from blues while Keen gets in the spirit of it. Lichtenstein is appropriating. Keen, even as he borrows, is contributing.

More on that Jeff Keen show here...

IT'S WORKER'S DAY!

"The present state of civilisation is as odious as it is unjust. It is the reverse of what it ought to be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together."

- Tom Paine

(Photo - 24 hr strike in Greece)

More info on May Day stuff round the world here

The history of International Worker's Day (clue: no connection to tank parades or the Soviet Empire) here

CONTEMPORARY ART – IS IT ALL JUST A GREAT BIG STEAMING PILE OF CRAP?

A detour round Tate Britain, taking in Jess Flood-Paddock and Jake Chapman, the better to ask the questions which everybody else does

Now, despite what that Daily Mail style header might suggest, I am not some traditionalist type who would suppress everything that happened after Landseer and who regards those Impressionists as dangerously modern and quite possibly foreign.

But as I was watching the recent repeats of Robert Hughes' 'Shock of the New' series, I noticed he seemed as keen to find end-points for Modernist movements as beginnings. Indeed, sometimes it feels like Modernism inhabited a bit of a bubble. From Impressionism to Fluxus... the 1870s to the 1960s... it rode a wave of technological and social change. Radical and innovative art seemed not a fringe, not even a response to but a component of a wider trend.

Once that era was over, what were we left with but a series of spent gestures now divorced from their meaning? Arriving after Modernism's last supper, we were inevitably left with nothing but the dirty dishes. Art became beached in Post-modern purposelessness.

Take for example Jess Flood-Paddock's 'Mindless, Mindless', (up top) in which a bunch of over-sized bicycle seats are artfully arranged on a section of Tate Britain floor. This, we are given to believe, is a comment on the recent riots. Bicycle seats often get nicked, something which Flood-Paddock has used to  (and I quote) “explore the exchange value of objects and, more specifically, their emotional value” in a work which is “concerned with the rhetoric of over simplification and misrepresentation.”

It is of course a great big steaming pile of crap.

Even if I were convinced that bicycle seats were an insightful emblem of the riots (which I'm not), there's no way you'd make that connection simply by looking at them. Works like this seem to think they're being conceptual when they're actually being ineffective. The work isn't a package for the idea so much as an oblique general pointer towards it, like getting street directions from a shaky drunk. You need to read the sign just to know what you're supposed to be pontificating about.

With Lis Rhodes' recent 'Light Music' (as covered here), you had to experience the work to get it. Here it's all happening backwards. You feel the artist wrote a proposal promising a cutting-edge challenging piece about a hot social issue. She knew her audience and what they'd go for.

But that audience isn't even the audience, it's not you or me. Of course the whole caboodle is aimed at the ones with the real purchasing power - the curators. You can so easily imagine them getting all excited...the urban riots! ...the ones that happened a few short miles from this gallery! ...how now, darling! ...how edgy! The work itself and it's relation to us punters is secondary at best. The sales pitch was successful, the commission was won. On to the next one. This isn't art as social comment. It's art as blag.

I emerged from the room speculating that if there's more riots, and if they break in the gallery and make off with those stupid oversize seats... that would be an artistic statement worth making.

When you see such sheer unadulterated crap it would be easy to go on to dismiss all contemporary art, to claim everything that came after Modernism was mere post-modern claptrap, a sea of signs signifying nothing. But that would be as easy as it would be blind. For it to be true, you'd have to buy into that most post of all Post-modernism's doctrines – that history ended, and all we can do now is repeat and revive. (Clue – if absolutely everybody in the world is standing still, history has ended. If you see anybody still moving about, it's most likely still going on.)

With hindsight, it might seem like Modernism had it easy. But I doubt it felt like that at the time. And just as each Modernist movement broke with the past, rained on yesterday's parade and devised new ways to engage with the contemporary, so should we.

And sometimes, every now and again, people even do. Take for example Jake Chapman's 'Chapman Family Collection' (2002, above). Stumbling across this room elsewhere in Tate Britain, I was pleased to see a display of some splendid-looking African fetishes. True, I was also a little confused as to what they were doing there, and wondering if I'd passed through some secret passage to the British Museum.

You can look at them for some time before you notice. One is clutching what is surely a carved bag of fries. Another has a familiar-looking curvy 'M' inscribed on his shield. The clownish face on that one there, haven't you seen it before? Then it's all around you. A few may be decoys, but most make reference to McDonalds at some point or another.

