WILL GREGORY MOOG ENSEMBLE/ WRECKLESS ERIC/ EMMYLOU HARRIS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

WILL GREGORY MOOG ENSEMBLE

All Saints Church, Hove, Thurs 15th May

Part of the Brighton Festival

As the record shows, we the undersigned were much taken with Will Gregory's co-authored live score to the classic movie 'The Passion of Joan of Arc', three Festivals back. And now here he is again, in a performance which promised eight Moog synthesisters a-beeping, “to create new sounds and reinvent old ones”.

Let's take those two declarations in reverse order.

They started the first half with a synthesised rendition of Handel and an excerpt from 1968's 'Switched On Bach'. As the man said, meh. Synthesising the classical always feels to me like string quartets trying to approximate rock tracks, something trying to be something it's not. With a predictable neither/nor result. The appeal of classic instruments lies largely in their rich timbres. Synthesisers are neither well-equipt to emulate that, nor are they exploring things they can uniquely do themselves. This was made all the more galling by the salubrious Church setting, and the silent presence of huge yet unused organ pipes rising up above the folks hunched over tiny boxes.

Gregory seemed to take such criticisms head-on, insisting more than one they were “poor relations to real things”. Leading me to imagine they weren't doing what they were doing badly, it was just something in which I had little interest.

I suspect that, while my eyes sezied on the word “synth” in the Festival brochure, the key term to them was “Moog”. They seemed keen to explore the Moog's deficiencies over its possibilities, it's retro appeal. To them it was a piece of Seventies culture, like sideburns, bottles of Blue Nun or rickets. Gregory compared one model to a Ford Escort. Yet to me, it's tinny efforts aren't really 'off' enough to be humorous or strange.

And if acoustic instruments are like sailboats, there to take you to foreign shores, synths are like space rockets, able to reach much more distant destinations – new worlds and new civilizations. (My first hearing electronic music in the context of SF soundtracks may of course have had some effect here.)

While this first half was highly eclectic, taking in both Bach and Bacharach, they seemed most at home during the 'Escape From New York' soundtrack. And, true, there is something to that era. Of course it was spurred by film studios realizing a geek with a keyboard came up with a score much more cheaply than an orchestra full of Musician's Union members. The result was usually gravitas on the cheap.

But, as ever, restrictions enable. Something like Moroder's classic 'Clockwork Orange' soundtrack creatively exploits the distinction between a Beethoven-blasting orchestra and the hollow grandeur of the synths. It conjurs up a dystopian future, simultaneously opulent and barren. I'm just not sure any of that made it into a set more concerned with novelty sideburns.

The second half, the promised section of “new sounds”, was given over to a Gregory composition, a live score to the film 'The Service of Tim Henman'. Some might claim this was as Eighties as 'Escape From New York', and it sounded at times like New Order with a higher staffing level.

But, you know, I like New Order. And it was in its own way more adventurous and successful. The pieces were essentially composed of overlaid rhythm tracks, formally at least following the conventions of beat music. Yet that's a restrictive, bean-counting way to listen to music, too fixated on formal innovation. The magic lies more in the detail. By dispensing with a lot of the traditional aural 'handholds' of instruments, such as pitch, the dish is something more richly rewarding than the recipe might suggest. Us old folks remember the days of LPs and turntables, and the warped sounds that emerged if you got the play speed wrong. Whereas with this music the tempo never sounds quite right. Its like it could be speeded or slowed quite considerably, and rather than going wrong it would just become something new.

Despite my SF analogies of earlier, when I listen to this music my mind's eye doesn't picture the de rigeur starfields. The music's more like a geometric abstract by, say, Malevich somehow rendered into sound, a landscape of shapes floating above and around one another.

But if visuals too closely match the music they become superfluous, reiterating what's already going on, they bring nothing to the party. The super-slo-mo film of Henman racket-raising worked much better by initially appearing unexpected, but soon becoming fitting. It took something we think we know, and defamiliarised it to the point where a whole new space opened up. And if like me you're a nerdy non-sports fan, who has probably never previously concentrated on the tennis, that just added to the effect.

Let's chalk it up as another example of slow being the new fast. Disruptions to timescale work in a similar fashion to disruptions in spatial scale. When what's 'normal' to us is taken away, the human eye can have trouble differentiating an aerial view across a vast landscape from a vastly magnified close-up. It only takes in the vastness. Similarly, the human brain associates the stretching of a short sequence with time lapse photography – of flowers blooming in Spring and the like. If it's not the entirely new, its the familiar from an unfamiliar angle.

All in all, perhaps not quite the hoped-for evening of life not as we know it. But after an uninspiring start it came to feature life not as we normally see it. Which, I think you'll agree, is pretty cool.

There now follows a short instructional video...

WRECKLESS ERIC + BAND

The Prince Albert, Brighton, Wed 14th May

There are three things to note about this gig by punk 'survivor' Wreckless Eric...

Firstly, he tells us with some glee they're starting off by playing the whole of an album no-one liked much when it came out, which he describes as “the musical equivalent of a comb-over”. (Well this is the guy who found he was “too maverick for punk”.)

Not being as acquainted with the Wreckless oeuvre as I should be, it's not an album I know. I'm not even entirely sure I previously knew it existed.

