You
know what they always said about the Sixties? That if you could
remember them you weren't there? Whereas with Eighties, it's those
who want to remember them who weren't there. There was not a whole
lot to do back then, except to wait for dole cheques to arrive or the
internet to be invented. Plus there were only four TV channels, so
instead we used to form bands. Some people said they did this as a
means of protest against the Thatcherite tyranny which pedagogically
imposed itself upon our lives. But I think the real reason was that
it was something to do with your hands. For example, I myself had two
hands and I was in two bands. It all went something like this...
The
best way to describe my first combo might be via the famous Buzzcocks
lyric: “We came from nowhere/ And we're heading straight back
there.” Fair enough in itself. But we figured we could cut out that
whole middle man.
'Liverpool
Explodes', a chronicle of punk history in that fair city,
had just come out and been read enthusiastically by myself and my pub
drinking mates. It recounted a scene built around a central notion,
that music was only of any real use as a jumping-off point for daft
art projects and Dadaist provocations. So practitioners would
endlessly configure and reconfigure into outfits with an absurd and
ludicrous name, some absurd and ludicrous stage attire and perform
under some over-arching absurd and ludicrous concept. This was to be
performed for one night only, then everyone involved was expected to
start from scratch again. Any variance from this was, in the parlance
of the day, “rockist”. Bands that tried to go on to do a second
gig would be met by punk picket lines.
We
considered this and decided it was a bit extreme. But only a bit, and
that was where we came in. The weak link was clearly that first gig
business. Cut that out and you remove even the possibility of a band
performing a second. Problem over. So we formed a band with the
concept that the less we actually did the truer to
the purity of our vision we were. We'd sit around and discuss what
sort of band we might be, in the most abstract and conceptual terms
we could muster. We'd ponder, for example, the prospect of our having
a name. Not, I hope you understand, consider names for possible use.
Most certainly not! Instead we'd consider whether considering the
possibility of a name was a violation of our most vital principle or
not. Then not decide anything. Then buy more drinks.
We
weren't, you see, part of the system like bands who had names and
instruments assigned to individual members, or for that matter
agreement on who those individual members might be. Instead our
philosophy was, if you're not doing something you could
be doing anything – inactivity sets you free. It was only much
later I discovered that, thinking along similar lines, the Residents
had figured the way their new album would sound the best would be to
give it a release date of never. Everyone was then at liberty to just
imagine the way they wanted it to sound. They based this on the
Theory of Obscurity devised by N Senada, a
Bavarian music theorist who they had made up.
Besides
most bands never rise above the level of pub talk anyway, never get
as far as all the sweaty business of lugging amps to rehearsals or
the writing stuff down involved in booking gigs. So we already had
those music-making bands outnumbered. If we kept
up the not doing anything, we might be bringing the whole music
industry to a grinding halt. Our way was clearly better. Mostly
through being easier.
We
kept this up on successive Saturday nights for many months. When I
think back, it was our earlier work which was the best. In the
beginning it was all about the not making any music, and later that
just seemed to change somehow…
My
second band were formed after I'd moved to Brighton, out of the
inhabitants of my student house. You could still get grants in those
days, and perhaps reflecting such enhanced purchasing power this time
we had instruments. I suppose what I should have done is invite my
original bandmates to come down to Brighton and picket one of our
sessions. But alas I didn't think of that until just now.
Some
of these were even musical instruments - an
acoustic guitar, an electric bass, a harmonica and drums. Though by
strict definiton the drums were really the pots and pans from the
kitchen. And this distinction came to light when the poor soul who
had to share the house with us came in to say he was in full support
of our musical endeavours, but could he at least have a couple of
pans to make his tea with. We complied and left that bit on the
session tape. To cut it out would have been commercial.
In
fact so far had I come on my musical journey that we even had a name
– The Search for Gravity Waves, the title of a Physics textbook
which sat on the shelf. We were supposed to take a different name
from a different textbook for each different session, but somehow the
Search for Gravity Waves stuck. Perhaps it was just too good a name
to pass over. Or perhaps we were just too damn lazy to look a bit
further down the shelf.
I
was chief vocalist and songwriter. I expect we decided that to not be
commercial. If it was that, it bloody worked. My material ranged from
surrealist imagery to social realism to stuff I'd just made up. We
were particularly proud of 'Everybody Does the Washing Up in
Hollingdean Terrace', a salute to the excess cleanliness of
our humble abode.
Our
tracks were played on the local radio. But only because we played
them. We talked ourselves into a slot on the student radio station,
where we'd play the work of our musical heroes then our own stuff,
and defy people to tell the difference. Nobody could. Probably
because they weren't listening in the first place. But the point
still stood.
Our
model this time wasn't Liverpool punk but the Velvet Underground.
They hadn't been popular in their day, but their music had later
become highly influential. So if we were even more
unpopular – and in our case even we didn't think
we were any good – then it followed logically we'd go on to have an
even more legendary status. We were destined for greatness, that much
was obvious.
Now
it may be objected at this point that Search for Gravity Waves are
yet to achieve greatness. As you might have noticed, we seem
strangely absent from Eighties nostalgia shows. But I reckon we still
might make it. In fact, now I come to think of it, the pension plan
is pretty much dependent on that...
What
happened to hip-hop... sometimes I feel it could break my heart.
Pioneering bands like Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan audaciously
tore music apart and reassembled it in a different order, to the
point where it felt there was no real putting it back together again.
They unleashed rule-breaking sonic assemblages which should by any
rights have sounded insanely cacophonous but for some inexplicable
reason always pulled together.
But
all that innovation just led to the likes of Puff Daddy (or whatever
he's called this week), rhyming badly about how many consumer
durables he either owns or has for sale over some randomly chosen
cheesy disco track. It went from the sonic equivalent of graffiti
art, colourful unexpected and transformative, to the plain tagging
of a wall.
