THE GREATEST BRIGHTON GIGS I NEVER WENT TO (2)

Continuing the vidclips of local gigs I failed to attend, taking us back from 2009 to 1974!

The Slits
10th Sept 2009, Brighton Concorde

In a similar story to Thee Silver Mount Zion, I had seen the reconstituted Slits at an earlier gig at the Pressure Point but was out of town for their return. From watching clips I’d reckon the set I saw to be better. (I posted my review of it in tribute after Ari Up’s untimely death.) But then a lot of the live experience comes from Ari’s arresting personality, which isn’t going to transmit to video the same way. This version of ‘Heard It Through the Grapevine’ can’t be faulted, though.



Fever Ray
Loop Festival, May 2009

Despite attending this very festival, and despite a friend’s protestations, I insisted on watching Squarepusher on the other stage. (Who admittedly was great!) Shortly after I read a Guardian review of this set, which prompted me to listen to the album again on Spotify - which prompted me to kick myself very hard indeed! Unfortunately this vid kicks out mid-track, but it’s surprising how well such spooky spacey music works live. (Her videos are worth watching too, in a strange and unsettling way that leaves you wondering if you’ve inadvertently strayed across some black magic ritual.)




PJ Harvey & John Parrish
15th April 2009, Corn Exchange

Beyond watching some of an early mid-afternoon set at Glastonbury, many moons ago, I have never actually succeeded in seeing PJ Harvey. This was another one I didn’t make this one through an unindulgent response from my bank manager. I guess I will never see her like this now because she isn’t like this any more. (Tho’ of course it’s cool the way she won’t rest on her laurels but is forever breaking into something new.)



The Vitamin B12
15th Nov 2008, Komediai

I don’t always make it to Brighton’s resident purveyors of Dadaist shock-tactics anti-music, but then I saw them fairly often when they used to rehearse in the front room of my old house. (I’d come home from work and they’d be squarking on saxes and hitting household items.) Believe it or not, this banging-against-the-bourgeoisie session is pretty ‘regular’ for them.



I obviously managed to make everything in 2007, because coming up next we have...

Polly Shang Kuan Band
11th Nov, 2006, Old Market

Not one for the fainthearted! Brighton’s finest in full frenzied flow, from the first ever Colour Out Of Space – which I inexplicably missed! (Alas only a short clip.)



Sonic Youth
Sometime in 1985, Brighton beach

“Anyone for a swim?”

There’s a story to missing this one, which may set the scene for what Brighton was like in the Eighties. I’d turned up in town for a seafront rally, especially early as rumours were flying that the fascists were going to try and disrupt it. (I remember this as a May Day event, and while the video claims August the weather looks more May-like.) A few bonehead twats actually did show up for once, and stood around in small clumps, occasionally shouting “seig heil” and generally behaving like the master race. Psychic TV (then Brighton residents) were supposed to play the beach, but had cancelled. The support act were still playing but, never having heard of Sonic Youth, we took them to be a reggae band (in the style of Big Youth?) and headed home. Ironically, only a few years later I’d have stayed for a reggae band!



Sonic Youth
11th August 1985, Zap Club

...and this is them at the old Zap Club, later that night. (Or back later that year, if my memory’s correct.) In fine ‘early’ mode, recited vocals, detuning as the new tuning, detached cool shook up in the same bottle as total derangement, coming at song structure like it’s an enemy stronghold that needs to be sacked! To this day I have never seen them, and most likely now never will, though I have seen both Kim and Thursten play solo.



ABBA
Brighton Dome, 1974

Okay this one’s a bit of a cheat! The odds were against me seeing this gig, principally because i) I wouldn’t move to Brighton for another decade and ii) I was eight at the time. But it was on the stage of Brighton Dome that Abba launched their career by winning Eurovision! And any excuse to play the track is a good one, as I think you will agree...



Coming Soon as I get the chance!: Something on this year’s Colour Out of Space...

THE GREATEST BRIGHTON GIGS I NEVER WENT TO (1)

This started with a desire to clone myself and ended up as an act of masochism.

I have wanted to see Bellowhead’s famed live act for a while now. But this desire is apparently not mine alone, and normally by the time I’d made my way to the ticket shop there was no more room at the inn. This time I made sure I was bright and early, and had my ticket to clutch. Then what do you know but Colour Out of Space (Brighton’s three-day festival of “exploratory sound”) gets announced the same weekend!

And then what do you know but two other folk/country artists I’m desperate to see get announced on successive dates the same weekend – Gillian Welch and Richard Buckner! There didn’t even seem to be any way to evaluate my choice, as the two styles of music were so completely different as to be incomparable.

When early experiments in devising a cloning method did not work well, I finally decided that Colour Out of Space would contain a whole load of acts I would never see again. The others (with varying degrees of certainty) may show up here again at some point. (Or at least such is my hope!) So I sold back my prized Bellowhead ticket and bought up a Colour Out Of Space pass. (Which I will write about soonishly – promise!)

Then, as is my custom for skipped gigs, I searched YouTube to try and catch snatches of what I missed. At some point along the way, it occurred to me to do a whole post just of unattended gigs. (As a kind of ‘negative space’ version of the normal run of things.) This gathered momentum and, at a further point along the way, became the two-part affair you see before you.

Having embarked on this, I discovered a complete absence of clips of this most recent Bellowhead gig, so I’ve slipped its predecessor into the chronology below. Nor could I find anything of Richard Buckner in Brighton, or for that matter anywhere in Europe. (So this doesn’t fit the schema at all, but having heard this there’s no way I’m not passing it on. Living right up to his “insurgent country” tag...)

People always tell me the fun starts when I’m not around. Let’s see if they’re right...

Gillian Welch
12th Nov 2011, Brighton Dome

Everybody’s... well mine... favourite Country star sounding typically fatalistic yet fantastically poignant on ’The Way It Will Be.’ (NB: I don’t think she’s singing “I’ve never been so disabused” about my not making the gig.) Someone else uploaded the classic ’Revelator’ but alas the sound is muffled for sections of it. Here’s me getting all excited over that album.)

I seriously hope she comes to Brighton again...