Also, his personal and musical partner Ann Rigby follows up by describing them as “the budget Paul and Linda McCartney”. And indeed 'Le Beat Group Electrique' is an album of a Sixties stripe.

Thirdly, the drummer plays a cardboard box which some suspect covered a real drum beneath. And wasn't the whole of punk like that? Its poorly concealed secret was that beneath the “no Beatles, no Stones” rhetoric it marked a return to the stripped-down beat music of the Sixties. And woe betide anyone who admitted any of that at the time. Eric however was initially part of the Stiff records scene, a slightly later growth less fixated on combing over those roots and happier to admit that songwriting was going on. And here he is with music which very much revels in the drum under the box. (Yeah, okay, in actuality they kept the box. Just go with the metaphor, will you?)

The essence of Sixties beat music was to blend the raucous with the melodic. Which is why it always needed two bands to headline it, the Beatles and the Stones. In fact songs here pretty much split evenly between Beatles-like and Stonesy, neat-haircut harmonies alternating with slurry drawling. (Bassist Andre Barreau was in fact a founder of the Bootleg Beatles.) A structure which may get a little schematic, when the point was more to mix the two things up. And while the jury remains permanently out on that whole Beatles vs. Stones thing overall, here it's definitely the Stonesy songs which win out. They sound spirited, while the Beatles-like can stray towards the pastichy.

A bit like the phrase 'just gay enough', in some ways it feels 'just post-modern enough'. It's neither an ape-like Oasis mimicking, nor some smartarse deconstruction. It's a knowing and witty take, while still tearing into the music with gusto. It's perhaps best summed up by the lyric “I'm a boy, of course/And you're a girl” - the two words “of course” giving the thing a slight twist. Plus there's the extra level of us listening to this now, to songs of long-gone hot summers.

The later part of the set was, stylistically at least, more familiar. Of the three times I've seen him, it may be the first where he actually played his hit 'Whole Wide World'. I'd enjoyed the last time I'd seen him playing alongside Rigby, their musical styles complementing one another. So it was perhaps a shame she only got one song here. He comments, amused but apparently seriously, they he recently got a record contract but she didn't.

And while we're on the subject of the Bootleg Beatles, I was never quite sure how all that worked. Did they start their sets in collar-less suits, then take psychedelic drugs in the interval and come back on with tuning-up symphony orchestras? And wouldn't they have to grow their hair during the interval, too? Perhaps they had some Getafix-style potion...

Footage from London a few days later. For the attentive, subtle clues are scattered as to Eric's age. (His birthday was actually the day after, but close enough.) And they're playing... oh, you guessed...

EMMYLOU HARRIS

Brighton Dome, Fri 23rd May

Part of the Brighton Festival

Emmylou Harris' status as a great of country music was cemented, at least in my mind, by her inclusion in Gillian Welch's 'I Dream A Highway', a song which (among many other things) sets out a subjective alternative history of country. “You be Emmylou and I'll be Gram” refers to her early duets with Gram Parsons, the first in an almost stellar list of collaborations which took in Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Most probably, and like many people, I chiefly know her through those collaborations. But it's never too late and now here she is in town...

Of course, she's in possession of one of the great characterful voices of country, simultaneously tremulous and sinewy. It's a little like the distinction between a good-looking face and a merely pretty one, pleasing in its blandness. Harris has one of the great good-looking voices.

And her voice is chiefly known for harmonising, something I'm never sure I've really got to the bottom of. Strong voices are usually like malt whiskies, best served neat. But here it's often when set against the backing vocals that her voice is set off the strongest.

Perhaps deriving from that voice, the key word for the set might be 'organic'. You can't imagine these songs being composed, annotated or arranged. They just seem to appear, in the moment, tumbling out one after another. Even as you exalt in how good they are, you half-imagine they're simply making them up on the spot.

It seems to me people can have a strange blind spot over country music. I'm often asked if this-or-that piece of music would appeal to those who don't normally go for country. I honestly don't know what they're talking about. But, before I'm asked, I really can't imagine a music lover not taking to this gig. If I wasn't one of the amassed hardened fans eagerly clapping the start of each number, I was joining in with them at the end.

For the second time in two weeks, the bulk of the set's given over to a track-list-order recital – this time of 'Wrecking Ball', now one year shy of its twentieth anniversary. And it sounds a pretty fine album indeed. Though that didn't stop one audience member briefly halting proceedings by protesting this. (Harris responded with her best Southern manners, but notably without budging an inch.) Now it may be a little late in the day to protest a set-list once the gig's already underway. It kind of presumes bands show up with a back-up plan, in case their first option gets voted down. And as in neither case did I know the albums beforehand, over-familiarity was scarcely likely to bother me. But overall it's not a fashion I'm keen on, even if I don't choose to shout about it in crowded rooms. It leads to, as Harris said herself, “no surprises”. And I can get no surprises without even leaving the flat.

But rather than ending on that flatter note, let's go out with a demonstration of how good the gig really was. After telling you two things about the gig, that it was all songs off one album, and that Harris exels most when harmonising, here's 'Pancho and Lefty' - which exhibits neither of those things. It's still a great clip. It goes a bit 'director's cut' in the middle, but the sound quality is good. So much of it is in the bittersweet way she sings “it was a kindness, I suppose”...

'CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER'

Face front, true believers! Plot spoilers below!

“On your left.”

Granted, Captain America's opening line is more likely intended literally than as some kind of political metaphor. But as Peter Bradshaw wrote in the Guardian “advocates of the 'liberal Hollywood' conspiracy will find plenty of ammunition here.” It's much closer to the 'Dark Knight Rises' that the fulminating Tea Party thought they were watching than anything that actually happened in that film. The conceit, as set up at the end of the previous instalment, is that a handy plot device transports Cap from the clear-cut square-jawed Forties to today's sinkhole of moral ambiguity. And finds it wanting.

As co-director Anthony Russo states “We were all reading the articles that were coming out questioning drone strikes, pre-emptive strikes, civil liberties — Obama talking about who they would kill... We wanted to put all of that into the film because it would be a contrast to [Cap]'s greatest-generation [way of thinking]." It could almost carry a screen credit “based on an original idea leaked by Edward Snowden”.

How come? How did the most straight-laced Marvel hero, the one with a military title embedded in his name, the one who made his costume out of the American flag, get first billing in a superhero movie that overtakes the others from the left? Actually, to those of us who know our comics history, its not so surprising. As Tony Keen argued in 'Captain America: Sentinel of Liberalism', Cap was created not to represent a white-faced conformist America but a liberal, inclusive one. The little guy who got beefed up by that super-serum never forgot the other little guys. His brief McCarthyite existence as 'Captain America Commie Smasher' has since been retconned out of existence. It's scarcely a co-incidence that his chief allies here are a black guy and a woman.

The plotline of course echoes the original comics, where wartime Cap woke up one day in the Sixties. Except the 'current day' here owes as much to the film world of the Seventies as to news articles. Producer Kevin Feige has stated “we really want to make a '70s political thriller masquerading as a big superhero movie,” citing films such as 'Three Days of the Condor', 'The Parallax View' and 'Marathon Man.' Casting Robert Redford, who starred in 'Condor' and 'All the President's Men', who is almost the poster boy of Hollywood liberalism, seems a deliberate tip to the audience to look in that direction. And casting him counter-intuitively as turncoat bad guy Alexander Pierce... well, we'll get to that.

Of course it references those political thrillers the way pop songs sometimes filch from symphonies, it takes the big thumping themes but leaves behind the complex structures and counter-melodies. It's all summed up in one exchange - “How do we tell the good guys from the bad guys?” “If they're shooting at you, they're bad.” There's a memorable scene in a lift at SHIELD's corporate-looking HQ, finding tension and paranoia in tiny details. Then as soon as the slugfest starts they could be fighting anywhere over anything.

A classic example of the need for jeopardy rigging the debate is when the big guns of the Helicarriers get locked and loaded. Its implied they're trained on actual or nascent superheroes, without any corresponding suggestion they might be taking in any super-villains. (Let alone your actual common-or-garden terrorists.) To the fan those guns don't represent a pointed debate between security and liberty, they threaten something more fundamental – preventing the making of any more superhero films. Yet even a dyed-in-the-wool state-hatin' civil liberties champion like me would concede that terrorists exist. Many of them are already in government, true. But not all. And I don't really want to get blown up on the London tube.

This structure also resides on the quaint notion that the Allies fought the War adhering rigidly to the Hayes code, and black ops are some recent arrival on the American landscape. That atom bomb was presumably dropped by someone else, then. The closest this comes to a head is where Cap admits to Fury they may have bent the rules back then, but “we never struck, until someone hit us first”. In other words the simplistic 'clear blue sky' myth that still hangs over Pearl Harbour.

You're probably better off not thinking of any of that. You're probably better off imagining some 'Purple Rose of Cairo' scenario, in which Cap steps not out of an actual past but down from one of those propaganda images on show at the Smithsonian – with their peculiar blend of primary colours and sepia. Which was more the way Marvel first brought him back. He'd then been out of the comic pages for more than a decade. Combined with the general young age of the readership, that effectively made him a long-lost figure from history, rather than from another film we all went to see a couple of years ago.

But there's a deeper structural flaw. How did SHIELD get warped into a sword? There's a moment in the end credits where its emblem is reflected as Hydra's, effectively encapsulating the plot. Hydra's infiltration of SHIELD is clearly meant to represent corruption at SHIELD. We became the people we fought. Yet language can be slippery stuff. The signified needs a signifier by definition, but then sometimes that signifier can just plain get in the way. At one point Rogers spits at Fury “You're not part of Hydra, but you had the same ideas as they did!” Which most likely represents the film's intent. But it often slips into implying that all of SHIELD's problems were external. There wasn't an excess of power, it just fell into the wrong hands. Pierce's plan, at root, seems to be to create a climate of fear which will allow him to rule more easily. If he'd genuinely believed his own rhetoric about assuring security, the film may well have been bolder and richer.

This is all pretty much summed up by the film's treatment of Nick Fury. The most radical idea it comes up with is that Fury himself might somehow be implicated. But this notion is only really flirted with, and it soon becomes obvious the bad guys' plot centres around bumping Fury off. Their failure to achieve this becomes their overall failure. Yet the comics were, after all, called 'Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD'. Nick Fury is SHIELD as far as we the viewers are concerned. They're the guy with the eyepatch plus his mates. If he was never corrupted then SHIELD never really was.