I
suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Nothing is more conservative than a
failed revolution. And perhaps it's no different to the Beatles and
the Stones “influencing” Oasis. But the result is that I tend to
treat hip-hop the same way I do black metal. I love the idea of it,
but so rarely do I take to any actual examples I figure I'm better
off sticking with the idea.
Cannibal
Ox, for example, get labelled 'underground hip-hop' when they are surely the truer
inheritors of the great Wu-Tang tradition. Yet as Christopher Dare said in Pitchfork they're in many ways
“like a musical negative, an inverse reflection of hip-hop history,
full of everything DJ's cast aside, from Sega sound effects to
electro-industrialism, gear-work grooves malfunctioning, synthesizers
belching, a menagerie of digitalia.”
Like
both Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan, they hail from New York and
make urban music. Not in the marketing sense of 'made by black people
and therefore most likely edgy', but reflecting the urban
environment. Their classic, and until very recently only, album
'The Cold Vein' is dedicated to “New York City,
the Mecca of Hip-hop” and seems inspired less by music history than
by a walk around the city block.
Marshalling
the insistent force of repetitive beats may inherently evoke the
urban environment, as in the otherwise quite different Godflesh. Pere Ubu named an album
'Dub Housing' after seeing a street on repeat,
repetitive beats evoke repetitive landscapes. But as William
Burroughs said the city is itself like a real-world collage, things
thrown together randomly and ever-shiftingly, and the lyrical
logorrhea and sonic assemblage of Cannibal Ox's music takes in both.
'Cold
Vein' slips from one line to the next between the social
realism of streetwise ghetto tales, grandiosely science fiction
images and Marvel comics references, never giving you the chance to
catch up. (It's bizarre but not all that unusual for New York natives
use both the real and the media image of city equally for
inspiration, like one accentuates rather than dispels the other.) Its
New York is a “rotten apple... evil at its core” and an Iron
Galaxy, described by the somewhat excellently named Sumo Kaplunk as "like a wildlife
documentary on the concrete jungle seen from an alien perspective”.
The lyrics seem at once stream-of-consciousness surrealism (Vast Aire
getting mid-way through one track, commenting he “used a word
twice”, and going back to the start with a substitute term) and
some fully fledged Burroughsian mythology, released in cut-up and
piecemeal fashion.
“Now
the environment's a product of me” they rap audaciously on 'Ox
Out the Cage' (not alas, a track they perform live), which
may be the key to the whole thing. It's like they've got a rhyme to
counter every brick and body in the city, and figure they might as
well set the lot off at once. A
while ago we looked at the way George Bellows’ turn-of-the-century paintings of New York celebrated “the strenuous life”,
and however different in style Can Ox’s turn-of-the-millennium
music has same spirit to it – the individual in constant conflict
between being crushed down by the mighty city and rising up to meet
it. They become critics and embodiments of the city simultaneously,
and like the city they're describing they're abrasive, overpoweringly
forceful and strangely compelling all at once. Picking it as one of his favourite albums, the Guardian's Dan Hancox called it “the true soundtrack for the end times”. And its one of
those releases that somehow doesn't stop, you can't imagine listening
to and not hearing something new in it.
The
alert reader may notice at this point in the gig review that I have
not said much about the actual live performance. And its perhaps an
irony of hip-hop that it started as a live affair, as a DJ and a
rapper performing in a park, but soon became a studio sound. It
passed quickly from its 'Hard Days Night' era to
its 'Sergeant Pepper'. Part of its collage quality
is to present sounds arranged at different levels, your ears
assaulted from every angle. While a live PA can have a flattening and
blurring effect, like watching a 3D movie without the special
glasses. Indeed when their one-time collaborator, and 'Cold
Vein' producer, El-P was in town I hummed and hawed over
this, and ended up not going.
On
the other hand, rapping is about personality and the interplay of
characters, possibly even more than punk. And its surprising how much
being able to put a face to a voice has transformed the way I listen
to 'Cold Vein'. Vast Aire is like the Chuck D of
the band, an unstoppable force, gesticulatingly working the crowd as
he spins lyrics. Yet Vordul Mega is less Flavour Flav than hip-hop's
Brian Jones, a semi-spectral presence drifting across the stage with
half-closed eyes.
I
have already squirrelled away my ticket to GZA this Autumn, so expect
further reports of live Hip-hop shortly...
Not
from Brighton, but the classic album opener 'Iron Galaxy' from a
Dutch festival on the same tour...
...and
for the sake of comparison the studio version...
TERRY
RILEY
Barbican
Centre, London, Sat 18th July
With
a better claim than most to be the father of Minimalism, any
appearance of the legendary Terry Riley is not something to be passed
up. You would of course be disappointed if he was promising a
programme of his best-loved tracks in note perfect order. But then of
course his freeform methods of creating pretty much make that an
impossibility from the get-go. Instead he's showing up for Station to
Station, a self-styled post-Sixties Happening, where he'll compose a
new piece while in situ (titled 'Bell Station III')
while on view to visitors. And he'll perform it... well, this very
evening. With Riley the unexpected is unsurprising.
And
as he walks on he certainly looks the part, an almost perfect double
for Robert Crumb's Mister Natural, even pressing his hands together
when taking applause. Yet surprise arrives along with the other
players. Minimalism normally operated through small ensembles, agile
guerilla units against the regimented rows of symphony orchestras.
Yet not only do countless players march on stage, they even bring
with them a children's choir.
As
the baton is passed back and forth between a solo Riley and these
amassed ranks, the point of the exercise would seem to be a creative
juxtaposition between the two. Yet the two were so
different it was hard to even contrast them, it felt like two
separate programmes spliced together. Worse, the ensemble's
interruptions served to cut against the all-important mesmerising
quality induced by Riley's performances.