Bela Emerson
4th Nov 2011, Green Door Store

It’s fantastic the way that Emerson can exploit the sumptuous, cigar-advert sound of the cello yet simultaneously make it sound so strange and out-there just by judiciously incorporating some loops. This clip is perhaps a good indication of how she uses them to build the layers up, until there’s a wall of sound that would knock Phil Spector over.

(Yeah, I know we were all consigned long ago to a soundbite world. If eight-and-a-half minutes seems too long to some, I nearly posted the other number which is twice the length!)



DJ Shadow
May 12th 2011, Dome

Alas I had to be out of town the weekend that Brighton Festival tickets went on sale and ended up missing out on a couple of things - chiefly a rare UK appearance of this guy! Music composed entirely of samples from what is quite possibly the world’s largest record collection. That weird thing that looks like the Death Star remodelled as an art installation, but still trying to take over the universe, is apparently the ‘Shadowsphere.’



Josh T Pearson
March 29th 2011, The Hanbury Club

Although I was absolutely gutted about not getting into this, the clip does reveal why a small and intimate venue like the Hanbury was needed. It’s about a seismic a shift from Pearson’s old Lift To Experience days - as if Ingmar Bergman took up breakdancing. Back then, tracks would start with the end of the world and work their way up. Now, playing solo, at times both his voice and guitar fall away almost to nothing, but the effect is to make you lean in, desperate to capture each breathy word.



Duke Garwood
March 2011, Hector’s House

In all honesty I stumbled upon this clip searching for something else. But now I’ve seen it I wish I’d seen Garwood’s blues, even if I’ve never heard of him before!




Show of Hands and The Brighton Taverners
Jan 2011, Brighton Trades and Labour Club

This place was less than five minutes from my house for about seven years without me going into it once, and I had only moved away from there a few weeks before this occurred. Apparently the farewell gig of the Brighton Taverners (who I had never heard of before), for which Show of Hands turned up “all the way from Devon.”



Bellowhead
Nov 2010, Brighton Concorde

As said, one of the many times I failed to see the full-on folk outfit do their thing, a group always described by A-list folk blogger Andrew Rilstone “the mighty Bellowhead.” (I always thought that was John Peel and the Fall, but no matter...) So raucous and yet so directed! Hopefully they will stride a Brighton stage sometime again soon.



Micachu perform Cornelius Cardew
July 2010

Somehow this one slipped me by! Michachu (aka Mica Levy) performing Cornelius Cardew’s ’Treatise’ as part of the Soundwaves festival. Alas the clip is little more than a minute long!



Nina Nastasia
31st May 2010, The Freebutt

I couldn’t make this night at the (now sadly lamented) Free Butt, though I did try and see her more recently. An icy night when the roads had been closed most of the day, I made my way there over treacherous underfootness to find it was unsurprisingly cancelled and not a single punter in the bar. I did see her at the ‘Homefires’ multi-headliner night back in ’07 where she mostly just seemed nervous. But here she’s at the height of her powers. If this version of (not the Beatles’) ’Cry Baby Cry’ doesn’t do for you what it says on the lid, I fear for your heart and suspect you of being a robot in human guise.



Tunng
15th May 2010, Komedia

I love the slightly twisted psych-folk of Tunng. Yet, though they seem to play down here a bit, beyond a short set at the Loop festival, I always seem to miss them. Not great sound quality on this one, but it is the very track which got me into them. (After I heard it on the Festive Fifty, many moons ago.)



The Fall
9th May 2010, The Concorde

Time was, I wouldn’t have missed a Fall gig had I been on my deathbed. But, truth to tell, I don’t normally bother going to see them now. Once they were so relentlessly, insistently together it was almost frightening. Later gigs can be strange, hit-and-miss affairs, constantly see-sawing between nailing it and bashing thumbs. (Depending upon the mood and alcohol consumption of the cantankerous Smith. And I’d guess his stated antipathy to Brighton doesn’t help.) From the clips, this night seems no exception. But when they’re on it they’re still on it! This is a rare re-tread of an early number, and virtually Smith’s signature tune. “When I am dead and gone, my vibrations will live on...”



Show of Hands
Komedia, April 2010

More of the above! As even I was able to see, once I’d finally caught up with them, Show of Hands are primarily a live band. The idea that folk music means wan warblings about May Queens, or school-assembly recitals gets unceremonially trampled in this charge-through of ‘Keys of Canterbury.’



Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra 27th March 2010, St. George’s Church

Actually I saw them a few years before in this very venue and they did this very number! But I’d happily have seen them again. Last time they sang a ‘clean’ version and Efrim confessed he’d been worried about swearing the whole time. Maybe there’s now a trendy vicar in charge, because this time they did the unexpurgated version. Be warned, kids!

The band commented “AA meetings and gymnastic classes in the basement, and a picture of jesus hung dangled above the stage, blood from his wrists pouring out on us. too much. we could have done better by them i think, but church-gigs are an awkward thing- uncomfortable as those fucking pews.” But to my ears those harmonies work splendidly in the cavernous Church.



Jerry Dammers’ Spatial AKA Orchestra
10th March 2010, Brighton Dome

Alas I just couldn’t cobble together the cash for this, no matter how many old jeans pockets I rummaged through. But word was that ex-Special Jerry Dammers’ tribute to the “cosmic jazz” of Sun Ra was quite splendid stuff! The band trooped off stage through the audience, playing all the while, then served up this impromptu finale in the bar area afterwards.



Coming soon! 2009 back to (yes, really) 1974

ENGLISH JOURNEY RE-IMAGINED/ SILVER APPLES (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES STAY CULTISH)

See here for other recent cult-event experiences

ENGLISH JOURNEY: RE-IMAGINED

Barbican, London, 22nd Oct

... in which Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore and assorted folks attempted to evoke the spirit of the English landscape in a multi-media extravaganza involving readings, music and visuals.

As which many of these things, I suspect we English came to be reacquainted with ourselves via an imported idea. It was some time after American writer Greil Marcus coined the phrase “old weird America” that we finally noticed we sat atop an England still older and still weirder. Perhaps we’re finally catching up. Recent genres such as folktronica feel almost explicably about coming to terms with it.

