CRACKS, LEVELS AND MARMITE - SOME LAST THOUGHTS ON STEVEN MOFFAT’S DOCTOR WHO (2)

I and he and you and she and we are all together in proclaiming Steven Moffat’s approach to ’Doctor Who’ as fresh and new. Remote Amazonian tribes made their first contact with Western Civilisation to say they found the ‘fairy tale’ approach more fitting for the show. Japanese soliders have been found on remote Pacific islands, insisting the War was still ongoing and that the irascible, fallible detective was more Doctorish than the lonely God with the magic wand.

And yet there’s a paradox. Everyone has simultaneously written about the Marmite reaction to the season. Andrew Rilstone felt he couldn’t write any further about it without an American equivalent to this term. (Which incidentally means “love/hate reaction.”)) How can this be squared?

It might sound banal to say “it depends on the way you look at it.” But what counts is the level at which you look at it. This series looks at its best as a series, viewed overall, or from moment to moment, in micro-close up. Moffat’s overview and sense of direction was in many ways exemplary. The Doctor should be alien and fallible, super-smart yet socially awkward, not noble and tragic. He should bump into the furniture then work things out, not point magic wands at them. Individual lines were often richly quotable yet simultaneously sounding fresh and spontaneous, never composed or devised. Take when the Doctor cries “I escaped! I love it when I do that!” It’s something which you could perfectly imagine him saying, not just a snappy line for his actor to read out.

But the series was at its’ weakest in medium view, at episode-by-episode level. And this remains true even if you factor in Moffat’s own episodes. He wowed us all with his original trilogy way back when he started – ‘The Empty Child’, ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ and ‘Blink’. But it was his last Davies-era script, ’Silence in the Library’ which set the tone for what was to follow. Abigail Nussbaum has commented that Moffat does structures in the place of plots. Yet this hit trilogy was all perfectly coherent, and of an even tone. It was his later storylines, while often great on a moment-by-moment basis, which broke into bits as soon as you tried to frame them as episodes. They had a tendency to lurch between incident, from one tone to another, a mere sum of parts except for that “sum” part. It was like Moffat was too clever to be coherent, his brain too active to merely follow any through-line, forever thinking up tangents and enticing side-alleys to explore.

The Vortex Manipulator and predestination paradoxes seem to rather sum this up. ’Blink’ contained a predestination paradox too, but only one which was saved for the very end - when Sally Sparrow hands the Doctor the transcript. The final episode here, ’The Big Bang,’ contained very little other than predestination paradoxes. It was like the whole thing was made of several different cloths and needed such a zapping thread to stitch it all together. One thing doesn’t follow logically or seamlessly to the other, but just lurch into it? There’s your answer, sitting on the Doctor’s wrist. (Perhaps for that reason the final episode was the least coherent. ’Beast Below’ was probably the most.)

So it’s perhaps not surprising that it was in episode view that the Marmite reaction was most pronounced. Mike Taylor commented “Gavin Burrows’ reviews seem to like all the episodes I don’t and vice versa.” On Beyond the Sofa, despairing of ’The Lodger’, Neil Perryman merely posted a picture of kittens rather than reviewing it. Andrew Rilstone took two posts to expend his enthusiasm. My review would have been one word – “filler”. (Or, if more copy was required, “ever-more-desperate filler.”)

Of course there’s nothing new or unusual about fans disagreeing about episodes. (Some people even affect to like ’Earthshock’, from what I hear.) In fact, it’s all part of the fun. But what’s odd is that, after everyone agreeing on how Moffat brought a new vision to the show, how familiar the episode line-up actually was. How recognisable is this?

- A Daleks-are-back story
- A historical guest-star (thinking here of Churchill in the Dalek story, not Van Gogh, for reasons I gave at the time)
- A lightweight romp inserted half-way through (Or at least that’s what I think ’Vampires in Venice’ was supposed to be)
- A pastiche of ’Old Who’ (which feels like a tradition but actually only dates to ’The Sontaran Stratagem’.)
- A comedy of manners story where a couple get together despite the impediment of excessive nerdiness
- A heavily foreshadowed closing two-parter, where the fabric of the universe is in peril, unless the Doctor does some life-risking stuff very, very quickly which very nearly does for him
...in addition, the Celebrity Guest Writer now seems an extra tradition. After Richard Curtis, next season brings Neil Gaiman.

(Even ’Amy’s Choice’, one of the biggest audience-dividers, wasn’t a million miles from the previous companion-focused ‘Turn Left’.)

...a line-up which often induced in me no more than weary resignation. It seems a shame the opportunity wasn’t taken to break the mould, and toss some of those clichés down some handy Crack in Time. In all honesty, the only non-Moffat story I could claim to enjoy was ’Amy’s Choice.’

This slightly generic feel was reinforced by a lack of decent villains. In fact there were very few new villains at all. (Space Vampires hardly count as “new” here, nor giant chickens as “decent”.) Unless you count the Smilers (which we don’t), all we really had was the Dream Lord - a great adversary but only ever a one-off.

I am also less than keen on the way monsters have been psychologised, and with it individualised. It’s significant that the one new villain worth speaking of turned out to be but the projection of a character’s mind. The Daleks once represented the totalitarian drive, enmity for the unlike, the Cybermen conformity. But the best new enemy here, the Dream Lord, was pure personal antithesis. If we no longer have monsters which reflect us, instead of merely me and you, does that not suggest we have become more like monsters?

During his spirited defence of ’The Lodger’, Andrew Rilstone patiently explains that the Doctor’s “real mission, the real subject of the story, is to appear normal while living with Craig... That is why anyone who focuses unduly on the nature of the top-of-the-stairs thing has probably misunderstood the episode.” This almost uncannily duplicates something I wrote in response to Iamus after the first episode. Guys, I get what’s going on. I just think we’re swapping something grand for something petty.

