THEATRE DE COMPLICITE'S 'THE MASTER AND MARGARITA'

Barbican Theatre, London

14th Dec '12 - 19th Jan '13

“The same passage read twice can double you up with laughter on one reading, and shake you with its menace on the second. The moment you decide what something means, it at once resists and seems to writhe its way out of your grasp, revealing itself as something quite different. But however stranger or contradictory, it always holds you in its grip.”

- Director Simon McBurney (from the programme)

This stage adaptation is peppered by bureaucrats or busybodies pronouncing Bulgakov's source novel “unpublishable” - despite the fact that here they stand before us. Then, very near the end, it comes to be called “unfinished”.

Which, of course, it is. The history of a work of art gets inscribed over the work itself, like a palimpsest. First contemporary history, then the response of succeeding generations... deepening like a coastal shelf. We all know the novel was never published during Bulgakov's lifetime, a microcosm of the problems he faced in Stalin's Russia. We all know it finally appeared in the Sixties and Mick Jagger wrote 'Sympathy For the Devil' after reading it. None of that is in the novel itself. But it cannot do other than permeate the book we now read, seeping through the pages like it's been left out in the weather of history.

But to stage an adaptation that tries to incorporate that expanded perspective? That's a pretty audacious step; particularly when we're talking about a work that's already multi-layered and metafictional, that isn't especially long but still feels vast, that interweaves plot strands on a scale that must have required an industrial loom. Things were, in short, pretty bloody expanded to start off with! But in fact it's made necessary precisely by the novel's meta-fictional conceits and multi-levelled structure. Of course it's unfinished, it was never intended as a closed, complete, didactic work. It's a decision which leaves us with a three-hour-plus performance, which is sometimes all too much to take in. But it's the only way to go.

Notably proceedings jump back and forth between a play, where actors playing characters interact with each other in scenes, and a performance, where figures take on roles to address the audience – even speaking into stand-up microphones like comperes.

If the expanded perspective does tend to come more through the microphones, things aren't so schematic as for one to represent the novel and the other our reading of it. But putting the two different dramatic devices side-by-side serves to remind us that both are at work.

At the same time, one blending into the other... that's part of the point too. Stage dressing is minimal enough to make Brecht blush. Rooms are created by beams of light projected on the floor, actors navigating through projected doorways like Cluedo counters. At one point a secretary tries to explain how a door opens, going through the possible options until crying in frustration “Just go in, there's no door!” Like those beams of light, everything here shifts and morphs.

Then again... I've commented before how adaptations of polyphonic works tend to unravel into one singular reading or other. It's like pulling at a thread from a jumper, you don't end up with the essence of the jumper, you end up without a jumper. Perhaps there's something inevitable in that. To pick a petty but perhaps telling example, in the novel everyone imagines the sinister  stranger Woland to be foreign - but fails to pin him to a country. In the play he must speak his lines and so choose an accent. (Though if he picks German, naturally enough it's heavily suggested he's not really German.)

This production, to be fair, offers us two threads to tug. One we might call the 'Singing Detective' reading. The titular Master is the author of the book-within-the-book. Underlined by a bookend structure, this suggests writing it has driven him crazy - and he's now in an asylum feverishly dreaming the events, a tangle of delusions where once there might have been straight thoughts in his head. Characters don't just (as in the novel) repeat and echo each others' lines, they swap actors and identities. (Chiefly, significantly, the author and the diabolic antagonist Woland.) At points there's nothing short of cacophony on stage. But as the author recovers they are reconciled, characters merge, the panoply coalescing into one another.

...which is a pretty good reading. It's probably one any writer could recognise. But I don't think it's the dominant reading here. Another one overlays it.

In the programme, Director Simon McBurney disdains the Sixties hallucinogenic reading and comments “in the Soviet Union this novel was not perceived as a fantasy at all. It was about their lives.”

All of which may well be true. At the opening of the book, Woland scoffs at the idea man no longer needs God as he can plan for himself. A contemporary audience would doubtless have seen a reference to Stalin's disastrous series of Five Year Plans.

However, when I read the novel, I was struck by how un-Soviet the setting was, how downright bourgeois the behaviour of the characters. It's stuffed with poets and writers, not workers or dissidents. Berlioz, the first character described in the first paragraph, is “well-fed and bald... neatly clean-shaven” with a “decorous pork-pie hat.”

Of course Bulgakov is not Orwell, and this book in particular is no analogue of 'Animal Farm.' Whatever he is, Woland is not Stalin. Besides, we're now in London, at a time where there's no longer even such a thing as the Soviet Union. But of course McBurney knows all that. In the opening, a Google Earth projection flashes up to shows us precisely where the setting of Patriarch's Ponds lies in Moscow. But the narrator then compares it to the more familiar Russell Square in London. Despite the dynamic visual of the first, it's the second which comes to seem more significant. McBurney has said his aim was a “questioning the dominant narratives of our time, which is what Bulgakov is doing [for his].” But in his keenness to avoid both the post-Sixties freak-out and historical timepiece, he sets himself up to step into a different snare.