But coming face-to-face with it still feel strange and unsettling. This is exemplified when, during an instrumental piece, a black-faced Mummers takes to the stage. He dances, but in an oddly automated way, as if zombified, a disinterred corpse. Coming to a halt well before the music he stands stock still, facing out at the audience, his very existence almost a confrontation. The relative you wanted locked away.

Of course the point of multi-media events is to create a synergy of all their elements, where they all gang up on your senses to the point where you can no longer tell them apart.

In all honesty, I am not sure how well that worked here.

This is partly because the music dominated. Perhaps inevitably for, in an evening designed to evoke, music has something of a headstart. As Tolstoy said, “music is a short-cut to emotion”, working it’s way upon you while words are still assembling their argument. But also, perhaps the music just worked better. Folk instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy were rendered unfamiliar. But most dominant was the percussion. Not least because it was too loud to miss, but it also fittingly employed actual objects such as pebbles. I’ve often wondered if something animist lay in the heart of music concrete, as if all objects have a spirit and music’s purpose is to release it. The music here felt part-predicated on that idea.

(Perhaps ironically that I realised afterwards that my ear had made the key evoker of Englishness someone German!, FM Enheit, aka Mufty, late of notorious metal-bashers Einsturzende Neubaten. Still, I suppose we both inherit the Romantic tradition!)

Meanwhile, as the musicians were bringing pieces from the landscape into the auditorium, the wordsmiths were casting their nets nationwide.  Many of Moore’s solo performances have been site-specific, often not in regular venues and designed around conjuring up a sense of place. This virtual tour took in Aldburgh and Newcastle as well as London, and the compacting of all these journeys into one point felt very modern - less pilgrim journey, more Google Maps.

But perhaps more to the point, the dense and allusive style of Sinclair and Moore was an odd fit for a live event. It’s like taking a document with lots of hyper-links, then having it read it out loud in the town square. You kept wanting to pause it to follow up some of those links.

The reading which worked best was Moore’s, from the journal of Victorian poet John Clare (see vidclip below). Though beset by madness, Clare had left his asylum to walk to his home village, his intent to see Mary, his first wife and childhood sweetheart. So he was distraught, not only to find merely his new wife but to be told such a marriage had never been, and that anyway Mary was now dead. Although you tended to presumed the marriage was a figment of his illness (as confirmed by subsequent research), I was at the time ignorant of this – an ambiguity which probably enhanced the experience.

A recurrent theme of the night was the concept of multiple Englands, of cultural memory growing in a sedimentary fashion, each layer inscribing itself upon the one beneath. I took the marriage to Mary to be in itself a ‘folk memory’, a buried layer, a Merry England which may never have been but still cannot be dispelled.

Whether this is an insightful idea or not is in a way beside the point. The point is that it is an idea, that my mind took Clare’s simple, direct words and sparked them against themes laid down elsewhere. At other times, it was too busy playing catch-up.

You may if you wish put this down to a prejudice of mine. I tend to prefer art which is a kind of collage, which takes simple elements and spins them into more resonant combinations. Moore was for many years the apple of my comic-reading eye, but the dense prose he can go in for, and the increasingly citational basis of his writing... that’s not really for me.

Try the podcast

SILVER APPLES

Coalition, Brighton, 28th Oct

A trendy young clubber joined the post-show toilet queue, grinning ear to ear. “And what are most 71 year olds doing tonight?” he asked, addressing no-one and everyone simultaneously. “Having a fish supper and watching some telly?” Indeed it seems worth remarking on, when music so out-there has come from someone looking every inch a retired financial advisor. (When told from the audience “you’re beautiful” our star turn quickly corrects the notion – “no I ain’t!” “I look in the mirror”, he explained, smile exacerbating the wrinkles.)

I’ll confess upfront to previously only knowing Silver Apples by reputation. That reputation is pretty much as the Stooges of electronica, pioneering a sound which all about them thought folly - then splitting before it all took off. Main man Simeon built his own kit out of oscillators, junk and the spirit of discovery, alienating even his own band who (all bar the drummer) walked out on him. He just built more switches. The first album came out in 1968, ahead even of anything in the German electronic scene.

He has a weak singing voice, true, but that just throws the focus onto the music. It’s not so much like looking at a template or prototype, it’s more akin to a stem cell dividing. Simeon didn’t pioneer a sound so much as an approach, different tracks point in very different directions indeed. You hear the roots of electro-pop, minimalist proto-techno and quite abstract instrumentals, all jumbled together.

In fact those differences are paraded almost willfully. The gig seems sequenced by i-pod shuffle, jumping from metronomic beats to abstract blurts to semi-songs and back again. I couldn’t quite decide whether that aided or abetted proceedings. Certainly it made everything seem alive with possibility. (Simeon cheerily explained his un-upgraded kit was “still a mystery to me”.) But some transitions were quite jarring. (To see what I mean try following the links from the YouTube clip, several tracks from the night have been uploaded.)

You get this strange displacement activity in venues nowadays, now the lucre has moved from live music to clubs. Gigs now start strangely early, so a club night can be slotted in after they finish. I’ve no idea what kind of a night went on at Coalition after we left, but it’s hard to believe it’s not indebted to Simeon in some way. Yet (lads in toilet queues notwithstanding) I expect the two audiences overlapped scarcely at all.

Mostly however the seafront venue started to remind me of the original Zap Club, which I’d attend on first arriving in Brighton in the mid-Eighties. ‘Alternative’ then was a more nebulous term, less a marketing tag and more a territory to explore. (Though thankfully Coalitions’ ceiling is less likely to drip into your beer.)

Certainly what appeals is the way the sound remains unupdated, like it’s emitting from musical Babbage Engines. Vintage cars are always more appealing than contemporary ones, precisely because they’re less smooth running, more likely to crank and belch gas. Like a lot of music, for it to feel like its working it has to feel like it’s barely working, for only then do you sense you’re in on something special.