As the documentary-maker Adam Curtis said in an interview with ‘The Register’; “What people suffer from is being trapped within themselves - in a world of individualism everyone is trapped within their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations. Our job as public service broadcasters is to take people beyond the limits of their own self... What is sitting there potentially is a vast world that will take people out of themselves.” Alas that potential remains unrealised.

Possibly what has changed most is the stylistic variety. Davies made a point of saying Moffat was the one writer he wouldn’t script-edit, rather suggesting that he did edit all the others. And certainly under him everything seemed to bear his imprint, to belong under one vision. The results may have varied in quality, but we agreed on what the measure was. People preferred ’Family Of Blood’ to ’Fear Her,’ ‘Dalek’ to ’Boom Town.”

But comparing ’Amy’s Choice’ to ’Vampires in Venice’ is like comparing chalk to cheese. Or for that matter, two episodes from ’Old Who’, which often didn’t feel like episodes from the same series at all, merely neighbours on a schedule. Wildly differing reactions therefore ensue. (Quite possibly including posted pictures of kittens.)

But then what of the celebrated Moffat vision? Of course it did not exist at that point, on that level, on that scale. It informs what the Doctor is doing right now, what he is saying and how he is saying it. And it is riddled right across what you must nowadays call the ‘story arc’ - the Crack, Amy’s marriage and so on. (Though even here Moffat’s rewritten rulebook was unevenly applied – think of the sonic screwdriver reverting to a magic wand in’The Hungry Earth’.)

Between those, writers were free to do as they felt. And with rare exceptions, what they felt like doing was more of the same. If only those differing reactions had led to a clutch of unique experiments, each boldly going where no episode had gone before. Had each episode dazzled with it’s own unique glow, our attention would hardly have been upon the through-line. ’Vincent and the Doctor’ was perhaps the sole exception. Despite it’s deep-rooted and numerous faults, all of which I spelt out at the time, it was at least trying to do something else.

The Crack, the predestination paradoxes, ultimately all these were not the icing upon the season but symptoms of it’s inner fault-lines. Viewed through the right magnification, so much was done so well it seems like carping to point all this out. But the problem is a deeper one than there just being some sub-par episodes. Look into those episodes and it simply does not cohere, it was like being handed a bag of ideas, a collection of scenes instead of a script. Moffat’s own scenes were at least interesting in their own right. Less so for most of the other authors...

Coming Soon! Stuff that’s not about ’Doctor Who’

Coming Shortly After That! More stuff about ’Doctor Who’

GIG-GOING ADVENTURES BELATEDLY ACCOUNTED: ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE/ SPLITTING THE ATOM/ SUBWAY SECT

ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE & THE MELTING PARAISO UFO

The Engine Rooms, Thurs 27th May

If you’ve not heard of them before, my handy sound-bite description of Acid Mothers Temple would be “the Japanese Hawkwind.”  (Though founder Kawabanta Makoto describes them as “extreme trip music.”) However, these johnny-come-latelies weren’t formed in the classic acid rock era but in 1995 – which actually gives them something of an advantage. While you can feel indulgently happy about the fact that Hawkwind are still going, let’s face it you wouldn’t rush to attend any of their recent gigs. Consequently, AMT are the band I’d insist someone see if they dismiss all hippie music as “mellow”.

Another difference may be that, while Hawkwind had many different eras, Acid Mothers Temple throw up many parallel incarnations.   (Wikipedia lists ten!) For the gen on these, you have to look to the second half of their name. In this very venue, I’d previously seen them under the suffix The Cosmic Inferno. As a rough and ready comparison, they were then most like Hawkwind’s New Wave era (the ’Quark, Strangeness and Charm’ or ’PXR5’ albums). They balanced free-form jams with spiky songs, and featured a crazy girl drummer (Pikachu Makoto) who leapt up half-way through and took over as front-woman as if the idea had just occurred to her.

The Melting Paraiso UFO, conversely, are all free-form jams, with no song structures and scant vocals. Now some may back away when I say that these jams did stretch. But stretching is not the same thing as meandering, or trilling about goblins. It’s not the music’s weakness but it’s strength. I can’t even remember the last time I listened to Radio One through choice. But Pop culture is still so insidious and all-pervasive that, no matter how much alternative music you listen to, a timer in your head expects a track to fade out after the regulation three or four minutes. But here the extended duration is essential in feeding the sense of derangement, the all-enveloping feeling that you have no sense of the track ever ending. If you’re going to get lost in the music you need some space to get lost in. It’s the difference between a hippie backpacking barefoot across India and a package tour to Goa.

Yet for all that, I’m not sure I didn’t prefer the Cosmic Inferno version. Partly, the song elements give the jams something to kick off against, like a taste of earth before you go floating in space. But mostly I feel free-form psychedelic jams work best in the environment which spawned them, hippy ‘happenings’ or curfew-free free festivals. Just as the appeal of each track is its sense of endlessness, the set should appear as unconstrained, the environment open. That doesn’t fit quite so well in a regular venue. (And, for a scuzzy pisshole, The Engine Rooms is obsessively anal about curfews.)

 

But to put this carping into perspective, what we’re really comparing here is ‘great’ and ‘even better’. You’re best off seeing the group in any incarnation which comes along. One thing they won’t be is “mellow”...

 

SPLITTING THE ATOM

The Hydrant (formerly The Hare & Hounds), Sunday 30th May

 

There’s actually something of a thriving free music scene here in Brighton. Colour Out of Space doesn’t just spring up from nowhere. I don’t tend to blog about it much partly because I don’t end up going as often as I’d like to, and partly because there doesn’t always seem that much to say about it. Some of it is great, other bits promising, large parts terrible. That’s a local music scene for you, of whatever stripe.

 

But at this all-dayer (actually more of an all-eveninger), two sets almost co-incided which made for a handy juxtaposition of something. (I have to say “almost” because between them two girls did an electronics set whilst clad in full burkas, at one point treating us to the sight of burka disco dancing. It was that kind of a night...)