The two main parallel plot-lines are Bible times (the setting of the Master's novel), and then-contemporary Soviet Russia. The production tends to emphasise the contrasts between the time of Christ's appearing and the Devil's, at a time and place where people were atheists or put on a great show of it. Electricity crackles through the production almost as much as Danny Boyle's recent version of 'Frankenstein'. Soviet Russia becomes the start of our modern era, it's electrified trams starting a lineage that leads directly to the iPhones in this audience's pockets. Soviet Russia is seen as the onset of modernity, a lightning rod for a contemporary kind of materialistic atheism. When Woland addresses the audience from the Moscow stage, it's underlined he is actually addressing us, here in this room. Microphone trumps staging.

This view of Soviet Russia is almost a refreshing change from the standard one of it as an aberration. We tend to look upon it armed with hindsight, as a lumbering anachronism which somehow just about made it into the end of the Eighties, the Neanderthal of modern times. Yet the classic Stalinist argument, that the revolution took Russia into the Twentieth Century, is on it's own terms correct. (Reader, please note that qualifying clause!)

Ultimately, despite the many good things you could say about this production, a creditable flaw is still a flaw. McBurney goes to laudible lengths to make the source material contemporary. But had he made it, as intended, universal then it would have become contemporary by default. Despite all the wacky modernist metafictional stuff, Bulgakov's novel is at root a cross between a parable and a fable – and parables tend to the timeless. In his stage speech,Woland asks “I'm not so much interested in the buses and the telephones as in the much more important question – have the Muscovites changed inwardly?” His ensuing misrule would suggest not.

The Biblical setting doesn't contrast against the then-contemporary Moscow, they even share the same Easter setting. It's more that they start out as separate stories which come to express the same timeless truth.

In one of Bulgakov's many structural strangenesses, the title-sharing Margarita doesn't show up until half-way through. Delaying her arrival until the second book of the novel may work to subliminally remind us of the New Testament. Certainly she plays much the same redemptive role as the Jesus figure Yeshua, rather than becoming corrupted by the world achieving the very reverse. (Think for example of the way both are reduced to nakedness.) Arguably her powers are still greater than Yeshua's, and she's able to redeem Woland himself.

In some ways the nearest comparison to this adaptation might be David Cronenberg's film of 'The Naked Lunch', not a film version of another unadaptable novel so much as a mythopoetic account of the writing of the book. It works as companion piece, not adaptation. Confronted by an unstageable novel the production instead focuses on everything around the book, chiefly keeping an eye out for what it might mean for us today. But for all it's virtues, all it's imagination and dazzling virtuosity, the result does rather fall between stools. 'Naked Lunch' has very little of the original book to it, and it didn't matter one whit. This production has either too much or not enough of the book, holding to it's narrative structure but then bending it to a more contemporary purpose.

'THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY'

Splitting Tolkien's book up into a trilogy of films like this, some have suggested a commercial motive. To which insiders have responded that those are people who “don't know Peter.” And they're right. For example, I have never met director Peter Jackson and I am suggesting that.

It's not just that Tolkien's first book was roughly a third of the length of 'Lord of the Rings'. That in itself is just an indicator of the way 'The Hobbit' was written in a very different tone. In a perhaps unusual move, Tolkien started off with a children's book then added a sequel for adults. I tend to think of it through Tove Jannson's illustrations; moody and myserious landscapes peopled by strange but cheery cartoon figures, at once otherly and homely.

Worse, take away that tone and you're left with the book's formal elements – which are uncannily similar to those of 'Lord of the Rings'. An unlikely hero joins a motley fellowship on a quest. It's quite often even the very same stops. If it's Thursday, this must be Rivendell. Oh, except instead of getting lost underground to orcs, this time it's goblins.

Plus of course it's all happening in the wrong order. I read... you read... everybody read 'The Hobbit' then progressed onto 'Lord of the Rings'. (I can distinctly remember seeing the fat one-volume edition in bookshops, thinking “one day I will be grown-up enough to read that.”) We read them in the order they were written.

Jackson's solution to that one is foreboding. (Tolkien buffs say a lot of this is stuff folded back from still-later works such as 'The Silmarillion.') Things in Middle Earth are taking a darker turn. Sinister figures loiter, Orcs are abroad, strange shadows fall. Pretty soon you won't be able to leave your windows open.

Particularly in the scene where Saruman shows up, it's hard not to be reminded of 'The Phantom Menace.' But then again, with all the problems that film filled itself, it's prequel ordering wasn't one of them. Plus Tolkien's compatriot CS Lewis wrote his Narnia chronicles out of chronology, starting off at quite possibly the darkest moment. The foreshadowing is probably quite a good idea. The problem is that this never seems a more innocent land, for the shadows to show up more starkly against. The Shire seems as provincially calm as ever. But that's precisely the way it was in 'Lord of the Rings'.

As you'd probably expect, things lurch from set-piece to set-piece like a video game. (Level 5 - Underground against Goblins. Level 6 – on a clifftop against Orcs.) Scenes can seem so overlong I'd claim the expanded director's cut has been released early, except that will tempt fate for the still-more-expanded director's cut that's doubtless to come. The warring rock giants epitomise one pole of the film. They look spectacular but add precisely nothing to the plot. They're not even overcome, really, they just do their thing and go away to leave us ready for the next thing.

But there is another pole of the film, in scenes which do seem more reminiscent of the book. (Or at least work the book into a contemporary film in a manageable way.) The Trolls are not CGI hordes but finite in number, and are (sort of) characterised. There's peril, but served with black humour. You're not quite sure whether to feel charmed or chilled. The scene where Bilbo first encounters Gollum is also effective. Notably both feature wordplay above swordplay, Bilbo battling Gollum by riddling.