The cool thing, in direct inversion to all that in-the-know Flood-Paddock crap, is that you have to notice this for yourself. The title and indicia keep up the fiction this is some genuine African collection. In fact, as I was later to discover, when this was first shown at the White Cube gallery, a deadpan press release enthused over these recent ethnographic finds from Camgib, Seirf and Ekoc. (Try them backwards.)

In a way, this is post-modern. The African art, that seemed so authentic to Picasso and his Modernist brethren, is now often expressly made with the collector market in mind. Woodcarvers labour in sweatshops, trying to guess what the Western eye would most want to see. Meanwhile, our fetishes have become the toys and figures we collect with our burgers, or the action figures which have replaced books on bookshelves.

But rather than suggesting that if us gallery-goers get it we must be smart, so are surely above all that, Chapman cunningly implicates us in the process. We enthuse over the figures first, then notice the trick. We're not flattered but ribbed, perhaps even challenged. It's art for our era that still questions our era. To borrow a description I heard somewhere it “explores the exchange value of objects and, more specifically, their emotional value” in a work which is “concerned with the rhetoric of over simplification and misrepresentation.”

The answer, then, to our initial question is – most of the time, yes. That's why I keep turning up to Modernist exhibitions like a man out of time. But not always. Sometimes, even today, art can still have some bite to it.

PERE UBU/ SWANS/ BO NINGEN/ COLOUR OUT OF SPACE/ MY BLOODY VALENTINE (...YEP, MORE OF THAT GIG-GOING)

PERE UBU

The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 13th April

Even more than Julian Cope, Pere Ubu are the walking, talking definition of a cult act. David Thomas, front man, arch-contrarian and only surviving original member, has described them as “the longest-lasting, most disastrous commercial outfit to ever appear in rock 'n' roll. No one can come close to matching our loss to longevity ratio.”

Named after a notorious proto-surrealist play, they function as a kind of missing link between the bohemian art-rock side of American punk (think Patti Smith or Television) and the Dadadistic, playfully destructive anti-music of British post-punk (think Josef K or Scritti Politti). They even embodied this link by moving from their native Cleveland to London, the better to hook up with Rough Trade records. Thomas now resides as one of the fair citizens of Hove, and was last seen on these shores providing a woozy film noir soundtrack to 'Carnival of Souls'.

Their sound is described by their promoter as “a disorienting mix of midwestern groove rock, 'found' sound, analog synthesizers, falling-apart song structures and careening vocals.” Their one constant is that listed last. Thomas' cartoony, whinneying vocals are perhaps the band's signature sound, simultaneously zany and macabre. Their first album, 'Modern Dance', surely remains one of the finest and most original albums released.

Though they don't place much reliance on back catalogue, and though they cover a fair amount of musical ground, that's pretty much their sound tonight. The keyboards are matched by a theramin player, who at one point brings out a toy plastic ray gun. A clarinettist turns up unexpectedly, adding what are quite often exquisite melodies.

The very first thing Thomas tells us is that we have in fact been dreaming these past years, with only the band to represent the real world. Which is kind of fitting. They are to rock music like that dream where you go back to your old school, and it all seems so familiar and yet not. They're simultaneously a parody of how rock music should sound and an escape route from it. They do the wrong things so wrongly that everything becomes right again.

Thomas is sharp-witted but prickly, and something during the encore flips his mood. He stops one song early, announcing he doesn't feel like playing it, then abandons singing the next one mid-way. Mumbling a taciturn goodbye, he stalks off. An awkward end to what was otherwise a great set.

Not from Brighton, but from New York slightly later...

SWANS

Concorde 2, Brighton, Tues 2nd April

“They are always different, they are always the same.”

As any music obsessive knows, John Peel said that about the mighty Fall. But he could easily have meant Swans. They always hold true to their path, while never ever standing still.

Last time I saw them, about two-and-a-half years ago, they were on the back of their first reunion album 'My Father Will Guide Me On a Rope to the Sky.' Their style was more ceremonial, with occasional outbreaks of... yes, really... actual songs, more reminiscent of main man Michael Gira's solo incarnation as Angels of Light. Exhilarated by the experience, I likened it to being clubbed to death inside a cathedral.

This time, accompanying new release 'The Seer' they seem to have decided all that was a little lightweight. It's much more a return to the unrelenting sonic brutalism of their early years. Pounding in it's onslaught, deafeningly loud, it's music as a means to whack punters in the solar plexus without that time-consuming business of first having to walk up to them. Last time I even speculated that years of musically exorcising demons had left Gira 'happier now.' This time he was much like when I first saw Swans back in the Eighties. I was seriously considering the possibility that he was having some kind of psychotic episode on stage, which everyone else was mistaking for a show.

