HAWKWIND
The
Old Market, Brighton, Mon 29th Sept
Hawkwind,
I discovered recently, now have their own covers band. Which is pretty weird when you
think about it. Cover bands are of course a red rag to rock fans.
Fans like to listen to the original band with the original line-up,
ideally playing an original album in the correct track order. They
can become almost as obsessive as ornithologists; if they insist on
seeing a particular line-up with the original bass player, it's not
necessarily because they think it will sound better or even different
that way. It's just what they want to come and see, something to tick
from the checklist.
But
what if you've been in the same band, playing the same songs for
decade after decade? Don't you hit a point where you effectively
become your own covers band? And the whole business of staying true,
of keeping it like it was, doesn't that hasten the process?
Stalwartism can be an albatross.
And
past reputation, that risks weighting the albatross. As argued here only recently “you couldn't overstate the
importance of Hawkwind if you tried. They're a credible candidate for
the most important band in the history of everything, ever.” A
reputation based on the classic 'space trilogy' they produced early
in the Seventies, culminating in the legendary live album 'Space
Ritual'. But if they weren never quite the same sonic
visionaries again, they carried on releasing classic albums
throughout the decade. (This account by my blogroll buddy Murray Ewing is a pretty good guide.)
Except
of course the Seventies are now a long time ago. Plus, as most
reading this will already know, the two founders irrevocably fell out
with Dave Brock booting Nik Turner from the band. (Twice over. The
history of Hawkwind can be confusing.) Picture if Paul McCartney had
continued the Beatles without John Lennon. Or, more accurately as
Turner was always the frontman, Brock would be Brian Wilson or Jerry
Dammers – a pivotal figure who was not necessarily terribly
visible.
Which
leads to the question - with all these changes and setbacks, combined
with the heightened expectations people have of Hawkwind, have they
been blown into becoming their own covers band? And their actual covers band are actually redundant? Let's take some
pointers...
The
merch stall notably only sells T-shirts. Okay, maybe there was a bag
you could buy, but none of the actual music. And there must be more
same-band T-shirts being sported here than at any gig I've ever been
to. Hawkfans are clearly the Deadheads of the UK. It made the whole
thing feel almost like some kind of rally.
Yet
a fair percentage of the audience are young folk, and they seem to
know as many of the songs as me. (Which left me wondering, when I
first saw the band early in the Eighties, were any of the old timers
there heartened to see the fresh faces of me and my schoolmates?
Thinking about it – probably not.)
It
is an oldies set-list. Yet quite an eclectic one,
which ignores their token hit single. Their unreproducable early
years quite sensibly go unreproduced, with most emphasis on the
riff-based tracks of the mid to late Seventies. 'Steppenwolf'
and 'Reefer Madness' are the order of the day.
Notably, the politics and drugs references of the Sixties underground
remain intact. If anything there's a disproportionately high number
of political songs, including 'Uncle Sams On Mars'
(in a different, more abrasive version) and a new track accompanied
by an Occupy photo-montage.
The
lengthy instrumental breaks were retained, but rather than wig-out
sessions were more like regular solos. The keyboard section of
'Orgone Accumulator' in particular felt like it
had dropped in from somewhere else, merely interrupting the track. At
other times it felt like the music was being made a sonic backdrop
while the filmshow or the dancers did something. The theatre-show
notion that only one thing can happen at once, that couldn't be more
counter to the crazy fugue states of the early days.
The
band are extremely tight and proficient, and Mr Dibs makes for a
decent enough frontman. But they're polished, they're in control. The
classic space rock band has carved out some turf for itself down here
on Earth. They're not their own covers band. The Hawk is still a hawk
not an albatross, but does much less of the actual hunting. It's like
an underground form of showbiz.
Nothing
is more likely to tug at my sense of nostalgia more than this band.
Those basslines are my Proustian cake. But in the great schism of the
Church of Hawkwind, I guess I'm more a dissenter and a Turnerite than
a devout Brockian. (His post-Hawkwind outfit Inner City Unit reviewed here. Which makes you like the Protestant heretics breaking
from Catholicism, there's less of the flamboyance and the
ostentation, and the congregation is normally smaller. But perhaps
its stayed more attached to the roots of the thing, the Church of
Hawkwind versus the Gospel.
'Motorway
City' may not be most people's first thought for a Hawkwind
classic. But for me it dates from the time I was first getting into
the band, and represented everything about why they mattered to me –
euphoria and escape given a science fictiony spin. Steppenwolf (the
band, that is) gave you the image of the biker sailing on the open
road, but Hawkwind upped the ante with a whole city on the move. (Was
it written about the then-still-intact Peace Convoy? I don't suppose we'll ever know.) Plus it was one
of the live numbers where an instrumental break actually was
an instrumental break.