But let's face it, we fans are probably making a category error to begin with. These films aren't made to be thought about. Whatever their claims to 'authenticity', they're there to go “oooh” to. A fan of the original trilogy will come away happy. The things you'd expect to happen happen. Except for the things you'd expect to happen in the two sequels. There's just enough Tolkien left in there to act as a kind of through line, to stop it becoming entirely lurching set-pieces like every other Jackson film.

It's like when Wily Coyote steps off the cliff edge, but doesn't fall so long as he keeps running. Things kind of get by on kinetic energy alone. Whether things will start to fall further in the two sequels... that remains to be seen.

ANY OTHER BUSINESS 2012 (aka FILMS)

At some arbitrary point this year I decided I was getting more-than-usual behind in my posting, and that something had to give. At the time I picked live music for the ejector seat, and even drafted a post that said so. (Which I never got round to posting. I was, you see, getting behind with my posts around then.)

Since when... guess what?.. I seem to have written almost exclusively about live music (alongside visual art), and almost nothing about films. Which is what is commonly known as ironic, at least in the Alanis Morrisette sense of the word. Just to rub it in, I've written less about films than last year, when I commented that I'd written even less about films than the year before.

There may be reasons for this beyond natural contrariness. Firstly, the picture isn't (honest guv) as bad as it looks. I may have only covered 'The Amazing Spider-Man', 'Alien' and 'Prometheus' here. But I have written about three... count 'em... three films over at 'FA Comiczine.' (Yes, a comics site. Someone needs to invite me to post for a film site, as that would doubtless get me writing about comics again. Or, should anyone want me to write about early modern history, a needlecraft site...)

More to the point, I'm not entirely convinced this has been that fine a year for film in the first place. Admittedly it's been such a stellar period for live music and visual art, film may simply have been eclipsed. But Brighton's Cine-City festival, whose previous instalments have almost run my life for a month, raised barely a flicker of interest.

If pressed to name a favourite, I might have cited as joint contenders Nuri Bilge Ceylan's police procedure turned existential drama 'Once Upon a Time in Anatolia', and Peter Strickland's tale on human corruptibility for Seventies movie buffs 'Berberian Sound Studio.'Though 'Mysteries of Lisbon', 'Beasts of the Southern Wild'and 'The Hunt' should also be considered among the cream of this year's crop. It's probably a blessing I never tried to capture any of them, as I'd doubtless have been reduced to a valueless set of stuttering superlatives.

As a fan of Nordic noir who somehow hadn't seen the original, I did find much to enjoy David Fincher's English-language remake of 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.' It may have even made for a twist to the usual genre rules, which I tend to regard as reflecting the current crisis of social democracy in the Scandinavian countries. (Marked by events such as the Youth House demolition protests in Copenhagen.) Though the film is again centred around an unsolved crime, pushing that crime back into the past creates a historical perspective that suggests social democracy as a flower not wilted but poisoned at the roots. Not unlike the last season of 'The Killing', it's proposed solution is to get the hell out of Scandinavia.

However, any recommendation needs to be come with quite hefty caveats - one formal and the other more sociopolitical. First, it has to be said the twist ending is rather telegraphed. Secondly, while inevitably the film centres around another autistic savant woman, Lisbeth seems a fair way from 'The Killings' Sarah Lund or 'The Bridge's' Saga Noren. Ironically when she seems the one most explicitly presented as a feminist icon, the solution to Lisbeth's social maladjustment would seem to be the love of a good man. At the end of 'The Bridge', conversely, Saga may have found a more regular boyfriend, but he's not a significant character and there's no suggestion this represents some kind of redemption in her life.

Furthermore, the rape revenge scene feels like having your cake and eating it - a way to bring in torture porn while still appearing to hold onto go-girl political correctness. It doesn't feel at all true, either to the world presented in the film or the more compromised one we inhabit - particularly in a year which saw Jimmy Savile dying having completely got away with his crimes. (Having never read Steig Larsson's novel, I can't comment on his partner's claim the film has distorted the original character.)

Had I actually reviewed 'The Hunger Games' I would have had a lot of positive things to say, not least the way it would recklessly crash cinematic styles into each other as a means of portraying different social worlds. But at the same time, it still exhibited the two great weaknesses of modern genre films. Firstly, they can never actually have a finale, as the door has to be left open for a possible sequel, leaving all the disadvantages of the episodic format without ever necessarily getting round to the benefits.

Also, there's a fashion for absolute dystopias in which 'they' are in total control and will stop at nothing to stay that way. But then that clashes with that staple of genre fiction the heroic individual, and a general reluctance to send the audience home on a downer. So absolute dystopias are always being unfurled, then retreated from for the final reel. For an Exhibit B, think of the final episode of 'Homeland.' Film can't decide whether to face the world as it is, or run from it into homespun fantasy. (But then again, can any of us?)

Despite it's general soaking up of audience acolytes, 'The Artist' was not favoured by film buffs - who commented the later silents were not these charming little melodramas but had become highly accomplished - and should actually be seen as a high point of film history. Von Stroheim was not making innocent, charming two-reelers with cheery dogs.

