“Bexhill!” bellows main man Mike
Scott at the climax of their first number. Mischievously aware that
this is not the most rock'n'roll word to shout. But the gag turns out to
be double-edged.
Last time they played these halls it was to revisit the classic
album 'Fisherman's Blues'. Their best-known era
consisted of Celtic folk with a side-order of Americana. This set
starts, closes and is dominated by new numbers. (Not just taking up
over a third of the set, but front-loaded in the running order.)
Last time, I made a gag about a
Scotsman, an Englishman and an Irishman getting together. This time
every member of the band, bar Scott and the fiddle of stalwart Steve
Wickham, is a Yank. While the latest album, 'Modern
Blues', was recorded in Nashville. An album which may well
be best described by the band's own website, as “an electric,
soulful, bold, freewheeling rock'n'roll record with a skinful of
killer new songs”. The jacketed bass player looks remarkably like a
solicitor from small-town Surrey, and makes John Entwistle look a
master of stage moves. Yet he turns out to be David Hood, from the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section the Swampers.
In short, Scott truly is
bringing rock'n'roll to Bexhill. A band who should have long since
been stuck on cruise control come up with the most kick-ass, rootsy
rock'n'roll you've heard in a long time. “I'm still a freak,”
Scott sings. “I never went straight.” Wheezy, swirly organ
suffuses each track, sounding like a log fire feels – like being
bathed in warmth. Almost every number goes into a wig-out
instrumental section, which gets unhinged even by Waterboys
standards.
Even when they turn to old numbers,
they get swept up in this new fervour. 'Medicine Bow,
stirring and expansive in the original, is now fiery and propulsive.
Then, in a fiddle-dominated coda, turns into something from the
Cale-era Velvets. They even do the double from their last appearance,
and provide the second time I've actually liked the hit
'Glastonbury Song'. In fact its the more
traditional version of 'Whole of the Moon' which
doesn't quite spark up.
Perhaps the most crucial thing is that,
even as it proudly wears the influence of the great music of the past
to the point of name-checking influences, its never referential.
Scott is simply taking the music he likes and making more of it.
Reviewing the album in the equally rock'n'roll Telegraph, Neil McCormick suggests
“Scott is perhaps the closest thing we have to a Neil Young figure
in British music, ranging across folk, blues and country.” And he
probably is.
Its one thing to see a longstanding
band and be cheered they're still coming up with decent material. Its
another to walk out thinking “these guys should really
be planning a live album right now. This stuff needs getting down.”
Scott's mission to take rock'n'roll to
unlikely places continues with this version of 'Still A
Freak' from Brussels...
...plus, from Bexhill itself,
Fisherman's Blues' for the encore. With added
“whoo-ho-hoos” from the audience...
...well the West, and partly the North coast of the Isle of Wight. Hendon Warren (just north of the Needles), the Yar marshes and Yarmouth to be precise. As always, full set over on Flickr.
If I haven't seen Godspeed live for
something like a decade and a half, I'm not being quite as tardy as
normal. They were, after all, on hiatus for eight of those years.
On that last sighting my analogy for
their sound had been the workings of an American football team.
(Though I'm not even sure if they play American football in Canada.)
The enlarged ensemble divided into two teams; the acoustic and
classical instruments would lull you in, before passing the ball to
the electric section who'd take up and run away with it. (Think for
example of the early track 'East Hastings'.)
Whereas at this gig they had a string
section of one, violinist Sophie Trudeau. (Though a double bass
appeared from time to time.) And instead there's... count 'em... two
drummers, two bassists and no less than three guitarists. These days
tracks more commonly start somewhere between a drone and a wall of
sound, the piece then gradually emerging like a sculptor hammering
away at a block. Tracks were less neatly divided into sections, more
likely to morph and blend, to surge rather than develop. On more
recent recordings the patented sampled vocals were less predominant
and tended to be more incorporated into the music than floating above
it. (Considerably less dominant in the gig, which featured precisely
one vocal sample all evening.)
(In a side-note for music
trainspotters, though the setlist contained only two pre-hiatus tracks it doesn't
seem to have been the long gap which caused the musical change. The
pre-gap album 'Yanqui UXO' (2002) was already
transitional. While the comeback album 'Allelujah! Don't
Bend! Ascend!' (2012) comprised material which they'd
already been playing live pre-hiatus, suggesting they merely picked
up where they'd left off. The actual shift was marked, but by the
promotion of the exclamation mark from the end to the middle of their
name, a bit! like this Though what that's got to do with anything I
couldn't tell you.)
In short, they've dropped the
nouveau-classicism to become more sonically adventurous. Though some
still insist Godspeed are a prog band in disguise as something more
contemporary, there's really very little soloing and a great deal of
ensemble playing. I am not normally at all curious over the mechanics
of music, but was so often unable to conceive how they were conjuring
up their sound I took to closely watching people's fingers. (It
didn't help much.)
With their long-duration tracks
containing dynamic contrasts, describing their sound as 'apocalyptic'
is a little like describing Motorhead as 'loud'. On the other hand,
it would be difficult to write about Motorhead without mentioning
that they're loud... Back in the Eighties, some on the religious
right attempted to negate the threat of nuclear annihilation by
conflating it with the Biblical notion of the Rapture. (As if the
Godly would somehow get saved from the fallout.) We'd cite this as
proof of their rabidness, their nuclear apocalypse sounded to us like
the very definition of a bad idea.
Godspeed picked up on this theme,
the afore-mentioned 'East Hastings' even starting
with a recording of a blood-and-thunder street preacher. But they
were part of a shift towards embracing the notion, towards what some
called 'the ambiguous apocalypse'. This went back to the original
paradox of the word, with its connotations of both annihilation and revelation. You're never sure whether
Godspeed's tumultuous sound is of something collapsing or being built
up, or even if there's that much difference between the two.
Guitarist and quite possibly band
founder Effrim Menuck had this to say about their sound: “We hated… privileging
of individual angst, we wanted to make… a joyous, difficult noise
that acknowledged the current predicament but dismissed it at the
same time. A music about all of us together or not at all... For us
every tune started with the blues but pointed to heaven near the end,
because how could you find heaven without acknowledging the current
blues, right?”