However there's none of the patented descending chords of times past, guaranteed to leave you feel like you were being buried alive by riffs. Instead things shift between pounding metronomic beats, with the bassist at one point literally thumping the strings with his fist, and lengthy drone-outs – pitched somewhere between ethereal and edgy.

Swans had their roots in New York's No Wave scene, which as Simon Reynolds commented employed standard rock instruments but in the most non-standard way. This is never truer than with the steel guitar, which sounds alternately like a theramin, an oscillator and an instrument of torture... in fact, pretty much anything except for a steel guitar. The second drummer/ percussionist is the one who actually smuggles in the undercurrents of melody, bringing in tubular bells or even trumpets which merge with the resonances from the guitars.

Yet No Wave was a musical short, sharp shock. Only two bands really came out of it of any longevity. Sonic Youth burst head-first from the top. Even during their most wig-out free-noise outbursts there was always the sense that these were aesthetes assaulting their fretboards; noise, yes, but noise as a contribution to an ongoing history of noise. Swans, conversely were born in the breach – kicking and screaming their way out of the bottom of the scene. And yet, in interviews, Gira is often as erudite and articulate as any Sonic Youther. All of which is there in the music if you know where to look.

The band are especially adept at cornering, one section of music segueing quite seamlessly into the next. Which gives them the power of duration; tracks feel compellingly metronomic, building the intensity up to fever pitch, while never actually getting repetitive enough to sacrifice your interest. Their other great weapon is a stalking tempo, a seething unhurriedness that makes the music less the temper tantrum of teen angst and more a journey to the dark side. It's like that horror movie trope when you hear the clack of the stalker's shoes, walking yet inexorably gaining on his running victim. They played for well over two hours, tracks getting time to stew, handing misery on to man by deepening like a coastal shelf.

Swans gigs are perhaps not for the faint of heart. But the valiant will find themselves richly rewarded. Really, the time I pass up a chance to see this band in action – check me for a pulse. Swans and Pere Ubu within one week...now that's shaking sixes!

BO NINGEN

The Haunt, Brighton, Thurs 28th March

Mention psychedelic music and people tend to think of blissed-out pastoralism, the soundtrack for long-haired sons of stockbrokers to recline in meadows. You know, the stuff punk swept away.

Which may not be entirely fair. Firstly, while it mostly struggles to become anything more than aural joss sticks, there can be good pastoral psychedelic as well as bad. I bow to no arbiter of taste in my appreciation of Caravan.

But more to the point, what about the other stuff? The brown acid stuff, the psychedelia that led to long-haired sons of stockbrokers losing their minds and being unable to take up the family business. Bo Ningen, for example, are a young band who trade in what's quite definitely psychedelic rock. Think Jimi Hendrix multiplied by Sonic Youth.

I thought that might make a recipe for a good live band...

...and I was proved right.

It's remarkable how much they look like they must have beamed in from 1972, though the most robust teleporter might strain to shift all that hair. All Japanese by birth and Londoners by origin, they kick off by announcing they're back from a tour of Japan. Is that meta, or just confusing?

The singer... who in police parlance I now know to be called Taipan, has a habit of throwing shapes with his hands, something which might seem familiar to any reader of 'Dr. Strange' comics. Which actually seems quite a good metaphor for the music. While the rest of the band throw up a wall of sound, the second guitarist plays not rhythms but creates musical shapes. The sonic equivalent of when perspective lines come out at you.

My one complaint would be the brevity of it all. Okay, they're more rocky than spacey, than someone like Acid Mothers Temple, their tracks bounce rather than glide along so there's not the same need for duration. And proceedings finished, as these things should, with a crazy wig-out. But it all still came in at under an hour. With two albums under their belt, they can't be that short of material.

More! But next time, more of the more.

From their previous visit to Brighton (missed by me), at the Green Door Store...

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE WARM-UP

West Hill Hall, Brighton, Sat 6th April

Another warm-up for the celebrated experimental and improvised music festival, currently pencilled in for a return in November. (hurrah!) This time the emphasis was on sound poets and vocal improvisers promising “accidental objects” and “surprise correlations.”

The headline was a kind of supergroup from that world, featuring Jaap Blonk, Phil Minton, Luke Poot and scene organiser Dylan Nyoukis. People often seem to assume this type of music is extremely challenging and in deadly earnest, met only by respectfully baffled audiences and EU Arts grants. And yet there's so much humour, something particularly evident with the sound poetry. Blonk (above) has spoken of his “penchent for activities in a Dada vein,” after “several unsuccessful jobs in offices and other well-run systems.”