But I disliked most the way, in a similar conceit to TV's 'Life On Mars', it allowed for an indulgent double take over the past. We can see it nostalgically as a simpler, happier time while crowing over our greater sophistication, with the disjunction carefully pasted over. The best scene by far was the magic realist moment when sound first appears - but only for some!

I did enjoy 'The Master', but still got that heretical niggle that often plagues me with the films of the feted Paul Thomas Anderson – what does all this sound and fury signify, exactly? I mean, beyond Scientology = con. Which works a little like Holocaust = bad or falling in love = good as far as movie themes go. 'There Will be Blood' remains my favourite of his films.

...and similar feelings over 'A Dangerous Method'. All very good I'm sure, as far as film-making goes. But were there any ends among those means? And those scenes of Keira Knightley getting spanked couldn't help but make me think of the old Kenny Everett line - “all done in the best possible taste.”

But it was fault-free compared to Cronenbourg's later 'Cosmopolis'. The film is in many ways fascinating, but every point of interest lies in how it manages to be such an absolute failure. The premise may be an interesting one. It's often assumed filmic analysis of capitalism must be either a documentary or in a realist style, which doesn't necessarily have to be the case. But this attempts to hold a distorting mirror up to capitalism, which already requires such a distorting mirror in order to keep seeing itself as the fairest of them all. Making the stretch limos bigger simply isn't going to do it.

It seeks to portray a capitalist trying to escape his own world, in an era when that has been deemed formally impossible. But it ends up seduced by it's own target. The image bloats monstrously on the screen but never cracks. It's summed up by the endless analysts studying currencies like they're holy texts, a concept it's not sure whether to treat as keen insight or absurdist satire. At times it seems keen to incorporate it's own failure into the picture, an idea which comes across as more intriguing on paper than the screen. As the line about “money talking to money” suggests, it simply becomes a feedback loop of garbled information.

And inevitably the only proletarians who aren't bit parts are inverted capitalists; destructive nihilists, feral rats or both at the same time. Joe Strummer said it all years ago - “I don't want to know what the rich are doing.”

Trend-watchers, alert! Not one but two movies which suggest the stretch limo somehow sums up the modern condition. (Get it? We're like pampered but itinerant, innit?) I might have felt more favourably about 'Holy Motors' had others been less exultant about it. (In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw called it “a genuine surrealist movie... unfettered by logic and common sense.”) To me it all felt neither-nor, the individual sections not strong enough to stand in their own right, the over-arching stuff with the actor in the limo never much more than a framing device, despite the heavily underlined stabs at symbolism. Ultimately it felt self-celebratorily weird, like surrealism played by session musicians. Perhaps significantly, by far the best section was with the father and daughter, the most naturalistic and the most stand-alone.

I'd imagine 'Room 237' would disappoint only those actually expecting a documentary on the making of 'The Shining.' For the focus here is clearly the obsessive fan, for whom no detail can ever be the result of chance. (Check out some of their theorising here.) As so often, it's simultaneously inspiring and crushing to see so much human creativity at work, only to be marshalled into absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

The most horrific thing in the world is of course not ghosts or axes or overacting, but the notion of that world defying all rational analysis – which essentially reduces us to powerless children. Kubrick was doubtless toying with us in his film, setting up readings like breadcrumb trails only to gobble them up again as soon as we started to follow them. There's a reason things end with a man lost in a maze.

But of course, more than anything else, ambiguity is the one thing the obsessive fan cannot cope with, so he keeps coming back and back again to impose his coherent reading on the madness. (And it always is his singular reading. The idea that the film may be tapping into, for example, guilt over the Native Americans and Holocaust disgust... well, no-one even considers that.)

There's absolutely no doubt that Haneke's new Palme d'Or winner 'Amour' is immensely powerful and affecting. And there's absolutely no doubt that it's leading characters are the sort of folk who almost never turn up in films – an old couple who have had a long and happy marriage, and now tend to potter about at home a lot. The near-opening shot which stays fixed on a concert audience, never the figures on the stage, seems a statement of intent.

Yet in another sense they're the sort of folk who always turn up in this sort of film. Art movies aren't just colonised by middle class people, but by music teachers or concert performers with grand pianos in their over-large Parisian lounges. It's not just the exclusion of other classes which galls, it's also the way this reflects the middle class's cultured self-image. After all, we're being told, we're a bit like these people we've come to see, aren't we? We haven't gone to some multiplex to gawp at CGI and chew popcorn with with the chavs.

Yet the majority of middle class people have tedious commercial careers, which they bore other middle class people about at parties. A true film about the middle classes would be populated not by grand pianos but by spreadsheets. This seems doubly disappointing after Haneke's earlier 'Cache', which focused on a similar subject group but dug into their nature to dredged up their repressions. Here their status is naturalised. The epitomising moment comes when the husband gives the sacked nurse a wodge of Euros from his wallet, without having to worry unduly about the change. It's simply taken for granted that those notes are there.

'Coriolanus' admittedly overdid the “making the Bard contemporary” business something rotten, reaching that particular nadir with Jon Snow on a current affairs TV show spouting blank verse. But if... big if... you could overlook that, things started looking a whole lot better. I may have been more pulled into it by not previously knowing the play.