The
ensemble's pieces were palatable enough, the clear children's voices
made them feel almost Christmasy (bizarrely enough for a hot July
day), but in the twinkly rather than the schmaltzy sense. The best
piece matched those freshwater voices against woozy jazz brass,
finding a creative juxtaposition within a piece rather than between
them. Yet overall they weren't especially memorable. If asked blind
to guess their composer I would have suggested Sid Vicious or the guy
who wrote the music for the R Whites lemonade ad before ever coming
up with Riley.
Riley's
solo performances took advantage of their un-ensembled nature to
become more free-form, and were most likely semi-improvised. They
also meshed well with Austin Meredith's film backdrop which, with its
held semi-abstract images, was involving without being
attention-grabbing. He swapped instruments for each piece, and for
his best number took to what I assumed was an electric organ but
discovered later was a synth... well he was playing it like
an electric organ. The notes naturally swirled and clustered around
the instrument, as if making patterns in the air. It bore a
similarity to the classic 'Persian Surgery Dervishes'.
But
his raga singing and prepared piano were listenable yet not
exceptional. Anyone blind-dating the gig, hoping to catch up with
what made Riley so important... well, in all honesty I don't think
they would.
It
might be overtly romantic to expect the man to still be making music
as innovative and captivating as in the days of yore. It might be
verging on contradictory to demand something brand new that also
holds up against past triumphs. At the age of eighty, the remarkable
thing might be he's still producing work at all. And ultimately it
doesn't really matter. Riley's longevity was assured a long time ago,
and proven more fittingly two years ago in this very venue when two separate ensembles
performed two wildly different versions of his classic 'In
C'. Musicians often face a dilemma between enabling new
work to happen or keeping alive the great compositions of the past.
With Riley's indeterminate, unprescriptive scores there's no need for
such concerns. Every time someone plays one of his works it will
sound new.
Events
conspired against my seeing any other Station to Station events. I would have been curious to see Suicide's Punk Mass, keen for Beck and would have loved to see the Boredoms with eighty-eight cymbal players – but
alas events intervened. Whether the whole event truly was a Happening
or merely a festival trading under a more attention-grabbing name,
I'm not really the one to ask. I retain, however, my natural
skepticism. Getting to see rehearsals live seems a bit of a thing
currently (PJ Harvey was also at it earlier in the year), but feels more
like the logical next step from the way everything
– including rehearsal tapes – now gets released. But witnessed
rehearsals doesn't seem very much to do with the 'no audience' spirit
of happenings. I took in two art instillations while at the complex
which were notably not just bad but bad in identical ways –
gimmickry stuffed with New Age platitudes.
A
different performance inside a video instillation in France three
years ago. Only excerpts but sounding distinctly better than the
night I went to...
...plus
some classic back-in-the-day footage, just because it would be
foolish not to...
'The
Great Learning' was composed at the end of the Sixties by
Cornelius Cardew, then the enfant terrible of contemporary music.
Inevitably, an infamous performance of an early version in 1968 (in,
of all places, Cheltenham) led to audience uproar. In violation of
the sanctity of the concert hall there were those who yelled their
disaffection at the stage, only for Cardew to happily defend their
right to protest.
He
was on something of a mission at the time, and it wasn't – at least
not entirely – about causing upset. Stephen Miles has said he “viewed contemporary music increasingly as
the occupation of a highly trained elite, completely removed from the
experience of the general public. Dissatisfied with this situation
for both musical and political reasons... [he] became interested in
music that could bridge the gap between amateurs and professionals….
sought to create music that not only was accessible to amateurs, but
that could be performed by large groups of people.”
It
was created, as described in the programme “for a large number of
trained and untrained musicians which includes singing, speaking,
drumming, playing stones and whistles, performing actions and
gestures, improvising, using conventional and unconventional
instruments and other sound sources.” It was less written for the
legendary experimental ensemble the Scratch Orchestra than the outcome of his work with them – the
teacher was himself learning as he wrote. And indeed, Scratch
Orchestra veterans Dave Smith and Michael Parsons are among the ranks
in this performance.
Its
division into seven “paragraphs” ostensibly comes from its basis
in a Confucian text, but as the above might suggest was also a clear
attempt at deromanticisation, a rejection of poetic 'verses' or
musical 'movements'. Let's take those paragraphs non-chronoligally
here, as they seem to fall into two broad groups.
Cardew
had already fallen under the sway of American minimalism, and
Paragraphs Two and Three are clearly influenced by Terry Riley –
indeterminate scores whose aletaory rules grant the performers a
great deal of freedom in interpretation. Three is even based around a
single note, though A flat rather than Riley's C. In P2 the singers
are based in four groups around a single drummer, all passing through
the same notation but at their own pace. Echoes, unintended harmonies
and resonances thereby pass across the space. The four groups were
(as throughout the night) unamplified, using the natural acoustics of
the venue rather than the wizardry of the mixing desk. The group
nearest me thereby seemed to 'lead', while the effect on others would
have been different. (Other performances have encouraged the audience
to move about the space as a way of varying the sounds. Alas not
practical for a Chapel bedecked with heavy pews.)
I once mentioned how, when I first saw Riley's 'In
C' performed, “it seemed not just musically but even
politically liberating. People don't have to get with the programme,
they're given space to do their own thing - but within loose
structures which allow them to play in accordance... The theme tune
to a free world, sounding different each and every time it's played.”
And that idea, implicit in Riley, is much more out in the open here.
The processes which produce the piece are far more foregrounded, far
more in your face – its a musical and social
manifesto. Plus, P2 in particular is quite savage in tone, quite
different to Riley's quiet transcendentalism. John Tilbury comments
in the programme on “Cardew's commitment to social music-making”.