As a chiefly instrumental band known to
have strong political views (for example including
a diagram on an album cover of the connection between the
mainstream music business and the arms industry), Godspeed's output
has led to the strange pursuit of pinning specific tracks to specific
topics. This one's about the Intifada, that one's about the black
bloc, and so on. Yet even were it to turn out a specific track had
been composed about cuts to tax credits or the closure of a local
library, that would really seem to miss the point.
As ever, Godspeed played beneath a film
show. (With projectionist Karl Lemieux even considered an official
band member.) And while this does include images of protests and the
like, it more often shows fragmentary and semi-abstract images of
urban spaces, or simply projections of the filmstrip itself. And
that's almost a clue for how to hear their music – as something
less specific than universal. As Mark Richardson said in Pitchfork: “Godspeed's music works so
brilliantly because it can be abstracted and scaled, blown up into an
edifice that towers over a continent or shrunk down to something that
feels at home in a bedroom.”
Below the film show, the band played in
similarly low lighting to Asian Dub Foundation the previous night.
Prior to the performance, they milled about on stage setting up
equipment, looking like a bunch of laid-back hippies uninterested in
showbiz entrances. Yet during the show they never spoke or even
seemed mindful of the audience, frequently playing facing one another
and with their backs to us. Particularly with the closing howlaround
of feedback, it was sometimes quite hard to work out when you should
be applauding! It led to quite a unique atmosphere, neither like the
formalised interactiveness of a 'gig' or the hushed attentiveness of
a 'recital'. 'Ritual' sounds too pious, too Churchy a term, but is
the closest I can come up with for now.
From Paris...
'THX 1138' WITH LIVE SOUNDTRACK BY
ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION
Brighton Dome, Tues 27th
October
(Officially, this one features
PLOT SPOILERS. Though anyone who's ever seen an SF dystopia need not
be too concerned...)
A new 'Star Wars'
film may be in the offing. At least, I think I read about that
somewhere. So what better time for to revisit its opposite pole,
George Lucas' first film – 'THX 1138' from 1971?
(Which, with maximum irony given his later career turn, even starts
with a parodic excerpt from 'Buck Rogers'.) The
studio were aghast to see they'd invested in something so bleak and
what's worse so arty, and did their best to bury
it. Though even among the critics many reacted with hostility, and
the film really only gained its reputation in retrospect. This was
the highpoint of Lucas as an auteur.
The Seventies were of course not short
of dystopian SF dramas. And plot-wise, it's an unashamed mash-up of
dystopias already mapped, the numbers-not-names of 'We',
the surveillance state and productivism of 'Nineteen
Eighty-Four', the pill-popping of 'Brave New
World', the don't-try-this-at-home porn-fixated public of
'Year of the Sex Olympics'... and probably more.
But despite such blatant borrowing it remains highly resonant.
For one thing, its not a film that
really draws its meaning from plot or dialogue so it doesn't matter
much where it got them from. Present its scenario next to the later
'Logan's Run' (1976) and they'd seem very similar,
though it resembles that film in no meaningful sense whatsoever.
Instead its substance is there on the surface. As Roger Ebert, one of the few contemporary critics to actually get the film, said “the movie's strength is not in its story but in its
unsettling and weirdly effective visual and sound style.”
Firstly, and most unmissably, there’s
the sheer unadulterated whiteness of everything.
This may even be the film which launched the fad for white as a
signifier of the futuristic. (Though there were the hotel room scenes
in ’2001’.) Whiteness stands for purity and
goodness; in 'A Matter of Life and Death' (1946)
Heaven was depicted in radiant white, in 'The Man in the
White Suit' (1951) it manages to stand for both the
futuristic and the innocent.
Yet its also a sign of artificiality.
The whiteness gives a hospital antiseptic sheen and a valium calm
which permeate the film. Perhaps best summed up by the android cops
whose modulated voices reiterate “we only want to protect you”,
even to those they're beating.
But what kind of
artificiality? Though set in the entirely artificial environment of
an underground city, it was shot on location (in airports and civic
centres) rather than in built sets. The initial motive for this was
most likely financial. (The film was made for a pittance, with the
repeated dialogue references to budgetary constraints surely an
in-joke.) The viewer soon finds they can tell stage sets from
location footage on sight. Yet here we can't pin what we see to
either real or constructed, instead it occupies some uncanny valley
between the two.
Further, while something like the city
in 'Metropolis' (1927) is grand and distant, here
it's all too credible – even recognisable. If, like most of us,
you're an urban dweller, you pass every day through places which look
something like that. In fact our world now looks more like the film
than when the film was made. No terrible take-over or grand disaster
would have to come along to push us into that place. Its more that
something would need to happen to stop us slipping into it. (The
tag-line of the original poster was “the future is here”.)
And this recognisability is juxtaposed
with a highly elliptical editing style, which makes events
anti-involving. (To the extent that I initially worried the band had
re-edited the film to fit their soundtrack. In fact they had the good
taste to show the original, not Lucas'
adulterated “Director's cut”.) With the low-key
performances and the almost perpetual background chatter, it's shot
almost like a documentary. (It might work very effectively with no
soundtrack at all.)
Further still, the ceaseless borrowing
from other dystopias becomes virulent rather than just derivative –
like we're in the worst of all possible worlds. This was made in the
Cold War era, albeit with the first glimmerings of detente, when it was almost obligatory for dystopias to make explicit which
side of the iron curtain they were targeting. Here the unisex
uniforms, the fetish for productivism and quasi-militaristic work
shifts, the locking-up of dissidents are all familiar tropes of
'anti-communism'.
Yet the continual pill-popping (with
“drug evasion” a crime) and consumer therapy (“Let us be
thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy more and be
happy.”) are recognisable features of dissident 'anti-capitalism'.
(Of course the sides in the Cold War were only ever the two sides of
the same coin. But the movies didn't normally see them that way.)