I was quite taken by 'In Darkness', but cannot think of anything wise or clever to say about it now. Cult expose 'Martha Mary May Marlene' held within itself a promise I am not entirely sure was delivered on. Alas, slowness and/or ineptitude on my part meant I missed a string of things - 'Cabin in the Woods', 'Lawless', 'The Angel's Share', 'Rampart', 'Looper', 'The Hunter' and 'Sightseers'. My loss, doubtless...

'DOWN ON AIRSTRIP ONE' (A SONG OF NEW YEARS PAST)

”Another New Year and too much beer

And a puke into the sea...”

It was the early hours of New Year's Day 1984, and a somewhat sozzled John Baine was walking home from a night's celebrating in Shoreham. On arriving home, he turned into his alter ego, the punk poet and musician Attila the Stockbroker, picked up his mandola and wrote the song 'Down On Airstrip One'.

“Going on about Orwell” was indeed something of a national pastime at that point. Michael Radford made a bad film version of '1984', while the Eurythmics stripped it for buzzwords and turned them into a rubbish dance number. As already mentioned on this blog, the sheer dreadness of the date was enough for the anarcho-punk band band Crass to split up. It all felt like something of a media frenzy. (Which is, you know, different to a lucid frenzy.) After all, it was common knowledge that Orwell hadn't picked the date out of some prophetic vision but as an anagram of 1948, the year he'd written the book.

But mostly it felt like misdirection. Perhaps there was no point looking for 1984 on the horizon, perhaps it had already arrived. Since the time of Orwell's writing, the world had been locked into a war between superpowers. It was just a cold war, and when it was fought it was by proxy. 'Cruise' (read nuclear) missiles had arrived at the American base on Berkshire's Greenham Common two months earlier. Many felt that Britain was already Airstrip One, America's Cuba. A handy platform on which to park it's battle gear, and a handy fall guy to take the hit should it's enemies start firing back.

Those nuclear warheads overshadowed everything, to a degree that's hard to imagine now. For all our watching apocalyptic faux-documentaries such as 'Threads' or 'The War Game' I doubt anyone could actually envisage so much destruction, it was simply too big an idea to truly hold in your head. But it became a totemic issue for all that was wrong with the world – people at the top willing to risk the end of it. I constantly wore an anti-nuclear badge through those years, which led to a fair few... ahem!... heated debates.

Yet, however prevalent the blather about Orwell, neither was there much of a shortage of songs about nuclear war. In the spirit of the times, Crass had taken to releasing compilation albums of tapes sent in to them. After listening to the slush pile for these Steve Ignorant emerged muttering “if I hear one more bastard song about Cruise missiles”, before wandering off into the night. Truth to tell, most of these songs were so turgid and worthy you started to wish for the onset of mutually assured destruction just so you didn't have to hear another one.

(Some even came to see them as a reactionary pursuit, suggesting problems didn't riddle our divided society but were confined to a few loose screws at the top. But that's a question for another time...)

Attila's number immediately outpaces the pack by not trying to sound as much like the Subhumans as possible. Those kind of pleasures were scant back then. But there's more...

On first listen, the New Year setting and the Sussex landmarks seem mere scene-setting, incidental to the main thrust of the song. In fact they're what lifts it from it's sorry company. Attila smartly roots things in the everyday, one minute singing about the over-familiar lights of Shoreham harbour, the next the end of everything.

But mostly the song works, and rather brilliantly epitomises it's era, through juxtaposing the New Year's jollity with the threat of annihilation. He sings the word “fun” more sardonically than at any other point in British history. Given the times, getting wrecked seemed simultaneously an act of bravado and the only option left, in a world so intent on wrecking itself. (In that way it's a kind of second cousin to the Specials' 'Ghost Town.') This has an extra piquancy in my case. I first heard this song live, at some Sussex University benefit gig Attila had agreed to play. And yes, at that moment I really was too wrecked to care.

Attila's posted the lyrics and some details of the song here. Though oddly, he hasn't mentioned what might be the most obscure reference for modern ears:

“And if you think your Kentish prayers
Are mightier than the gun
I'll tell you that you're dreaming
Cause the countdown's just begun”

This recounts a 1982 meeting of South Coast Against the Bomb, where the Kent contingent baulked at Sussex's insistence on more radical direct action. Some have compared this to the historic split in the First International...

...okay I made that bit up! It's really a reference to Bruce Kent, Catholic priest and then General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - a group who emphasised political lobbying and electoral support for Labour. Attila, it seems, was unimpressed.

“There's some choose civilisation
And a promise unfulfilled
And there's some choose extermination
When it's someone else who gets killed
A gesture of insanity
And a world left to the crabs
Five thousand years of history
And now they're up for grabs”

At a time when the Tories are trying to throw cash at a replacement to the Trident submarine programme just as they slash benefits for disabled people, I'd sing along with those words today. Come to think of it, I just did.

PLEASE IMAGINE SNOW ON THE LOGO...

A very merry Christmas to all our readers!

In the spirit of this festive season, here's some more photos taken in Sicily at the height of the summer. (Flickr set here.)

ORBITAL (MORE GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

Brighton Dome, Tues 11th Dec

Named after London's ring road, where those rave parties happened back in the day, Orbital were part of a triumvirate of Nineties acts rooted in dance music. Along with Leftfield and the Chemical Brothers, they made music you could listen to as easily as dance, and won fans in the world outside the party scene. (One of which was me.) Yet it seemed vital the way each managed to stay rooted in dance while bringing in things from outside. (I mean, I like the Prodigy as much as the next man, but they essentially swapped being a dance act for being a rock band.)