It
suggests the way collective human activity can mimic the intricate
chaotic patterns of nature. Watch the passage of people across a
crowded station concourse from a high balcony, or the pattern of
dancers at a free party, and its as mesmerising as watching the
babbling of a brook.
Paragraph
One, the source of the outrage at Cheltenham described earlier, is
probably best seen as a cleanser of the palette before the Great
Learning proper can begin. Truth to tell it is overlong and
repetitive, and I could understand someone finding it muesli for the
ears. (Plus, its hard to hear swanee whistles without thinking of
'The Clangers'.) The evening had an early start,
and the multiple latecomers may have had the best of it.
Paragraph
Four, however, was a game of compare and contrast against One. It was
the most Sixties of all the pieces, with its ensemble sat on cushions
under mood lighting. (Though some less limber veterans had to be
supplied with chairs. The Sixties were a long time ago, after all.)
But the particular form of Sixties it took was anti-Sixties. It was
the most ritualised Paragraph of all, starting with a single player
whacking a cushion, a second joining in on the second beat and so on,
passing down the line then repeatedly returning to that origin point.
And with its repeated iterations of the word “discipline”, the
musical strokes became almost a sonic underlining of this word. With
it's keep-to-the-beat rigidity, almost echoing the work songs which
spawned blues, it didn't just venerate discipline but seemed an
exercise in instilling it.
This
insistency felt almost like the antithesis of the Sixties fixation
with freedom, perhaps indicative of that point where many attempted
to transcend bohemian lifestylism by trading it in for sloganistic
militancy. Such a thing was to become as common as sideburns. Cardew
himself adopted self-criticising Maoism, disowning the piece and
instead taking up self-parodic Socialist Realist music for the
masses. (It sounded like this. No, really. It really did.) Of course in retrospect
its obvious enough not just that both the blissed-out hippie and the
order-spewing cadre fail us, but that they're two sides of one coin
that needs throwing out.
However,
things are not so simple. For one, that would leave out the sheer
sense of delight the piece exudes, the keen
awareness of its own absurdity. At the same time as a devotion to
discipline is insisted upon, the text is bent and twisted with each
iteration, to an almost Dadaistic degree.
And
perhaps more importantly, Cardew's later exception to the piece
mainly lay in the Confucian text. True enough, in many ways he was
doing something classically Sixties, assuming a foreign culture
merely reflected his own needs and desires as a Western malcontent.
The text could certainly be called reactionary, for reasons which
needn't concern us here. (And it probably didn't help the translation
came from notorious fascist sympathiser Ezra Pound.) But at the time
the key line for Cardew was “they disciplined themselves”. As he
said “I see such self-discipline as the essential pre-requisite of
improvisation. Discipline is not to be seen as the ability to conform
to a rigid rule structure, but the ability to work collectively with
other people in a harmonious and fruitful way.” The piece (and
'The Great Learning' in general) transmits a
collectivising energy, which creatively counters the
let-it-all-hang-out individualism which plagued so much of the
Sixties counter-culture. The truth is, Cardew was simply a better
communist before formally deciding he was a Communist.
Not
entirely by coincidence, the performers throughout adopted a
particular stance – somewhere between the demonstrative
impassiveness of a Brechtian drama and the trance-state of ritual
initiates. It was a long way both from the performative emoting of
rock musicians and the professionalised sweatless prowess of
classical players.
The
programme talks of Cardew's emerging “belief in the power of music
not as an abstract and specialised pursuit but as a vital and
essential social activity”. And if that's what's coming out of
'The Great Learning', then P4 may well be the most
learned paragraphs of all. Certainly the ritualistic element was
strongest, perhaps ultimately winning out over the music. With all
the Paragraphs a recording wouldn't give you half the picture,
they're something you really need to take in live. With P4 I'm not
sure it would capture any of it at all.
And
yet all this democratising music, all this foregrounding the ritual
element, can it really be happening when the audience stands apart?
With a ritual, shouldn't everyone present become involved? Wouldn't
the swiftest way for us in the aisles to discipline ourselves be to
abandon our pews and surrender to the discipline of the performance?
Stephen Miles raises the question that it might seem “intended
entirely for the performers’ enjoyment, that an audience is
superfluous”, only to dismiss it. I'm not quite so aligned.It
reminded me of something contemporary but from the more popular music
realm – the Soft Machine track
”I
still can’t see why people listen instead of doing it
themselves
But
I'm grateful all the same
You're
very kind and I don't blame you
I
don't mind if you just watch”
When
describing this sort of music, people seem to automatically take to
the term ‘avant garde’. But really, I couldn’t imagine
something less accurate. There's a reliance on drones and held tones,
but little of the dissonance so commonly associated with contemporary
music. P2 and 3 are really quite harmonious. True the indeterminate
nature of the scores make for long durations, which some find
challenging. But that's a matter of finding the right way of
listening to it, which is less to do with listening – in the sense
of mentally minute-taking - than surrendering.
It's not like running a marathon, its like basking in the sun.
Above
all, it’s not like gazing up at a lofty peak, which you imagine one
day you might be able to ascend. It's quite the opposite, as Michael
Nyman commented “it seems to recreate music from its very roots”.
'The Great Learning' is really a programme of
unlearning, a deconditioning process through which
we declog ourselves of all the constraining notions a proprietary
society has instilled in us about music-making. Muesli for the ears?
No, its tasty and its good for you!
The
programme was spread over two evenings. Understandably so, for it
runs to nine hours in all. But alas as I had only the time and means
to attend one, Paragraphs Five to Seven remain unread for me and so I
remain only half-deconditioned. Maybe next time...
…this time in the London Road/ Lewes Road area of town. Some of these snaps have been in the can for a while, so the work's most likely not up any more. This stuff doesn't seem to stick around very long. As ever, full set over on Flickr.