On first, The A Band launched into some free impro. At first it sounded like each player was merely testing out their instrument, seeing what it could do in the acoustics and against the other instruments, and soon things would start to gel. After a while, the realisation sunk in that this was it. It wasn’t even that they weren’t throwing the six to start, they were tossing the dice oblivious to where it might take them. Breaking out of the strictures of regular musical structures is all very laudable, but these were rebels without a clue.

 

They might contend that they intended to be playful. But in fact it highlighted the negative aspects of child’s play, the frenetic inability to resolve on anything combined with the “look-at-me” attitude, while lacking the unhinged invention. It might have been bearable had it been just bad, but it reeked of a smug “freak out the squares” attitude. At an alternative music night in Brighton. They were actually squaring out the freaks...

 

 

Ironically, I don’t think of Bolide Awkwardstra as one of my favourite Brighton bands. I tend to like them when I see them, but don’t seek them out. They’re too based in free jazz to really excite me. (Albeit a kind of free jazz that sounds like it’s been reconstructed from Magic Band recordings – a good thing in my book!) But put them on against the superficially similar A Band, and what they can do suddenly starts to shine. However crazy the surface of their music gets, there’s guiding forces beneath it. They play together. their sets naturally cycling between sections.

 

It’s reminiscent of the Germaine Greer quote which opens the Sinead O’Connor album ’Universal Mother’. We could, she contends, “make politics irrelevant by a kind of spontaneous co-operative action, the like of which we have never seen, which is so far from people’s ideas of viable social structure that it seems to their mind total anarchy but what is really very subtle forms for inter-relations which do not follow hierarchical patterns.”

 

If at times Bolide seem to be speaking an alien language, that’s still a language! Go abroad and hear a new language to your ears, and at first all the unfamiliar elements leap out at you. Yet give it a while and, even if you can’t yet follow it, you start to catch its cadences. You sense it’s making some kind of sense, even if it’s workings as yet elude you.

 

Yet many stop at that first step. Most simply give up there, and pronounce it “just a noise.” But others embrace it for that reason, and start trying to duplicate it. Some thought they could sound like the Sex Pistols, just by swearing loudly on stage. Some thought they could draw like Eddie Campbell by scribbling down their last night’s pub crawl. And some take up free music just from what they hear taken out of it, insisting there’s “no rules, daddy-o.”

 

Bolide Awkwardstra are speaking an alien language. The A Band are simply doing baby talk.

VIC GODARD’S SUBWAY SECT

The Albert, Fri June 18th

 

”In the end, the idea of Subway Sect proved more potent and influential than the few records they released... in their under-achieving lifetime.”

- Simon Reynolds, ‘Rip It Up And Start Again’

 

It is difficult to read Simon Reynolds or Clinton Heylin without deciding to base your life on Vic Godard’s teachings. A devout contrarian, he devoted his musical career to the theory that the most punk thing to do was always the most un-punk thing to do. Briefly managed by the Clash’s Bernie Rhodes, Subway Sect were told their new drummer had to have short hair (the requisite punk look), “so we hired the first bloke with hair down to his arse.”

Someone at this very gig tells me about seeing the band back in the day. After the Birthday Party had shrieked and howled their way through the support slot, Vic stepped up and entertained the leather jackets by crooning his way through old Dean Martin numbers.
< Of course in summary this meant he devoted his music career to not having a music career, and pretty soon he’d become a postman. But, as is the way of these things, now he’s back.

 

Which immediately raises a problem, which Reynolds’ quote above hopefully pinpoints. Lydon was the legend who sang ’Anarchy in the UK’, Iggy the legend who sung ’Search and Destroy.’ Godard is just a legend. It didn’t really hit me until I was there how few of his songs I actually knew. A couple of the oldies I only recognised from reading the words in Reynolds’ or Heylin’s books. (Something I’m sure he’d be pleased to hear.) But if he does something contrary now, outside of and after the fervour of the first punk wave, he’d only be doing what we expect. Yet if he just treats us to the oldies, that would be expected as well.

Wisely, Godard circumvented this problem by ignoring it. Most of the songs I’d reckon to be new. With no other old Secters present, the backing band were sharp-dressed musos, in sharp contrast to his ungainliness. Notably, one of them had to tune his guitar for him. But somehow they gave the set a picture-frame effect, framing and emphasising his bumbling, gentleman amateur status. The one problem they did face, the bass drum not staying fixed, was ironically solved by him standing with one leg pressed against it - happenstance forcing him into a fittingly awkward pose. And at one point during a tune-up, someone cried from the audience “this is irrelevant!”, so perhaps the old spirit isn’t dead after all. It was like, rather than live up to his old reputation, he was trying to do a regular set - but this was the closest he could come. He couldn’t sell out if he wanted to, and he may well have been trying.

 

The set was admittedly patchy, but had highlights. Oldies came up later on in the evening, but didn’t dominate. Perhaps it wasn’t the greatest gig of the year, but then it was never lining up to be. It was quirky and eccentric. It was a Vic Godard set.

 

This was the third gig I’ve seen this year (after Wreckless Eric and Viv Albertine of the Slits) where old punks decided to do something new,which reflected their lives now, rather than squeeze back into the bondage trousers. The results may be uneven, but then everyone forgets how uneven punk was back in the day, before it was filtered into compilation CDs and “remember when” features. Which is as it should be. Life is too short to spend it trying to recapture your youth.

 

I’m not sure, but I think that’s the back of my head persistently getting in the way in this video...

 

Coming Soon! Gig-going adventures of even greater belatedness...

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A FAIRY TALE WHICH KNEW ITSELF - LAST THOUGHTS ON STEVEN MOFFAT’S DOCTOR WHO (1)

“I’ll be a story in your head. That’s okay – we’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one. Cause it was, you know. It was the best.”

When decriers of ’Old Who’ jeer about “wobbly sets”, what are they really saying?  Perhaps they consider it a fool’s errand to make a science fiction show on such a limited budget. The alien planets would always look like sand quarries, the spaceships like hairdryers and the result an inevitable shambles. But... surprise, surprise... they didn’t understand what they mocked. Its makers were abundantly aware you couldn’t build a convincing alien civilisation on thruppence ha’penny and some sticky back plastic – and so they didn’t try.