The dichotomy between Fury and Pierce also suggests that the split lies between the 'suits' and the 'agents' – those who make Powerpoint slideshows of strategic directions and those who do the actual work. Fury partly defeats Pierce through using the imprint of his bad eye, which of course he got in battle.

Having previously complained that Jane Foster got little to do in 'Thor', and that the Black Widow was somewhat under-used in 'The Avengers', my happier task here is to tell you that the Black Widow plays quite an integral role. Peter Bradshaw goes as far as to say that she “at least gets to be an actual character this time.”

If she was paired up much with Cap in the comics, it was after my mainstream-reading days. But she makes a good foil for him, to quote Bradshaw again, “chipping away at [his] old-school earnestness and trying to fix him up with a date.” Some of this is schematic. (Cap won't push a bad guy off a roof to make him talk. But she will because she's, like, a badass herself, yeah?) And this date-pushing business is doubtless only going one way. But there's genuine sparks in the scenes between them. And they're pretty much fired by her to his straight man.

Now the alert reader may already have noticed my talking about this relationship rather one-directionally – what she does for Cap. He's certainly the moral centre of the film, around whom all the other characters need to reorient themselves. (While he just needs to catch up on modern cuisine and Marvin Gaye.) Her reformed criminal role is not only repeatedly referred to, but in many ways reprised. The film is bookend by scenes of her uploading data. The first time she's uploading from, going off-mission to rescue info rather than people and consequently raising Cap's ire. But then she uploads to, to the people, spilling those black op beans like a one-woman Wikileaks.

But she's so much like Selina Kyle from 'Dark Knight Rises' I could almost cut and paste what I said back then about her. While you probably don't want to picture me sporting the costume, I would rather be the Black Widow than the pious, serious-minded Cap any day of the week. Unsurprisingly, she's sexy. But she's also smart, sassy and just enough on the right side to not be goody-goody. And it's not just me who things so. In his review at the FA site, Will Morgan comments: “in comic stores, or at least the one I run, we had numerous girls and young women coming into the shop asking for 'Black Widow' comics, because they’d finally seen an on-screen Marvel heroine who wasn’t insipid, leaden or flat-out embarrassing.”

Superhero films commonly suffer from overcrowding, and its true the two-way banter between Cap and the Widow leave the Falcon as something of a gooseberry. Look at his comparatively minor contribution to winning the final battle. At one point he even points to Cap and says “don't look at me. I do what he does - just slower.” And it's funny because it's true. At times you feel he's there so there can be a black character for Cap to be racially inclusive to.

Which is perhaps true to the comics. For most of the Seventies the cover was double-billed 'Captain America and the Falcon' ('71 to '78). While Marvel comics in many ways pioneered black characters in mainstream comics and often ran overtly anti-racist storylines, there was also a tendency to pair them with a more suburban-friendly white face when it came time to sell the unit. There was also 'Power Man and Iron Fist' ('78 to '86). (Disclaimer: Power Man started out with sole billing, and the Black Panther had his own title from time to time.)

But it's the other double-biller, the Winter Solider, who really feels double-booked. You could easily imagine the plot running without him, suggesting he was spliced in at some stage or other. It might have been better to hold him back more in this film, perhaps just hinting at his actual identity, then give him more screen space in the third instalment. (A mid-credits teaser tells us he's returning.)

It would, its true, be fairly easy to come up on this film's left. But in a way, it would be too easy. If, ultimately, it's not terribly radical its coming up on those other blockbusters' left still seems notable. Could you ask for more than this? Yes, of course you could. But we're not used to blockbuster films even having an agenda. Normally they're stewed by too many cooks and too wary of alienating any sections of the audience, the ellipses and caveats effectively driving 'Dark Knight Rises' into incoherence. Perhaps it could be taken of an indicator of the way the Snowdon revelations have been taken more seriously in the States than here in the UK. Even baby steps in the right direction might bode well.

WILL THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY EVER GET OVER ITS SICILIAN THING?

My (somewhat intermittent) series of photos of Sicily closes on Catania. Samples below…

...full Sicilian set viewable on Flickr here.

So the answer to that title question is, finally, yes? Actually, it's no. For I voyaged back to that fairest of Meditteranean isles the following year, so have a whole new set of photos to post! (This time the North and West coasts.) I may well break things up with pics of other places before embarking on those, though...

THE EX/ STEPHEN O'MALLEY + ALUK TODOLO/ MIKE WATT (MORE GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

THE EX

Sticky Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Wed 23rd April

When a longstanding band still prove themselves able to cut it, the standard thing to say is its like watching something brand new. But with Dutch post-punkers the Ex, that doesn't quite cover it. They sound more like a band two or three years in, who while still on that first burst of enthusiasm have also had time to sharpen up. When you're glad you caught them at that highpoint, cresting a wave that must inevitably crash. And they've sounded like that every time I've seen or heard them, in their thirty-five year career.

