THE CRAVATS
The Albert, Brighton, Sat 11th
August
”Sometimes... when I'm going
backwards... I feel like I'm going forwards.”
I'd commented in an earlier post on the
motley assortment of folk that were The Men They Couldn't Hang,
but their line-up has nothing compared to the Cravats. We have... a
singer who looks like he should be securing the door, in fact
considerably more so than the chap who is actually securing the door.
(And who, holding to this role, frequently tells us to “calm down,
please.”) A guitarist who arrives attired as a World War Two flying
ace. (And somehow retains this attire, despite the extreme heat.) A
bassist who looks like a Guardian journalist, perhaps initially sent
to review proceedings but now drafted in. A sax player who looks....
er, a little strange. And to top it all a spiky-haired youth on
drums, the only person present who at all fits the punk stereotype,
and (as events transpire) knows everyone in the mosh pit personally.
I ask you, with everything so
gloriuously askew - what could possibly go wrong?
This recent reformation was my first
chance to catch the Cravats. (Though I did see the Very Things, their
more psychedelic offshoot, sometime in the Eighties.) They had done
the whole punk thing, self-releasing their first single in '78 after
a loan from the singer's mum, using John Peel airplays as lifeblood,
even managing a release on Crass records. And yet it was clear from
the outset their run was not of the normal mill.
When most punk songs were about hating
your parents, your teachers or (at more of a stretch) whoever the
Prime Minister happened to be, the Cravats pitched in with a single
titled 'I Hate the Universe.' Which was their
whole schtick, absurdist black humour given a backbeat, Dada antics
mixed with English tomfoolery. (Though the early band member whose
on-stage task was to watch TV does not, alas, part of the
reformation. Unless he's still rehearsing.) At the height of the Year
Zero rule, when the Sixties were struck out of musical history, they
took from it's more sinister side. 'Who's In Here With
Me?' and 'Ceasing To Be' are like younger cousins to 'I Am the Walrus' and 'See
My Friends', with the air of menace not so much thickened
as stewed.
The Shend's vocals are a mixture of
plummy yodels and screeches, like an after-dinner speaker gone
through the looking glass. (With perhaps a nod to the Karloff-styled
narration of 'Monster
Mash'.) Rick London's sax is used less as a rock'n'roll
instrument and more a sound generator, sometimes injecting nigh-on
white noise into the mix. (After the gig, a friend avidly shows me
how he possesses more effects pedals than the guitarist.) The band
seem simultaneously on the edge of turning to free-form noise, whilst
remaining as tight and powerful as any punk band could wish to be.
You can hear klezmer or cabaret in there, not paraded as a set of
look-at-me influences but thrown into the whirlygig of sound.
The systematic deragement of the senses
you can dance to. What's not to like?
'Rub Me Out' live
from London a couple of years ago...
...and 'In Your Eyes',
from the gig above. Lower sound quality, but then that's punk, innit?
PUBLIC IMAGE LTD.
Brighton Concorde, Thurs 16th August
John Lydon (aka Rotten) was not just
the poster boy of Brit-punk and arch-stirrer of media shit-storms, he
was also a key ingredient in one of the finest albums in the history
of everything.
Of course, anyone who knows their music
will know of what I do speak.'Never Mind the Bollocks'
is a pretty damn fine rock'n'roll album. But it was after
the Sex Pistols, when Public Image Ltd released 'Metal
Box', that punk became post-punk and the rules of the game
were well and truly changed. Okay, so perhaps both changed music. But
with so many no-hopers taking 'Bollocks' as their
starting gun, only 'Metal Box' did it for the
better.
Of course since then Lydon's
increasingly fallen back on his chief career of being a TV
personality. He hasn't really made a great album since 1986's
'Album', in fact he hasn't relased anything
at all since 1997. Instead his chief occupation has been appearing on
TV documentaries about punk in order to put everyone else down. (“Be
a punk. Join the army!”) Well, that and advertising butter. He was
always entertaining, and somehow you can't help liking the
self-aggrandising snotty taunter. But it seemed the more a
self-caricature he became, the more often he got hired.
...which is hardly surprising when you
come to think about it. Like Damo Suzuki, Lydon has a natural talent
but plays no instrument, so is more-than-usual reliant on talented
collaborators. Yet he's too egotistical to stick collaborators for
long. The better they are, the shorter thy last. Famously he had
ejected the bassist from the Pistols, overlooking the small matter of
him writing all the music. Then replaced him with Lydon's personal
sidekick overlooking the small matter of him not being able to play
the bass. That really set the tone for his subsequent career. The
classic line-up of Public Image lasted twice as long (ie they made
two albums instead of one), but that seems something of a record.
