THE
RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP
Queen
Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London, Fri 16th April
I
loved the music of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop before I knew their
name, or even particularly conceived that music had to be made by
somebody in order to exist. There is, I would suspect, a whole subset
of my generation for whom that statement speaks, and which has led to
the boys coming out of retirement for gigs such as this.
Back
then, my limited knowledge of music led my young brain to divide it
into two distinct types. There was chart music, advert jingles and TV
themes, and I didn't differentiate much between them. (And still
don't, now I come to think of it.) Then there was the 'space music',
unearthly and scarce, primarily to be found on the few science
fiction shows of the few channels we had then. Of which, of course,
'Doctor Who' was spaciest of all.
But
I wasn't sure how all this would work in the modern world, or in a
live setting. It wasn't just that this was music made to go
with something. 'Workshop' was the right name for
the enterprise, boffins who lucked into a day job which let them make
and tinker with equipment, leaving them to their own devices provided
they fulfilled their production quotas. They did it, you could
imagine, just to see what was out there. An important feature was the
wide-ranging nature of their remit, where they were asked to provide
sound effects as often as anything resembling music. Their products
were more akin to music concrete, electro-acoustic sound collage and
tape manipulation, left-field stuff normally associated with formal
experimentation inexplicably grafted onto the popular media of radio
and television. (Another example, as if we needed one, of how
commerce is a dampener not a driver of innovation. Imagine something
like that getting past the sponsors and focus groups of today.)
And,
once in a concert hall, the workshop does indeed transform into
something of a band. Things revert to more conventional
instrumentation, incorporating a live drummer who tends to have a
standardising - even (if there is such a word) normalising effect.
They largely play themes recognisable to their audience, and they
play them in a recognisable form. All the strangeness, the
unpredictability was smoothed out. This was more musicians making
more music. I was reminded of something Mark Fisher wrote after JG Ballard's death, on the base
banality of most of his press obits:
“So
here they come again — all the familiar profiles, all the old
routines. All that over-rehearsed musing about the supposed contrast
between Ballard’s writing and his lifestyle and persona. All that
central London cognoscenti condescension: he lived in Shepperton, he
wore a tie and drank gin and yet he could come up with this —
imagine that. As if it isn’t obvious that English suburbs are
seething with surrealism. As if you could think for a minute that
'The Drowned World' or 'The Atrocity Exhibition' were written by
anyone wearing jeans.”
For
too often this gig felt like the pressed flares of the Workshop
crammed into straightleg jeans.
Granted,
most people are here to rekindle a few youthful memories. But
ironically our view of the Workshop is probably a limited one. The
workshop was created back in 1958, and was not particularly confined
to 'Doctor Who' or even science fiction. Expected
to be productive and earn their keep, they worked on many a
production we'd not automatically associate with them. (The gig opens
with a sound effect of Colonel Bloodnok's stomach from 'The
Goon Show'.) It's not that they did a few totemic things,
which the rest of the world has now caught up with. That's not even
close. There are reservoirs of strangeness here as yet not dived
into.
Alas,
the opposite seems to have happened. Originally they may well have
popularised some out-there music production techniques, inspiring the
Beatles, Pink Floyd and others. But their history was effective
rewritten in the Nineties, where they came to be seen as a prototype
of a kind of dance music – the quasi-mystic New Agey type. And what
they are doing now is confining their sound to conform to this
conforming stereotype. (The drummer, I later discover, is Kieron
Pepper who has played with the Prodigy.) Perhaps that's the fate of
everything in our modern soundbite culture. Stars that rise precisely
because they're something different can't be kept that way,
gravitational fields come to pull on them and their distinct shapes
reworked until they fit more easily into the neat constellations of
our minds. In the words of that other great BBC institution 'Blue
Peter', everything from the past just equates to something
we have now, its just one that was made earlier.