However, Orbital seemed unique even in that triumvirate. Both Leftield and the Chemical Brothers moved further into rock modes and song structures, often working with guest vocalists like speed dating to stay fresh. Orbital had precisely one guest vocalist, Alison Goldfrapp, who would more commonly chant or babble nonsense words than sing.

And instead of song structures tracks would stretch into phases and movements. Mark Riley once remarked that Television were like a string quartet who just happened to use rock instruments. Bass and drums wouldn't just provide a backdrop for some guitar fretboard stretching, every instrument would contribute to a string of overlapping, interlocking lines. Similarly, Orbital were like a string quartet with electronic instruments. Even though there was only two of them. More than anyone else, they were dance music's grown-up children.

When popular music tries to take on a greater sophistication, it often ends up falling between stools. Those longer numbers aren't really as intricate as a string quartet, while they're no longer as appealing to dance to. Orbital's greatest triumph may lie in that never happening to them, in having enough reach to grasp at both ends. In about every sense, they seemed to know which button to press. From the peeling bells of their first release, 'Chime', they seemed able to conjure up sounds which hit you at quite a primal level. And, as fitted their raving roots, the feeling they went for was euphoria. A track like 'Way Out' has the sense of Christmas carols, without the cheesiness, while 'The Girl With The Sun In Her Hair' uses a human heartbeat for it's bass line. Those who claim electronic music to be merely cold and cerebral have simply never listened to Orbital.

Instead of vocalists they featured samples, often lengthy and from unusual sources. 'Forever', for example, featured the closing speech from Lindsey Anderson's 'Britannia Hospital'. These often suggested at social and environmental issues, but were oblique more than didactic. They worked like the blurry photos in the booklet to 'The Middle of Nowhere'. The photos themselves were often simple snapshots, but the combination of the blurry filters and the emphasis thrown on them transformed them - into something allusive and mysterious.

Yet the Nineties were now some time ago, and (as doesn't occur to me until afterwards) I haven't heard a single Orbital release since that far-flung decade. Will their edge still be cutting? Unusually for the dance genre they have a reputation for wanting to play live, rather than just employ backing tapes and projections, and certainly much of the stuff I know gets reworked and rearranged here. Yet, in what seems significant, there's a noticeable move away from off-the-wall samples into more regular dancey vocals. They're as good as ever at inducing audience frenzy. But it lacks something of the lucid frenzy of old, the audacious invention.

What they were about, if reduced to a soundbite, was dance plus. It's like that plus has been eroded over time. They're still good. They're still very, very good. If this was all you knew of them, you'd probably have raved about this gig. (In about every sense.) But I'm not sure they're still great.

Interestingly, when I saw the recent Chemical Brothers concert film 'Don't Think' I thought something similar. (Leftfield haven't had a release since the Nineties, so we can't triangulate the crossfire.) Somewhere along the way, before most of us were born, popular music got given the task of reflecting and epitomising it's era. This style of dance-plus managed to do that for the Nineties superbly. But perhaps then's gain is now's loss, and what we are left with is the style rather than the substance.

In the unlikely event you haven't heard anything by them before, here'ssome YouTube vids they selected themselves. While this is the classic 'Chime' from Brighton...

JOWE HEAD + THE DEMI-MONDE/ BORIS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

JOWE HEAD + THE DEMI-MONDE

Caroline of Brunswick, Brighton, Sat 1st Dec

For anyone here who isn't a pun rock trainspotter, Jowe Head was a founder member of the legendary Swell Maps. Who, once described by Simon Reynolds as “the missing link between Neu! And Sonic Youth”, were another of the classic bands who took punk not as an excuse for the usual rants about being bored in a bus shelter but as a cue to embark on surreal low-fi adventuring. (See here for ilks of a similar nature.) Since those days, extensive research can reveal, Head has trod a fittingly wayward path and has fronted this particular outfit for the past four years. (His name, incidentally, is Brummie slang for weirdo and the band's an archaic term for bohemian.)

His attire (colourful waistcoat, feathered top hat, paisley everything else) proved a clue to what we were in for – psychedelia served with wry humour and a folkish tinge. Their website lists the influences “Sun Ra, Joe Meek, The Left Banke, Sandy Denny, Os Mutantes, The Flaming Lips, flamenco, Ali Farka Toure, Tinariwen, The Byrds, Captain Beefheart, Hildegarde von Bingen, Velvet Underground and Nico” - which sounds like music to my ears! Accompanying him are a drummer, a cellist where you might otherwise expect a bassist to be, and a woman providing everything else. Yes, everything else – backing vocals, keyboards, xylophone, theramin and at one stage a kettle. There may even have been a kitchen sink involved for all I know, missed in the general melee.

Subject matter includes Krampus (the Bad Santa of German folklore), William Blake and men turning into fish. Or fish into men. I wasn't clear which. Which was probably the point.

Though they don't sound much like the Swell Maps, there's the same sense of eccentricity, of glorified gentlemanly amateurishness, of revelling in music as a hobby. Which has all the usual advantages. Simply by playing whatever they want, they come up with a slew of playful ideas. Of course all the usual disadvantages turn up too, and not all those playful ideas actually stick to the wall. (A version of 'Nottamun Town' was actually fairly ropey, and that's not a song to spoil.) Head's stage presence seems to epitomise all that, coming across as grinningly impish but also mildly distracted. But then again, to misquote Captain Beefheart, if not everything works that's because it's really about playing.