GOAT
Concorde
2, Brighton, Wed 1st Oct
Goat
hail from Korpilombolo, a small town so far to the north of Sweden
that it was never truly Christianised and pagan traditions still
thrive. The music they play is simply the folk music of this town,
and its something they've done since childhood. It's a blend of
psychedelic funk and afrobeat, the latter influence stemming from a
Voodoo witch doctor who one day decided to decamp there. They now
live together in a commune from where they await “the return of the
horned one”.
On
the other hand, they might not do. There doesn't seem to be any
history of the band before they were gigging in Gothenburg and a reliable source of gossip states they don't even spell the town's name right on their
website. But the point of the story is more likely that
it's a good story. Its one of those stories which
should be true, to the point where the fact that
it isn't becomes almost trivial.
Of
course some might want to argue that, much like their origin story,
with their wacky masks and crazy costumes there's something of a
simulation to it all. And of course as the record shows we at Lucid Frenzy take a dim view of
simulation. Like New Wave was to punk, have they taken volatile
unpredictable freeform psychedelic music and bottled it, make it neat
and tight, made it marketable? While they frequently go into lengthy
instrumental breaks they notably keep to the beat. There's nothing
that teeters on the edge.
But
if there's no actual derangement to their music,
there's no shortage of abandon. With many bands
you can tell when they're coming to the climax of the main set, when
they start pulling out enough stops to make sure they get clapped
back on. With Goat the gig's pretty much at that fever pitch the
whole way through. They're quite unrelentingly up.
Besides,
lacing afrobeat with psychedelia actually makes for a pretty good
cocktail drug. Psychedlia could get ungrounded quite quickly, and
only some of its practitioners were able to fly through space in the
way that lack of grounding required. Even something like Pink Floyd's
'Interstellar Overdrive' needed a heavy riff to
moor it at either end of the track, more barrage baloon than rokcet.
Here the afrobeat provides that grounding, stops things floating off
into noodliness or indulgence. It's sky meets earth, head aligned
with feet. And the afrobeat has enough space within it to stay
insistently punchy without ever becoming merely repetitive. (Within
tracks. There's perhaps not a massive scope to the sound between
tracks.) In the Guardian, Paul Lester described their music as “Parliament
covering Can's 'Tago Mago' with Bhundu Boys and
the Incredible String Band, or a super-jam involving Faust,
Funkadelic, Fairport Convention and Fela Kuti.” Which sounds like a
magic potion of some sort.
And
another besides, the truly out-there psychedelia was non-mainstream
music which worked best in a non-mainstream setting. And the squat
centres and free festivals it used to happen in, they've all been
supressed in recent years. It simply won't work as well in a venue
that clamps shut at 10.30pm so they can fit a club night in. Goat's
more concentrated, more directed music fits better inside those
confines. While notably their audience is the Hawkwind audience with
the proportions inverted – a young and boisterous crowd with a fair
smattering of us old 'uns.
The
neologism I'd coin for it is 'bironic'. In one sense it feels a
knowing parody of this sort of music, blowing up the absurdity with
over-the-top fancy dress. And yet at the same time it's so compelling
that you cannot help but be swept up in it. It's self-mocking
and it's genuine. It's to psychedelia what the Fucked Up gig was to hardcore. And, where we're at right
now, perhaps it's bironic men and women we need to come and rescue
us. There's no point trying to imagine ourselves back in the Sixties,
where people blithely fancied The Man would never be able to take
their music. But if we're all just going to smile knowingly like a
bunch of hipsters there's no point in our showing up. We could just
as easily feel self-satisfied at home. The absurdity becomes the
spoon of sugar that helps the medicine go down. And the medicine can
still work. (According to the Urban Dictionary, bironic actually means “ironically
bisexual” or some such. Whatever, mate...)
Because
at the end of the day Goat seem to have the same bit between their
teeth that pyschedelic music always had. Which is the same as the
instinct that makes a child melt down all his plastic toy soldiers -
it's to melt everything back into one again. The masks and costumes
aren't just an image gimmick, but the age-old carnivalesque trigger
to the loss of self. The singers wave branches across the audience
like magic sticks, and indeed once you've been annointed it feels
impossible to stay outside of things. The perfect Goat gig would be
where we all show up in masks.
And
in fact after the gig I stumbled across this quote from band spokesman Mr Goatman: “When you make
music in a collective, the individual is unimportant. The music I
partake in making has little to do with me as a person; there’s
something else at play.... For us, it’s unimportant who we are.”
Quite so, Mr Goatman.
Goat
probably don't come from a small town in northern Sweden where old
pagan rites are still practised. But after seeing them live you could
imagine they did. Which is probably the part that counts.
Not
from Brighton. Not from anywhere near Brighton. Hey, would you rather
have something local or decent footage..?