And yet don’t we have quite a contradictory reaction to electronica? We tend to hail the pioneering days of backroom boffins armed with soldering irons, before rich kids could just buy some kit off the shelf and elbow in. Yet we also praise it for democratising music, rescuing people from having to devote months to mastering archaic instruments. (There’s the famous quote from Alvin Lucier, that electronics should liberate music the way the instant camera liberated photography.)

But perhaps those seemingly contradictory arguments can actually combine. Perhaps the point of Silver Apples isn’t that it happened at the beginning but that it hit a kind of goldilocks ‘just right’ point, where you needed neither a pedigree in music nor degree in electronic engineering – when, given enough attitude, the gifted amateur could take the stage. In fact it worked so well that, over forty years later, he can still be there...

Coming Soon! Beyond even culty...

JULIAN COPE/ PETER GABRIEL (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GET CULTISH)

JULIAN COPE

Concorde, Brighton, 18th Oct

“I was thrown out of the crib into the snow
I was born to entertain so here I go”

How do you define a cult act?  Well, when a frontman promises “near-hit after near-hit, plus a few obscure B-sides and unreleased stuff” and receives an uproarious cheer... that’s a pretty good sign. (The frontman being the only man on stage might be construed as another clue.) It was perhaps a peculiarity of the early Eighties that so many chart-topping pop stars became cult acts shortly after. But of course most succumbed to the lure of reforming. Even Howard Devoto reformed Magazine, (though he baulked at rejoining the Buzzcocks). Beyond Cope, it may only be Morrissey and Paul Weller who have resisted.

Yet Cope stands steadfast even in that select company. You would guess that most of Morrissey’s cult fans would be secretly delighted were the Smiths to reform. Yet stock in Cope’s original outfit the Teardrop Explodes has if anything gone down in the intervening years. Those that still think of Cope tend to think higher of him now, that he got better as he got weirder. (For example, I think that.)

Ironic then, that this must be the most Teardrop-derived set I’ve seen him do! Admittedly, most of these come from their second album. (Which in retrospect, along with his first solo work, seems transitional to his solo years proper.) His haunting version of the Teardrops track ’The Great Dominions’ was a particular highlight. (Shown below, in Brighton but from his previous visit.)

In point of fact, there’s very few new songs. There’s a very Fugs-influenced drum-basher which rails against Cromwell. (A protest song about Cromwell is surely something only Cope would try to do and only Cope would get away with.) That may have been it! Instead he tells us about his forthcoming book about the prophets. (“Messed-up dudes”, to a man, so we hear.) A friend suggests the gig’s whole purpose may be that the book advance is now all spent. But it was still a worthwhile night.

Cult appeal may lie in seeing someone stride like a star in a small room, interact with his audience, extemporise, change his mind. Which is actually something that suits Cope down to the ground. As I’ve argued before, the very purpose of the rock star is to be saviour and screw-up, tragic hero and clown, all simultaneously. I quoted John Lennon: “part of me thinks I’m a loser. The other that I’m Christ Almighty.”

But I may as well have used the quote from ’Las Vegas Basement’ above, for Cope may be the epitome of this more than any other man. He has said himself, “What I'm trying to do is strike a balance between triteness and greatness.” In his leathers and cap, he looks simultaneously like a rock star on a cover shoot and someone on their way to a fancy dress party. There’s lots of laughter, yet any with-him vs. at-him distinction soon erodes.

Why should Cope epitomise those early Eighties era so well, perhaps even better than Weller or Morrissey? Punk had still believed it could act as a radical and transformative force, an idea soon lost to musical commodification. Early Eighties types could still take to the Top Of the Pops studio yet still feel like musical outsiders. Pretty soon after that, you were asked to choose.

I will admit to slightly mixed feelings about the solo shtick. A song like ’Great Dominions’ benefits from the spotlight intimacy, but the set as a whole might gain something in variety were the occasional extra hand aboard. Cope’s appeal, after all, isn’t as a singer or player. In fact, what he’s really good at is being Julian Cope. I reckon he wouldn’t lose much of that in a crowd.

But don’t expect any objective assessments from me. I found myself smitten many years ago. As, I would guess, was everyone else here...

PETER GABRIEL

With the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Mermaid Theatre, London, 19th Oct ...oh, okay, I only heard this one on the radio!

Peter Gabriel rediscovers his back catalogue with the assistance of symphony orchestra... no, thankfully, not what you’re thinking. Of course we have Simon Reynolds to tell us that music has become too self-referential and backward-looking of late. But worse, when singers use orchestras they’re not normally interested in using the orchestra. The orchestra is just like the stretch limo that takes them to their award ceremonies, it’s not about taking them any better or any differently. It’s merely musical bling (except perhaps for that musical part). Barely altered arrangements wrap themselves round a saccharine approach to melody, a regressive attitude even compared to the things Stravinsky was doing with orchestras more than a century ago.

But here, take for example ’Rhythm of the Heat’ (see vidclip). After the final line (“the rhythm has my soul”), the recorded version breaks into a frenzy of African drumming. This version neither emulates nor diminishes that but strikes off somewhere new, a cacophonous cross-currents of lines, a veritable jungle of sound. (It sounds almost like Stravinsky now I come to think of it, but at least that takes us within the last century.)

Perhaps we should have guessed we were in for something better than nostalgia given a gimmick. Gabriel is not one for looking back, pretty much eschewing his back catalogue with Genesis from the day he left the band. So it may be significant that the only track from the first two solo albums, his first single ’Solsbury Hill’, is the only significant mis-step. It’s one song which simply isn’t suited to being dressed up in orchestration, it pretty much is the simple flute line and spirit of jaunty innocence. Gabriel, I would guess, felt obliged to include his hit.

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

ELIZA CARTHY/ JUNE TABOR & THE OYSTER BAND/ LE MYSTERE DE VOIX BULGARES (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GO FOLKY)

ELIZA CARTHY

Ropetackle Centre, Shoreham, 12th Oct

I’d only seen Eliza Carthy once before, some three years ago, at the Daughters of Albion night. Though for some reason I don’t seem to have mentioned her at all in my write-up, she made an impression on me – a wild card, leaping on stage and stirring things up with her rousing fiddle.