Before they come on, a friend reminisces of seeing them in their shouty punky days when he was still an angry young man. “Then a few years later”, he continued cheerily, “I was watching them improvising with an avant-garde cellist.” It’d be tempting to describe their sound as “ex-punk” out of sheer cuteness. With an name that suggests perpetually breaking company, rather than some stifling marriage they became a jumping-off point for endless sonic adventures. Along their path they've morphed into a twenty-piece modernist orchestra, hung out with traditional Ethiopian musicians... it would be harder by this point to name some turn they haven't taken. Last time they played Brighton was with a brass section more accustomed to jazz venues.

But tonight guests get the night off, and the Ex are just the Ex. Part of me wishes they'd come up with a set based on a whole new scale system they'd devised, were collaborating with robots or running through a concept album about Ludo. But they've reached a point where going back to the classic four-piece seems almost like a bold new adventure in itself, and it displays what a powerful unit they are.

In their recent 'Wire' interview (issue 362, April '14) Daniel Spicer was rightly praising Katherine Bornefeld's drumming, “instinctively avoiding the usual foursquare rock rhythms” for “tumbling polyrhythms.” And certainly her drumming makes for a band based on quite different foundations to the rockaday world. Notably there's points where the guitars reduce to punching our the sparsest morse code riffs, while her pummelling drums expands to fill the space. While for their part the three guitars tangle together like barbed wire, then suddenly lock in and break forward like an armoured car. (The band go in for baritone guitars, which can when required approximate bass notes.)

I commented a while ago that the significant thing about Led Zeppelin was the way they could sound tight and loose at the same time. Similarly, the Ex can simultaneously sound ordered and disordered, manifesting whatRichard Elliott called “tightly controlled uncontrol”.

For a band who often had similarities to Gang of Four, the arrival of new singer/guitarist Arnold de Boer might have pushed their sound even closer. Many songs are based in the same sense of insistent confusion. Rather than righteous shouty slogans comes the perspective of the bewildered outsider, the unchosen candidate, the gambler always losing to the house, the rabbit in the headlights. The All Music review of their last-but-one release describes their tracks as “anti-anthems”, sparking off the dissonance between their propulsive force and their gnomic obliqueness.

Much like the music, his lyrics can at the outset appear simple and direct yet become less and less pindownable the longer they continue. Often he'll repeat nonsense phrases with mounting intensity. He delights in telling us one number will be sung in Friesian.

Having said it before won't stop me saying it again. If anything ever deserved to be described as a lucid frenzy it was the Ex. Thirty five years – and counting...

This clip has the vocals somewhat low in the mix for some reason (which wasn't the case on the night), but is otherwise a pretty reasonable representation of what went on. The last track is new to me. Anyone reading this know it?

STEPHEN O'MALLEY + ALUK TODOLO

The Green Door Store, Brighton, Sun 13th April

As the record shows, I exulted over having got to see Stephen O'Malley's mother outfit - drone metal cultists Sunn0))). (Who, looking back, I also saw on a Sunday. That's the day for it.) With my characteristic lack of originality, I compared their sound to entering a darkened room. At first all seems indistinguishable, but the longer you linger the more things take shape. Pretty soon, it's like you always lived there.

Ecept this time, as O'Malley's guitar was accompanied only by its own reverb and echo, I couldn't help feel we all hung around with our eyes open and the room turned out to be empty. Perhaps that comparison's a little harsh. The point of the piece was clearly intended as something closer to Cage's minimalism. If you play loud guitar long enough, all sorts of unexpected resonances start to creep in. And the interference, the distortions, break-ups and fringe harmonics, becomes what you listen to. The instrument is instrumental, the guitar just the net to catch the butterflies. (Notably O'Malley had no CDs on sale. It's a sound to hear live.)

But, in all honesty, that's something I've heard done much better elsewhere. Overall, it felt like those solo albums band members brought out in the musoish Seventies – released irrespective of the obvious fact that only when the band members together did the elements react.

The night was saved however, by the mesmerising set provided by Aluk Todolo. I'm not sure whether they were intended as first support band or co-headliner. But, having never heard of them before, I would doubtless have missed them otherwise. Their mission statement's been described by Pitchfork as “to set the dark sounds of black metal to the typically kaleidoscopic expanses of krautrock.” I'm not sure whether that's a presumed or informed summary, but it's a pretty damn good one. Plus, as befits one of life's less obvious French exports, it led to one site giving them the somewhat unusual combination of tags - “rock, black metal, experimental rock, krautrock, occult rock, Paris.”

This krautrock/metal accord was chiefly exepmplified by the bass lines, varying between the propulsiveness of Sabbath and the looping patterns of Can. In fact, perhaps partly from seeing him in this very venue, I was more than once moved to compare them to Damo Suzuki. There's the same win/win mix of metronomy and perpetual change, the overwhelming force of repetition combined with snake-like shifts in the sound – like you can't really tell where they're bringing them in. Unlike Damo, the tracks come in too quickly to be made up on the spot, but they have such a keen interplay it's also hard to imagine they're all scripted in advance.

With so tight a rhythm section, the guitar is used more as a sound-source generator than producer of chords or melodies – more Gang of Four's 'Anthrax' than anything Anthrax ever did.

A short clip of Stephen O'Malley which, to quote the poster, “basically sums up the entire 40 minutes”...

...and a longish clip from Aluk Todolo, not from Brighton or even this tour. Just a great clip...