Similarly THX's work shift, on a production line yet technically
skilled, matches neither the image of blue or white collar work. (In
an ironic reversal to the standard automated utopia, we see people
working like machines to produce robots.)
And this unity of alienating systems is
perhaps best summed up in OHM, a combination of Catholic
confessional, watchful Big Brother and feel-good therapy. Should the
pills not be soporific enough, you can pop into one of OHM's
'unichapel' booths, where the platitudinous advice mixes the
Stakhanovist with Californian feelgood. “Let us be thankful we have
an occupation to fill. Work hard, increase production, prevent
accidents, and be happy.” (I particularly like “fill”.)
When one character comes across the
original OHM icon, the one replicated in all the booths, a monk is
both mystified and appalled to see him praying to it – and demands
he goes and finds a booth. For the power of OHM lies in his
prevalence, the copies more significant than the original.
...which takes us to one way in which
the film is genuinely original. Dystopias come stamped with a face,
like Stalin's mug being stuck up all over the Soviet Empire. Or if
not a human face then a malevolently sentient super-computer. Like
OHM there may be no actual Big Brother in 'Nineteen
Eighty-Four'. He may be a mere totem of power, a scarecrow
of dissent concocted by the regime. Yet the traitorous O'Brien
becomes Winston Smith's antagonist. Here, it looks at first that
THX's antagonist will be surveillance chief SEN. He maliciously
usurps his position to disrupt THX's forbidden love affair with LUH.
But rather than agent of power he turns out to be something of a wild
card, even a wacko, and they're soon locked up - and even escape -
together.
Because the real antagonist, the real
puppeteer... well, though reviews of the film often tend to terms
like 'oppressive' or 'totalitarian' there's no real sign there
is one. Perhaps, with everyone playing their part
in production, there doesn't need to be. In perhaps the most
dystopian notion of all its a society not held in place but locked in
stasis, the daily cycle repeating on rotation, alienated workers
producing their own alienation - not an autocracy but a feedback
loop. (It seems they don't keep to this in the novelisation. But then
novelising this film was probably a category error to start with.)
And this is captured in one of the
film's most striking points, the 'white limbo' sequence. This
essentially ups the ante to unleash whiteness beyond whiteness.
Dissidents and non-conformists aren't placed behind bars but stuck in
this white void. There’s no walls or bars holding you in, just the
sense there’s nowhere else to go, that over there is just more of
being here. In the end, THX simply calls bluff on this – he stands
up and starts walking.
This sequence supports a common reading
of the film – that its an allegory for Plato's Cave. Much like Lucas, Plato never
bothered explaining just how people came to be chained up in that
cave, only that they'd been there since childhood. And of course
there can't be a reference to their captors, since
their captive state equates to our reality.
Plato's Cave could also explain one of
the more bizarre moments of the film. Its established that people
here watch hologram TV. On walking out of white limbo, THX runs into
one of these hologram stars who helpfully points the way out –
straight out the screen. They turn and see where they have just
walked now shows a screen-shaped black rectangle. It's not just a
metafictional moment, like Jodorowsky's 'Holy Mountain'
(1973) its a wake-up call to its audience. Alongside Plato we might
want to quote Blake: “For man has closed himself up, till he sees
all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
The film has proved a gift for
samplers. Wikipedia lists eleven examples, with a particular favourite being
the medicine cabinet which asks “what's wrong?” when opened. But
for a soundtrack... the logical choice would seem cold electronica,
the sound of white. Yet significantly Lalo Shifrin's original
soundtrack didn't go for that. While with 'Clockwork
Orange', released the same year, Giorgio Moroder did
put its ultraviolence to cold electronica. For the film already
looks cool electronica enough, and the creatively
counter-intuitive choice of a world-flavoured muscly rock soundtrack
becomes effective.
In fact it works almost too well, for
it fits too neatly with flaws already present in the film. For,
despite its undoubted strengths, flaws run right through it. Much
like Julia in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', its LUH who
instigates the forbidden love affair with THX. But, perhaps typically
for a Seventies film, she's a mere plot enabler. The effects of her
actions fall primarily on him and she's soon fridged. (Well in this
case embroyed.) All of which underlines the way that heterosexual
desire is equated to 'normal living', like the couple unit is our
natural state. This is then laced with the whiff of homophobia, when
SEN tries to creepily insert himself as THX's new room-mate. (“It
will be good for both of us... we'll be happy.”)
And compounded with this... apologies
for the jargon... heteronormativeness is a hippyish form of
techno-fear. (Though of course, much like the sides in the Cold War,
there way never really much to distinguish hippyness from
heteronormativity in the first place.) On one level the film is
simply about the way technology is de-individualising, and so we must
escape it's artificial clutches and get back into the garden. Plato's
Cave becomes the hippy notion “it's all in your head, man”, the
all-enveloping city nothing more than an illusion you can choose to
un-see.
It sounds a strange paradox, a film in
which we're inescapably becoming components of our own machines, and
one in which we can leave Babylon behind to live out our lives under
the sun. But that is the paradox of the film, and perhaps the paradox
of its era too. As said over 'Quatermass IV': “It’s difficult to capture
in retrospect just how contrapedal Seventies culture was. And how
science fiction, which had always held to a view of the future which
was bifurcated verging on bipolar, was the ideal arena to capture
that.”
All of which becomes most apparent in
the ending. After there'd been no previous indication private
transport even existed, THX gets into a car. And what follows is a
classic movie getaway scene. And what could be more all-American than
a man behind the wheel of a car, going where he wants to go? And
the... there's no other word for it... driving beat played to this
sequence emphasises the he-man heroicness, kept up even after the end
credits like he'd punched his way out of the film.
It's true that even here there's some
masterful moments. Not least the point where his pursuers give up on
him after their operation goes over-budget, not one of the standard
scenes in action films. And Lucas has the sense to freeze-frame the
final shot, leaving things on an open note. But really, you wonder if
everything shouldn't have ended when the hologram showed him the
black rectangle and they stepped through it.