Though I enjoyed the main act, perhaps this isn't the scene for supergroups and I leaned more to the main support Dogeeseseegod, with their gutteral wails, deranged cries and use of found objects – if 'Blue Peter' had formed a band, and they'd all been psychiatric patients. I was laughing out loud almost the whole way through. (but not quite as much as when I just clicked on their MySpace link and saw the advert for “other similar acts including Nickleback.”)

There were several more acts, but I had an overdue appointment with my sofa and some sleep. Maybe next time.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE

Hammersmith Apollo, London, Mon 12th March

I've left it too late to write something properly about this gig, to be honest. Of course the band are legendary, and of course it's fantastic that I got a chance to see them again. Whenever I finally get round to my Top 50 albums series of posts, I'm giving nothing away by saying 'Loveless' will take it's place among them. The image of their now-ritualised free-noise set closer, with the majority of the seated ranks with their hands over their ears while still nodding along, will stay with me a long time.

...but I wasn't sure about the sound. Okay, a typical track is like a duet between a pop song and a passanger jet taking off – hardly the easiest set of sounds to mix. Even so, all too often the melodic elements were so far back I realised I was hearing them more through memory than the PA. There was a keyboard player on stage who I'm not sure I heard at all.

One of the comments from this web-link says “they've been having problems with mixing”, so perhaps I shouldn't blame the venue. Anyone seen them anywhere else, who can comment?

IT'S DING DONG DAY! (HURRAH!)

What I said about this recently, I stand by every word of it. Most likely, we'd have still had some form of Thatcherism without Thatcher, we just wouldn't have called it Thatcherism. But that doesn't mean that, for those of us who lived through the Eighties, today isn't something to celebrate.

Whether someone else would have done it is in many ways akin to arguing “if I didn't sell heroin to schoolkids, someone else would.” Or arms to dictators... no, wait, that was her son. Thatcher should still be held responsible for her appalling actions. Under the guise of extending “individual freedom”, her policies exacerbated the class divide to the point where the wealth gap is wider than ever and social mobility is virtually a thing of the past. Once it was the case on Albion's shore that you could fall ill, get old or lose your job without having to worry about the consequences too much. No longer.

She talked about “rolling back the frontiers of the state”, but these were oddly mapped frontiers where an NHS hospital was an example of state control while a group of riot cops attacking a picket line was not. Her 'deregulation' of finance-capital, continued by her mimicking successors, led to the worst recession in post-war history - the one we're now living through. And while the emphasis should be on her political legacy, if we're being pulled into describing her as a person she was a loathsome, racist, homophobic, self-righteous bully.

But more to the point, I'm joining in precisely because so many people have told me not to. All the wrong people have said it's the wrong thing to do – making it the right thing to do by definition. Simples, really.

Over at Mike Taylor's place, in the comments section someone called Jdege insists “her opponents didn’t have rational arguments.” Of course this individual is either trolling or being imbecilic. (It scarcely matters which). But such comments act as an outlier for right-wing opinion, in the same way the Daily Mail's insistence Thatcher's state-funeral-in-all-but-name is part of a leftist plot because it's not an actual state funeral (apart from all the ways in which it is).

It's a bit like the war on Iraq. Before the war, I was told numerous times there was no point going on about this now, as war hadn't even begun. As soon as it started, the same people told me now was not the time to criticise, not now we were at war.

It's a bit like strikes. The right won't come out and say they're flat-out against them. Instead they always insist “now is not the time for strikes”, staying strangely quiet on the subject of when that mysterious time might actually arrive.

When they say “this is not the time” the invisible corollary is “and it never will be. At least not if we get our way.”

As Professor Nicholas Till argued in a recent letter to the Guardian, this is “evidence, if evidence were needed, that the neoliberal capitalist ideology that she forced upon Britain has now been accepted as the official ideology of the British state. The message it sends so clearly is that neoliberal capitalism transcends politics: it is the natural and 'correct' state of affairs.”

A similar trick was pulled in America after Reagan popped it. Though even more than Reagan, Thatcher proved to be a divisive figure even within her own party. After she'd been ousted, for the first time in her life she provided a useful service by constantly criticising the current leadership. (As the old saying goes, “with enemies like this, who needs friends?”)