MIKE WATT AND THE MISSINGMEN

Green Door Store, Brighton, Wed 9th April

The Missingmen... I had taken that band name to be punningly seizing the bull by the horns. For Mike Watt's chiefly known as the bassist from the influential punk band the Minutemen, whose (to quote a reliable source of gossip) “anti-rockist eclecticism” was sadly and abruptly curtailed back in 1985, by the death of his chief collaborator D Boon. Actually, as I was later to discover through an equally reliable source of gossip, its not to do with Boon's enforced absence but a joke on a later band – the Secondmen. It still kind of works.

With a guy like Watt, you'd probably expect him not to provide a greatest hits set of bygone days, or serve up a fan-favoured album in the correct track order. However, you might not necessarily expect him to instead embark on a forty-five minute “punk opera” about the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

So of course he does. Describing it, with some glee, as “a fucked up thing”.

“Punk opera” might be something of a provocative gag of a title for this piece, 'Hyphenated-Man.' Think of a more DIY, less cartoony version of some of the old Zappa side-stretchers, such as 'Greggery Peccary'. Though he also calls it a “song” its neither long song nor song cycle. Its composed of individual pieces, each too short and sharp to work as songs in their own right. They need to be fitted into the a greater whole, like the individual stones making up a a mosaic. (Watt himself calls them “parts”.)

Like many of their compatriots on the SST label the Minutemen eschewed hardcore's confines to compress off-kilter funk, Beefhartian jazz and wired post-punk into almost impossibly short, tight numbers - likened by Simon Reynolds to “electro-convulsive jolts”. And the hyphenated music of tonight's the punked-up, angular, agitated, caffeinated funk you might expect to stem from that source. (If adding more of a country influence from time to time.) It was simultaneously akin to and unlike Nomeansno's long, lumbering, bass-powered numbers.

If not a long set, it was so skittering and frenetic it was constantly springing something new on you, never allowing you to slip into a reverie. Watt's habit of trading vocals with guitarist Tom Watson, sometimes a single word at a time, seemed symptomatic. It was quite possibly a very different gig for those who knew the piece beforehand and those who didn't. For those of us who hadn't, listening to it's clutch of tangents almost like trying to hit a moving target. Alertness was mandatory. There was quite possibly more going on within one ten-minute segment than most punk bands have in their whole careers. Leaving you at the end feeling some combination of “wow!”, “whew!” and “sorry, could you say that again?”

Its challenges and rewards were quite possibly eased by Watt's engaging personality. These days he looks like he should be staffing what Americans call a 'Mom and Pop Store', while sounding like some cool old jazz guy. And he seems as comfortable carrying a bass as anyone I've ever seen. I'm not even sure he unstraps it to go to bed at night. Plus, to pursue the Zappa comparison, the piece is full of infectious humour, often causing the audience to laugh out loud.

And the Bosch element? Not only is the piece hyphenated in its title but in each segment, example including 'Arrow-Pierced-Egg-Man', 'Hand-and-Feet-Only Man' and the somewhat splendidly named 'Confused-Parts-Man'. I can only suppose that each segment is dedicated one of Bosch's hybrid creatures, the parts crowding together to make up a scene as the amassed figures in his paintings.

The opening six hyphenated minutes, though not from Brighton...

"DESTROYING THE LINES OF DEMARCATION" - RIP GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

"My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic."
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014)

“YES IT'S A PROMISE, AND IT'S A THREAT...” - A HISTORY OF HARDCORE PUNK IN THREE-AND-A-HALF CHAPTERS

Firstly,  from the 'American Hardcore' documentary, Keith Morris and Vic Bondi “go off”...

...leads us neatly into this gloriously grainy footage of Black Flag tearing through 'Rise Above'. With, as was the way of things, ample audience participation...

Next up, a hardcore anthem if ever there was, 'Drink Deep' by the short-lived but perpetually influential Rites of Spring.(And source of our title quote.)

...and last, but by no means least, an inexplicably suited-up Minutemen playing 'History Lesson – Part II'...

Keith Morris is right of course, that was what it was. The stuff Mark E Smith called “R+R as primal scream”. But let's focus on that last clip for a second, what about the Minutemen?

“Punk rock changed our lives.” Such heady words, can they actually be backed up by anything? After all, detractors commonly claim the politics in punk songs was crude, naïve and sloganistic. Which it normally was. But, really, they're missing the point! I've often laughed out loud at the earnest imbecility of punk lyrics, yet loved the very same song.

These were songs, not political treatises. Perhaps the most classic hardcore lyric of all was by Ignition, “I know what my anger means.” Punk was a means to articulate something inside you. Punk songs did for you what spinach did for Popeye. Ther archetypal hardcore band Bad Brains formed after the singer read a self-help tract 'Positive Mental Attitude.' Like most punk stories, that's absurd – but fittingly absurd.

Since the blues days, singers and musicians had tended to change their names – McKinley Morganfield becoming Muddy Waters and all the rest of it. Those were something more than stage names, I can't imagine anyone other than his mother still called Muddy 'McKinley'. But with punk the audiences often changed their names too. Punk was a step towards self-transformation. The first step towards not accepting the world as it was - that was not accepting you as you were. From that point on the watch-words were “question everything” and “be self-reliant.” The hardcore resource guide everybody was expected to read was called 'Book Your Own Fucking Life'.