It’s significant that stories would often occur in the Land of Fiction or similar. The series wasn’t metafictional, exactly, but it was aware that it was in a sense always set in a land of fiction. Its storylines were like little fables which weren’t really attempting to sell Skaro as a believable setting, any more than they were police boxes as a feasible form of time travel. Instead it was allusive, a way of bringing up issues and concerns from an oblique angle. Refererntial names abound, Skaro itself is surely a riff on “scar” – emphasising the deadness of the Dead Planet. The show’s style was more similar to theatre than the ‘realism’ of TV; by it’s nature theatre does not try to convince you that you are looking at the actual Royal Court of Denmark or Roman Senate. Rather, the stage is a magic transporting space which is unconstrained by geography and free to allude elsewhere.

Frank Collins quotes Bakhtin in the context of ’Doctor Who’, “the use of the fantastic... to create extraordinary situations, for the testing of philosophical ideas.” Fables are not neat analogies, equations where one side always equals another, but throw themselves open to interpretation, like spurs to thought. (Okay, at other times it merely served up endless Nazi analogies. We’re really talking about the old show at it’s best here.)

This may be part of what lends ’Who’ to be written about. There’s plenty of other stuff that I enjoy as much, if not more, than the good Doctor. But it always seems to be ’Who’ which clocks up the column inches. (And, it would seem, the readership stats.) The sense that is always about something outside of itself, without ever quite specifying what, makes it a cup which will never run dry,

Davies’ ’Who’ took a slightly different tack – it was more of a cosmic soap opera. The Doctor’s line in ’Army of Ghosts’, “I’m burning up a sun just to say goodbye”, perhaps sums this up the best. Unlike the old show Davies seized science fiction’s scale, it’s opportunity to blow up events to a cosmic level, but then marshalled that imagery to bring something down to earth. We don’t know what it’s like to watch a sun die, but we do know what it’s like to say goodbye for the last time and how gargantuan that can feel. The burning sun is but a metaphor to show how much the Doctor wanted to see Rose again. It’s like watching a summer storm, which appears to be just a show in the sky, then being struck by lightning.

Of course the histrionic, convoluted world of soaps is unlikely to resemble our lives, and if it did those lives would be so frenetic that there’d be no time for watching the soaps in the first place. Yet, in the reverse of ’Star Trek’ soaps ask us to buy into the notion that they are in some way about life as we know it. Social themes (such as death or divorce) or issues of the day (such as gay adoption) are reflected, albeit through a monstrously distorting glass.

The peculiarity of Davis’ era was that he simultaneously leapfrogged the fable element and went for fully-fledged metafiction. He’d draw attention to something like the rules of coincidence which power a genre season, such as the Doctor and Donna meeting again. Yet, as the genre most coded as close to ‘real life’ soaps embrace metafiction least of all. (As in the famous dictum that no-one ever watches Eastenders on ’Eastenders’.)

It could be argued Moffat tried to square these. As just about everybody noted, he saw and sought to play up the fairy story aspects of the show. (Let’s not concern ourselves here with the distinction between fables and fairy stories.) He started his run with a little girl talking to her imaginary friend, a pretty hefty indication of the sort of thing that lay ahead. His stories are stories, and don’t feel the need to disguise themselves as anything else.

His characters don’t try to approximate psychological depth, they go more for breadth. Rose worked in a shop, Donna was an office temp. Yet Amy is a kissogram, in defiance of the fact that they don’t even make kissograms any more. (Even her other half gets a stripper for his stag do.) She dresses up and plays for a living. She’s the one who fixes things on her very first adventure. She takes to the Tardis like she was meant to.

But Moffat also incorporated a great deal of metafiction, albeit dressed up as time travel. Few modern dramas pay attention to the old Aristotelian unities of time and space, they flash-forward and back again, they intercut, they compress time. But the characters within them are usually innocent of this. The ’Doctor Who’ scripter may think how to get his hero out of the inescapable trap he’s just shoved him into, and hit on the idea of him passing his sonic screwdriver to an aide beforehand. He may then scroll back on his script, and insert that scene earlier. Or, to keep it a surprise he may instead use a flashback. Or he may have his hero use time travel to do it. Through this time travel motif, Moffat emphasises that his stories are doing things only stories can do – to both us his audience and to his characters.

This metafiction is most clear in the Davies-era ’Silence in the Library’, which I’m starting to think of as the start of Moffat’s second phase. There, a character becomes aware her apparent life is a fiction through the elliptical way that it passes. (The same story even features two guys named Dave, deliberately flouting the famous rule of drama that two guys named Dave can’t appear in the same story.)

But is there a downside to all this? In the old days, time travel was just a means to get the characters places and the show started. It had the same role as shaking a six in a board game. But then fans came to write the show. And fans have the same attitude to subtext or plot mechanisms that schoolboys have to farts – better out than in. If there is, for example, unresolved sexual tension between two characters in a show, fans will immediately want it played out – not stopping to think that the tension might have been more compelling than the resolution, that in is sometimes better than out.

The Doctor’s comment “you know fairy stories” becomes double-edged. It’s not just that we’re familiar with them any more, these days we are knowing about them. We tend to associate the two things because things happen in fairy stories which could only happen in fiction, and serve to remind us we are reading fiction. Yet within fairy stories, everyone accepts these rules without comment. When Sleeping Beauty succumbs to the Wicked Witch’s curse, no-one asks “how can such a thing be possible? As much as this story takes place in any genuine time or place, it is clearly centuries before cryogenics.” Instead they wail “who will break this terrible curse? Some way within the conventions of this sort of thing, that would be good.” We’re not the first people to notice those rules. We’re just the first people to think they need to be commented on.