The critical reader... or for that
matter anybody who managed to read this to the end, might comment it
doesn't focus enough on the live soundtrack. They're right, of
course. But in my defence I have written about Asian Dub Foundation before. And
besides, here's a taster of the soundtrack in action...
'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me
Yet' is perhaps Gavin Bryars' other
classic composition, a companion to the afore-seen 'Sinking of the Titanic', perhaps equivalent to
Steve Reich's early pairing 'Come Out' and
'It's Gonna Rain'. There are strong similarities
between the two, both wrapping indeterminate compositions around
ghost voices. 'Titanic' used the tune the band
famously played as the ship went down. With 'Jesus'
Blood', as Bryars explained in the pre-show talk, finding
the originating voice was much more the product of synchronicity.
Helping to sound-edit a film on
London's homeless, he happened upon a recording of a frail old man
singing. Deciding to create music around the voice, he went back to
try and find the fellow - but could not. Similarly attempts to source
the original hymn drew a blank, and only then was it realised the old
man had made it up himself. More, despite being recorded for a film,
there were no images of him. All paths led back to him then came to
an abrupt halt. The tape was simply all there was, making it almost
;literally a ghost voice. In the performance the conductor would
signal to an off-stage tape operator, as if gesturing to spirits.
Despite the M-word being used in the
title for the programme, Bryars confessed to feeling somewhat saddled
with the term. And indeed in our last look at him we saw how
different to Reich and Glass he really was. Reich's 'Different
Trains' is set to human speech, but captures brief
utterances to let their cadence create a rhythm. (In that pre-show
talk, Bryars suggested “pulse-pattern music” as a more apt term
for this.) Bryars lets the whole recording play out, creating
surrounding music as the sonic equivalent of a highlighter pen,
bathing it in response. The music somehow always appears to be
swelling, new instruments and new elements joining in. (In fact, like
extras in one of those old BBC battle scenes, they fade out and then
reappear in new guise.)
Like many great works, it succeeds in
straddling a contradiction. Bryars spoke of how he considered John
Cage and Marcel Duchamp as influences, and the piece has some of
Cage's sonic audaciousness – as if you can make music from any old
thing, even the barely tuneful utterances of a tramp. And yet the
music always works in response, never overpowers that original
recording. There's no sense that Bryars has done something terribly
sophisticated to a naïve source, so we should all now toast his
cleverness with our wine glasses. It always feels like a
collaboration, even if it is with a ghost. Bryars has said he intended to create a work “that respected the tramp's nobility
and simple faith... the piece remains as an eloquent, but understated
testimony to his spirit and optimism.”
It partly achieves this through the
music itself being so hymnal. Bryars made a point of noting his
chosen instrument was the double bass, and his compositions tending
to low sonority. Perhaps, rather than Reich or Glass, the closest
comparison would actually be the most recent – Feldman's 'For Samuel Beckett'. Even if Bryars is much more melodious
than Feldman's austerity, there's the same combination of the sombre
with the rapturous. However, as commented last time and a point taken
up by Bryars in the talk, he is much more of an English composer. If
there's a quietness and simplicity to Feldman, there's also an
austere epicness to him. With Bryars there's the word he used in the
quote above - an inherent understatedness. And this places him, in
every sense, in tune with an old man singing with a frail voice. It's
the combination of that understatedness with indeterminacy that earns
the piece's title – a softly spoken power which never stops.
'Jesus' Blood' was
the only Seventies work of the programme and, with one other
exception, all else was post-millennial. Bryars has kept that keen
melodic sense over the years, and the more recent works incorporated
subtle shifts. Alas, however, in that time he's also become more
conventional. 'Jesus' Blood' left me thinking
“genuinely hymnal”. While with the other pieces my thoughts were
more along the lines of “very tasteful, very sophisticated”.
Bryars spoke of how he has extended the length of 'Jesus'
Blood' as technology has allowed, from LP-side to CD
length. And at times I found myself wishing they'd sacrificed some of
the other pieces and chosen something longer than the half-hour they
gave it here.
It may be the paradox of 'Jesus'
Blood' has become a trade-off. Some of his other Seventies
works were much closer to Cage's Dada iconoclasm, much more
anti-music. With his signature works, the balance was struck just
right. While now that side is almost absent.
My favourites among these tended
towards the smaller ensembles, perhaps best retaining that
understatedness. 'The Flower of Friendship' in
particular seemed to justify its title with some mutually supportive
playing. It also epitomised Bryars' singular use of the electric
guitar. If it looked strangely incongruous among the other
'classical' instruments on stage, it was played in so un
rock-and-roll way it could almost be a brand new instrument. Its
timbre was somewhere between a steel guitar and an electric piano,
with a radiating rather than a strident sound.
And from one bass player to another...
(We don't just throw this show
together, you know.)
Both are deranged, freak-out dance
music. But its remarkable how different the two things are. Less
polar opposites than chalk and cheese, two things you couldn't get
close enough together to compare.
With bands, its normally not a matter
of how well they're playing but how well they're playing
together. That's why the concept of a supergroup,
where you just place the best bassist next to the best drummer and so
on, was always such a bozo notion. If you want a visual image to pin
it to, at the recent Melvins gig the twin drummers played on a
conjoined kit. But of course that was just a microcosm of the
conjoined way the whole band played, as if they'd become one entity.
And seeing a whole band in Jenkinson's patented fencing masks, never
one speaking to the audience, that seemed to similarly enhance the
feeling of groupthink.
Whereas if you want a visual image of
the Squarepusher solo gig... well the move 'Inside Out'
might be close. Its like its finally become possible to go
inside someone's head, and finding inside it an infinite space filled
with impossibly grand and huge architectural constructs. Like there's
no intermediaries between thought and action.
The live set picked up and discarded
genres like it had music history on speed dial, opening with roots
reggae but within minutes morphing away from it. The predominant
style was probably muscly Seventies funk shot through with frenetic
jazz, bass lines skittering around the number rather than just lying
in place. The best track, perhaps strangely for so noted a bass
player was led by a hauntingly ambient guitar line.
