THE WOODENTOPS
Prince Albert, Brighton, Mon
12th Oct
It was strangely fitting for the
Woodentops to reappear midway through BBC4's 'Story of Indie' series, even if they weren't featured in
any of it. Because, let's face it, how many times in the last
quarter-century has someone said to you “I've discovered this great
new indie band”? So perhaps we need reminding of the golden times
when the word meant the Smiths or the Cocteau Twins.
Not to reduce those years to a formula,
but it often took post-punk's low-fi squattage industry aesthetic and
combined it with tuneful pop cheer. Post-punk had been great, of
course. But it was something of a relief to no longer have to look
dour and disdainful all the time, and finally admit you had heard of
the Sixties after all. Guitars, so long expected to sound awkward and
angular, could even jingle if they chose. And the Woodentops' early
singles were classic examples of all this, a shotgun marriage between
melody and cacophony, so rambunctious and exuberant that the
shuffling beats and skittering drums seemed mid-way to a skiffle
revival.
Back in the day, I remember a housemate
convulsing with laughter at a Pseud's Corner entry in 'Private
Eye'. Some music journo had told a tale of Jack Kerouac
thrusting his dick into a hole in the ground, and asserting “the
same primal energies drive the Woodentops!” I said, “but the
thing is, they do!” and he looked at me like he often did and went
into another room. They seemed a band who existed for the sheer love
of playing, who had (in the name of one track) a 'Love
Affair With Everyday Living'. Which must surely make them
the polar opposite to Gang of Four.
Alas, indie proved as short-lived as
post-punk. 'The Story of Indie' picked Aztec
Camera is their example of indie having its lo-fi edge sanded smooth
until it sounded just like more Eighties music. After all, how could
you keep your quirky charm in an industry designed around packaging
you? But the Woodentop's first album 'Giant' took
the same mis-step, swapping the home-made for the shop-bought.
Finding myself a disappointed purchaser, and being in those days
rather rigid of mind, I swiftly decided they'd “gone commercial”
(a lesser sin than “turned Nazi”, but not by much) and lost all
interest in them.
Perhaps consequently, this was a gig I
wondered whether I'd take to or not. Concern which only mounted when
on the day I discovered they'd be playing 'Giant'
in its entirety. A practice I've never been keen on, over an album I
never liked first time round. But with my ticket was already
trousered, along I went...
And it was a storming set! Its not
often you catch up with a band thirty years later, and find they're
performing the tracks much better than the album you have at home.
Perhaps their home was always the live stage, and they merely had the
misfortune to fall into the gravity of Eighties production.
Proceedings suggest an album where the rough should really have run
with the smooth. 'Good Thing', even here, is
perhaps too polished to leave much of an after-taste. But 'Love
Train' was surely always meant to sound this way, put
together more with spit than polish, served up by a band so fresh
you'd imagine they were just starting out.
Frontman Rolo is so avuncular and
engaging a character, he seems to be making the whole thing up even
when reading lyrics off a sheet. Indeed, seeing them on the opening
night might have even been the Goldilocks moment, when the set isn't
yet learnt by rote, when everything was still part up in the air.
The emphasis on 'Giant'
did mean there was less time for those classic early singles. My
personal favourite, 'Well Well Well', was
bypassed, as were the B-sides which delved into more intense,
frenzied post-Velvets territory. But as they close on an extended
version of 'Move Me', spirits undampened by the
decades, its hard to hold a single negative thought in your head.
(Digression time: Another feature of
'Story of Indie' was how, in those days of 12”
sleeves, the look and design of a record became as integrated part of
the picture as the sound. Which it did. All Cocteau Twins sleeves had
in common with Smiths or with New Order covers was their uniqueness
and recognisability, while almost never containing pictures of the
bands. And the Woodentops belong with the above, artist Panni Bharti
gouging, nailing and glueing naïve and iconic images from the most
basic of art materials. They're collected on the band's website here.)
That encore of 'Move
Me'...
… and from back in the day...
FELDMAN:
'FOR SAMUEL BECKETT'
St
John's, Smith Square, London, Sat 10th Oct
Before
we get to that title piece, let's start with what in less salubrious
surroundings would be called the support acts. Both of which, I'll
have you know, were world premieres.
Laurence'
Crane's 'Chamber Symphony No. 2, The Australian' I
confess to struggling with, mostly due to its structure. It
ceaselessly chopped and changed between a jaunty brass-driven section
and something quieter and more sombre, centred on the double bass and
piano. Each just seemed to arrive to interrupt the other, while
either might have sufficed in its own right.