So, while the Ropetackle Centre in Shoreham is perhaps not the rockiest of venues (and rarely gets confused with the ABC No Rio), I was initially surprised by the sound of this set. It was all very songwritery, the words witty and urbane, the music more notable for nice arrangements than foot-stompin’ tunes. It all felt strangely un-folky, with (in perhaps the biggest surprise) Eliza playing very little of her trademark fiddle.

I may have something of an agenda here. When music is raw and raucous, people tend to look for a black influence. And of course much great music has come from exactly this influence. But, beyond all the prinnying about the happy past, folk gives us a reservoir of raucousness beneath our feet.

Equally, I may have simply been confounded by my own expectations. (For all I know she has sounded like that on record all along, with the last time I saw her the exception to the rule.) I did find myself getting into it more as it went along – to the point where the very final track, ’Thursday’, I liked a great deal (check vidclip). That may be partly because it is built around a simple and effective tune, rather than a fancy arrangement looking for a home.

But also it made respective sense of (if such there be) her change in musical direction. Rather than hiding or excusing away the mundanity of a middle-aged life, it instead finds a poignancy in a mundane situation. Having become confused about the day, she believes she has more time at home with the family, and doesn’t have to take to the road. It’s rather like Joni Mitchell’s ’Chinese Cafe’ upside-down, rather than reflecting on the troubles of adapting to middle-aged life it struggles to raise itself out of them. (“The baby she distrusts my suitcase/ So I put it away in a safe place.”) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Life is too short to waste on trying to recapture your youth.

I wondered if that song was the key to it all, and if I could hear the rest of the set again I would glom on to it. But alas live sets cannot be replayed, and instead I was on a bus taking a bizarrely circuitous route back to Brighton...

JUNE TABOR & THE OYSTERBAND     

St. George’s Church, Brighton, 27th Oct

’Freedom and Rain’, the 1990 collaboration between June Tabor and the Oysterband is of course a classic album, rated both by folk fan and not. Yet of course after it the two went their own ways and, having missed the moment, there was no way to see them again. Until twenty-one years later, when they reunite for a successor (‘Ragged Kingdom’) and... yes, really!!!... embark on a tour which takes in Brighton.

Judging by this night, the new album draws from more contemporary styles. It’s predecessor included contemporary songs, true, but they generally already came in folk styles. (For example Shane McGowan’s ’Lullabye of London’.) This night featured versions of more modern-sounding numbers, including PJ Harvey’s ’There Was My Veil’ and even Jefferson Airplane’s ’White Rabbit’. (Though the latter doesn’t seem to be on the album.)

As I’ve said before, Tabor must surely be one of our finest folk singers. Her voice is so full of feeling, yet so free of affectations or showy flourishes. Some attendees baulked then when Oysterband frontman John Jones took over a fair portion of the singing. (As Tabor plays no instruments, she’d then slip off to the side of the stage.) Unfamiliar with the band beyond this collaboration, I couldn’t say whether these were tracks from the new album or band classics enlisted to fill up the set. I suppose time will tell.

Personally, I found myself enjoying these numbers enough. The only parts which didn’t work so well for me were when Jones and Tabor traded vocals (such as their cover of ’Love Will Tear Us Apart’), which didn’t seem to marry so well.

Naturally we all focus on the vocals, but seeing the band live I wondered if the drumming was just as integral to the sound. It’s not rock’s regimented “factory beat” which Matt Groening has railed against, more a series of circular rolls and rhythms which stop the sound slipping into lockstep. Check them out in the vidclip below. Ironically, I noticed this on the military-themed opening number, ’The Bonny Bunch of Roses’. (So different to the Fairport Convention version that it took me a while to recognise it as the same song.)

If I had one complaint, it might be the choice of venue. The natural acoustics and size-defying intimate feel of St. George’s Church might have been better suited to a solo, acoustic Tabor. A standing venue, with the standard brightly-lit stage, might have served this night better. But still, a combination I never hoped to see, armed with brand new material... I simply would not have missed this one.

This is from the first reunion at the Roundhouse last year, performing ’All Tomorrow’s Parties.’

LE MYSTERE DE VOIX BULGARES

Dome Theatre, Brighton, 1st Nov

Thirty singers, all unmicrophoned, lined before a plain background in bright traditional dresses, colour-coded for their section in the harmonies, looking like pastel crayons in the box. The image is bold and simple yet striking and containing variety – the perfect visual correlative of the sound.

Though I first heard them during their Eighties popularity and have music by them at home, it’s not until now that I notice something quite fundamental about them. As you most probably don’t remember at all, a recent installation led me to discover the Renaissance music of Thomas Tallis. Having then found a Tallis LP in a charity shop, I had been playing it recently and (as you are supposed to) noticing the intricacies of the vocal lines. Yet the lines here are no less intricate, it’s merely the harmonies sounding so... well, harmonious that allows you to miss that.

However, if the music rewards attention it doesn’t necessarily encourage it. Perhaps it’s the foreign language, perhaps the relative shortness of the pieces (some stopping just as they seemed to be getting going), perhaps just something in the style, but it somehow becomes rather chill-out. It’s like trancing out to someone’s mellifluous voice, then only noticing as they stopped speaking that they could have been saying something interesting. (A friend said he found the same thing, so it wasn’t just the mood I was in.) In a way this is odd because the successions of held notes on first impression sound rich and resounding. I am not entirely sure whether this is a disadvantage or not. Perhaps folk music should sound simple and heartfelt, and disguise its sophistication in smocks.

Coming soon! Gig-going gets culty...

DOCTOR WHO: THE (NOT-SO) SPECIALS

(aka ‘Who’ fan in obsessive behaviour shock)

Planning to create a special one-stop page for all my ’Doctor Who’ reviews, (which in fact lies here), I came across something I’d started then forgotten – reviews of the ‘specials’ which finished David Tennant’s run. Though I’m fairly sure I lost enthusiasm for them originally through the ‘specials’ not actually being very... well special, I decided to polish up and post them anyway. This is part of my idle fancy that I might one day have a comprehensive list of ’Who’ storylines covered. I haven’t re-watched any of the episodes (which I don’t currently have any access to), so they are slighter pieces than normal. As they date from some time ago, I’ve given them ’Friends’ style subheads as a memory jogger.