And as a band they work very well
indeed. Had this been my first experience of Squarepusher's music, I
would have been very much impressed. But compared to the solo set it
felt more rooted, more regular, easier to relate to music you'd heard
before. It was like Jenkinson trying to channel his mind through
group consensus involved taking on a standard language, which stopped
his thoughts being so singular. Maybe not all kids play better with
others. It was also a strangely short set, perhaps about fifty
minutes – leading to some audience disbelief.
Should anyone reading this know more
about Squarepusher's back catalogue than me, what was the set mainly
composed of? I listened to a few tracks from the one album on-line,
which didn't sound so much like the gig. (More song-like than
groove-based.) But many tracks seemed to get instant audience
recognition, so I'd guess it was mostly old solo stuff reworked.
From London...
Mentioned in dispatches!
Having previously enthused over Acid Mothers Temple not oncebut twice,Hey Colossus and the Melvins I don't really have much to add from seeing them
again. Apart from an hour being too short a time for AMT's immersive
psychedelic soundscapes, to the point where I thought the audience
might collectively refuse to go home. But instead of overlooking such
good gigs altogether, let's at least celebrate them with some YouTube
clips. (The first two, usually enough, actually from Brighton.)
Okay, that's a mash-up of "gets the needle" and "gets to the Needles". It's still the best gag you're getting today. Latest Isle of Wight pics up take us to the South coast - Ventnor Botanic Gardens, Alum beach and the iconic Needles. Full set, as ever, over on Flickr. More to come as we head up that West coast…
It was strangely fitting for the
Woodentops to reappear midway through BBC4's 'Story of Indie' series, even if they weren't featured in
any of it. Because, let's face it, how many times in the last
quarter-century has someone said to you “I've discovered this great
new indie band”? So perhaps we need reminding of the golden times
when the word meant the Smiths or the Cocteau Twins.
Not to reduce those years to a formula,
but it often took post-punk's low-fi squattage industry aesthetic and
combined it with tuneful pop cheer. Post-punk had been great, of
course. But it was something of a relief to no longer have to look
dour and disdainful all the time, and finally admit you had heard of
the Sixties after all. Guitars, so long expected to sound awkward and
angular, could even jingle if they chose. And the Woodentops' early
singles were classic examples of all this, a shotgun marriage between
melody and cacophony, so rambunctious and exuberant that the
shuffling beats and skittering drums seemed mid-way to a skiffle
revival.
Back in the day, I remember a housemate
convulsing with laughter at a Pseud's Corner entry in 'Private
Eye'. Some music journo had told a tale of Jack Kerouac
thrusting his dick into a hole in the ground, and asserting “the
same primal energies drive the Woodentops!” I said, “but the
thing is, they do!” and he looked at me like he often did and went
into another room. They seemed a band who existed for the sheer love
of playing, who had (in the name of one track) a 'Love
Affair With Everyday Living'. Which must surely make them
the polar opposite to Gang of Four.
Alas, indie proved as short-lived as
post-punk. 'The Story of Indie' picked Aztec
Camera is their example of indie having its lo-fi edge sanded smooth
until it sounded just like more Eighties music. After all, how could
you keep your quirky charm in an industry designed around packaging
you? But the Woodentop's first album 'Giant' took
the same mis-step, swapping the home-made for the shop-bought.
Finding myself a disappointed purchaser, and being in those days
rather rigid of mind, I swiftly decided they'd “gone commercial”
(a lesser sin than “turned Nazi”, but not by much) and lost all
interest in them.
Perhaps consequently, this was a gig I
wondered whether I'd take to or not. Concern which only mounted when
on the day I discovered they'd be playing 'Giant'
in its entirety. A practice I've never been keen on, over an album I
never liked first time round. But with my ticket was already
trousered, along I went...
And it was a storming set! Its not
often you catch up with a band thirty years later, and find they're
performing the tracks much better than the album you have at home.
Perhaps their home was always the live stage, and they merely had the
misfortune to fall into the gravity of Eighties production.
Proceedings suggest an album where the rough should really have run
with the smooth. 'Good Thing', even here, is
perhaps too polished to leave much of an after-taste. But 'Love
Train' was surely always meant to sound this way, put
together more with spit than polish, served up by a band so fresh
you'd imagine they were just starting out.
Frontman Rolo is so avuncular and
engaging a character, he seems to be making the whole thing up even
when reading lyrics off a sheet. Indeed, seeing them on the opening
night might have even been the Goldilocks moment, when the set isn't
yet learnt by rote, when everything was still part up in the air.
The emphasis on 'Giant'
did mean there was less time for those classic early singles. My
personal favourite, 'Well Well Well', was
bypassed, as were the B-sides which delved into more intense,
frenzied post-Velvets territory. But as they close on an extended
version of 'Move Me', spirits undampened by the
decades, its hard to hold a single negative thought in your head.
(Digression time: Another feature of
'Story of Indie' was how, in those days of 12”
sleeves, the look and design of a record became as integrated part of
the picture as the sound. Which it did. All Cocteau Twins sleeves had
in common with Smiths or with New Order covers was their uniqueness
and recognisability, while almost never containing pictures of the
bands. And the Woodentops belong with the above, artist Panni Bharti
gouging, nailing and glueing naïve and iconic images from the most
basic of art materials. They're collected on the band's website here.)
Before
we get to that title piece, let's start with what in less salubrious
surroundings would be called the support acts. Both of which, I'll
have you know, were world premieres.
Laurence'
Crane's 'Chamber Symphony No. 2, The Australian' I
confess to struggling with, mostly due to its structure. It
ceaselessly chopped and changed between a jaunty brass-driven section
and something quieter and more sombre, centred on the double bass and
piano. Each just seemed to arrive to interrupt the other, while
either might have sufficed in its own right.
Marisol
Jimenez's 'Memoriam Vivire', conversely, was
something of a discovery. She used found instruments (plucked wires
and so on), but rather than juxtaposing them with the sound of
conventional instruments combined the two - as though to her ears
they were equally new. Brass, for example, was often little more than
amplified breath. It became like listening to the rudiments of music,
like the whole thing was being rearranged from the bottom up. The
music seemed to be almost auto-assembling, sounds combining without
the obvious presence of a composer's hand. The sense that all this
was somehow just happening made it all the more
compelling.