Not as stellar a show as the Cravats, perhaps, but a drop of the good stuff all the same.

Incidentally, it wasn't actually that dark on the night...

The Swell Maps themselves at their Peel Sessions epitome...

BORIS

Tues 4th Dec, Sticky Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton

Sometimes not knowing the rules is a handy short-cut route to breaking them. Take Japanese music. Forever reassembling Western influences in different combinations, like consignments of LPs were showing up at Tokyo docks shorn of labels and context, leaving the locals to make of them what they will. Like the bass sound from here but the drumming from there? Who's to stop you sticking them together?

Boris being a case in point. Named after a Melvins song, they apparently stem from the Japanese hardcore scene, though little of that sound sticks to them now. (Well they've been at it a good fifteen years!) Instead imagine an intersection of Sabbath's sludgy gut-level riffs, Sonic Youth's adventures in detuning and Mogwai's deranged dynamics and semi-symphonic noise sculptures. And probably other things as well, but that's the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties already thrown in the blender, so seems enough to be going on with.

These sounds are sometimes combined in unimagined ways, but also tracks take unexpected corners, develop at tangents, virtually ambush your ears with sonic assaults. You're never really sure when a track is over, except for the people clapping. Actually, I'm not sure that was much of a guide either. All of which is rather epitomised by band member Takeshi boldly sporting what 'The Simpsons' Otto called “a double guitar.” Apparently one bridge is strung as a guitar and the other as a bass, allowing for rapid-fire switching. Notably, even when they go in for the long ambient sections the audience stay with it. (Unlike my schooldays, when my headbanger classmates would always jump the needle whenever Led Zeppelin got acoustic.) Vocals appear more sparingly than is common in guitar rock, and rather than dominating tend to the intonatory.

My only caveat would be (perhaps unsurprisingly) the same as over Mogwai. There's an occasional tendency to get muso-ish which stopped me committing to it fully. Of course we don't want that punk fundamentalism that tries to insist everything has to sound like the first Black Flag album. And, true, it's a thin line between musicians doing things because they work and because they can, but still not one I like to see crossed. Yet that aside, overall this was a band boldly going, rather than just reheating the rock template for another TV dinner.

If you like this, a full one minute of Boris in Brighton...

...you'll love this. Best part of an hour from a Philadelphia set back in 2005 and probably better than their Brighton gig to be honest. It starts out with their Sabbath side very much to the fore, but starts getting really good when it starts getting spacey about half-way in...

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

AURAL DETRITUS/ COLOUR OUT OF SPACE (IMPRO-ATTENDING ADVENTURES)

Aural Detritus 2

Phoenix Gallery, Brighton, Fri 30th Nov

Somehow, with the previous Aural Detritus concert series I managed to attend all three “cutting-edge UK improvisation strategies”. This time round, I reverted closer to type and only made the closing night. Which, needless to say, left me pining for what I hadn't heard in the other two.

Organiser Paul Khimasia Morgan commented ”more by accident than by design, tonight's performances all have strings in common”, to which I'd add all performances were relatively restrained and sparing. Both of which are of course grist to Lucid Frenzy's mill, where all-out free-jazz blurt is not the order of the day. (I can respect Ornette Coleman as much as the next man. Just so long as I don't actually have to listen to him.)

Considering cellist Bela Emerson is a local lass who performs regularly, and considering how much I've enjoyed it whenever I have seen her, I've succeded in seeing her a stupidly short number of times. This collaboration with Adam Bushell on marimba was the first time I've seen her collaborate, and I was curious as to how it would work. After all, her practise of looping and replaying her own lines effectively makes her her own built-in rhythm track.

As if acknowledging this, while still stamping on those effects pedals with abandon, she used loops more sparingly - giving Bushell space. And perhaps by result the marimba was less a rhythm track and more an active collaborator, appealing to those of us who like the way impro eschews instrumental hierarchies. At time the respective instruments seemed to be morphing into one another, Bushell descending on his bars with bows while Emerson drummed her fingers along her cello's body.

Last time I speculated that a reference to “long duration” performances was Aural Detritus' raison d'être. It was certainly duration which made this – it seemed to just get better and better, the collaborators throwing up new combinations like there was no tomorrow.

Photo Paul Khimasia Morgan

We were then shepherded into a smaller, bare room where we sat at the feet of Angharad Davies as she played unamplified, unaccompanied violin. Appealingly, her performance worked down rather than up. As she moved her bow further and further up her violin's bridge, the sounds became fainter and less recognisable as notes. And the less, the quieter she played, the further she pushed things to the edge of hearing, the more our ears were pulled in to what she was doing.

At points a newcomer to the room would probably have been dumbfounded as to what could be holding our attention so raptly. While we who'd been there from the beginning were committed to the path. Quietness and even silence become part of the vocabulary of music, like the way an artist can use white space in his compositions. Enthralling!

In a scene often dominated by gimmicks and gizmos, it was impressive to hear not just new but extraordinary sounds emerging from an instrument dating back to the Renaissance. In fact, so strange seemed the sounds I realised I had not the slightest idea how technically accomplished Davies was on the instrument. They could as equally have come from a complete novice as a classical master. (Though Davies' range is actually quite wide, click on some sound clips here.)

