SIGUR ROS/THE WATERBOYS (MORE GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

SIGUR ROS

Brighton Centre, Wed 20th Nov

Though originally claiming to be singing in their own imaginary language, Sigur Ros later confessed they'd only ever meant that as a gag. In actuality they were simply scatting. Yet ideally, not only would they never have let on, they'd have convinced every country they visited that they were singing in a native language that wasn't theirs. That way, everyone can imagine you're singing something, which they can somehow intuit, without ever knowing for sure. After all, what is glossolalia but scatting given a religious context? Nonsense can be important stuff.

However, that alone would suggest their music is merely some kind of template, a big cavernous space onto which the listener can project whatever they want to imagine. Which admittedly would explain the keen-ness of marketing types to license their music for ads and soundtracks. (Requests which normally get turned down. Frontman Jonsi has spoken of his amusement at the resulting mini-industry in Sigur-Ros-alike compositions.)

That suggestion does perhaps have advantages over the other theory they get saddled with, that their soundscapes are a kind of sound painting of the landscapes of their native Iceland. And true enough, there's great footage out there of their touring their home island. Yet their music isn't cold and glacial, like Joy Division or Echo and the Bunnymen, it's richly melodic and quite often rhapsodic. The Bunnymen shot the cover art for their third album in Iceland. Whereas the projections which accompany this live show, while frequently of nature scenes, are rarely of anywhere particular. Many, in fact, veer towards the abstract. (A sense emphasised by the overlaying of the images on the band as they play.) Joy Division's sound, at least when it had been through Martin Hannett's production, was resolutely Modernist. Sigur Ros are more resonant of the previous Romantic era. It's the difference between Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff.

Ultimately, both theories are insufficient to the point of being diminishing. A more likely means to get somewhere would be to try and fit them together. They combine into a music reflecting both the enticing beauty and overwhelming scale of nature. Tracks show a vast dynamic range, rising to thumping crescendos utilising the full eleven-piece ensemble, then falling to the merest whisper from a single voice. It's nature to simultaneously find yourself and lose yourself in.

… which, and you may well be ahead of me here, makes it ideal music to see live. Not because of the stage show. (Impressive though that is, filling the eye without distracting from the music.) Not because they improvise or add elements or do crazy stage dancing, because they don't much. The truth is something much more simple. It's perfect music to experience collectively, in a big space full of people, forests of hands flying up as one. I normally steadfastly avoid the elephantine carbuncle that is the Brighton Centre. When a gig there can still feel involving, that's the sign of a band that's on to something.

It also felt right to see them on a dark Winter's evening. For the band look on the bright side in an almost literal sense. While stage shows by necessity involve lighting in some form, this seemed unusually based around the concept. Old-fashioned light bulbs (the ones that go off over people's heads in cartoons) sat on stands adorning the stage, emitting a warm orange glow, as if Edison had gone in for forestry.

Perhaps the actual moment of truth about all that 'sound-of-Iceland' schtick isn't what you see there but the proportion of time where you can't. For their homeland infamously falls into near-complete darkness in the depths of Winter. Perhaps the perfect night to see them would have been a couple of weeks later, on the Winter Solstice itself. Certainly it started to feel like a modernisation of some ancient ritual, nourishing the light in the dark like it's performing our magic which will see it grow again. (I was probably getting carried away by that point.) In choosing a name for his non-existent imaginary language, Jonsi hit upon Hopelandic. And indeed it all seems less the sound of mighty grinding glaciers than of flickering hope.

Despite the appeal of all that dynamic range, I think I took most to the more subdued and serene tone of the encore. It may have been that we needed to the bigger, more attention-grabbing stuff to pull us in, but once we were there the band had less need to address us and could simply speak.

From Brighton (unfortunately cutting off a bit abruptly)...

...and from Brixton, earlier in the year...

And, as if all that wasn't enough, check out the “evolving” video to the track 'Stomur' from the band's website, made from ever-changing footage supplied by fans – some live footage, some everyday diary stuff.

From Iceland to... Ireland. (We don't just throw this show together, you know.)

THE WATERBOYS

De Le Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sat 14th Dec

This tour was announced as a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Waterboys' most popular album, 'Fisherman's Blues.' But as Mike Scott (singer and sole constant in an ever-changing line-up) soon tells us it's actually the five-week anniversary of 'Fisherman's Box', a new collection of out-takes.

There is of course far too much of this sort of thing nowadays. Where every bump into the mike gets a retrospective release. Where editing down to get the good stuff has suddenly become a bad idea. Where our culture is so oriented around perpetual consumption we lap it all up regardless. Those CDs you buy because of all the extra material, even though you had the original LP, how often do you actually play those extra tracks? This box set, for example, runs across seven discs.

Well, most of the time that's true. But then Mike Scott's music with the Waterboys has never been constrained by such norms. He'd promised “we won't be playing the original Fisherman's Blues album in order or anything tame like that. That's not the Waterboys' style.” A full third of the set must have been taken up by these rediscovered songs. So rather than this being a retrospective affair, the night was instead filled with classic songs you'd simply never heard before. I came out feeling that 'Fisherman's Box' must be the most essential box set since 'The Can Tapes.'

Scott was always a prodigiously prolific songwriter who had the greatest difficulty in fitting his compositions into the then-constrains of two sides of vinyl. (See for example me raving about the awesomeness of 'Beverley Penn', effectively thrown away at the time.) But the trip to Ireland which launched the album seemed to spike his output still further. He'd originally intended to visit new band member Steve Wickham in Dublin for a week or two. As he later commented “100 songs and 2 years later" the album was ready for release. Apparently, he still had trouble editing things down to the seven CD limit!

While Steve (Wick) Wickham's fiddle playing had accompanied Scott on the recent 'Appointment With Mr Yeats' tour, about eighteen months ago, this gig reunites the dream team line-up by bringing in Anthony (Anto) Thistlethwaite on sax and mandolin. A Scotsman, an Englishman and an Irishman... it may sound like the start of a joke to some – but for me it was a very good reason to take the trek to Bexhill.