The
programme is next visiting Jimenez's native Mexico, and she briefly
spoke to explain she'd composed the piece in support of ongoing
protests there. (Though unfortunately the speakers were poorly miked
and it was hard to pick out most of her words.) There doesn't seem
much of her work online as yet but this piece is very much worth a listen.
An
associate of John Cage, Morton Feldman is most associated with
indeterminate composition and minimalism. The latter was a label he
always decried, and certainly he's quite unlike the extended
arpeggiating of Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Their music is active and in its own way rich, for all that its
uninterested in conventional development. While Thomas Patteson defines Feldman's approach as “less is less”. Wikipedia says that in his early years he was influenced by Webern,
and his music has music of serialism's sense of stasis. (A stasis
which I can find unendurable in its 'pure' serialised forms.)
While
the Sinfonietta seem commendably keen to broaden the appeal of this
music, I've previously had misgivings about their running through
indeterminate works a little too quickly, as if concerned not to
scare the horses. Thankfully they allowed this piece to run for
almost an hour. (Though other pieces of his last up to six.) And, in
another difference to Glass and Reich, it isn't divided neatly into
movements or sections but ceaselessly reiterates one main theme.
The
same span as an average TV episode might not seem lengthy, but when
combined with so stripped-back musical input that time does start to
stretch. A little like Riley's 'In C' its built
around a heartbeat supplied by a single instrument, here a two-stroke
pluck on something which sounds like a harp without looking much like
one. Other instruments do nothing singly but cluster re-cluster, like
simple shapes shifting and recombining.
Its
variation rather than progression, but once your ear's tuned into it
the effect is literally hypnotic. Not in the sports commentator
sense, it genuinely has a hypnotic effect upon you. As Alex Ross comments Feldman used “vast forms” because
“he wanted listeners to stop thinking about form altogether and
lose themselves in the harmonic material”. Your ear simply gives up
on duration as something beyond it, and listens more closely to
what's happening right now.
Were
the piece not dedicated to Beckett I don't think I'd have ever
thought to associate it with him. Rather than his bleak absurdism,
its character is to be simultaneously unearthly and serene. It feels
like being on some hillside some early morning, watching waves of
mist cross the landscape, taking parts of the world away then putting
them back. It has the terrible yet compelling grandeur of the sublime without the usual triggers of Romanticism, without
evoking the shapes or sounds of mountains and waterfalls and all the
rest of it.
Reading
a little about the piece afterwards, I discovered i)
every proper commentator seems to disagree with me about Beckett
(Ross wrote “the connection to Beckett's austere, depopulated
landscapes was easily grasped”), and ii) Feldman
composed the piece shortly before his death in 1987. And if the first
of those bewilders me, the second seems to make perfect sense. Rather
than the standard business of your life flashing through your eyes,
like a photo album on fast-flip, its more like arbitrary demarcation
lines dissolving you're able to get some glimpse of the eternity
beyond. Its like Blake's line “every thing would appear to man as
it is, infinite”.
Thomas Patteson wisely noted “all music can be understood as a kind of
commentary on the passage of time. Most music constructs time in ways
analogous to our everyday experience: from the clockwork regularity
of the Baroque orchestra to the thumping heartbeat of dancefloor
electronica, music builds on and reinforces our natural perception of
time. Feldman’s music seems to negate this. In its non-metric,
floating quality, it challenges our comfortable sense of
chronological proportion. And yet, the unfolding of musical events is
not random. There is a 'flow' to Feldman’s music, as undeniable as
it is impossible to pin down.”
Let's leave the
last word to the man himself: “I feel that music should
have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that
you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know
anything about it … except that it's some kind of life force that
to some degree really changes your life … if you're into it.”
The
evening's being broadcast on Radio Three's 'Hear and
Now' sometime in November, so you'll be able to judge for
yourself.
(Yep,
another art exhibiton reviewed after it closes!)
For
Foreign Shores
An
accessible destination even in Sickert's day, Dieppe was once a
fashionable resort – a mecca for holiday-makers and a haven for
expats. The artist first visited it as a child, made it his honeymoon
destination in 1885 and lived there from 1895. But more, the show
boldly claims that “it was in Dieppe that Sickert formulated some
of his most important painterly techniques and pictorial strategies”.
As if it was as much a rosebud to him as Tahiti was for Gauguin.
His
initial influence, however, was Whistler – to whom he was even
apprenticed. An artist who, in all honesty, I know even less than
usual about. The show cites 'La Plag, Dieppe' (c.
1885, below) as one of these early works. The sea, very often, is
simply a setting for a painting – a backdrop for the actual
subject, or at least we see human figures in interaction with it.
Check out for example Monet's 'Jardin a Sainte-Addresse'. Human figures fill the
foreground, the sea but one section of the perspective, and even then
is shown busy with boats. Sickert, we're told, mixed with the
fishermen and even learnt their local dialect. But the subject of his
sea paintings is very much the sea itself. All else arranges around
it, both boats and human figures pushed to its periphery. The
different shades of the sea become the work, in a painting only one
step away from a tone poem. (Our pal Wikipedia cites Whistler as a
proponent of Tonalism.)
The
story picks up as we're told “it was in Dieppe that Sickert became
affiliated with French Impressionism”. Which makes sense. At that
time Impressionist art didn't just feel frightfully modern and
continentally chic. Fidelity to subject, then a new notion for an
artist, tied their art to French soil. A French way of looking at
things combined with a way of looking at France.
Meeting
Degas in 1883, he fell under his influence and began to turn to
“direct painting” of more naturalistic settings. (Perhaps
remarkable in itself, for Degas was notorious for being truculent and
reclusive.) 'Dieppe Harbour' (c. 1902, below) is
perhaps a good example. The sea is no longer a central colour field
but a murky depth lying beneath a deep harbour wall - at the base of
a tall painting. It's no longer vivid and shimmering but built up by
thick dabs of grey and deep green. The whole painting
characteristically displays what the show calls a “low tonal key”.