BRAKHAGE'S
'DOG STAR MAN' WITH LIVE SCORE BY REDS
Fabrica,
Brighton, Mon 22nd Sept
The
work of American experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage is something I
have always enjoyed whenever I've come across them. (Even though I am
not exactly what you'd call a subject expert.) True, he's very much
yesterday's avant-garde. But I suspect at least some of the appeal
may stem from that. Starting in (yes, really) the early Fifties he
used the most lo-fi technology, even of the day. Partly due to
working practices including marking or multi-exposing the film frame
itself, you pretty much have to see his work on old-style film reel
projections. (At the Barbican's 'Watch Me Move'
exhibition a few years ago, his was the only work to be shown this
babbage engined way!)
Though
coming after the classic Modernist era, Brakhage is in that way very
Modernist – rather than trying to naturalise film grammar in your
mind until you take it for granted, he ruthlessly homes in on
everything that's unique to the medium of film, and uses that as his
native language. He's less using film to talk than he is talking
film. But more than that, his non-narrative semi-abstract works are
almost like Pollock paintings – you're best off going to see them
on a big screen rather than catching them on an iPhone while you
queue for a cheeseburger.
His
linked series of 'Dog Star Man' films, made
between '61 and '64 and described herein as “a hypnotic visual
feast”, is given a live score by local impro collective Reds.
(Themselves described as “an amorphous psychedelic beast”.) Wind
instruments blow up squalls while violins pluck and keyboards throw
up tones. Perhaps the nearest to a conventional sound comes from the
guitar, whose reverby lines live up to that psyschedelic tag with
echoes of Robby Krieger. (At points even the Dead Kennedys' East Bay
Ray came to mind!) The guitar can be like the skeleton of the sound,
around which the other players mass. The programme tells us they're
recently formed but there doesn't seem to be any casting about for
themes – spirited yet accomplished, they strike up straight away.
While at the same time the daunting-sounding seventy-plus minute
duration of the films seems to allow them to grow bolder and wilder.
Unlike
other films he made, it seems Brakhage wanted 'Dog Star
Man' to be silent. Yet the programme tells us his widow
okayed this performance. Personally, I side with the YouTube poster who states “this needs some crazy weird music”. After all, why stimulate just one sense?
And
you know the magic is realy working when the synaesthesia takes hold.
It comes in stages. Brakhage's rapid-cut and overlaid images are
sometimes from abstract and sometimes from natural sources. They also
vary massively in scale, from a solar corona (the High Altitude
Observatory of Boulder, Colorado are thanked) to close-ups of the
human face and body. (The title might be a portmanteau between the
dog star and the recurring shots of a man with his dog.) Other images
might well have been microscopic. But you stop making the
distinctions after a while. Like the overlaid images, everything
starts to multi-expose on your mind.
Similarly,
having the musicans play in semi-darkness around the screen stops you
differentiating between them too much. You can't observe
whether the violinist or keyboardist made that particular sound (and
round here its not always obvious), so you just take in how those
sounds combine. In your mind, they move as one.
But
after a while, when the magic is really working,
you stop even diferrentiating between sound and vision. The
soundtrack might well be subsequent to the film, but the two start to
coalesce and you simply see what you hear, and vice versa. It all
becomes one experience.
Chiefly,
the word from that description of Reds that rang with me wasn't even
“psychedelic” but “amorphous”. The experience is incohate
without being formless, a state of flux which never settles – like
swirling dots which may or may not be joined together. It's the
suggestion of form, without ever spelling anything
out, that sets your mind racing.
Getting
hopelessly carried away, as is my wont, and riffing on the cosmic
imagery I started to imagine the period just after the Big Bang,
where nothing was yet locked down, before things had to become
thing-like, when the universe was effectively a stem cell and
everything still had the potential to become anything.
Which
may be the basis of those repeating scenes of the man (actually
Brakhage himself) and dog struggling to climb a snowy mountain. (An
unusually recognisable image for Brakhage.) Significantly, in a
typical violation of standard film grammar, we're never shown if he's
made it to the top or even get to glimpse the peak. Perhaps in some
ways the solar corona so frequently cut to stands for the peak,
something unattainable yet still to be reached for.
The
film not having a soundtrack becomes like Shakespeare not coming with
many stage directions or authoral notes, it just increases the
opportunities. But it doesn't work like the open ending to a novel,
where you're given some information and left free to speculate what's
left. You don't come away with your own reading. It's more like a
space you can hang out in, with no end to the free association.
A
better way to spend a Monday evening I simply cannot imagine.
Brakhage's
film in full...
Various
commenters come up with multiple suggestions of other pieces of music
to play in a parallel browser window. Perhaps the John Cage thing
would be to choose another YouTube page at total random, and try
that. Or you could if you so desired try the below, an entirely
separate performance from Reds (but sounding every bit as good as the
one I saw)...
Coming soon! Back to 'Quatermass'...