As the launched into their Patti Smith tribute 'A Girl Called Johnny', in the venue where last I saw Smith herself, it felt like a baton being passed. I'd written of that night “there’s nothing you could possibly compare Patti Smith gigs to except each other.” Yet, while there must be few music-makers in the world of Smith's calibre, Scott is surely one of them.

'Fisherman's Blues' is of course famous for marking the point where the band (to quote Smith) “plugged into traditional music.” And notably, earlier songs tended to go through a kind of 'Fisherman's Blues' filter, such as the stripped-down three-piece version of the once-epic 'Don't Bang the Drum.' As the place names above might suggest, this mostly meant Irish tradition. Yet Scott also spoke warmly of the band's then interest in Americana, even temporarily relocating to California to be produced by the larger-than-life Bob Johnston. (One full CD from the set is apparently dedicated to this period.) They even play a Ray Charles and a Hank Williams cover. I became quite excited by this discovery, before recalling the original album had a track asking 'Has Anyone Here Seen Hank?'

All of which said, I would have to say I find some guilty of printing the legend. For example David Simpson's Guardian piece makes it appear Scott had some sort of Damascene conversion. Personally, I consider their previous album, 'This is the Sea' to be their finest. But even those who disagree would be hard pressed to describe it as a standard Eighties rock album, sharing stadium space with Simple Minds.

Simpson focuses on the track 'Fisherman's Blues' as if it was Scott's version of 'Solsbury Hill', an abrupt and deliberate volte face in musical style, a bold statement of intent. But, especially in retrospect, you can see how much of an interchange there was. Wickham had already played on the track 'The Pan Within' and the very same month (March '85) they recorded their first cover of Van Morrison's 'Sweet Thing'. 'Billy Sparks', described by Scott as “a ragggle-taggle folk romp” dated from still further back, Nov '82. (Though admittedly it's not one of their best songs.)

The references in the track to being “loosened from the bonds that held me fast” may well be about slipping music biz expectations, for it's an otherwise uncommon image from Scott. But the line he cites as marking the decisive break is “far away from dry land and its bitter memories." When the previous album was called 'This is the Sea'?!? (And in fact 'Fisherman's Blues' is the most old-style track on its album.)

Yet if the shift from the 'big music' of London to the traditions of Ireland was organic rather than calculated, it was still a smart one. 'This is the Sea' was released in '85 and Fisherman's Blues' in '88. It was after punk's Year Zero rhetoric and post-punk's futurist experimentation, where every release came on like a Modernist manifesto. By that point music had changed direction and come to re-water it's own roots. 'Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?' had become a pertinent cry once more. (Dexy's Midnight Runners had already taken the same turn into Celtic folk, albeit more cartoonishly, in '82.)

Plus, the 'big music' sound of the band's earlier albums... it was great, but big music can only get so big before it becomes a Jenga tower. There's only so much up up there. A sideways step was what was required, and Ireland provided the place to step into.

More widely, by the late eighties Thatcherism was consolidating and counter-culture seemed on the wane. (Several commentators have connected Scott's departure to Ireland with his song 'Old England', a diatribe against the ravages of her ruinous policies.) Post-punk had been based around the utopian/dystopian dialectic of science fiction, but by '88 the future no longer seemed ours. A weird switch occurred, as if the monetarists were now the modernists and we'd become the conservatives, the custodians of some cherished tradition. As in the words of the 'Likely Lads' theme tune, the only thing we had to look forward to was the past. Certainly during that era I mentally divided music into stuff with a history, which came from some longstanding tradition, from the cappuccino-less froth that was flavour of the month.

Well, the past is a nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there. A Scotsman, an Englishman and and Irishman – that's not the same recipe as three Irishmen. Despite Simpson, Scott never “walked away from rock music”, but took what he wanted with him. It was the marriage of his tradition, of teenage playing in punk bands, with Irish tradition which produced the flock of beautiful children. The successor album, 'Room to Roam', where they did abandon rock music in imitation of Irish tradition, was notably less successful. What the band needed then was another sideways step... 'Fisherman's Blues' was a moment in a band's musical history, not a magic escape button.

But of course they didn't get trapped in the past forever. The band proved last year there's more life left in them, that when they raid their back catalogue it's for something extra, not a consolation prize for the lack of something new. Scott chose the name to suggest something ever-fluid, ever-changing. It looks like he's sticking to that.

The classic 'We Will Not Be Lovers.' I love the opening section with Scott, Anto and Wick grouped together...

...and the band and audience singing happy birthday to Scott, who turned fifty-five that very day. (My voice is in there somewhere. Thankfully inaudible.)

Recognise that backdrop? I didn't till the very end, when they reassembled themselves into the cover of 'Fisherman's Blues' (albeit with a couple of stand-ins). Which does serve to sum up the album quite well. The very fact they go to such effort emphasises what a classic it is. The only other cover I can remember having been reassembled in such a way is 'Sgt. Pepper'. But 'Pepper's cover is so composed, a statement that popular music had become something important. Whereas this is as casual as it is classic, a quick line-up of the musicians, as if done hastily between takes. And the fact that it is a line-up, in old-time black-and-white even, makes it feel traditional – as if from before the days cameras were quick enough to snapshot moments. As if they were itinerant players, showing up at the mansion house to play the wedding dance. And indeed, the album is all those things...

LIVE_TRANSMISSION/ THE LADY, A SANDY DENNY TRIBUTE (BRIGHTON FESTIVAL GIGS)

LIVE_TRANSMISSION
Scanner and the Heritage Orchestra rework Joy Division
Brighton Dome, Fri 18th May

Though it might sound a gimmick, the idea's actually a smart one. Joy Division's spacious yet driving music, simultaneously austere and melodically rich, uniquely lends itself to orchestral or electronic reworking. (Try out, for example this serene but more conventionally 'classical' re-scoring of 'Ceremony'.) Announcement of this gig had me highly hopeful.

But hopes shouldn't be confused with expectations. My fears found an emblem in that affected_underscore inserted into the event name, which has long been a token of Shoreditch_style_techno_hipness. (The phrase itself comes from the opening line of the track 'Transmission'.) I knew not of the Heritage Orchestra but have been lukewarm over Scanner, who seemed forever coming up with good ideas that never quite came off, a conceptual artist perpetually confused that he was some kind of musician.