I did think of saving this to post in the ‘timey wimey’ hour when the clocks go back, until it occurred to me that saying that was easier than doing it yet had a similar result.

’THE NEXT DOCTOR’

(aka ‘The one where the Cybermen go Victoriana Cyberpunk and David Morrissey plays the Doctor who isn’t the Doctor’)

I think I probably enjoyed this one more than the average fan. (In fact for some reason I’ve tended to like ’New Who’s Cybermen episodes more than the average fan.) Maybe I just liked the underbelly of Victoriana being broadcast on Christmas Day.

I wasn’t even bothered by David Morrissey so obviously not being the Doctor from the off. (Or from earlier. It was really given away in the trailers, by showing off his conventionally heroic personality. Even when fools don’t know what to do with the Doctor they don’t make him conventionally heroic. Instead they give him question-mark lapels.)

But did it have to assert so vehemently that this Doctor is the actual Doctor? Couldn’t it at least have flirted with the idea that anyone who wants to be the Doctor can be? (At least, you know, sort of.) The invitation in a character like Rose is that you can be a shop girl one week and sailing the universe the next. Does that have to stop dead at the companion? Does copying the Doctor inherently involve a cargo cult mentality?

It professionalises a character whose appeal rests so much on his gifted amateurism. Worse, it shifts the role of heroes in stories from inspiration to delegation. And it renders almost meaningless all those big-up speeches about how much the Doctor values humans. ...actually, if it’s going to stop those irksome audience backslaps perhaps its not so bad after all. Okay, forget I said anything...

’PLANET OF THE DEAD’

(aka ‘the one which has flies drawn to it for some unaccountable reason’)

A London bus, with its vivid colour coding, marooned in the desert is a strong image. Not necessarily a different image from the Tardis being anywhere at all, but strong nonetheless. So enjoy it, because unfortunately that’s all this least-special of all the specials has to offer.

Ripping off films is fine, in fact its virtually a ’Who’ tradition. But simultaneously ripping off ’Flight Of the Phoenix’ and a caper movie is simply dumb. Unlike the bus in the desert, it’s not an interesting juxtaposition but an oil-and-water clash. Caper movies have an almost de rigueur gravity-defying scene, normally where the fabled jewel is nicked despite the laser wires, and in fact that’s exactly what we get here. ’Flight of the Phoenix’, conversely, is precisely about the effects of gravity. It’s set in a world of real physical rules, it closes in on the sweat of people’s brows, on ropes fraying with strain.

One suggested improvement - Lady Christine’s stolen cup was made from a rare metal from a meteorite, and is what the aliens were after (rather than the Triotian MacGuffins). She ends up having to give up her precious booty to the Doctor, as it’s unique properties make it essential to their escape.

Okay then, two. Enough of these info-dump psychics. Carmen was the most egregious one yet. Do London buses usually have a resident medium on board? Wouldn’t a cleaner or call centre worker be more common? And her powers played no part in the story, just ostentatiously foreshadowed a later one. Why not just have a telegram arrive from the scriptwriter? “Doctor in peril. Stop. Foreshadowing. Stop. See episode after next. Stop.”

’WATERS OF MARS’

(aka ‘the one with a base under siege, soggy zombies and where the Time Lord Victorious is wrong’)

Despite the generic plotline, this one nearly gets away with it, through a combination of speed and style. Two scenes stand out. After the Doctor has refused to help he stands still in the airlock as the chaos is unleashed behind him in the control room. This plays the normally frenetic Tennant against type, the stillness in the middle of all the noise shouts louder.

And yet there’s still something very New Who about this moment. Not only do we know full well he will turn and intervene, that this is just Campbell’s Refusal of the Quest from Screenwriting Basic. But there’s also the whole high-sounding business of “some fixed points in time” is just an excuse to have it both ways – moments can be decreed ‘fixed’ or ‘unfixed’ as is convenient. In short, this moment isn’t being milked for its emotional weight but the very reverse – the emotional weight is found a useful hook where it can be hung.

The coda scene (with the ‘Time Lord Victorious’) admittedly goes some way to remedying that. (Also, as we think the first scene was our statutory twist, we’re not expecting another wringer.) Of course it refers back to ’Voyage of the Damned’, with Mr. Copper’s line “if you could decide who lives and dies, that would make you a monster.” (Somewhat presented as  A Significant Line at the time, but at least not delivered by another bloody psychic.)

’THE END OF TIME’ (Parts 1 + 2)

(aka ‘the one where Russell T Davies started writing more like Russell T Davies than we had previously thought Russell T Davies capable’)

More than anything else in ’New Who’, this two parter succumbed to the lure of ’The Matrix’, throwing lots of crazy-sounding concepts and wild images at the

screen in such a hectic way that you don't really notice their not

joining up. In a way it was all summed up by an early line - "we see so much yet understand so little."The whole Donna subplot, for example, was pretty much superfluous.

At the same time, the Master replacing everyone with himself is Davies’ writing par excellence. It’s not just a dramatic cliffhanger, it’s quite a neat image of megalomania that he would literally rework every other person into his image. I guess the general idea is to establish the two rival kinds of megalomania, the Master wanting dominion and the Time Lords deciding to destroy what they couldn't control. But in terms of story logic it doesn't really make much sense - how exactly does it aid him, more than would taking over everybody?

And once he’s stuck himself with that image, Davies, isn’t sure what to do with it – and in fact just reverses straight out again. The Master doesn't know the guard's been replaced when the guard is him? That'd take a fairly hefty no-prize to explain!

In general, having more developed three-dimensional characters, like a Doctor who can cry at the idea of his forthcoming death, fits poorly with "in one bound he was free"-style get-outs. ’The Matrix’ has ciphers for characters and intends nothing else. Can you ask the audience to buy into those emotional payoffs, then say “oh, it’s only sci fi, of course lots of it doesn’t make much sense”? Davies seems confused about what kind of thing he’s writing at quite a fundamental level.