Okay, the new show must do things the old show did, or else it isn’t the new show. And it must also do those things better, or at least more sophisticatedly, or else it isn’t new. And I like the way it's doing that, honest I do! But even so, haven’t we become rather hung up on sophisticated? Wouldn’t it be better to just make it like a fairy story? Do we really gain very much by perpetually being told that this story is actually a story? Didn’t it work better the way it was? Would ’Planet of the Spiders’ be a better story if the giant arachnid at the end started saying “by the way, Doctor, I’m a manifestation of your ego. It’s all quite clever really...” As Tyler Durden so memorably said: “Being clever, how’s that working our for you?”

“ISN’T IT TRUE WHAT SMALL CAN DO?”: MARTIN CARTHY AT THE GREYS

Three days before he does the Royal Festival Hall, and the same day he’s interviewed in the Guardian, folk legend Martin Carthy plays in a pub less than ten minutes from my house. And it literally is a pub gig, with a grinning guy on the door and an impromptu ‘stage’ in the corner.

An appealing thing about gigs at The Greys is the sense of non-occasion. They put on acts they like, in the hope other people will too. You end up with the feeling that everybody is there for the music, right down to the guy collecting the glasses. It’s putting on a night the way it should be. Its putting on a night the way that was once fairly standard in Brighton, before it succumbed to the corporate clone crap you see infecting everywhere these days.

I did wonder, had some passer-by poked their head in the window, what they would have thought. Would they have guessed this was a folk world legend in the building, and not some regular Monday night? I mean this in a very positive sense - I’m not at all sure they would. Partly, Carthy is an unassuming performer. His attitude is that he might as well sing the songs as someone else, that the songs themselves are the stuff that matters.

But also it’s music which takes its time to work upon you. He’s not the greatest singer, not even greatly distinctive in the way of someone like Bob Dylan. And, heresy though it may be to say, his guitar playing at times can be almost awkward. But put the ingredients together and leave to marinade, and some invisible magic sparks between them.

As a nipper I lacked older brothers, so the only music I had to listen to was my Dad’s. I took to folk but took from it (and projected onto much subsequent music) the feeling that it was all about storytelling. Folk music was really just folk tales, the music there just to punctuate and illustrate the words. Folk instrumentals existed, but only as a means of testing the faithful. (This theory came in useful again as I grew older, and my brain became asked to explain Led Zeppelin drum solos.)

As I would finally discover, mostly this just missed the point. But I did find my old listening habits creeping back during some of the instrumentals. Perhaps Carthy really is a kind of storyteller, in the troubadour tradition.

Carthy’s importance is as a linking figure, a carrier of the folk spirit rather than the preserver of some imagined essence, an anti-Ewan McCall. He started out as part of the early Sixties acoustic folk revival, but inspired many from the subsequent electric folk scene, and even played awhile in Steeleye Span. I last saw him on these shores amid the multi-generational troupe of The Imagined Village. (A line-up which included his own daughter, Eliza.) And it's the linking figures who are important, because folk music shouldn't be about preserving the past but accentuating the continuum between the past and the present.

So it’s perhaps significant that only once did I notice him playing the now-common trick of ‘updating’ the lyrics - comparing a soldier crippled by a Napoleonic cannonball to one cluster bombed in Afghanistan. True, these aren’t songs which should be seen as fixed or in need of preserving. But it’s a smarter trick when it isn’t overplayed, or it just becomes a gimmick. It also risks the idea that the update somehow ‘politicises’ the old songs, as if dragging them out of retirement. A nice feature of this set was that it didn’t care to distinguish much between political songs and others. “There’s hardly such a thing as an apolitical song,” he told the Guardian. “They’re all political.”

Besides, if things are running right, we will make those connections ourselves. One example was when he launched into the folk original of Chumbawamba’s ode to a wifebeater’s comeuppance, ‘Stitch That’. As the track dated from their anti-pop-star era, I had no idea there even was a folk original! (Tho’ it’s notable that in this version the husband gets off with a warning, whereas in Chumbawamba’s he simply gets offed!) Carthy told us he’d long thought the tale a legend, but after one gig a stocky old Welshwoman had proudly told him it had happened in her village. The actions of one person who refuses to take the knocks become preserved by being turned into a song, a vehicle which passes easily from hand to hand and year to year. As the words go, “isn’t it true what small can do?”

Coming Soon!: Even older gig reports!

'THE PANDORICA OPENS', 'THE BIG BANG', UNCLE STEVE MOFFAT AND ALL

Funny how things turn out really.

It wasn’t the World Cup that was the proverbial game of two halves, but Steven Moffat’s two-part finale to Doctor Who. Russell Davies’ finales always felt like a film chopped in half. (Albeit spliced together with a contrived cliffhanger.) But here the two parts felt strangely unlike each other, like jigsaw pieces crammed together. The first was much closer to the Davis finales we know, all galloping horses’ hooves and spaceships filling the sky. And, as with Davies, it often felt like a shopping-list of set pieces put on film. Take the Doctor’s big speech to the amassed space fleets. Even if we are to accept they would bugger off simply from being barked at by him, what has this got to do with the rest of the story? Isn’t their plan to get the Doctor to open the Pandorica? For that matter, why is a Cyberman on guard?

There’s been much fan comment over the Axis of Evil Aliens. I’m wondering if its source was the cover of the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary special. Certainly the image of the Third Doctor recoiling from all kind of baddies boggled my young mind. It was a long time before I realised that this wasn’t some episode I somehow hadn’t seen, but a specially composed photo-op. Whereupon I immediately wished it could be one, with all the monsters, all at once, surely the greatest ever. Yet of course it’s a fannish notion. I may well be wrong about this source, but they appear within the story much like that photo-op cover. You line them up and then there isn’t a lot for them to do but pose.

The second part was much more like a “time travel farce”. (In a way that even other “timey wimey” tales weren’t, for example ’Girl in the Fireplace.’) The standard farce trope is of course someone getting mistaken for someone else, repeated until convoluted. Here characters get mistaken for somewhen else. It was very similar in both tone and content to  ’Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban’. With his fez and broom, the Doctor even resembled a Potter character. His appearance to the grieving Rory at the very beginning seemed to sum up the lurch. “Don’t worry. She’s dead now. But we’ll just turn this into a completely different kind of show!”