A few fears, in fact, settled on that_underscore. I feared genre-bending, which is commonly based more around audience demographics than musical notions. Music audiences are no longer tight-knit but disparate, so crossover became a device to net the greatest number. It's the same hapless marketing strategy as those Hollywood films which are a bit rom-com, a bit conspiracy thriller, a bit satire, but nothing very much of anything. Genre-bending is most commonly a fancy term for bet-hedging.

But mostly I feared a project, and those with previous knowledge of my rantings will know I nurse a deep skepticism of anything smacking of such a thing. Projects are hooks which drawn in arts funding, and (every now and again) audiences. And from there they consider their job done.

...yet happily those fears fled. The Festival brochure claimed “rather than classical interpretations or cover versions, Scanner and Heritage Orchestra pay homage to the music and signature spirit that defined Joy Division.” And for once the PR wasn't spin but the honest truth.

If you'd chanced upon the whole thing cold, with no foreknowledge of it or Joy Division's music, you may have sensed some scheme was afoot. But it didn't rule out anyone who hadn't done the background reading. Notably, it wasn't arranged in that literalist 'remix album' format, with their take on 'Atmosphere', then their take on 'Isolation' and so on... Some pieces were so reworked that even a lifelong fan such as myself took a while to spot the original. Long sections seemed, if inspired by the band's music, no longer based in it but able to break off and do their own thing.

That genre-bending business, if it's often less than successful that's because it's more difficult than it looks. Those who vow to march oblivious to such boundaries end up with bloodied noses more often than breakthroughs. If you're aiming to marry a small orchestra with electronics and a live band (as they are here) you need to be master of all those disciplines separately before you can think of naming the day and sending the invites. Which doesn't happen all that often.

And yet here they were blended so finely you barely noticed the joins. Though the novelty of the situation might have initially drawn you, you quickly got over it and listened to the music on it's own terms. Pieces would have contemporary music structures, moving through sections rather than swapping between verse and chorus, but still be driven by the most thrusting popular-music beats.

In short, they shrewdly chose to play down the cross-genre element. However, every now and again, they'd spark things off against each other. A section would be made up of the most intricately beautiful counterpoint, only for everyone aboard to suddenly pile into one pounding riff. Much of it's force would come from it's unexpectedness.

The very success of this was perhaps something of an an irony. The band's dub-influenced, spacious sound effectively boxed them in as a studio-centred outfit. Most live tapes, including the live sides of their posthumous release 'Still', show them struggling to replicate that sound live. (PA technology was poorer then, plus they mostly played in pokier venues during their short existence.) Yet ironically, as was telegraphed by it's title, this event worked particularly well live. The music had a physicality to it that bordered on monumentality, a sense of space, a feeling of force. You felt it in both senses of the word, with the communality of a packed room adding to the experience.

Another feature of the performance which enhanced the sense of a special event, was Matt Watkins' set design. The musicians performed not on the regular stage but inside a giant gauze cube, with projections playing upon it's semi-transparent walls. However the Festival guide's claim we would be able to move around this, making it sound as much an installation as a gig, did seem mere spin. In fact, as it took up much of what's normally the auditorium, we all pretty much found our vantage points best we could and stayed as still as at any regular gig. Indeed, as the back of the cube was effectively made a solid cinema screen, there didn't even seem any real invitation to do otherwise.

One pleasing feature of the visuals is that, though they started off with cityscapes, they soon veered off into more abstract realms. Though urban spaces have long since become part of the band's iconography, us old fans remember there was a time before that. As the band didn't give interviews or even get photographed very much, their look came mostly from their record sleeves. The stark, minimalist design of these, provided by Peter Saville, often didn't incorporate photos at all, and never images either of the band or urban space. (It was years before I knew what any of them looked like!) In fact, the sine-wave lines of 'Urban Pleasures', below, were directly referenced by the projections.

This links to an article in the programme, written by no less than Simon Reynolds. His contention is that the memoir of Curtis' widow, 'Touching From a Distance,' and the subsequent movie 'Control' have skewed our appreciation of Joy Division into a biography of Curtis' short life. Indeed at times, with all the lights and the iconography of Curtis' face and lyrics, the gig started to feel quasi-religious, as if he was some martyred saint. Reynolds feels obligated to counter by emphasising the universalism of the music, and the contribution of the other band members.

My own take on 'Control' was admittedly different. As the band only really broke after Curtis' death, the way myself and many others have heard their music has always been framed by news of it. So I found the film refreshingly myth-deflating. I said “Let's do the punk thing. The punk thing is to kill your idols.” Whereas Reynolds says, “myth is what rock music is all about, despite the attrition of facts and over-exposure wrought by historians and gossipers alike.”

...and let's concede he makes a good point. Cancerous celebrity culture has done much to redefine art as celebrity autobiography, an 'OK' interview with a soundtrack. Distant seem the days where Dylan said “a poet tells you what you feel.”

But where this performance comes in is perhaps via the last item of Reynolds' list - “the unofficial fifth member of the group, producer Martin Hannett.” Though taking place on the anniversary of Curtis' death and at times fetishising his words, playing them as samples or displaying them on-screen, in formal terms it sidelines them. Despite the multifold musicians, there's not a single vocalist on stage. The riffs and tunes are the band's, but what's being channelled is more the austere, expansive sound, taken up and transformed into grander soundscapes.

And pretty much all of that sound was Hannett's. Famously, he foisted that sound upon an initially unwilling group. He was a figure less akin even to George Martin, but should be seen alongside Phil Spector or Lee Perry – a musical visionary in his own right. Of course he needed the band as much as they did him. But if this production's about bigging up his contribution, that's well overdue.

Admittedly, it was unfortunate for the show to finish on its weakest note. After such powerful, expansive music, it made sense in terms of set dynamics to finish with a simpler, more straightforward piece of songcraft. And so we get 'Love Will Tear Us Apart.' This was the only number to feature Curtis' complete vocals, over softer, sweeter, simpler music.

Alas, there seems some sort of conspiracy to redefine this song as a crooner number. Of course there was that risible Paul Young cover in the Eighties, but it now comes even from people you'd think to know better. Only last November, I was saying how much I enjoyed the June Tabor and Oysterband gig, but their version of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'is to me an exercise in point-missing.