And on the rare days when he did
perform, changes in his voice seemed to work as a barometer. Just as
he swapped intense glares for gurneying, his sneering put-downs
became more elaborate and theatrical, trilling consonants and
stretching vowels, like an elocution teacher on bad drugs. Ironically
they're in some ways not dissimilar to the Shend's, but it did seem
to dampen the threat element and make them more of a self-caricature.
Nevertheless, though he brazenly
continued using the name Pil for what were essentially solo albums,
announcing he'd 'reform' the band was a signal for those with ears to
listen. He'd decided to cut back on the TV punditry for a bit and get
serious about music again. The Pistols reformation involved the full
original line-up, and I didn't even bother to listen when they played
live on the radio. Pil has precisely one original member, Lydon
himself, and I bought my ticket as soon as they went on sale.
And they were good.
They were really, really good.
Barring the new stuff, 'Metal
Box' is the most visited album. In fact early on they
launch into the most 'Metal Boxy' of all tracks -
'Albatross.' If it's a more rocky version than the
original, it's still a chip off the 'Metal Box'
block – in fact it sets the tone for proceedings. While the
earlier, punchier numbers lie unplayed, tracks are stretched past any
kind of shape or structure. They have the same relationship to songs
as instillation pieces do to pictures, they become places to hang out
in. 'Flowers of Romance' started life as a single.
With this version I started to wonder if the very conception of
linear time had been an illusion all along. (Alas they don't play my
two favourite tracks from 'Metal Box',
'Poptones' and 'Memories', but
it's scarceley a greatest hits set they're doing.)
As 'Metal Box' is
the album on which Lydon sings least affectedly, making it's recipe
post-dub trance-outs plus emotional intensity, his more recent style
of singing doesn't always work out. 'Death Disco'
in particular seemed to lack something. Yet had 'Religion'
been any more intense, it would most likely have
provoked a war.
I am probably doing the show a
disservice and giving vent to nostalgia by not saying more about the
new songs, which are strong and distinctive. The deranged
'Lollipop Opera', which I'd seen on the TV without
quite getting... well it would be wrong to say it made
sense but somehow it clicked with me. I
found myself wanting to hear the new album, which wasn't something I
was expecting. The new band work well together, with the guitar of Lu
Edmonds (who's played with the Mekons and 3 Mustaphas 3) particularly
notable. (Probably meaning Lydon will fire him first, so get in while
you can.)
“We do this because we love doing
it,” Lydon tells us before leaving the stage. “Remember that.”
And against all odds, the rentagob
persona, the guy who denounced all other punks as fakes while making
butter adverts, you find yourself believing him.
Punk was always at it's dullest when it
started chasing some spurious credibility, ranting in mockney about
being unemployed in a bus shelter or sniffing glue against the
system. (The Exploited managed to rant in mockney despite being from
Scotland, surely the ultimate in self-caricature.)
Punk was always at its best when it was
creative and arch, aiming to stay in rock'n'roll just enough to
explode and expose it's absurdities, but mostly heading out
of it - into the unexplored. That two bands could come along in a
row, both from the classic era of Brit-punk, who are interested in
neither the nostalgia circuit nor in holding to some illusory musical
fundamentalism... if that's not an encouraging sign, I can't imagine
what is.
I should probably link to either a
'Metal Box' or a new track for the customary
vidclip, but for no good reason at all instead here's
'Rise'...
In other news... find yourself missing
other founder members Keith Levine and Jah Wobble? Wondering, if
there can be two competing versions of Hawkwind, why can't there be for Pil?
In such a spirit, Levine and Wobble have formed Metal Box in Dub.
With the singer from a Pistols tribute band and Levine's Beatles
T-shirt, this is surely staged at least in part as a fuck-you to
Lydon. (Whose antipathy to the Beatles is legendary.) But the music
is... wait for it... genuinely great, and I might even have been
tempted to London to see them had I known of it.
There's actually odd similarities to
New Pil's take on the tracks, they're not so much re-entacted as used
as the basis for bendy, stretchy workouts, less trance-out than the
originals, more free-form. And, while Wobble's bass was a key
ingredient in the classic band of yore, both are notably
guitar-dominated. This is their 'No Birds Do Sing'...
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