Marisol
Jimenez's 'Memoriam Vivire', conversely, was
something of a discovery. She used found instruments (plucked wires
and so on), but rather than juxtaposing them with the sound of
conventional instruments combined the two - as though to her ears
they were equally new. Brass, for example, was often little more than
amplified breath. It became like listening to the rudiments of music,
like the whole thing was being rearranged from the bottom up. The
music seemed to be almost auto-assembling, sounds combining without
the obvious presence of a composer's hand. The sense that all this
was somehow just happening made it all the more
compelling.
The
programme is next visiting Jimenez's native Mexico, and she briefly
spoke to explain she'd composed the piece in support of ongoing
protests there. (Though unfortunately the speakers were poorly miked
and it was hard to pick out most of her words.) There doesn't seem
much of her work online as yet but this piece is very much worth a listen.
An
associate of John Cage, Morton Feldman is most associated with
indeterminate composition and minimalism. The latter was a label he
always decried, and certainly he's quite unlike the extended
arpeggiating of Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Their music is active and in its own way rich, for all that its
uninterested in conventional development. While Thomas Patteson defines Feldman's approach as “less is less”. Wikipedia says that in his early years he was influenced by Webern,
and his music has music of serialism's sense of stasis. (A stasis
which I can find unendurable in its 'pure' serialised forms.)
While
the Sinfonietta seem commendably keen to broaden the appeal of this
music, I've previously had misgivings about their running through
indeterminate works a little too quickly, as if concerned not to
scare the horses. Thankfully they allowed this piece to run for
almost an hour. (Though other pieces of his last up to six.) And, in
another difference to Glass and Reich, it isn't divided neatly into
movements or sections but ceaselessly reiterates one main theme.
The
same span as an average TV episode might not seem lengthy, but when
combined with so stripped-back musical input that time does start to
stretch. A little like Riley's 'In C' its built
around a heartbeat supplied by a single instrument, here a two-stroke
pluck on something which sounds like a harp without looking much like
one. Other instruments do nothing singly but cluster re-cluster, like
simple shapes shifting and recombining.
Its
variation rather than progression, but once your ear's tuned into it
the effect is literally hypnotic. Not in the sports commentator
sense, it genuinely has a hypnotic effect upon you. As Alex Ross comments Feldman used “vast forms” because
“he wanted listeners to stop thinking about form altogether and
lose themselves in the harmonic material”. Your ear simply gives up
on duration as something beyond it, and listens more closely to
what's happening right now.
Were
the piece not dedicated to Beckett I don't think I'd have ever
thought to associate it with him. Rather than his bleak absurdism,
its character is to be simultaneously unearthly and serene. It feels
like being on some hillside some early morning, watching waves of
mist cross the landscape, taking parts of the world away then putting
them back. It has the terrible yet compelling grandeur of the sublime without the usual triggers of Romanticism, without
evoking the shapes or sounds of mountains and waterfalls and all the
rest of it.
Reading
a little about the piece afterwards, I discovered i)
every proper commentator seems to disagree with me about Beckett
(Ross wrote “the connection to Beckett's austere, depopulated
landscapes was easily grasped”), and ii) Feldman
composed the piece shortly before his death in 1987. And if the first
of those bewilders me, the second seems to make perfect sense. Rather
than the standard business of your life flashing through your eyes,
like a photo album on fast-flip, its more like arbitrary demarcation
lines dissolving you're able to get some glimpse of the eternity
beyond. Its like Blake's line “every thing would appear to man as
it is, infinite”.
Thomas Patteson wisely noted “all music can be understood as a kind of
commentary on the passage of time. Most music constructs time in ways
analogous to our everyday experience: from the clockwork regularity
of the Baroque orchestra to the thumping heartbeat of dancefloor
electronica, music builds on and reinforces our natural perception of
time. Feldman’s music seems to negate this. In its non-metric,
floating quality, it challenges our comfortable sense of
chronological proportion. And yet, the unfolding of musical events is
not random. There is a 'flow' to Feldman’s music, as undeniable as
it is impossible to pin down.”
Let's leave the
last word to the man himself: “I feel that music should
have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that
you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know
anything about it … except that it's some kind of life force that
to some degree really changes your life … if you're into it.”
The
evening's being broadcast on Radio Three's 'Hear and
Now' sometime in November, so you'll be able to judge for
yourself.
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