The original number is a ballad in a kind of symbiotic struggle with a rock track, fitting the theme of a relationship which is convulsive and unsettled. (I never tire of the opening segue, where the accelerating drums suddenly give way to the main keyboard theme. It's like a twist in a classic movie, which you know off by heart but can still watch over and over again.) Perhaps you need a different angle to avoid duplicating the original. In which case, rather than a crooner, it should be sung more coldly, by someone akin to Marlene Dietrich. Crucially, it should be sung by someone who seems no longer capable of love. As it is, I expect to see some 'X Factor' wannabe emoting their way through it any day now...

But caveats aside, the event was a triumph. It felt in many ways akin to the live 'Joan of Arc' soundtrack from last year's Festival. Both took place in the Dome, were cross-genre and multi-media performances based on an external source. Yet, most importantly, both were the hit of their respective Festivals. Perhaps I should try to wring more drama from these posts by saving that news till later, but I knew even part-way through the gig this would be this year's highpoint.

Still not sure about that underscore in the title, though...

THE LADY, A HOMAGE TO SANDY DENNY
Brighton Dome, 21st May

...from one great vocalist and songwriter, who died tragically young, to another. And, as with Ian Curtis, it can be hard for us to separate Sandy Denny's music from her conflicted and tragic life.

The way we feel about her may be summed up in her song 'Stranger To Himself', which of course gets aired here. Though ostensibly written by her about a man, it's effectively become our song to her.

“You know you're a master of your art

You'll realise that when you think it fit...

You can run for cover, run for cover like a frightened hare

Till it's all over, all over and there's no-one there

Cause you daren't discover, daren't discover that we really care.”

(In fact 'Stranger To Herself' might have made a more memorable night name than 'The Lady' or, from another line in the song,'Her Beauty Lingers Still'. But then who am I to judge?)

The show assembles former collaborators and guest stars to celebrate her “posthumous reputation as one of the UK’s greatest ever singer-songwriters.” Note the p-word. During her time with electric folk legends Fairport Convention she was often thought of as the chassis of the band, to Richard Thompson's engine. Though her voice was inextricably part of their sound, her songwriting tended to be eclipsed by Thompson's.

Furthermore, there's the old joke about the two finest folk composers being Trad and Anon. As they both wrote prolifically for the band, crowding her songs out further, perhaps it's no surprise she soon decided to go solo. Yet I have to confess, and I suspect I'm not the only one, I simply don't know her solo work as well. Which alone may make nights such as this a good idea.

Green Gartside, before launching into the afore-mentioned 'Stranger to Himself' comments “it's Sandy's mysterious songs I love.” And perhaps the nail has it's head struck right there. In a previous post I was upbraided for starting a sentence “folk music should...” So let's just say that the folk music which interests me isn't about the days when a pint of mild cost under three bob. Occasionally such sentiments crop up even here. One song about the freewheeling life of a gypsy is all very well when sung to an audience of mortgaged-up middle class people, but might get a different response from the former residents of Dale Farm.

The folk music which interests me isn't about reacquainting ourselves with our homeland, so much as defamiliarising that land, rending it strange and new again, making us... you've probably guessed where I'm going with this... strangers to ourselves. Art without mystery, wouldn't that be simply decoration?

Yet the paradoxical truth about Denny is that no-one sung about a home hearth the way she could. Her signature song, the classic 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes?' (the inevitable closer here) is so much a song about homecoming that it's about never having left in the first place. It's perhaps the combination of these two things which becomes enthralling, as we simultaneously belong here and don't recognise it at all.

We could slip off here into Freudian notions of the unhomely and the like, but truth to tell I barely understand how any of it works and I doubt Denny did. After all, it's a mystery, right? All we really need to know is that it does work. It's perhaps exemplified by folk tunings, which should come over as antiquated but actually sound strange and eerie.

On top of which, there's simply no getting away from Denny's voice. She has the consummate folk-rock voice, the strength of rock without the theatrics, and folk intonations taken on like that's her natural way of singing. Yet Richard Thompson is possessed of a fine and distinctive voice himself, as I said last time I saw him, but somehow others can sing his songs, he doesn't 'own' them in that sense. I'm not sure that's so true for Denny, even if I've no idea why that might be.

...all of which may make something of a stiff challenge for those performing her songs that night. But then, like the old saying goes, hazards are risks and risks are chances.

You may note I have of late being going to these platform nights at the Dome, then complaining they're like a mixtape you can't fast-forward. But this seemed particularly thrown to the extremes, ranging from the exquisite to the (frankly) bland with little in between. And most peculiarly of all, these zigzags seemed to strike with little rhyme or reason. The opening number, Lavinia Blackwell boldly taking on 'A Sailor's Life', rousingly bode well. Yet it's follow-up was a disappointment, despite being performed by the same band and the same singer!

One constant, which may be down to the centrality of Denny's voice, is that the female singers did better than the male. Another might have been that the traditional numbers associated with her worked more easily. But both rules came with exceptions. Green's version of 'Stranger To Himself' was spirited and faultless. Thea Gilmore came with inauspicious-sounding news that she'd added music to words found after Denny had died. (A project if ever I heard one.) Yet at least one of these, 'Long Time Gone' was unforgettable. To those of us who know a little of Denny's at-times traumatic life the words (“Will he come, will he ever come, home again to me?” as if the antithesis of 'Who Knows?') were almost heartrending.

The band were a similar strange mix, with several outbreaks of Eric Clapton blues guitar. Blues and folk are bedfellows, of course. But that over-saturated style bears the same relationship to blues as the synthetic 'strawberry' flavouring used in sweets and cheap desserts does to strawberries. It's a tag that's been given so long we apply it without even thinking it's nothing like the original.

In short zigzags predominated, fantastical highs and uber-forgettable lows. Reviewing an earlier version of this tribute night in the Guardian, Robin Denslow commented “It had been a great evening, but I went home to listen to her original recordings.”

Well of course he did.

Johnny Flynn at the Denslow-reviewed night, in possibly an even-better version of 'Stranger To Himself' than Green's, followed by 'Long Time.'