Coming soon! Probably more of this sort of thing. (Well it's finally got warm outside. You don't really expect me to sit indoors writing more nerdy blog posts, do you?)
Happening
to walk past the venue earlier in the day, I found they've recently
placed one of those old-fashioned long white name strips outside. So
the names Irmler and Liebezeit were spelt out to one of Brighton's
busiest streets. And of course most simply trudged straight past.
While to those of us steeped in Krautrock lore those lengthy,
foreign-sounding and entirely unprepossessing names couldn't seem
more enticing. However much it might sound like hyperbole the bands
they stemmed from, Can and Faust, were credible contenders for the
most important band in the history of everything, ever.
How
could you sum up the appeal? The nearest I could manage, at least for
comics fans, would be when Marvel and DC staged the Superman and
Spider-man team-up. It's not just two greats, its two reality systems
coming together. Liebezeit drummed with Can, Zen masters of metronony
who could take a groove to trance states. Meanwhile Irmler played
home-made keyboards plus any number of other invented or extemporised
instruments in a multitudinous collective who brimmed with deranged
invention. Like the Velvets, they could coin and discard musical
styles and ideas which later bands would build careers around. While
Can's method was to boil music down, Faust's was to rip it apart.
While Can's credo was less is more, Faust's was that more could be
more too. Put them together, I wondered, and what do you get?
The
result is perhaps closer to Neu!, the third great Krautrock band,
than either outfit they were in. There's the same sense of music as a
serene, gliding force, as if untroubled by gravity. As is always the
distinction between great and merely good musicians, what they did
didn't seem impressively hard so much as infectiously easy. You felt
they could have continued playing for hours without breaking a sweat
or furrowing a brow. You felt like anyone else cold have got up and
joined in, just through getting swept up in the sheer joy of it.
While
drums often merely provide the base line for other instruments to
jump up and down on, here neither instrument led. When I saw Irmler
earlier this year, accompanied only by a woman drawing, I didn't feel
it that engaging. Yet give him another musician to spark off and the
magic is soon unleashed.
Liebezeit
played ostensibly simple patterns, but subtly shifting throughout.
Jah Wobble has compared his playing to a man running, and for all its
marshalling of the power of repetition there's something very organic
about it. Rolls often kick off with a lift, throwing the emphasis on
their beginning. Rather than dominating Irmler would often pass
through sections of tone and washes, like colour fields. Only for the
last number did he – literally and metaphorically – pull out the
stops for some powerful surges.
Sometimes
you get the feeling people come out to see great musicians from past
eras just to say they've seen them. It's like a form of
commemoration. Not this time. In the small but crowded Hope, the
mesmerising set went down a storm. What are Irmler and Liebezeit
doing these days? More of what they've always done. If that's not
inspirational, I can't imagine what is.
Film reviews are like buses. You wait for ages then two come along at once
A
GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT
Reader,
if you're here to simply ascertain whether you want to see this film
or not, you may wish to stay wary of PLOT SPOILERS which lie in wait
below. There is, however, a swifter means to achieve your end –
simply scan the page and check out some of the stills. The film's
very much a mood piece, with a strong aesthetic and some quite
stunning black-and-white photography – somehow connecting classic
cinema with stylish art movie. If those stills appeal, most likely
the film will too. If they don't, you're probably better off
following your taste buds elsewhere.
With
a film self-styled as 'the first Iranian vampire western', its no
surprise for it to frequently be described as surreal. However, a
more accurate word might be uncanny. Take the central image, captured
in the poster, of the vampire in her chardor. It's simultaneously
jarring and fitting, a spooky echo of the vampire's black cloak,
lacing the usual associations of compliance and confinement with
undercurrents of menace and mystery. It's not an image you find you
can file and put away, it stays, it haunts you. Her sinister
presence, glidingly stalking the streets, is accentuated halfway
through when she starts... yes... skateboarding. It's absurd, it's
laugh-out-loud funny. But crucially, it stays spooky.
Filmed
on location in California with an all-Iranian cast speaking in subbed
Persian, it creates a similarly strangely indeterminate mood. This is
furthered by it being shot in black-and-white, which always tends to
work as a distancing device. You're quite literally never sure where
you are. And temporally its equally indeterminate, flatscreen TVs
existing alongside classic cars and vinyl record players. The
standard recipe for the surreal is the juxtaposition of the familiar
with the unfamiliar, epitomised by Dali's lobster telephone. But here
both elements are defamiliarised, like one
exoticness rubbed up against another. The result is that all figures
look lost in the terrain.
Director Ana Lily Amirpour is herself an Iranian brought up in the
West and now living in California, so we may be seeing things through
the prism of her eyes - a film about outsiders made from the
perspective of an outsider. She's said of the setting:
“It’s
not Iran, it’s like a fairy tale world, it’s universal. It’s
like any town where there’s corruption and there’s secrets and
there’s loneliness and people that got dealt a shit hand. They’re
searching for something in this loneliness. I mean, that’s what I
am and that’s why I made the film. That’s all I really know. I
don’t know how everyone else feels.”
(At
one point the chardor-clad titular Girl is asked where they are and
she replies “Bad City”. The questioner seems familiar with the
name. Yet several reviews and even the Wikipedia entry went on to literal-mindedly declare this
the official name of the town. Which seems to me mistaken. It cuts
against that all-important state of indeterminacy. The term could as
easily be a nickname and its allegorical nature, akin to calling a
city Babylon or Mahogany, is the point.)
Reviews
as frequently cite the Iranian New Wave as an influence, but the New
Wave it recalls more is the French. Americana is framed in a way
which it never could be from inside, while the screen exudes coolness
and composure to a degree Hollywood could never match. Arash, the
other lead character, has a studied rocker look which echoes
Michael's channelling of Humphrey Bogart in Godard's
'Breathless' (compare them below). Actor Arash
Mirandi is now being called by almost everybody the Persian James
Dean.