Here's something a little similar from another performance eighteen months ago, only not from Brighton and with industrial clanks as a backing track...

Up next, Dominic Lash was like Davies in a distorting mirror, playing acoustically and unamplified but more fulsomely on a double bass. In some ways he followed the same schema as Davies' set, starting out in the safe harbour of more recognisable chords before sailing straight off the chart. But the uncharted parts seemed more rudderless to me, as if he was spending more time seeking than finding. There seemed a Goldilocks point where it worked the best, as if the most abundant discoveries were at the fringes of the known. In all, a mixed set, but with high points.

Sarah Hughes (announced as “all the way from Withdean... that's Withdean!”) played zither, bows and amplified found sounds. It was one of those sets you find yourself wanting to like more than you actually did, there seemed to be more in there than was actually coming out. Her often delicate sounds sometimes fell victim to street noise, which doubtless didn't help. I would like to see her again before saying anything further.

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE

West Hill Hall, Brighton, 15th Sept & 24th Nov

Though I have a huge amount of time for Colour Out of Space, some strange curse seems to stop me writing about it. I greatly enjoyed last year's Festival, and assembled a huge bundle of notes, which I never seemed to write up until it all got far too late. (Even for me.) This year, alas, there was no major Festival but a mere two evenings at the West Hill Hall. Which is a quite gloriously inappropriate venue for such out-there music, a Church Hall whose idea of stage lighting is plonking down a couple of tasselled standard lamps from some Fifties front room. (And this bring-your-own-booze business makes a Saturday night almost affordable!)

Setting aside ever-present compere Daniel Spicer, there seems strangely little social overlap between the two events. (Perhaps I should start some rumour of a feud between the two, accusing one side of lacing the other's samplers with tunes.) There is perhaps a difference of emphasis, Colour Out Of Space can tend to noise music and other wilder affairs, often with a more performative or even confrontational edge, like a cross between a gig, a pagan rite and a Fluxus happening. While Aural Detritus events can feel closer to recitals.

Take for example Mik Quantius, whose roots are in the Cologne metal scene and performed a shamanic-style set of droney chanting, even entering the room playing a drum. By which token I should be a bigger devotee of COOS, right? Yet life is a perplexing beast and I found Quantius' set to exemplify the tendency of impro sets to lack structure and fail to spark interest. It seemed to go nowhere and take a terribly long time to not get there. For a self-styled shamanic journey, it never really left the Earth. Of these three nights, it was the restrictive and sparing nature of AD which I ultimately found the most evocative.

Yet of course it's not a competition and needless to say I greatly enjoyed many of the other performers, such as Dutch free-form noise-makers Dagora. I probably enjoyed the second night more, but alas rather uselessly lost track of who was what! (Well these boho types keep swapping collaborators and identities, they just won't stay still...) I am perhaps not quite the devotee of Adam Bohman's found sounds as others seem to be, I tend to prefer his cut-up readings and deadpan comedy routines. 

Closers King Alfred Man of Leisure (most likely named after a local Leisure Centre) displayed the variety on offer by, in this world of free-floating duos and trios, being quite definitely a band! A droney, trancey band who would make Kraftwerk sound like Guns and Roses, but a band nonetheless. They triangulated the place where Sixties garage beats, lo-fi and out-there coalesce, and then peppered us with crossfire. One track was a steal from Faust's 'Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl', but then what better place to steal from?

Postscript! News is that the full Festival will be back next year. (Hurrah!)

Niether from COOS, King Alfred Man of Leisure in action...

...and Dagora starting off from somewhere with a lot of vowels in it and heading straight for outer space...

SOMEONE TELL GEORGIE WE'RE NOT FOR SALE!

As many others have already said, Tory Chancellor George Obsborne got so little right in his Autumn statement that he didn't even manage to make it in the Autumn. 

His claim that Britain has “a welfare system that supports out-of-worklessness" is about as correct as it is grammatical; though with weary familiarity he claims his benefit cuts will target 'scroungers', the majority hit will be those claiming in-work benefits. It's all part of the familiar put-on that the crisis was somehow caused by the unemployed or by excessive public sector pay, when it's clear it was actually brought on by the greed and stupidity of his cronies in the banks. They don't just live off our labour, they try to hold us responsible when they fritter away all the cash.

Which makes his further attempts to make a yard sale of worker's rights (first unleashed to the faithful at the Tory conference, now soon to be a law hitting you) nothing more than base misdirection. I'm not normally a fan of clicktivism. But in this case anyone who works for a living (like, you know, most of us) really should be signing this petition...

http://www.unionstogether.org.uk/page/s/not-for-sale

Disclaimer! Check Andrew Hickey's comments below about the Labour origins of this petition. Which wouldn't bother me unduly in itself. (While completely disdainful of Labour, I recognise you can't always choose your political bedfellows.) But he also warns of a high level of politically partisan spam. I haven't received anything like that yet, but shall add another update here should the situation change.

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY GETS BACK FROM IT'S HOLIDAYS...

...well actually I was in Sicily in September, but have only just got round to posting to Flickr some of the shots of sunny Taormina. Those who like this sort of thing can expect more of... um... this sort of thing...