This time from Brighton - the closing number, which was... oh, you know already...

Coming Soon! Brighton Festival Theatre and performance...

CINE CITY 2007 - THE THIRD HALF

As we reach the third but not final 'half' of my reviews of Brighton's CineCity festival, perhaps it's time I learnt to use the word 'part'. Anyway, it allows us to look again at Joy Division via this previewed documentary...

JOY DIVISION, Grant Gee, 2007
“After a Tony Wilson film (24 Hour Party People) and an Ian ‘n’ Debbie film (Control), the idea someone might make a Joy Division movie about Joy Division now seems remoter than ever.”

…or so I argued here, back in October, reviewing Corbijn’s Control. Little did I know that elsewhere in Brighton Grant Gee was putting the finishing touches to this documentary on the band. (Actually I did know, I’d just forgotten but that doesn’t sound so neat.) It works not so much as a counterbalance to Control but a companion piece, like a right speaker to be set alongside a left one. Despite the fact Gee is yet to even see Control, by a series of almost uncanny co-incidences every character on the periphery of the film is put centre stage here and vice versa. (Curtis’ widow Debbie doesn’t appear, citing overload after her involvement with Control, but agreed to the use of extracts from her book.)

However, the generic name of this documentary is in some ways telling. Despite Jon Savage being enlisted as ‘writer’ (read ‘creative consultant’), this is not the opinionated essay that might lead you to believe. There’s some attempt to set the context, with references to Thatcherism, Manchester’s sewers collapsing etc. (Plus some best-ignored bookending hyperbole about the band marking Manchester’s transition from an industrial to a ‘post-industrial’ city.) But mostly, while the film is solid, well-researched and even entertaining, the tone is straightforward and literal - at times skirting the prosaic. The meat of the film comes from the band interviews where they (Hook in particular) happily concede they just lucked into what they were doing and never bothered thinking about it much. There are occasional overlaps, for example Sumner commenting how little “beauty” you saw growing up in Sixties Salford. But mostly you glean the context from the archive film, very similar to the trick played by Control but you expect a documentary to tell you stuff where a film can imply.

In fact, while record titles like An Ideal for Living suggest a plan or at least a considered aesthetic, the whole story seems so casual as to be hilariously lackadasical. Curtis was hired over the phone without an audition. While everyone has commented on how Saville’s sparse sleeve design matched the music, we learn here he only ever heard them after delivering his first load of artwork. (He tried to get out of hearing it at all, then was surprised to find himself liking it.) Of course like some twist on schadenfreude, hearing how hopelessly casually history can be put together does become a kick in itself – I certainly always enjoy such stories. But lackadaisical doesn’t mean lacking, the fact the band didn’t think about what they were doing doesn’t mean they weren’t doing it. The band just aren’t the best equipped people to tell their own story, that’s all.

Almost by default, emphasis falls onto what has clearly been bugging the other band members ever since – could they have done more to prevent Curtis’ suicide? They played a gig the night after his first attempt, picking him up from the hospital, something they clearly now feel incredulous over. This is actually more than confession porn. Indeed it does sound incredulous, from a gang of guys at such a remove from ruthless careerism. As Gee suggests during his Q&A, the most likely explanation is the truculent Northern male syndrome of the time – being able to express themselves through amplifiers didn’t mean they could express themselves through their own mouths.

It’s human, of course, to wonder what you could have done. But could they have changed events? We have in many ways moved between extremes – from a reticent, stiff-upper-lipped society to a touchy-feely psychobabbly one. But a group hug, alas, doesn’t necessarily cure all ills. And as many have commented, Curtis became an expert at masking his feelings. The band confess they never even listened to Curtis’ lyrics, let alone connected them to his mental state. But in her book Debbie recounts that she did confront Curtis over this, leading to “a one-way conversation”.

While Control got hazy over what triggered Curtis’ downward spiral, here Sumner claims the anti-epilepsy drugs he started taking gave him extreme mood swings. (Quite possibly exacerbated by the band’s career starting to rocket just when doctors were advising him to take life easy.) Sumner also mentions, despite Curtis’ deranged persona on stage, he never took drugs – it just appeared with the music. But perhaps this means the mood of Closer was inspired by drugs – merely prescription drugs obtained on the NHS.

The one figure who remains insufficiently acknowledged is producer Martin Hannett, who contribution to the band’s sound places him second only to Curtis in order of importance. Hannett sadly died back in ’91 so isn’t available for interview. However, Wilson does discuss his strange working habits plus we get a brief audio clip of an interview he gave to Jon Savage – has this ever been released? Similarly Sumner and Morris at least developed much of the band’s sound (ahead of Hannett’s involvement), but again this rarely reaches the surface. The band’s transition from a guitar to a synthesizer-based sound doesn’t seem to get mentioned at all.

Something more conceptual that’s absent from both here and Control is the band’s refusal to give interviews. (In fact in Control their agreement to give an interview to Annik Honoré, suggesting quite the opposite.) With punk so tied to fanzines, manifestos and general ranting this insistence on silence helped draw a line between punk and post punk. Of course this may well merely be down to them having nothing particular to say, but it would still be interesting to see how it arose.

One absence from the film I’m not convinced matters is Curtis’ notebooks. Gee didn’t gain access to these, but enthused over what light they might shed someday. Of course this is possible, but it carries the connotation we are encountering something encoded which requires locating the decoding book. What matters is what was released, and the recordings are there for anyone who wants to hear them.

As Gee said himself during the Q&A this is the story of Joy Division served straight but what we need now is something to examine and critique that story. Within those workmanlike parameters, his documentary is successful, a great story well told, and would probably serve as a better introduction to the band than Control. The camera gets pointed in all the right places, but too often it just points – it doesn’t enquire. Ultimately it strays close to being a Wikipedia article when we really wanted a poem…

A FEW MORE WORDS ABOUT CONTROL

“Ultimately the character portrayed with the least satisfaction is the city of Manchester. I don't mean specific locations, but the look of the film in general. Where are the dark, empty streets, the Manchester of the Seventies, evoked by the lyrics and music of Joy Division? I don't expect the film to be a history lesson but its glossiness is disappointing. How can an audience understand Joy Division without understanding its environment?”
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,,2180296,00.html

Always amusing to read a review of a film where it says exactly what you said, only the other way up. But who is this know-nothing, who has so little feeling for the music of Joy Division they can’t see it when its corollary is so clearly put up on the screen? None other than Natalie Curtis – Ian and Debbie’s own daughter! I hang my four-eyed head in shame!