His palette seems simultaneously deep and muted – frequently
returning to ruddy browns, burnt oranges and cold greys. Whistler's
disinterest in human figures is retained, however - we see the hotel
on harbour-front but the figures before it are dwarfed.
A Nation At Unease With Itself Let's
take the next two pictures together...
'The
Fair At Night' (1902/03, below) has the recognised
Impressionist sense of verite. We're not outside the picture plane
dispassionately peering in, we're made to feel we're there on that
street with that bustling crowd. The awning and buildings are angled
and cropped, giving a sense of immediacy rather than a detached and
calm composition. And yet at the same time the crowd's collective
back is to us - we've no way of joining it. This is a paradox which
will come back again and again in Sickert's work.
While
'L'Hotel Royal Dieppe' (1894, up top) has the
strangest of colour schemes. Beneath an eerily pink-purple sky sits a
strangely green-hued hotel, in front of which flags hang rather than
flutter. The figures on the lawn, as a contrast to the barely
individuated crowd above, stand isolated. The two most foregrounded,
in nearly the only use of white in the painting, look almost ghostly.
This was painted before Sickert was living in Dieppe. But still it
has a haunting, end-of-season feeling. The viewer's mind travels from
the end of a day, the point where objects seem to radiate luminosity
rather than have solidity, to the end of the season. And quite
possibly the end of an era.
Its
worth considering how unlike the popular image of Impressionism these
works are. They're some way from the verdant gardens or promenading
dandies depicted in bright, vibrant colours. How much of this is
accurate and how much it's merely a popular stereotype will have to
wait for later. (And we should remember Degas did not necessarily fit
the model, to the point where he took umbrage at being described as
an Impressionist at all.) But its this popular view of the school
against which Sickert's works would have been seen. And had he stuck
to a more orthodox take, held to its themes and tone, he would have
most likely been a mere copyist. Perhaps an accomplished one, but
still a footnote in art history.
We
should remember Impressionism had arisen thirty years earlier, and
society had not stood still in that time. The show makes much of
Sickert's associating with 'decadent' artists, including during his
stay in Dieppe - such as Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde and Arthur
Symons. As curator Katy Norris puts it in the Pallant House magazine:
“His strange and unsettling imagery was paralleled in the work of
decadent writers and illustrators that typified the fatalistic
attitude of the fin de siecle”.
As
a catch-all name for a social trend rather than a movement which
emerged clutching a densely worded manifesto, the fin de siecle isn't
something that could be precisely defined. The Tate, however, call it “an umbrella term” which
“expresses an apocalyptic sense of the end of a phase of
civilisation.”
Society
had been transformed in the previous decades to a then-unparalleled
degree. It had been possible to witness and believe in uninterrupted
linear progress. Now people were starting to ask, perhaps too late,
where we were being taken. And many feared that social harmony had
been left behind, that we had made ourselves degenerate. A rootless
cosmopolitanism and a disconnected sense of self-absorption seemed to
go together in making up the modern mind, a sense of being everywhere
and noplace.
And
bohemian artists, with their introspection, with their dangerously
new ways of looking at things, were perhaps the lightning rod for
this trend. Wikipedia citesMunch's 'The Scream' as “a prominent cultural symbol of the fin
de siecle era”. Though there are two other (semi-silhouetted)
figures in his picture they're distant, removed from the screamer.
It's not a painting conveying what the screamer might be screaming
about, its subject is given in its title – the scream, the
subjective experience of the artist. Sickert takes up similar themes
but essentially faces the other way - he paints not the outsider
artist but society in the act of not cohering. To misquote John Major, a nation at unease with itself. So,with 'The
Fair At Night', we're there with the crowd on the street,
yet at the same time removed from them.
We
should remember that at this point, England still regarded
Impressionism as dangerously modern. (France in general was seen as
the centre of the wild and the scandalous.) So works such as these
would have seemed both commentaries on and examples of this
'decadence', records of their own condition. (Disclaimer: Sickert was
also exhibited in France at this time. Whether he'd have been seen in
a similar way in the home of Impressionism will have to stay an open
question.)
Back
to Churches
Perhaps
counter-intuitively for a 'decadent' artist one of Sickert's main
subjects was the churches of Dieppe. He returned to paint them again
and again, at different times of day and under different lighting
conditions. Once more this shows an Impressionist influence, for
Monet had repeatedly painted Rouen Cathedral in a similar fashion.
(Though Sickert's motives here may have been part financial, he
called Dieppe his “only goldmine”.)
In
'La Rue Piquet' (1900, above) the angle of the
view part-obscures the Church while the long shadows suggest a
particular time of day. The indistinct, suggested figures may well
have originated from sketch, where he started filling in the horse
and cart only to see them driven away. However his decision to then
keep them in (while moving them off-centre from the original drawing) gives the
work a ghostly sense, as if they are fleeting and impermanent against
the solid stone. The sky's confinement to a small snatch of grey at
the upper left adds to the architecture's imposing dominance.
In
'Rue de la Boucherie with St. Jacques' (c. 1902,
above) the colourful shop awnings suggest at human life. Yet the
square before them is devoid of activity, its literally in the shade
of the Church. The expanse of browns is as uninhabited, as much a
space in it's own right, as the sea in 'La Plag,
Dieppe'. In these works, it's the Impressionist sense of
verite which is both present and contrasted. The light and shadows
fix the works to a distinct time of day, yet there's also a sense of
timelessness. The result is quite Gothic. The churches are never
isolated from the town, as if they're being made the subject of
study. Yet at the same time they dominate the town, often towering
over it.
The show describes these works as “a conversation between
the mysterious and the commonplace”. Yet is it more of an awkward
silence? One way of reading them would be to see the human activity
as forever milling around the churches, but never finding their way
in. They’re almost akin to the way Paul Nash and others painted
megaliths, something irrefutably present on the landscape yet at the
same time inscrutably strange.