Cameron's initial tactic was to draw a line under Thatcher and portray himself more as a successor to Blair. (His 'social inclusion' stance dubbed 'hug a hoodie' by cynics. Or by anybody else, for that matter.) All of which makes it even more vital for them to try and perform this sancification. All that unfortunate truth business must be buried under the notion that she's a symbol of national unity.

I was against her policies then and I'm against them now. To those who claim we're crowing over the death of an old woman, I say wait until the next old woman dies of a stroke and see if we react the same way. To those who accuse us of “bad taste,” Thatcher denied welfare payments for strking miners' funerals. That's not exactly in the best possible taste.

How do I feel about the death of Margaret Thatcher? I feel this...

Inevitably, Blair was one of those most loudly insisting no-one should dare criticise her. Is it too early to start picking our song for him? Is there anywhere in 'Wizard of Oz' where they burst into something like 'Shut Up, You Sanctimonious Lying Little Shit'?

THATCHER THE UN-GREAT (PARTY BY ALL MEANS, BUT DON'T START TAKING HER ON HER OWN TERMS...)

”The books are filled with the names of Kings...

Each page a victory


At whose expense the victory ball?


Every ten years a great man

Who paid the piper?”

- Brecht, 'A Worker Reads History'

“Never hate your enemies. It clouds your judgement.”

- Al Pacino in 'Godfather III'

It is of course ridiculous to say that we should focus on Margaret Thatcher’s “strong leadership,” as if that was automatically a good thing. Mike Taylor has already said all that, so I don’t have to.

It is of course ridiculous to organise what David Cameron called “all but” a State funeral, then complain that her critics are cruelly attempting to drag politics into a private event. Andrew Rilstone has already said all that, so I don’t have to.

And it is of course completely telling that they would spend what may turn out to be eight million quid on such an event, at precisely the point where they’re cutting the pay and benefits of the poorest people because they say they can’t afford it. And that the Daily Mail would then complain that it wasn’t ostentatious enough.

I suppose I could say that, but it seems pretty obvious and anyway I sort of have.

Let’s take another tack. What would Thatcher herself say if she could see all this happening? From up in her cloud/down in that pit (delete according to personal prejudices)?

I think she would be delighted. I think she fed on the wrath of her foes, like a car that’s fuelled by pollution. After all, she coined the term “the enemy within.” Our gloating over her going would have been music to her ears. Wrinkles in her blue-rinse would have been expressions like “Margaret who?”, “wasn’t she the one before John Major?” or “was there ever an easy way to tell her from Virginia Bottomley?”

Except of course that wouldn’t look great on a banner. And I wouldn’t deny that her dark shadow had an influence on the British political landscape. But, for example, someone suggested on the Trade Union board at my work that our history might have been different had Thatcher been converted to socialism instead of free market capitalism. And I wonder if our side aren't starting to inflate her image too...

When 'The Wicked Witch is Dead' was chosen as the theme song of the opposition, it wasn't intended as a serious political statement like the Communist Manifesto. It's clearly a cross between a gag and a provocation, and in that way is more like 'The Road To Serfdom'. But it's notable what happens in 'Wizard of Oz'; as soon as the wicked witch pops it, her former followers escape from her spell and all is immediately right again. 

It's comforting to think had Thatcher stayed a chemist none of the sewage we wade through now would have been unleashed. But it's wrong. Neoliberal economics did not begin in Britain or even America, but in mid-Seventies Chile when a leftist government was overthrown in a US-backed coup and the free market doctrines of Milton Friedman imposed.

Since then it's spread around the world, with organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund existing precisely to propagate it. The “private competition” that now riddles worm-like through our Post Office and NHS services is enabled not by the Tory right, but by the EU which they ostensibly loathe. Many of these changes have structural causes, the move from Fordist to post-Fordist production or changes in communication which enabled globalisation.

India underwent a massive transformation from a protectionist to a free-market, ‘globalised’ economy without them having a Thatcher figure to speak of. In America they talk of 'Reaganism' despite Reagan being more figurehead than politician. When we talk about the post-war consensus we don't talk about 'Atleeism' because Atlee wasn't iconic in that way. That didn't stop the post-war consensus happening or us continuing to talk about it.

Many years ago, Brecht cautioned us that history was “not made by great men” (qouted above). The Gang of Four went and wrote a song about it (embedded below). The surfer, standing high, may look like he’s in command of that wave. But really he’s just riding it.

There will of course always be “great” men and women trying to tell us it’s all down to them, and we should orient our lives around them.

It’s only true if we hold them up.

WHAT THEY SAID!