She continues…

“In recent years much has been made of the notion that Ian's biggest problem was the women in his life, when in fact his inability to deal with his relationships, not to mention everything else, was a symptom of his depressive illness. Sadly, the film does little to show this, or how these two women were more aware than anyone of how ill Ian actually was and how hard they tried to help him.”

…while meanwhile…

“No matter how close either woman tries to get to Ian, neither can ever really get inside his head: neither cups of tea nor romantic conversations will do the trick… Control frames these failures - these gaps not closed - in such gendered terms; in terms of each woman's proximity to Joy Division as a band and Ian Curtis not only as a man but as a (burgeoning) rock star. This is not necessarily the fault of the film, for the contours of this story took shape long ago.”
http://fangrrrl.blogspot.com/

Perhaps Control is one of those films which divides its response neatly between girls and boys. “His inability to deal with his relationships… was a symptom of his depressive illness” sounds to my ears like a summary of the film rather than a critique of it. And, to make a comparison with the other great rock’n’roll suicide of our era, I don’t think I’ve heard any “some bitch drove him to it” style suggestions, a la Courtney Love. The film does show Debbie trying to help him, albeit in an ineffectual way, suggesting doctor’s visits which fail to happen. The irony lay in his making Debbie a surrogate mother without surrendering to her the authority of a mother. (How true to history all that is I’ve no way of knowing, of course.)

Plus a large part of the appeal of Joy Division to me is the conjunctions they found between the personal and the social, the private and the public spheres. (Formally caught in the combination of Curtis’ words with the evocative music, as already said.) You put in what you want to take out of these things of course, but for me it’s emphatically not merely the story of an isolated male ego, triumphantly insisting on his own private hell whatever the cost to those around him. (I never stand to hear Joy Division compared to whingers like Radiohead!)

Of course, that may well be just a personal response, choosing to see the glass half-full. And truth to tell, the last line quoted does somewhat resonate with me. Curtis quotes Wordsworth in the film, and in many ways he was a kind of post-industrial romantic - finding himself in tower blocks and empty car parks rather than waterfalls and fields of daffodils. But the deal’s the same, you look at the word outside of you and see only a reflection of your own face. (Me, I prefer the notion of two-way traffic.)

Hennings also says:

Listening, this last week, to Pere Ubu, Joy Division's cross-Atlantic mirror…

Reading this line just today, I was struck by the fact I don’t compare Joy Division to Pere Ubu more. Apart from musical connections (like using synth as soundsource rather than instrument) the comparisons between Laughner and Curtis are too obvious to spell out. But partly the contexts are so different. Paradoxically, the aesthetes in Ubu reviled American gonzo punks like the Ramones without any of that mud ever sticking, while Joy Division quite clearly had their feet in punk yet somehow effortlessly transcended it. At the time it seemed an incredibly powerful statement that the band just wore ‘normal’ clothes on stage. With every other band on earth spiking themselves up into hackneyed shock, that ‘normal’ look added massively to their mystique! (Joy Division happened after the Pistols, while Ubu went alongside the Ramones – at least as far as chronologies went.)

But mostly the consequent events are so different, that they can’t help but reshape what went before. While the electro roots of early New Order are clearly there in late Joy Division, I increasingly lost interest in their subsequent albums. (I’m glad they avoided becoming the first Joy Division tribute band, but have no desire to own a copy of Worlds in Motion.) With Pere Ubu, Laughner’s contribution lasted for two singles (not two albums) and subsequently they’re seen by pretty much everybody as Dave Thomas’ band. The tombstone on the cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart ultimately cast a longer shadow than that bomber over Tokyo…

A FEW WORDS ABOUT CONTROL

Anton Corbijn’s recent biopic of Joy Division’s ill-starred singer Ian Curtis can be said to have many achievements, but perhaps a crucial one is its ability to set the scene so well. So let’s try and follow its example…

From its very beginnings, British punk felt it saw a defect in previous home-grown music. In seeking to emulate American rock and blues, earlier bands ended up duplicating something second hand. While American music arose, quite naturally, out of the American landscape, British groups would sing diligently about (say) the L-Train while oblivious to what the L-Train was or where it went. So in Britain punk retaliated by taking up a provincial anti-Americanism (one of the Clash’s main anthems was “I’m so bored with the USA”), by dropping the L-Train and instead singing defiantly of the Number Seven bus.

While it would be easy to ridicule all that in hindsight, we should remember some (such as Paul Weller) were able to do it well. But the problem with this fixation upon fag ends, chip wrappers and damp weather was that it became just that – a fixation. American music had arisen naturally from its landscape, while this obsession with seedy Englishness soon became at best a cliché and at worst a put-on. Any dickhead, after all, can sing about stepping in used condoms in the hallway.

Joy Division, probably more by luck than judgement, hit upon a more winning combination. Curtis’ lyrics were (depending upon who you talk to) painfully introspective, universally existential or some combination of the two. (Typical line: “Seeing me this time/ Hoping for something else”.) It was in the music where the band conjured up cavernous yet claustrophobic soundscapes which, to quote K-Punk, “suggest the derelict factories and litter-strewn ex-public spaces of a decommissioned industrial economy.”(1) Bypassing the literalism of words, the music left you feeling you stood in a crumbling entropic Britain. It was a world away from the Clash’s rallying calls of onedownmanship.

And, perhaps more by luck than judgement, Corbijn uncannily duplicates this vital balance. While the frontstory recounts the details of Curtis’ life, something which in another context may have felt soapy, the sheer vivid look of the film makes it come alive. A shot as simple as rain on a phone box window becomes something simultaneously mundane and numinous. Rather than chase an elusive ‘authenticity’ the film achieves a kind of poetic realism. (2) (It should perhaps be noted that there had always been a strong visual dimension - the band’s look and sleeve design have been celebrated for synesthesiastically adding to their soundscape, and that Corbijn had been a photographer of the band.)