Perhaps
attending such an event is a little like watching one of those 'I
Love the Seventies' chat/clip shows and expecting insight
into what made the Seventies so unique. The actuality just gets in
the way of the flow of nostalgia. Perhaps we should just make do with
when the remaining strangeness still shone through. Generally their
reworking of incidental music worked better than their rehashing of
TV themes, less readily transformable into tracks. There were
highlights, such as 'Electricity, Language and Me'
where a spoken poem and music interbred, rather than one being set to
the other. And despite my qualms about the drumming, introducing a
second drummer seemed to tip things over into defamiliarity.
And
what might seem the most predictable, most crowdpleasing moment of
all – the 'Doctor Who' theme, inevitably saved
for the finale – worked surprisingly well. The Delia Derbyshire
version has a crystalline simplicity which belies its strangeness.
Its effectively unimprovable, to add anything to it merely takes
stuff away from it. (Check out, for example, the version currently
being used by the show.) Yet if they just perform the original it's
already familiar, and besides quite brief.
At
first perform the original is what they do, and fairly faithfully,
before launching into what's effective a live remix of their own
work, taking up elements and playing with them, before dropping back
to the original. And yet it's not the original
original they come back to, but the later theme of the Tom Baker era,
like the music itself had induced some kind of time travel. In short
it stayed faithful to the original, while finding a way to rework it
into a live number.
This
isn't, I don't think, precisely the remix I saw but follows a similar
trajectory. (I'd still prefer it without the drumming, mind.)
MARC
ALMOND
Brighton
Dome, Tues 21st April
After not being overly impressed by the Tyburn Tree despite his
contribution, I was keen to see Marc Almond performing in his own
right. He's a classic example of a singer
whose personality far outshines technical ability. He has a voice
which is simultaneously histrionic and heartfelt, campishly
theatrical and yet impassioned. When he sings, to quote Johnny
Rotten, he “means it, man”.
Despite
coming to everyone's attention via the synthpop era, which might seem
one of the more transient moments even in the ephemeral world of pop
music, even then it was already obvious he was part of a broader
tradition. As a child he’d listen to his parents’ Eartha Kitt records, while since those days he’s recorded an album of Jacques Brel
songs. The only other time I saw him, back in the late Eighties in
the cabaret environment of the old Zap club, he was perched on a
barstool as part of a duo. And tonight he appears on a behind-stage
video in crooner garb, while a lyric name-checks Sinatra.
Not
uncoincidentally he's described his new record, ‘The Velvet
Trail’, as “one journey, one record you put on from
beginning to end, linking tracks with musical interludes... I always
see my records as a show running from beginning to end that takes you
on a ride.” And he audaciously pushes the Eighties hits to crowd
singalongs at the end, the better to concentrate on that ride.
Which
would be all to the good... Except what little I'd heard of the new
album I'd found uninspired so had been secretly hoping for something
more oldies-centric. (Not necessarily synthpop, for there's a lot of
material between then and now I've never really caught up with.) As
it turns out, the album – and by extension the gig – isn’t weak
so much as maddeningly uneven. True, the title track does sound a
placeholder for grandiosity. But 'Minotaur', the
gig opener, is as mighty as its monicker might suggest.
I
suspect if I were to catch up properly with Almond’s oeuvre, I’d
most take to the Marc and the Mambas era. One of the great things
about the Eighties was the continual cross-traffic between the
popular and the left-field. And indeed, simultaneously to his
clocking up hits with Soft Cell, Almond was getting together with
more experimental musicians to combine cabaret songs with sheer sonic
strangeness. (He later disbanded the outfit when he feared they were
becoming a regular band.) Perhaps unsurprisingly one of my favourite
songs from the set, ‘Black Heart’, turns out
to stem from that era.
And
as for those Eighties hits, they've actually aged well. What then
seemed contemporary has by now become evocative. A lyric like
“standing in the doorway of the Pink Flamingo/ crying in the rain”
brings the whole thing back - the cheesy cocktail bar with the neon
palm tree in the window, the night's drizzle smearing itself across
it...
'Live
My Own Life', not from Brighton but the same tour. Shaky
camera but not too bad sound...
No comments:
Post a Comment