And that's what it's all about. We didn't come out of that the people who went in. It did what it said on the lid. Punk rock changed our lives.

NOT THE LAST WORD ABOUT ALTERNATIVE TV AT ALL...

Sometimes, scary as it sounds, the rest of the internet can be slower than me.

When I posted my review of the recent Alternative TV gig in Brighton, I could find no footage of the event on YouTube. Which normally wouldn't matter much. Normally that hand-held juddery stuff doesn't give DA Pennebaker much of a run for his money, and I link to it more as evidence that the event happened. It's like all those blurry photos of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

This time, however, two separate sets of footage has subsequently appeared – and it's champion stuff! Here's a track I mentioned in my review, the epic 'Splitting In Two' complete with it's classic rolling riff. It's great the way Mark Perry looks more like he should be propping up the bar in an East End pub than fronting a classic punk band, while the drummer looks a similar thing only relocated to the shires.

'Splitting In Two' comes from their first album, 'The Image Has Cracked'. The next night, when I went to see Blyth Power, front man Joseph Porter cheekily enquired whether they'd played anything from its follow-up, 'Vibing Up the Senile Man'. Just as post-punk was like the difficult B-side to punk's catchy single, that album became notorious when live renditions of it's experimentalism were frequently rewarded by hurled beer cans from frustrated pogoers.

Porter was clearly expecting the answer “no”. Yet they did play something, they played 'The Radio Story'. For, according to the clip's poster, “the first time in a generation” – and what's more it was great! As if to underline the divergence, this is even shot from a different angle and suddenly bursts into colour.

Both awesome tracks, I think you'll agree. But, as I said in my review, the really cool thing is that one band can so effortlessly encompass both styles.

Mr. Perry and cohorts, please come back to our fair town soon...

FOCUS: WILLIAM ROBERTS

The first in a promised series on long-gone art exhibitions, this time a mini-show at Tate Britain dedicated to William Roberts

When looking at the Vorticist exhibition here in this very venue, we saw how David Blomberg's 'Mud Bath' (below) had a totemic influence on the group he never officially joined. Mostly they seem to have seen it as a step ahead from something like Matisse's 'Dance' (below below).

And, okay, you can line them up that way should you choose. But Blomberg was most likely trying to evoke the loss of self that can be generated by group frenzy. While the Vorticists too often saw in it something linear, the next footfall in the regular advance of the avant garde - the collapse of the figure into abstract angularity. If a little geometry is a good thing, then more of it must be better – right?

They drew, in short, the wrong lesson and went tilting off at the horizon line. Blomberg had pitched his painting precisely, at the point where the human figure tips into the abstract. That's what makes it so compelling and so memorable an image - that it's so stark and striking yet so hard to pin down. It hits you and then it lingers.

William Roberts, however, was not caught up in this charge. He may have gained more of an insight into Blomberg through studying alongside him at the Slade. Or the self-identifying prole may have refused to fall in line out of personal animosity with Vorticist guru (and arch toff) Wyndham Lewis. Perhaps he was simply smarter than the pack. Whichever, it ended up the same way, and he refused to fall in with the frog-march and instead embarked upon... well, let's check it out.

The earliest piece on show, 'Leadenhall Market' (1913, above), is a pencil drawing made while he was still a student at the Slade. Particularly when placed against the bold use of colour he was employing later, it would be easy to dismiss it as juvenilia. In fact, incipiently, everything's here.

The tubular geometry he would use for anatomy is already emerging. But more significant is the composition. It's calm descriptive title (almost inviting the prefix “study of...”) belies its contents, for the figures are thrown in a tumult that often seems fractious. The crowd pours into view like a raging river; faces are sometimes realised, sometimes not, as if semi-discerned under it's froth. It's almost the opposite of Jose Munoz's comic strip art, whose street figures are trapped in an alienated individualism. For better or worse, these are thrown together.

Though it's shown only through a preparatory sketch, its with 'Return of Ulysses' (1913, up top) that Roberts ceases budding and starts to flower. Actually, it doesn't even matter that it's just a sketch. There's many sketches in this room, and beside them the paintings often look like sketches blown up rather than filled in with any greater detail - the blocky faces, the thick lips, the eyes a clamped-closed line. If there's a lingering influence from Blomberg's bathers, they look as much like the graphic icons of the working man from Otto Neurath's Isotype picograms. Equally drawn from the world of graphics is the posterly look – the limited palette of deep but vivid colours.

Vorticism was almost absurdly short-lived, and by 'Athletes Exercising in a Gymnasium' (1920, above) we're already past it. If Roberts seems to be moving away from the Blomberg style, then by this point so was Blomberg himself. The figures are less bold geometric colours, and more naturalised. However stylised and transformed they may be, we can see the basis in actual people in a real space. It's almost like 'Mud Bath' decoded. Perhaps because of it's transitional nature it's not one of Roberts' best, but looks like something of a half-way house.