This is news to be received gratefully, for I had high hopes and bigger fears for this film. Biopics are normally something to avoid like the plague, and rock biopics are the worst of the very bad bunch. Made by those who understand more about lens apertures than music, they try to turn the amps to 11 and manufacture excess in the absurd belief that’s what rock music is about – or will at least drown out the complaining. This is bad enough at the best of times, but the most significant element of Joy Division’s music was its sense of restraint. Possibly more than even their post-punk contemporaries, they eschewed orgiastic solos for an austere discipline bordering on rigidity. Not to name names, but an Oliver Stone at the helm here would mean a Titanic on our hands. Even the film’s title, spinning off from the track She’s Lost Control, reflects this relationship between discipline and derangement.

We need Corbijn’s restraint for a separate, but possibly more important, reason. It’s scarcely a plot spoiler to reveal Curtis committed suicide, on the eve of the band’s first American tour. While the band’s star had been rising, it seems this terrible act propelled them into the big time. His death hit the headlines, made both a twisted selling point and an eerie sense of his melancholic lyrics, and one month later came their first hit single. Youth culture is of course obsessed with early death, but this story is so true to legend that interest can quickly become ghoulish. (I can remember seeing a bootleg t-shirt commemorating his death, and wondering even at the time whether a man’s life is best commemorated by a t-shirt.) Yet Corbijn avoids, for example, any gratuitous shots of Curtis as a gurneying corpse and instead portrays the moment of his death through his wife’s reaction.

Of course for all that we may ask whether we really want to know this sort of stuff. As Simon Reynolds has commented, underneath the grandeur of the songs the problems besetting Curtis were “mundanely specific.”(3) Isn’t it falling into the same ‘pop psychology’ hole as all TV documentaries seem to have of late?, with their banal and bathetic revelations that the Russian Revolution failed because Stalin’s dad didn’t hug him and the like. Curtis’ lover Annik Honore has commented: "The music should always be more important than people's private lives”.(4) Or as Bob Dylan memorably said “a poet tells you what you feel.” Shouldn’t our focus be on the music and our own reactions to it, and the tawdry details of those who made it be left to gutter journalists?(5)

Again, this question is a bigger deal for Joy Division than almost any other band. Even by the standard of bands, they went out of their way to create a mythos for themselves. If for a band a mythos is currency, they were shrewd enough to know you make a currency valuable through scarcity. As Emmy Henningshas said “part of Joy Division's allure lay in the fact that there was so little information outside of the sound and the record sleeves to go on. As a band they gave very few interviews, and the fact that nearly every photograph ever taken of them has become iconic is due partly to scarcity - images become icons through being both rare and precious.”(6) The band were like some ancient civilization where there were never quite enough artifacts unearthed to understand – some designs, bits of tablet in a script no-one’s sure how to read.

Curtis was found dead on May 18th 1980, precisely one day after my fourteenth birthday. At the time I held onto a huge yet half-formed belief in his death as something grand and existential, as if he had the courage to face something essential I could only glimpse secondhand through his songs. Too young to truly understand death, I figured it must be something cool.

Of course I was already seeing the world much differently by 1996, when his widow Deborah published her biography Touching From a Distance. Though I only read press excerpts, I was struck how far the husband she knew was from my image of a doomed Keatsian romantic. Instead he seemed a fairly typical Macclesfield male, leaving the wife to domestic drudgery while he went out and about, and (when she was permitted out in public) obsessive over her covering herself up. It’s Deborah’s book which has been adapted and extended into this film (she even served as co-producer), and in fact the very reason it should be made is because it dispels all the ‘die-young’ myths surrounding Curtis’ life. As Deborah has put it, "We're looking to give the world a truthful view of who Ian really was ... It will be a balanced approach - this isn't the rock and roll Shine."(7) Let’s do the punk thing. The punk thing is to kill your idols.

It’s unafraid to show Curtis as callous, as much torturing as tortured. One reader of Deborah’s book was even driven to title an Amazon review Rock Martyrs are Subhuman Too. (8) Yet he and everyone else is portrayed in quite a nuanced manner. Even the loudmouthed manager, Rob Gretton, is shown as torn over his response to Curtis’ unraveling life, concerned over his fraying health yet eager for him to keep performing, ultimately out of his depth. The film’s also unafraid to introduce farce elements into this otherwise bleak story. In a nicely telling moment we follow Curtis into the Labour Exchange with ‘Hate’ scrawled punkishly over his jacket, only to find out he’s actually working there as an advisor. These scenes are both funnier and more effective than the earlier, somewhat histrionic 24 Hour Party People precisely because they’re played so deadpan.(9)

The lynchpin of both book and film is the emotional triangle between Curtis, Deborah and first the band – then Annik Honore, the Belgian fanzine writer who became his mistress. In a sense, there are two Curtis’ in the film and they occur in reverse order to the one you’d expect. While still a schoolboy he carries himself like a self-confident star, only to become sullen and introspective when the front man in a successful rock band. Though we spy Burroughs and Ballard on his teenage bookshelf, the music he loves is not glum but glam – the Dionysian dressing-up of Bowie and Bolan. When Debbie first meets him, he’s in a combination of mascara and school blazer. As if unused to aesthetes in Seventies Macclesfield, Debbie is soon smitten by him - complaining he’s “a bit presumptuous” then letting him kiss her three seconds later. “You’re mine and you know you are,” he tells her by way of a marriage proposal. It’s like she was his first groupie, arriving even before his first gig. His subsequent disdain for Debbie can best be summed up by Blake’s proverb “the bounded is loathed by its possessor.”(10)

In a key early scene he recites a poem to impress Debbie. Yet when asked if he wrote it he shakes his head and replies “Wordsworth”. For all his acting the part of the star, as yet he has nothing to say. (Perhaps in an alternate universe he stayed like this and Oasis were formed fifteen years early.) While meeting the rest of the band at a Pistols gig gives him the opportunity, it’s the loveless bind of marriage to Debbie which gives him the motive to write. He earnestly scribbles lyrics in an exercise book as an alternative to talking to her, as she timidly taps at the door inviting him to bed. Henningsremarks how Debbie is “patronised as a terribly embarrassing reminder of the humdrum domesticity that rock music sets itself up time and time over to escape.” When a pregnant Debbie finds him backstage getting cosy with a hanger-on, he defiantly shoots back “should you be out in your condition?”