But then the second part turns into a game of two halves all by itself, the frenetic zipping about is over and we’re left with a much more intimate, more psychological story. In fact we’re pretty much where we began, at the start of the season.

Here the oft-made comparisons of Moffat’s work to fairy stories really come into their own. Pandroa’s Box becomes kind of merged with the Tardis, and the girl opens the box to let all the good stuff back in. It also works like ’Sleeping Beauty’, again in reverse. Instead of Beauty and all in her castle being put to sleep they’re the only ones awake, it’s the rest of the universe which needs Amy to remember it into life again. There’s a wedding instead of a christening, in which the uninvited guest arrives to complete the festivities.

Of course it’s a metaphor for Amy remaining connected to her imagination, not throwing it away in pursuit of the adult life we saw in ’Amy’s Choice’. In a potent image the stars are no longer in the sky but only in her mind, and as any SF fan knows stars stand for imagination. But there’s also a strange association of imagination with memory. Amy states almost in the same breath that the “raggedy Doctor” was her imaginary friend and “raggedy man, I remember you!”

After not one but two strange leaps, it’s inevitable that much got left behind. We don’t know what became of the Axis of Evil Aliens, and I don’t suppose we ever will. But in the sudden shift to Amy’s mind a lot of plot resolutions are conspicuous by their absence. We still don’t know River Song’s “spoilers”, or even what caused the cracks in time. As with the note Amelia finds on the Pandorica, we’re supposed to “stick around.” The suggestion is that the chief villain, and cause of the Cracks, lies unrevealed. In fact he even gets forgotten for the whole second half of the episode. After all that hard work scheming, he must surely be seething at the affront!

Of course continued serials live by the rule of tease. But there’s more to this than simply feeling strung along. Moffat’s first story, the one that got us all excited about him, was ’Empty Child’, almost completely devoid of ”timey wimey stuff” and mostly remembered for the titular kid with the sinister catchphrase. Even after his embracing of time paradoxes, we still most commonly thought of him as the deviser of sinister adversaries – the Clockwork Robots, the Weeping Angels.

This time we got the Weeping Angels back, if somewhat streamlined for mass production. But he’s given us no real additions to the pantheon of creepiness. (Unless you count the Smilers. Which we don’t.) To merely dangle a Big New Foe and deliver no goods on him whatsoever leaves a hole. The reveal that the Pandorica was empty, if great at the time, feels all too telling in retrospect. Has Moffat’s cranium simply ceased producing creepy foes, and he’s holding off delivering in the hope that lightning will re-strike? What is the Doctor without his monsters?

Instead of the sinister, Moffat’s subsequent works have shown a greater and greater reliance upon time and all that ever wimed with it. After ’Big Bang’ we are surely gorged on all that, even if it once was a good thing. To follow this with some ever-more-tangled criss-crossing of timelines would just be like Davies’ device of having an even bigger Dalek fleet at the end of every season. It’s time for a clean break. Yet these two running plotlines are inextricably linked to the timey wimey stuff, which does suggest more of the same. (I’m assuming that neither plotline will be resolved in the Christmas special, but right at the end of the next season. An “Egyptian Goddess loose on the Orient Express in space” sounds too much like River Song to be her, particularly so soon after she’s done Cleopatra.)

Ultimately, if the empty Pandorica was a telling symbol, so was the Doctor zipping here there and everywhere. There were some great moments along the way, but the overall experience was disjointed - bitty. It was great in parts, weak in whole. I’ve commented before how Davies’ finales worked to his worst instincts for ‘event TV’, when it was always the smaller moments that stayed with you. The Tardis pulling along a planet was groansome. The Doctor walking out in the rain, unremembered by Donna, was heartbreaking. Similarly, I will remember the Doctor being late for Amy’s wedding above all the time paradoxes. Or the headless Cyberman above the whole amassed Axis of Evil Aliens.

One final niggle was summed up by the Doctor’s line “your girlfriend isn’t more important than the whole universe.” Which of course, by the standards of ’New Who’, means that for some reason she is.

Though it started in the Sixties, ’Old Who’ was still a product of the post War era. As dull as the endless Nazi analogy stories sometimes got, there was an upside to this. Life was about responsibility, about doing the right thing. This led to an almost obsessive focus on sacrifice, on ordinary people fighting and even laying down their lives if it led to a greater good.

Moreover, the ‘companion’ was always the audience identification figure, the one who saw and responded to things the way you would. Their selling point was that they were an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation. Now they are always ‘special’. In fact poor Martha is the only New Doctor companion not to have been (at some point or other) The Most Important Being In the Universe. It smacks of our me-first society, as if we have become infantilised - not quite learnt that the world in our head and the world out there are separate places.

There’s an equally observable shift in War films. Old War films typically start with a cast of quite ordinary people who step up, often quite reluctantly, to fight for freedom. They’d often feature a helpful voiceover at the end explaining that it was these men, and the thousands of others like them, who stopped fascism. Modern war films are almost always about crack bands of troops, embarking on a mission on which the whole War might turn.

Of course it’s a waste of time even talking about things like this. People will just shrug out of confusion and disinterest, or tell me I “don’t get” it. (Much like I “don’t get” why poor people have to pay for the bankers’ screw-ups.) But the way that, of all things, Doctor Who has turned so ego-gratifying seems supremely indicative.

Coming Soon! More of this sort of thing...

WHEN NO-ONE SEEMS AT HOME...

Whenever there are not updates here, it is because I am busily posting comments elsewhere that are extensive, sharply written and insightful.

That is normally two lies. At the moment it's only one.

(Andrew's comments are well worth reading in their own right. But you knew that already.)