Not
all of Sickert's town studies are in this style, however. For example
'The Basket Shop, Rue St. Jean, Dieppe' (1911/2,
above) shows the Impressionist luminosity in full force, and is
almost a bookend to 'La Rue Piquet' - its street
running in the opposite direction. There's even another cart. And
this time the street does not run up against an imposing church but
opens to a bright skyscape, with a telegraph pole pointing upwards.
The feeling is one of forward motion, as if we're being pulled into
the painting., Human figures, however, are still de-emphasised.
Similarly, in 'Une Dieppoise' (1900) the titular
figure is foregrounded but then sheathed in shadow to the point she's
almost silhouetted.
New
Horizons
If
there was any doubt over the show's main theme, that Dieppe was
Sickert's muse, it's confirmed by the next section. For its not set
in Dieppe at all and is by some margin the weakest in the show. In
1912 he bought a house in Envermeu, some miles inland and took to
landscapes. Mostly these show how social subjects were his forte. The
best of them is 'Dieppe Races' (1920/6, below).
While
the horses are an active blur, one caught by the edge of the frame,
they're kept to the lower quarter of the composition. The audience
are not raked but placed directly behind them, visible only in the
gaps between the racers. Over half of the picture becomes graduations
of skyscape, similar to the seascape of 'La Plage'.
Nature takes the place of the churches in the earlier pictures, with
human activity a blurry and transient presence before it.
The
Twilight Life (Company Loves Misery)
Following
the death of his wife in 1920, Sickert was back in Dieppe. Though he
only spent a further two years in the town before returning to
London, its this brief period which may well yield the best material
in the show. The nearest comparison from the already-seen works would
be 'The Fair At Night'. However, Sickert retreated
not just to Dieppe but from expansive landscapes to interiors.
In
'Chez Varnet' (1925, above) the three foreground
figures are all in profile, the one furthest left unceremoniously
half-chopped by the edge of the frame. They look neither at us nor
one another but off, to something we can't see. While they look
present, there in front of us, its almost impossible to actually
focus on them. Sickert seems more interested in gesture and placement
than what they might actually look like.
Like
his mentor Degas, Sickert is less contrasting the mysterious with the
everyday than finding the mysterious in the everyday. He paints not
grand events but 'normal' scenes. Yet by virtue of them being
paintings, we expect his paintings to be explicable, poses and
objects arranged in such as way as to convey a meaning. When they
don't the normal becomes compelling inscrutable. Every now and again,
you may be in a pub or cafe and suddenly become fixated on people on
another table – trying to discern their relationships from what
little you see of their interactions. 'Chez Varnet'
gives this sense. The
exhibition notes find an insightful quote from Virginia Wolfe: “The figures are motionless, of course, but each has been seized in
a moment of crisis; it is difficult to look at them and not to invent
a plot, to hear what they are saying.”
The
bright light through the windows, however, makes this an unusual work
for the period. To the interior he normally adds the nocturnal. Take
for example the artificial light of Baccarat – The Fur
Cape' (1920, above). It's suggested Sickert was obliged not
to show the gamblers' faces by their unwillingness to be witnessed,
engaging as they were in so twilight an activity. If so, he made a
less a virtue of necessity than made it the subject of the painting.
With the great block of the back of the chair, the titular cape and
wide-brimmed hat, Sickert mixes verite with anonymity. While there's
little open space the image is less claustrophobic than entangled.
The lines of composition close in on one another, leaving no room for
the viewer. It's a table without a place for us.
'Au
Cafe Concert, Vernet's Dance Hall' (1920, above) does
centre it's composition on the singer, and shows her addressing the
crowd open-armed. But the line of tables that lead to her are
cluttered with the night's detritus to the point they make a
veritable obstacle course. Not least amongst this is the jutting
elbow of a slouched figure, who manages to have his back to us while
paying no attention to her. Night life is not only shown as something
seedy but strangely isolating, the promise to get out of yourself and
meet people unfulfilled, everyone trapped in their own reverie.
Wikipedia is unusually eloquent on the theme: “For
his music hall subjects, Sickert often chose complex and ambiguous
points of view, so that the spatial relationship between the
audience, performer and orchestra becomes confused, as figures
gesture into space and others are reflected in mirrors. The isolated
rhetorical gestures of singers and actors seem to reach out to no-one
in particular, and audience members are portrayed stretching and
peering to see things that lie beyond the visible space. This theme
of confused or failed communication between people appears frequently
in his art.” Again in the Pallant House magazine, Katy Norris
suggests mourning for his wife acting as Sickert's spur for these
works. There seems some evidence, however, the earliest of them were
planned before this.
'L'Amoire
A Glace' (1921/4, above) translates similar themes to a
domestic setting. The woman is placed beside, not in front of, a
mirror. Hands clasped in her lap, she looks almost like an attendant.
Her face is towards us but, almost in shadow, is indistinct and
barely delineated. This cropping allows the mirror to dominate the
frame, even suggests the room is arranged around it, yet neither do
we really see it reflect anything. After thousands of paintings of a
woman looking into a mirror, Sickert paints us a mirror.
We
saw earlier that a recurring theme, both of Sickert’s art and his
era, was self-absorption. And, in a scene boiled down to a woman and
a mirror, we have the theme in its purest form. But it’s a thwarted
self-absorption, someone not connecting even with themself. The
central yet removed mirror is an echo of the imposing church walls we
saw earlier. (And if there seems a detectable taste of misogyny to
all this women-and-mirrors business, then you ain't seen nothing yet.)
An
attentive disciple of Degas, Sickert was adept at something we don't
commonly associate with Impressionism - but probably should. He could
create apparently straightforward-looking works which have an
indefinable, beguiling quality to them. He took this further by
playing elements against one another. This gives many of this works
a strangely unsettling quality. We're invited into them at the same
time we can't feel at home within them. And this quality is
intensified by the difficulty the viewer has in figuring out just
how they feel that way. You’re not even
completely sure that something is wrong, you just
can’t shake the nagging sense that all might be not quite right.