So instead of being at the football or with the pub darts team, Curtis was fronting a cutting-edge band which redefined music? Yes – and no. Factory Record’s Tony Wilson famously said he signed Joy Division because they were the only band he saw who had to be on stage – and he perhaps meant Curtis more than the others. The band was more to him than an excuse to get away from the wife and crying child. In fact, for a while seems to have served as his lifeline, the place where he could sing what he was unable to say. But as time goes on, the lifeline came to feel more and more like a noose.

Though never laboured, the film is normally clear. Only over this transformation does it become slightly elusive, and my comments here consequently more interpretive. In the early days, Curtis is the arrogant and ambitious one of the group. His tactic to get Wilson to sign them is march up and call him a “bastard” for not having done enough for them already. But as success builds the band becomes more of a bind, his input an expectation… all too much like the “opportunities” he’d find the hapless doleys back at the Labour Exchange. At one gig he finds himself unable to sing. When Rob Gretton’s solution (getting someone else up who happens to know the words) is less than successful (it results in a riot), he confesses his fears to Wilson.(11)

Curtis tells Annik his marriage was a “mistake” taken “too young”. While this feels more than a chat-up line, we might reasonably ask in that case why he doesn’t just leave Debbie for Annik? The film flirts with the idea that Annik is the one person he can express himself to. The above comment is made as they stay up all night talking, while the rest of the band crash out. But in a later scene Annik makes a prying attempt to open him up, with Curtis replying disarmingly his favourite colour is “Man City Blue”.(12) And, if his songs are to be taken as the voice of his heart, they seem far more concerned with lost love for Debbie than found love for Annik.(13)

When Debbie insists she must divorce him over Annik, Curtis asks “what’s that got to do with us?” The line got a laugh at the showing I attended, and while it is a classic piece of chutzpah its also possible he really meant it. As Beatrix Campbell and others have argued, there’s a common male desire to avoid maturity by making your wife your second mother – a desire compounded by the social breakdowns which were underway at this time.(14) The night before his suicide Curtis visits first his actual mother, and then Debbie to ask her to drop her divorce claim. Curtis first drove a wedge that kept Debbie away from his creative life, then complained that all she stood for was domestic drudgery. Yet, infanatalised, he was unable to completely cut the apron strings and run off with Annik. This was not long after their daughter’s birth. Babies are often a crisis point in such a scenario, bringing out in the father something approaching sibling rivalry. But it seems it was Debbie’s threat of divorce which took him over the edge. Though accounts often emphasise his last acts as watching a Herzog movie and listening to an Iggy album he hung himself, with horrific appropriateness, by the most domestic of icons - the clothes dryer in their flat.

www.controlthemovie.com
(The official site also has a cool trailer)

(1) www.factmagazine.co.uk/da/61846
(2) If the film has a fault, it’s that at times it leans a little too heavily towards the poetic and breaks the vital equilibrium. Real events are rejigged, compressed or even distorted – for example the urban myth gets repeated that Tony Wilson signed the band with a contract written in his own blood. (A tale which only seems to have started with 24 Hour Party People , five short years ago). Such things matter little. But I doubt, for example, many Macclesfield pubs were playing the Velvet Underground in 1979, and these jarring moments can throw you out of the film’s spell.
(3) Rip It Up And Start Again – Post Punk 1978-1984, Faber and Faber, 2005, ISBN 0-571-21569-6
(4) http://www.side-line.com/interviews_comments.php?id=23440_0_16_0_C
(5) The spotlight on Curtis’ troubled soul also makes for something of an auterist approach, with the rest of the band in very much secondary roles. We’re told band rehearsals are “pretty shite, actually” until he arrives and galvanizes them with his angst. But perhaps he needed them as much as they him. Producer Martin Hannett’s vital role seems particularly neglected. After a Tony Wilson film (24 Hour Party People) and an Ian ‘n’ Debbie film, the idea someone might make a Joy Division movie about Joy Division now seems remoter than ever. Notably, the band had agreed to dissolve if any member left, not just their front man. However, the last shot with (presumably) joinee Gillian Gilbert implies the others are ready to carry on reconstituted as New Order.

(6} fangrrrl.blogspot.com/2007/10/sister-midnight.html
(7) http://www.side-line.com/interviews_comments.php?id=23440_0_16_0_C
(8) =”http://www.amazon.co.uk/Touching-Distance-Ian-Curtis-Division/dp/0571207391/ref=sr_1_2/026-7793081-6048466?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192899908&sr=1-26048466?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192899908&sr=1-2
(9) Directed by Michael Winterbottom in 2002, and (while heavily featuring Joy Division) more the story of Factory Records.
(10) Assuming the film is faithful to Deborah’s book the character she seems least even-handed with is herself, time and again she’s portrayed as a doormat.
(11)Though the song doesn’t appear in the film, the psychological blood-and-circuses of Atrocity Exhibition would seem to contain Curtis’ most explicit doubts about the inherent exhibitionism of his career direction: “For entertainment they watch his body twist/ Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist.'”
(12)It should be conceded the Annik scenes do suffer from the film being based on Deborah’s book. The film scrupulously avoids portraying her as some clichéd femme fatalle yet, even more than his
time with the band, his moments with her were conducted away from Debbie. There’s a consequent extemporising, as they attempt to cut her a character out of little cloth.
(13) Anyway, is this ‘explanation’ quite the rosebud it appears? While it may account for Atmosphere or Love Will Tear Us Apart, how does it explain away Decades or Dead Souls? Curtis’ depression came to be a dark prism through which he came to see the surrounding world, and this is precisely what makes the music so worth listening to. Art is no mere mirror to life, and reductive and schematic approaches to it need not apply.
(14) Strictly Campbell’s argument was confined to the unemployed, jobless Northern males unable to confirm their identity in the classical way, stuck in the women’s world of the home. Nevertheless, there is a parallel.