DOCTOR WHO 'VINCENT AND THE DOCTOR'

“Have you heard about the writer Ritchy Curtis?
Who wrote the Doctor and did miss
No point sitting on the fence
That was bad in the English sense.”
(With apologies to Jonathan Richman)


Every now and again a long-running genre fiction series will decide to splash out and get a Proper Writer in. Healthy cynicism aside, this can sometimes work. Harlan Ellison wrote well for both ’Star Trek’ and Marvel comics. But he had half a foot in genre fiction to start with. More normally, this very drive will propel them into getting a Real Proper Writer – someone with no previous on their record.

At which point the results are almost inevitably lose-lose. It’s like bringing in a master chef to flip burgers. His Egon Ronay training isn’t going to help him flip any better, in fact the guy they just deposed, who knew how to flip burgers, he did it better. What people tend to be good at is the thing that they are good at.

This notion then married the New Who fixation with wheeling in Big Historical Figures. These have not worked well in the past. By bringing in someone to impersona... sorry, play this figure, some of their gravitas is supposed to rub off. But it’s like sticking a statue up, then trying to cast it in your drama.

Combining these two is a perfect storm of good intentions and bad outcomes. You end up with a historical drama about the last years of Van Gogh’s life with a monster turning up and running round at arbitrary points. It’s like the ’Red Dwarf’ episode where a tank turns up in a Jane Austin adaptation. Except risible instead of funny.

Before anyone rushes to the Comments section, yes I got the idea that the monster was some Bunyanesque manifestation of Van Gogh’s despair. In fact I got it with the full force of his stabbing easel. Only he can see it! He kills it with his art! But if the monster’s there to do anything, it has to give us some insight into that despair. So if you want to argue that a giant, badly CGI’d chicken is an illuminating metaphor for manic depression, then the Comments section is now open.

The monster was such a poorly conceived afterthought that it didn’t really work on it’s own terms. Desperate to make it not just a giant, badly CGI’d chicken they launched a late-in-the-day campaign to portray “evil when I see it” as suddenly lost and alone. But the more they gave it it’s own identity the less it became Van Gogh’s embodied despair, there for him to slay and vanquish. It was lose-lose. (And was there any internal logic as to why only Van Gogh could see it?)

In fact, his despair is brought home much more in the scene where he’s unable to leave his bed. We all have moments a little like that, so we relate to him just as we realise his are so much more magnified. After such scenes, do we need all that stupid chicken chasing? I couldn’t help but think how much better it would have worked with all that rubbish removed, as a return to the old ‘true’ historicals.

Perhaps the time travellers are unable to give away their origins, and become convinced that if they could just explain how they know his art to be important... Perhaps there could be a left turn, when they realise they have just labelled his art “historically important” but when pressed can’t articulate exactly what is so great about it. Perhaps they finally desperately admit where they’re from and he just dismisses them as bigger absinthe drinkers than he is.



Alternately, the monster could have been made to actually mean something! There’s two all-too-brief suggestions of this, which might have worked if they’d been built on. One comes right at the beginning; as Van Gogh paints a wheat field, it rustles mysteriously amid the stalks. Later he part-enthuses, part-rages at the Doctor that nature calls him to “capture my mystery.” The appeal of his art is that it portrays nature not as a pretty scene for our contemplation, gardens assembled like a still life, but as a wild force, an entity in its own right. Trees thrust up through the ground, skies convulse. The monster could have become the nature he fought to capture in his art, a Captain Ahab always after the white whale.

But I’m forced to concede that, over at Behind The Sofa, Neil Perryman had the best idea. What if the Doctor had it right the first time? The invisible monster really was just in his mind, a for-real creature of the id. Used to encountering the real thing, the Doctor tests for it with ever-more-elaborate scanners fished from the Tardis’ closet. Finally he bleakly concludes that this is the one kind of monster he could never hope to defeat.

This might have even fixed that sickeningly schmaltzy ending. Some are those who have seen the particular soundtrack choice as a step too far. (A band called Athlete, whose market demographic seems to be anyone who finds Coldplay too edgy and challenging.) But the terrible truth is that it was all too terribly appropriate - it fitted right in with what was on the screen!

Yet the basic premise, underneath that Euro-mountain of saccharine, is actually quite a good one. Depression is a medical condition to be distinguished from a grumpy head day. It can’t be cured by buying the sufferer some nice things, any more than an evening out cures typhoid up.

So instead imagine this. Amy alone in the gallery, sobbing uncontrollably for the man she couldn’t save. Finally Bill Nightie happens by and agrees that, yes, these paintings really are quite moving. Or perhaps his despair is in some way cured, and Amy races to see the extra works only to find the room empty – with no demons to struggle against, he had no need of art and chucked his old easels on the fire.

Let’s gallantly close with some plus points about this episode:

1. It does try to get into the head of it’s historical subject (“hold my hand, Doctor, try to see what I see”) rather than just stand him up reverentially and have him say the sort of things he’d say. He becomes a character in his own episode.

2.The Doctor’s new-found fallibility was in evidence. He’s a genius at extemporising his way out of a crisis, but not someone you’d want by your bedside as you were beset by depression. His railing against waiting, and time dully passing “in the right order”, was masterful. And, thank heaven for simple mercies, his sonic screwdriver didn’t work!

3. Rory’s absence was well handled, alluded to but never laid on.

4. When they travel back to the future, the Tardis is plastered with handbills. As it rematerialises they immediately burn up. Yet Van Gogh’s art survives. It works precisely because the image is not laboured over.

GIG-GOING ADVENTURES 1: WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM/ TIM HECKER/ WOLF EYES

I seem to have been attending a surfeit of gigs lately, at a rate too fast to write them all up – and now there’s a bit of a backlog. Looking back at this list, I seem to have perversely decided to ignore chronology and post them in pairings which just seem to suggest themselves. This also means posting two of the most recent outings first...

(At least this proves I don’t only stay in and watch ’Doctor Who.’)

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM
(The Engine Rooms, Fri 21^st May)

A band composed of radical environmentalists from Washington state, were even formed at an Earth First gathering and live together in a rural commune outside of Olympia. The track title ‘I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots’ might suggest their sound, which tends to longish soundscapes based in doom drone and even black metal. Partly, I was interested in the idea of political opinions being expressed through the music, rather than channelled into words shouted over some generic backbeat (aka the anarcho-punk trap).