Given
the prominence of the chardor, and scenes such as the one where the
Girl kills the bullying pimp Saeed, some have been keen to find a
feminist message in the film. Certainly her motivation is partly to
rescue the prostitute he mistreats, and the scene must rank as one of
the most barely symbolic of all symbolic castration scenes in cinema
history. And her very presence often seems accusatory, a sudden
black-clad appearance.
Yet,
confessing at one point she's done “bad things”, she seems like
judgement without the justice. She does seem to have a rule only to
feed on bad men. Yet her morality seems much like the Gemma Arterton
character in 'Byzantium', walking the streets of
Bad City at night is an occupation likely to lead to situations where
'bad' and 'men' run rather easily together. The otherwise superfluous
scene of her feeding off the homeless guy seems there to suggest that
she needs a meal of an evening as much as everyone else - and needs a
good reason not to make you her victim rather than
the other way around. At another point she mimics a potential
victim's movements, like a cat playing with a cornered mouse.
Similarly,
the scene where she frightens a young boy seems creatively ambiguous.
While she could be trying to frighten him onto the straight and
narrow, she could equally be looking for a weakness which would allow
her to make him a victim. Besides she leaves town rather meekly on
Arash's instruction, which would be an odd scene to include in an
avowedly feminist film.
Rather
than having a political message about reclaiming the night, the film
is probably more existential. Characters encounter one another on
empty streets and try – and normally fail – to size each other
up, in a way reminiscent of the existential concept of the Other. It is of course very often women who are
characterised as 'otherly' in this way, and the Girl makes a classic
example. Through staying silent, she allows Saeed to project his own
prejudices onto her, assuming she's yet another prostitute. Notably,
she never gives away her name. (I kept misremembering the title as
”She Walks Home…”, but its the
less personalised, more distanced ”A Girl
Walks...”)
And
yet while we learn neither her name nor her backstory we do see her
at home alone, dancing like no-one's looking, without her chardor. We
even see her in the tub, surely the most un-vampiric of all
activities. The one way the 'crusader' element of the character works
is that the chardor is something like a superhero costume, like
Batman striking dread in the hearts of criminals. And the girl inside
the costume is something more vulnerable, more human.
The
nearest we get to a self-description is when she goes to see the
prostitute, Atti, and gives her the watch she's purloined from Saeed
– confirming he's dead. Asked who she is, she's unresponsive. But
with everything she then says to Atti in description of her - that
she is growing older, that at one time she imagined she could escape
this life, that she has since forgotten to hope – she is describing
herself as well. Notably, both women have maps on their walls –
signifying a will to escape. Amirpour has said the film's “really a story about battling
loneliness. And vampires are the loneliest.”
And
all this talk of existentialism, it's probably a way of saying the
vampire western is at heart a love story. All the supernatural
elements are merely there to amplify this. Even the Girl's age
signifies that she's been young for the longest time, like some dark
sibling to Peter Pan, adding more pop star posters to her wall as the
decades passed. And her mysteriousness, her meaningful silences, the
sense she's possessed of strange powers - that's pretty much how
girls seem to a teenage boy.
When
she meets Arash on the street he's off his head and lost, on his way
home from a party. It was fancy dress and, in a typically witty
inversion, he's gone as Dracula. Finding her (naturally enough) cold
he wraps her in his cloak to warm her. It's a reversal of the classic
Dracula lunge, when he is if anything the one in danger. The goofy
costume becomes the ironic counterpoint to his inner goodness and,
rather than making him another victim, she takes him home like a
stray.
(Some
reviewers have described Arash as a drug dealer. Yet while we do see
him selling drugs at the party he's simply helped himself to Saeed's
stash to get over his cash shortage. He doesn't even charge the girls
for the pills he gives them. Clearly when they then insist he takes
one himself its his first time – hence he has so strong a reaction.
Rather than making him cocky and strutting like the coke-sniffing
Saeed, drugs make him helpless and child-like.)
Its
their encounters, not the Girl's vampire attacks, which are the crux
of the film. The most trite, most cliched scenes from any movie here
become the most memorable. On their dates they stay awkwardly yet
meaningfully silent, standing before pounding oil derricks or roaring
diesel trains. They communicate mostly by playing music, at the age
where it feels more natural to put on a record than speak your mind.
Notably all the music in the film is diegetic, played by characters
within the film. The characters wrap themselves up in tracks like
garments, the music working something like the thought balloons in
comic strips.
They're
at the age where you become aware the self can only have meaning by
relation to the other, and so the existence of the other is a
necessity – they have to be there just for you to be you. And yet
the other seems inscrutable, remote, removed. Even love is ambiguous,
whether its a means to bridge the divide or whether it just heightens
the problem. The basic elementary question of how one person related
to another becomes foregrounded, raised to a fever pitch.
The
significance of possessions is also tied up with this. When asked by
Atti if she's a thief, the Girl replies no. Yet several times over we
see her takes her victims' belongings, and in this very scene she has
Saeed's. However at no other point does she lie, and it doesn't sound
as if she's doing so here. For here possessions have no exchange
value (only Saeed is seen dealing in money), they're more tokens of
identity, the way a crown bestows regalness or a badge authority. And
transference of objects transfers this power. Yes, the Girl takes
Saeed's expensive watch but only to give it to Atti, to symbolise she
can now control her own life. Saeed takes Arash's car, ostensibly as
payment for his father's debt, but clearly to belittle and disenpower
him. Even Arash steals some earrings from a rich girl he has the hots
for, but gives them to the Girl, piercing her ears and attaching them
himself. They represents the transfer of attraction.