'The Port of London' (1920, above) is, conversely, the least Roberts-like work on show here and much more successful. Described by the indicia as “unusually a landscape composition”, the few figures are faceless and non-dominant. You can see the influence of Impressionism and it's celebration of everyday life. (Water-side scenes being of course an Impressionist favourite.) But it's an English Impressionism, of quiet business, of caps and chip wrappers, something akin to Stanley Spencer or later Edward Burra. Roberts would habitually walk the London streets and frequent its bars. And he paints the waterfront warmly, like a portrait of an old friend.

'The Cinema' (above) was painted the same year, but is based on the genre of Music Hall paintings, by Walter Sickert and others. Traditionally the genre celebrated the unruly liveliness of such popular entertainment, with a boisterous audience undifferentiated from the stage. Formally, Roberts distinguishes his cinema from such shenanigans - fencing off the silver screen into a square in the upper corner, and giving it it's own separate palette of gold and bronze.

But from there he quite deliberately undermines his own composition. A woman's head strays across the corner of the screen, the angle of her body pulling it's diagonal composition out into the auditorium. The figures mostly look to the screen, but from a bustle of different poses. They're not in the neat rows you'd expect to see in a cinema. One group sit on a bench at right-angle to the screen, while the couple on the lower left seem more interested in each other. Others amble in, even though the film is already showing. The capped, uniformed, upright figure dominates the auditorium, and looks to be some sort of usher or guard. But his arms are folded, his eyes angled up at the same screen as everybody else.

The cinema was held by some to draw a line under the Music Hall era, to mark the imposition of order. Not to Roberts. He's celebrating the crowd, its carefree, good-natured unruliness, its true nature lying unabated beneath those bureaucratic rules and regulations.

It features a device characteristic to Roberts which might at first seem paradoxical - to give each figure a unique pose while withholding any individual features. After all, this is no faceless horde but a cheery gang. But Roberts isn't concerned with the people that make the crowd up, he's concerned with the sum of parts. Roberts' subject matter was his own people – the English working class.

'Deposition From the Cross' (1926) uses a device Roberts shares with Spencer and other artists of the era - uniting not just modern and classical themes, but the everyday with the legendary. Here, despite that title, the emphasis is not on the cross but on the ladder. The figures are in modern dress and multi-racial. When you hang pictures up in a row like this, you cannot help but see a sequence to it. And unlike 'The Cinema' they're not at their leisure but at work, united in common purpose. The earlier claim that the crowd is innately untameable is now more nuanced, more muted.

Yet, while the face of Jesus is obscured, three sets of eyes triangulate upon him. Rather than being stuck on a cross, like the figure on the far left, he's handled tenderly. Again despite the title, it's ambiguous whether they're taking down or placing up his body. This is Jesus the modest carpenter's son, who belongs not to Kings and Queens but to working people.

But there's also an almost Communist reading, to file alongside the religious one. One of the paradoxes of capitalism is that our need to sell our labour is what brings us together. With common orders, wage labour gives us common purpose. Jesus could represent salvation but also workers autonomy, which had seemed so strong immediately after the Great War. Perhaps it's significant that this was painted the year the General Strike was defeated.

With 'The Art Gallery' we suddenly fast forward to 1973, and with the leap in time comes a corresponding change in style. Most immediately noticeable is the new palette. Colours are now brighter, pinks and purples, the once-dark background a mustard yellow. But the bigger shift is in the figures. Heads are no longer blocks but rounded, individualised, caricatured, like his cartoons from the '50s seen elsewhere in room.

In what must surely be a snub to Vorticism, geometric abstract artworks are thrown into the background - almost blocked out by crowd, barely space for a triangle to protrude. Unlike the screen of 'The Cinema', not a single figure looks to them - instead they look at each other or out to us. Roberts, the great chronicler of life in the streets, finds the visitors more interesting than the art. Had he been in the Tate the same day as me, he'd doubtless have found more inspiration in the crowd than on the walls.

And yet there's a trade-off. Cinemas, at least in Roberts' day, had one mighty screen in a large auditorium. While art galleries featured a multiplicity of works, making gallery-attending a more individualised experience - something reflected here. (It's perhaps a paradox of our age that, as general life becomes more closeted, modern art is becoming more installation-based or otherwise experienced collectively.) Figures are blocked together, in one heaving clump, but their body languages places them in chatting couples or family groups. If the Cinema could still be like the Music Hall, the Gallery is no longer like the Cinema. As figures grow features and gain their individuality they lose their common purpose. The two works probably reflected their respective eras.

Much of the criticism directed against Roberts (and there's plenty) is simple art snobbery. True, he sometimes gave a romanticised view of the working class, which took its subjectively as almost self-evident. But his sin was not to depict the lower orders through the necessary distancing devices, not to place them as his subject, his sin was to give them collectivity.

However, it shouldn't be denied that he could be repetitive, falling back again and again on familiar themes and devices. At its worst his work looks like Playpeople in stock sets, ready to pushed around in little dioramas. A child's eye parody of working class life, one cliché swapped for another.

I'm forever insisting that British Modernism needs bigging up, and complaining when this or that artist doesn't get a major retrospective. Whereas this time we may well have been better off with a greatest hits sampler rather than the comprehensive box set. However, while in life Roberts walked his own furrow and kept the art establishment at a firm arms-length, there is no need to keep him in such a box today. As mentioned above, there are frequent overlaps between his work and other British Modernists of the time. His contribution should not be over-stated. But it should be celebrated.