You could certainly see their music as reflecting a view of nature apart from the pop music view, where it’s mostly held to be a twee place to snog in. Yet, though it would be true enough to say their sound reflects the elemental wildness of nature, there’s more to it than that. If you were in a fanciful mood, you could even describe it as having an ecology!

What really compels is the harmonics between the guitars, which bisect and throw up patterns which are so much more than the sum of their parts. You could try and reduce the resultant sound back to the constituent instruments, but it would be like reducing a forest back into the trees, birds and animals. The wood is more than the trees, and all that.

But for all the fantastic guitar harmonics my ears hit a huge stumbling block in the growelly grindcore vocals. (You know, the stuff that goes ‘MWUUUUUURGH! URRRRRGH!” a lot.) Though the set had long instrumental passages, whenever those vocals recurred I found it hard to do much except for wait for them to stop again. Yes I know they’re supposed to sound unmediated and irrecuperable, but by this point they actually sound about as generic as a Ritchie Blackmore guitar solo.

Ultimately I found myself wanting something more to happen. This may have partly been due to it being something of a short set, lasting an hour at most. Though it wasn’t just one-note heavy, their first album (available on Spotify) branches further into ambient and even folk passages. (Plus has a second, more folky vocal to counteract the grunting.) I’ve no idea whether they’ve now nixed those elements from their sound, or whether they just prefer doing the louder stuff live. Legend has it they prefer playing outdoors, so maybe it all works better in that setting.

TIM HECKER
(The Free Butt, Mon 17^th May)

I did, at first, have my doubts. We’re past the era where rock music is the default mode of music expression, but most venues are still set up like it’s the Seventies and Nine Below Zero are in town. This problem is actually more manifest in smaller venues, for larger ones often double as arts centres and the like. An intimate space like the Free Butt is a great place to see a band. But Tim Hecker’s an electronica artist. You don’t want to feel like you’re part of a sweaty, heaving crowd. Because you won’t be, for one thing...

As it happens, things worked out well. This was probably in no small part down to the venue judiciously dimming the lights, as if tipping us off to focus on the mind’s eye.

Everything that was good about this set simultaneously makes it difficult to write about. It worked precisely as a soundscape, to envelop and transport you. It didn’t raise any issues, coin any concepts or do anything that might be rationalised into words. Some prefer to see that as a limitation, as art for art’s sake. But art isn’t a newspaper, it doesn’t always have to be telling us something. I see it more as music doing something only music can do. A song can tell a story, but so can many other mediums.

It reminds me of a panel transcript from an old ’Comics Journal.’ Complaining about that newfangled abstract art, some curmudgeon grumbled he’d once asked a painter what his work was about – “and he couldn’t answer me.” A slightly wiser soul pointed out “well that’s why he painted it.”

Here’s a video of Hecker not doing very much...

WOLF EYES
(The Engine Rooms, Tues 1^st June)

Wolf Eyes, conversely, worked precisely because of what they were able to do with a rock format. It felt right seeing them in so ‘rocky’ a venue as the Engine Rooms, for they walk and talk (well, swagger) as much like a rock band as a noise outfit. They strike up a deranged cacophony which feels as elemental as being caught in a wildstorm. Yet at the very same time they’ll lay down what’s hazily recognisable as rhythm tracks over which the vocalist will intone - the CD I bought even came with a lyric sheet! By the very act of disdaining the strictures of rock music they feel just the way such music used to feel in days of yore – full of attitude, abandon and unconstrained by tradition, able to make up its own rules as it goes along.

We can of course want things both ways. Rock theatrics now feel tired, even ‘alternative’ rock may as well be Judas Priest. So we turn outside of it, only to find ourselves missing its visceral vitality. But every now and then our contradictory wishes get rewarded, with sets of such gut-punching physicality that chinstrokers would be thrown off like chaff!

Each member ‘triples up’ on stage between traditional rock tools, power electronics and home-made and extemporised instruments. (Including something which looked like a metal stool, down the legs of which they promptly started blowing!) But this didn’t come across as any kind of eclectic blend or statement about virtuosity.  Each new item, as soon as picked up, would simply shape to their hands. It was as if they were audaciously able to make their music out of anything. At times this might be something so apparently archaic as a guitar. Another, a contact mike dragged down a packing case would be all that was needed for a rhythm track.

This willful shaping of anything into their sound may sound very Faust-like, but there’s no sense of Faust’s devilish pranksterism.  Wolf Eyes seem more steeped in the in-your-face tradition of New York noise, such as Swans or Suicide, only pushed still further into the maelstrom. (At times they even blurted some Throbbing Gristle-style cornet.) While Faust provoke and antagonise their audience, New York noise would cow them into submission through the blunt instrument of their music.

But you might strike closer by calling them the Stooges of noise music. (Both band being Ann Arbor residents, after all.) Instead of adding influences, both preferred to boil (things down – only once having stripped the flesh from the ‘bones’ of chords and song structures the Stooges would stop while Wolf Eyes then boil down still further. There’s something gloriously unfinished about their raw slabs of sound, as if they’re first stirring up some blocks of noise then extemporising what to do with them. Rather than playing us their compositions, it was like they were unleashing forces they could themselves barely control.

It was like looking at some cut ‘n’ paste collage. Every element is in itself almost lumpenly simple, and the bold and jagged way they are sewn together part of the picture.

... in fact, let’s pursue that metaphor. I swear at times I felt that it was the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, and everything I thought I knew was been remorselessly stripped away before me! This has felt like a good year for gigs already, not yet half-way through and the reformed Swans still to appear. But Wolf Eyes must surely rank high amongst them...

PS I have no idea about the sudden congruence of wolf-derived band names. Last year it seemed every other band was called Deer-something, now its all gone lupine. Psychic TV always had a thing for wolves, maybe it’s all down to them...