That
other great staple of young love stories, the generation gap - here
its more of a generation rupture. Arash's father becomes angry when
he hears he has been with the Girl, an absurd burst of morality from
a man so fixated with prostitutes. But its best captured in the
role-reversal scene where Arash throws him out the house for bad
behaviour. This sets up events which cause him to forcibly attempt to
inject Atti with drugs, then be killed by the Girl in her defence.
Coming to realise this as they drive out of town Arash stops, gets
out of the car and paces. She has killed the pimp to liberate Atti
and the father to protect her, but in so doing liberated Arash
instead. He then gets back in the car, silently puts on a tape and
drives off.
It
would be tempting to take this acceptance and see the story as
redemptive, as about a killer of men who instead learns to love and
make a life with one. Yet this ignores the crucial theme, running
right through the film, of addiction. Arash's father is addicted to
smack and prostitutes, Saeed literally to coke but more generally to
power and dominance. Even the young boy is always popping sweets.
While for Arash and the girl, their addiction is one another. In this
way she doesn't abandon vampirism for love, their affair is more a
mutual form of vampirism. The love scene where she first takes Arash
back to her flat, where they simultaneously devour and offer
themselves to each other, spells this out with images.
Seen
in this way the ending is characteristically ambiguous. They're less
making a new life outside Bad City, a place which doesn't seem likely
to be festooned with labelled exit routes, than they are swapping one
set of addictions for another. (In Arash's case, life with the father
versus life with the Girl.) Perhaps they are simply removing all
that's extraneous to be left with their primary addiction. It's
teenage romance in its purest form, looking for your reflection in
another's eyes.
And
from the ridiculously sublime to the sublimely ridiculous... (We don't just throw this show together, you know.)
MAD
MAX: FURY ROAD
Once
more with the PLOT SPOILERS
Let's
start this review the way the film does - by cutting to the chase.
This belated yet gazumping entry in the Mad Max series does exactly
what it says on the lid. Which is to say there's a guy called Max in
it and it's mad. It's an almost continuous white-knuckle ride,
frothing with deranged invention. In the Guardian Peter Bradshaw called it “Grand
Theft Auto revamped by Hieronymus Bosch”. Personally I'd have gone
for “an ultraviolent 'Wacky Races' filtered
through punk and surrealism”. But either work. There's images which
genuinely almost reach Bosch levels, delirious and compelling.
In
one scene some of the characters handily supply their motivation in a
single word. As most of them share the same motivation, there's
really only two words to learn. Yet what might seem risible is
actually the way to go. When action films make feints to
characterisation, in the English Lit sense of the term, the result is
usually neither/nor. It's like interrupting a roller-coaster ride for
a psychobabble feelgood session. Here there's no pretence there's any
hidden depths to the characters, everything happens on the surface.
Significantly director George Miller chose to storyboard the film rather than script it, working with the comic artist Brendan McCarthy – regarded (at least
by me) as one of comics' most singular visionaries. Miller's
commented he wanted a film comprehensible to foreign audiences even
without subtitles. (Perhaps just as well, for my middle-aged ears
lost much of the dialogue to those roaring car engines.) You read the
film via the look, the style, the images. The way you'd read a comic
strip. Or, for that matter, look at a Bosch painting.
In
this post-apocalyptic setting, does the villain Immortan Joe
represent a return to the pre-civilization world of the patriarchal
tribe, while Max and his mates keep the flame of civilization
flowing? In short, are we being told our world can be down but never
out? Its true, labour power (as opposed to the
looting of predatory gangs) is largely absent from the film. As a
natural resource being hoarded by Joe, water is simultaneously scarce
and abundant. There doesn't even seem much reason for him to be
keeping alive those ragged peasants (alas another passive mass in a
multiplex movie), other than to demonstrate his tyranny.
Yet
Maher also foregrounds “the battle cry of
Joe’s escaped wives: 'we are not things'.” Which seems selective,
for their other quote, “who broke the world?”, hangs just as
heavily over the film. With the machines largely gone, remaining
merely as a residue, it's people who have become both machines and
their fuel. Women are farmed for baby milk, Joe's wives kept in a
vault of a room like prize jewellery. But the pallid flesh of Joe's
War Boys is also shown manning the dark cogs of the lift to his
Citadel, human grease to the gears.
You
could tie yourself in knots trying to figure what the social system
represented is. Patriarchal tribalism? An all-commodifying
neoliberalism, in which this is our future even if you take
ecological disaster out of the equation? Primitive accumulationism?
(Probably the most likely answer, but hardly a multiplex movie
staple.) Or some other thing? All these answers overlook that this is
a film composed of images. And the images are of divine right and the
machine age coexisting. They're deliberately juxtapositional, tourist
viewfinders pressed into service as security devices. But the point
is that they can and do fit together.
And
Joe's sermon to his flock? “Do not, my friends, become
addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its
absence!” This may be a singularly British response, but its hard
not to think of one of George Osborne's budget statements about
austerity. Joe bears a remarkable resemblance to Bane from 'Dark Knight Rises'. (Check 'em out below.) And like Bane's Gotham,
there's an ambiguity to his domain. But its horror resides in its
recognisability.
Maher
is on stronger ground when he criticises an anti-patriarchy that
confines itself to escape from a harem. When Joe points to a pregnant
wife on the run and cries “that's my property!”, its hilariously
monstrous. But it's as archaic as the chastity belts we see them
remove. It bears little relation to patriarchy as we find it, you
can't imagine someone saying anything like it in the Western world
today. (Though of course what's unsayable isn't necessarily what's
unthinkable.) Joe contrasts with someone like the 'Gotham'
villain the Ogre, a charismatic metropolitan who seduces women back
to his pad, then chillingly makes them into his possessions. Of
course its heightened for the sake of the drama. But his behaviour is
connected to a recognisable real-life type, the possessive boyfriend,
while Joe is simply a panto menace unmoored to our lives.