But one thing which annoyed me was the theme of the Doctor's own megalomania, so heavily foreshadowed in ’Waters of Mars’, suddenly being so absent. Of course the Time Lord Victorious gets projected onto the Master, as the Doctor’s shadow. But it all feels like a cop-out from the idea that the Doctor himself might go baaaad. However, it is to some degree brought back in the end, and brought back fairly well, when the Doctor must sacrifice himself for the “not very important” Wilf.

VISUAL ART REVIEWS PAGE

Reader please note I have added a page which gathers links to my visual art reviews in one handy go-to place.

(I may do a similar thing for my 'Doctor Who' reviews if I find the time...)

SON OF THE RETURN OF ‘DOCTOR WHO AND THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND’

Previously on ‘Lucid Frenzy’, in a two-part piece, I tried to transcribe what I saw as the essence of ’Doctor Who’ and ascertain how well the revival was preserving and updating that essence. As the title might suggest, this looked into the political philosophy of the show, but of course that wasn’t the piece’s raison d’etre.

Except this time it is. No more sitting on the fence. The Doctor has probably hung around England long enough now to acquire voting rights, so it’s time to pin down just where he pins his rosettes. (Just in case anyone ever figures which constituency the Tardis should be counted in.)

“I think that I shall not listen to reason.”

-       Madame du Pompadour

Let’s start with ’Girl in the Fireplace’, if for no other reason than it lets me use this line – what was it that made those clockwork robots tick? They not only had mechanisms in the place of brains, they were forever attempting to make the organic into components of the machine - eyeballs into spy cameras and so on.

Of course they turned up during the Ancien Regime for a reason. They came to represent the imagination-deficient revolutionaries, the uprising of shopkeepers who, lacking the aristocratic grandeur of imagination, take everything literally – “thickies from thick-town.” In this literal-mindedness, they attempt to remove the head of the Madame de Pompadour, gormlessly unaware that her head was only ever symbolically important.

The Doctor, meanwhile, falls in love with that head, countering their clockwork noggins with the beating of both hearts. He was never more the dashing romantic hero (well at least not since ’The Christmas Invasion’), charging through mirrors on horseback and risking all to save her.

And she is saved – only to die anyway. Rescued from the robot’s beheading she simply dies of old age, and their life together can never be. We’re reminded that a whole history dies with her. The bureaucrats the Doctor forever encounters, the bean-counters and rule-followers who disbelieve his tales and clog his path, these analogues of the clockwork robots come to inherit the world she leaves behind. It’s a pessimistic view of history, in which the present is only a grey delineated sequel to the more colourful carefree past. It’s a fantastic episode, it topped polls and won awards. It’s also almost the very definition of reactionary.

So big it doesn't need a name; just a great big ‘the.’”

-       The Doctor, ’Silence in the Library’

Of course it’s absolutely in character for the Doctor to both choose love over operating system, and choose a mate within class confines. He is full of aristocratic signifiers – titles instead of names (the Doctor, Time Lord), costumes instead of clothes, has neither need of nor interest in money or work, and above all inhabits an air of mystery which suffuses his ‘specialness.’ The Doctor first visited the French Revolution in his first ever season, in ’The Reign of Terror’, and he took the aristos’ side then as well.

But then that’s hardly the sort of thing we should be surprised about. We’re talking a long-running prestige BBC drama, not some agitprop theatre company operating above a pub in Haringey. The BBC is government-funded, so what to expect from them except the art of the state?

But let’s look at it from a different angle...

“Everybody lives! Just this once! Everybody lives!”

- The Doctor

’The Empty Child’ was from the previous season to ’Girl in the Fireplace’, when Christopher Eccleston was still the Doctor. He stumbles upon a collectivised child group  stealing a slap-up feed from a hoarding nuclear family, who have been cheating on the rations. Enthused he cries “I’m not sure whether it’s Marxism in action or a West End musical!” (Though even here the group is notably a pretend family, with the mother figure Nancy at the head, insisting upon table matters.)

Yet beyond that family there are no real villains. Problems arise from good intentions misdirected, which the Doctor is called upon to re-route. This applies not just to the nanobots, who are only trying to fix up the injured, but also to Nancy. Unable to care for her own child, born out of wedlock, she sublimates this urge into looking after the gang of street urchins. To quote myself (well no-one else does)...

“Evil in [the Doctor’s] universe tends to be less an absolute force and more a product of the misguided or misunderstood. It’s less about kicking bad guys and more about healing the sick. In ‘The Empty Child’, for example, the malevolent monster disguised as a child crying for his mummy turns out to be nothing other than a child crying for his mummy.”

This time the future is coming up roses. Almost the last line is the Doctor calling “Don’t forget the Welfare State!” Wars will cease, poverty be reduced and single mothers given public assistance not ostracisation. (“Twenty years to pop music! You’re gonna love it!”) It’s almost the polar opposite of the previous story.

Okay, but what do you expect? A long-running series stretching back to the early Sixties, invented by committee, written in relay... that’s scarcely a recipe for consistency, is it? Yet, as you’ve probably guessed if you didn’t already know, both storylines actually came from the same author – Steven Moffat. What gives? Maybe we could go for a third example from him, establish a triangulation point to try and sort this sorry mess out.

“This dream must end, this world must know,
We all depend on the beast below”

’The Beast Below’ is perhaps Moffat’s most explicitly political storyline so far, and is a much closer successor to ”The Empty Child’. With the absence of anything resembling a West End musical, we are forced to conclude it must be Marxism in action. (I am only half-joking there.)

Society ‘above’ is predicated on both repression, and on repressing the very knowledge of that repression - which itself sends shock-waves through everything. The ‘beast below’ on which we all depend is the slave subject of imperialism, the sweatshop workers who clothe us, the migrant labourers who put food on our plates even as we grumble about them. The whole notion of England, pulled from its white cliffs and green fields, as a city thrusting itself through space, powered by the labour of others reeks of colonialism. (Even if we weren’t tipped off by our intruders being “Scottish.”)

Of course I was half-joking when I said it was Marxist. As in ’The Empty Child’, everyone really wanted what was best for everyone else. Problems can be solved by a push of a button rather than a messy revolution, and life goes on much as before only more nicely. (If I was that space whale who’d been tortured for decades after turning up just to help out, I might be a bit miffed about the whole thing.) It might make an interesting comparison to the SF classic ’Metropolis’ and it’s call for “a mediator between head and hand.” But it’s clearly packing an inclusive, socially progressive message. Two onto one, Moffat’s a liberal, Job done. We even got to finish early.

And yet... what about the character Liz10, who later turns out to be Queen Elizabeth 10th? She not only becomes their key ally in fixing the problem. It’s notable what a Queenly role she plays within the storyline, she is simultaneously above her subjects and represents them. Her button is simultaneously the same as everyone else’s and vital. First it appears the truth had been kept from her, that her power is actually only symbolic. Then it transpires she is as in denial of that truth as anyone else – and has held the power to fix up everything all along.

Her character is a clutch of contradictory signifiers; regal, commanding, decisive, while at the same time black and street-talking. (“I’m the bloody Queen, mate. Basically, I rule.”) Which makes her an interesting companion for the Doctor - who himself epitomises a similar set of contradictions, aristocratic saviour and social leveller.

As George Orwell once said of himself, the Doctor “preserves the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible.” Of course his most regular foe was always the Master, a fellow Time Lord. But this is even truer of the revived show. Three times now the enemy have been not a species but a family group who felt they should be running things (‘Aliens of London’, ‘Family of Blood’ and ‘Vampires in Venice.’) And the Time Lords themselves are seen in a schizo, polarised way, either a sober, regulating force who keep us from the abyss (’Father’s Day’) or malevolently destructive megalomaniacs (’Death of a Time Lord’).

“Hang on a minute. Who put you in charge? And who in the hell are you anyway?”
“I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord. I'm from the planet Gallifrey... and I'm the man who's gonna save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below. You got a problem with that?”
- ‘Voyage of the Damned’

Of course it would be pointless to take all the episodes in the show’s history and separate them into little lists marked ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’. Art is not about getting the right answer, and art criticism is not about accountancy. The point is that the two things are intertwined, that this is not some paradox or error on the show’s part but a reflection of the British society which spawned it.

This is enhanced by the fact that we most compare our popular culture with a New World nation – the US. In attempting to define and defend what is special about ourselves, we tend to reach to (and then rewrite) our past. But this only exacerbates a tendency that is already there. It’s something which would still be true if we compared ourselves to another West European nation. Can you imagine a French Doctor, proffering baguettes instead of jelly babies? A German Doctor? Think how smoothly that would make the Tardis run!

To dig deeper, we need to not only look at what is present but what is absent. Though there’s been two takes on the French Revolution, the show only touched on the English in a short two-parter transmitted a decade into the show’s history. This is indicative of our culture in general, the English Revolution is not held as a totemic event the way the French one is across the water. There is no English Bastille Day. It is not held up even by the mercantile class who it took to power, even under the cosier rebranded name the English Civil War.

Arriving much earlier than the French, this event was never as root-and-branch. It’s not simply something like our monarchy being retained (at least after a brief inter-regnum), for even other European countries with monarchies do not match ours for status or grandeur. Aristos retained a stronger symbolic importance in no small part because they retained their actual existence, heads attached to shoulders and everything.

But there’s another, more recent factor. Britain escaped much of the social turmoil that swept the continent in the early Twentieth Century, not just the great wars but the worker’s movements. As well as no Bastille Day, we have no May 1968.

So, from the anti-French antics of the Scarlet Pimpernel through to today, we retained our fondness for aristocratic heroes. And it must be admitted that, functionally, toffs make for effective heroes. An aristo is not promoted according to merit, his superiority is held to be inherent and self-evident. He is constrained from acting out his will by no day-job. (There’s a strong overlap with the emblematic hero, a point I argued here.)

Plus there’s a twist. Since the medieval Robin Hood ballads had noble origins grafted onto them, the aristocratic hero has tended to be an outlaw. Created in the era of the Welfare State, the Doctor was first an exile then the only one left. This threw the aristo off his antique furniture and into the maelstrom, like Robinson Crusoe forced by events to reassert his essential superiority.

”Planet Earth. This is where I was born. And this is where I died. For the first nineteen years of my life nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not ever. And then I met a man called The Doctor. A man who could change his face. And he took me away from home in his magical machine. He showed me the whole of time and space. I thought it would never end.”

Rose, ’Army of Ghosts’

Moreover, an aristo who disdains social dues might even one day brefriend you, and take you on a life of adventure away from clocking-in cards. This was true of the Doctor even during the ban on hankey-pankey in the Tardis, but is out in the open now. The new Doctor’s companions have all been taken away from jobs rather than careers, a shop worker, an office temp, a kissogram. (Martha, true, was a trainee Doctor. But then she was a different colour to most aristos.) A tall, dark stranger takes them away from all that.

Of course to think of the Doctor in this way is tantamount to suggesting that he occupies a fixed point in the narrative, that he merely appears mysterious to the rest of us. True, he often operates on a meta-level to the mere humans around him – possessing secret knowledge, pulling off impossible feats. But he is not and never was a short-cut to a copycat morality. He’s also prone to expressing doubts, making mistakes, even feeling regret. This departure from conventional hero status is a major attraction for the show.

Yet this apparent departure from the description actually confirms it. An aristocrat in a post-aristocrat world, he still has his privileged birth but no longer occupies the same place in that world. Stripped of his formal status, he is forced to extemporise.

Some take this character as a signifiers of a golden past where all knew their place. Others turn him into critiques of the post-war era; the target culture, the snooping, the petty regulation. Yet such characters were not a result of these divergences so much an expression of a paradox in our culture, one which expressed itself within as much as between ourselves. Popular characters like the Doctor are not offered as a solution to social concerns so much as a signifier, as a worrying-tooth which we might use to worry them through.

I ended the previous piece by quoting him saying “you need a Doctor.” But perhaps all this time he's merely been a symptom...