Maher
says sardonically of Max “with the collapse
of society, our only hope resides in the individual... the lone
hero”. Yet in his narration Max comments “it was hard to
tell who was more crazy... me... or everyone else”. In the early
stages of the film he's a classic example of a man without a mission,
floundering and getting himself captured as a result. The ghosts he
sees of relations past don't spur him on to fight for justice in a
barren land, they beset him. At all the wrong times. And it remains a
singular feature of the film how Tom Hardy's Max is so un-matinee
idol. True he repeatedly performs the actions of the hero. But
there's no pithy one-liners, no victory-through-handsomeness
close-ups. He seems mad in the more common sense of the word, rather
than the righteously vengeful.
The
word which strangely seems to be missing from all this is 'family'.
I'll take Maher's Jesus comparisons and counter with a Dad. Max is
more the reluctant father who steps up to do his duties. He and
Furiosa become honorary parents to Joe's escaped five wives, the
family unit held against the tribal horde. The escape scene where
Furiosa drives as he lies astride the bonnet, pouring petrol into the
tank, seems their bond in microcosm. (Is it pushing it too far to
point out their initials also stand for Mother and Father? Probably,
but I seem to be saying it anyway.)
Maher
rightly calls the film “a classical Hollywood western”. As much
as his comparison of 'The Searchers' it recalls
Ford's 'Stagecoach', the lone coach trying to keep
to the straight line against the amassed, whooping Indians. But it as
often, and perhaps more inventively, appropriates the tropes of
sea-battle cinema. In this dried-out world, the desert has become the
new sea. The cars almost have sails, which amass on the horizon. When
they arrive they torpedo Furiosa's tanker with harpoons like whale
hunters, swing aboard while its still in motion like pirates. While a
prisoner, Max is tied to the front of a car like a human figurehead.
And
another sea battle trope is the symbolic association of the Captain
with the ship. While Max commandeers other vehicles at numerous
points, Furiosa sticks firmly behind the wheel of the tanker. (Only
abandoning it for a motorbike when she's considering going
off-quest.) As the tanker is pierced in the battle, she is stabbed in
the side. To aid their escape, Max has to both pour gas in the tank
and give her a blood transfusion. In a film which avoided computer
graphics wherever it could, her metal arm necessitated it's use in
almost every scene she appears. So why include it? To underline the
symbiotic relationship between her and her vehicle.
And
associated with this is the hiding of the five
wives in the hold. This is partly to get the film off to the required
running start, bypassing explicatory and redundant scenes of how
Furoisa got them out or decided to risk the run. But also the belly
of the tanker is by association her belly, and
when they emerge – the first time in the film we see them - it's a
symbolic birth. (One emerges already impregnated by Joe, as if born
pregnant. But this merely underlines the symbolism by irony.)
When
Max first sees the five wives they're hypersexualised, washing
themselves while wearing very little – the subject of a myriad
model photoshoots. They're played, more or less, by models, so
there's little point in pretending they're not used as eye candy. But
their presence, after both a battle and a sand storm, is also
incongruous. They're equally like water nymphs, spirits seemingly
appearing out of nowhere. Of course, as has to be established by
repeated cut-tos, their honorary father Max has to react merely to
the incongruity. (He's puzzled, get it? Puzzled.)
But if we're invited to see them sexually, we also see them his way.
If they're models they're Marilyn models, with an innocence to them.
The
conceit is that the harem has offered them a paradoxical kind of
protection from the outside. The big bad world, which has rubbed
itself all over Max and Furiosa, hasn't touched them yet, however
often Joe got his grubby hands on them. Furoisa tells them this
explicitly. Seeing what's around her, one repeatedly toys with the
idea of going back to the devil she knows.
In
this way they can be as innocent as children, even as they're
themselves bearing children. They wear white. Some have semi-angelic
names like the Splendid Angharad. They can believe they're going to
the Green place, they can pray, they can disdain killing.
Unsurprisingly the Green place itself turns out to be long despoilt.
But they pick up and keep the bag of seeds given them. In effect,
they are the Green place of the film. The answer
to “who killed the world?” is of course the same as to “who
killed the Kennedys?” - we're all implicated. So its asked by the
most clear-cut representation of the next generation.
It
can at times involve fuzzy logic. At one point Nux, a War Boy gone to
their side, points to a tree. He doesn't know what to call it,
despite widespread foraging in this wasteland he's not seen one
before. Yet faith in the Green place means the Wives do, even if
they've never been to the non-existant place and have previously had
less cause to see one than him. Nevertheless its a paradox which
perhaps rests on an inherent feature of polygamous patriarchy, which
almost inherently blurs the distinction between wife and daughter.
However,
Max and Furoisa's job isn't just to deliver this cargo. They start
off as hope without agency allied with agency without hope. But the
trip mixes the two up, the Wives aiding more and more in their own
rescue. One even gets a putative boyfriend in Nux, they grow up fast
in these parts. While those with survival skills start to see
something to survive for. Like all road trips in films, this is part
pilgrimage.
If
there's been a lot of talk about the sexual politics of this film (improbably reaching the pages of the Daily Mail), you are frankly best
off forgetting all of that. It does worse than getting in the way.
Championing the film as some kind of feminist manifesto undoes what
is otherwise it's best and boldest move, the way Furiosa is simply
assumed to be a strong and capable character with no further
explanation considered necessary. In the New Statesman, Tracy King titled her review 'No,
Mad Max: Fury Road is not a feminist masterpiece (but that’s
OK)'. And it is. Once you start to prod and poke at them the
politics aren't all that progressive. In many ways they're
reactionary. But it was ever thus. Instead focus on what the film is
good at. Instead think of 'Wacky Races' crossed
with Hieronymus Bosch...
