...so ran one of the straplines for the sony walkman when it came out, or so i remember. that was 30 years ago (sheesh) though i didn't manage to get one till around 1985 or so. despite their habit of chewing tapes, going through batteries like water etc etc, i found pretty soon that i couldn't live without one; going on a 200 mile coach journey without my hatfield and the north compilation became unthinkable.
but after a while i found that the walkman was doing more than just allowing me to indulge my taste for canterbury prog while using public transport. listening to stuff like eno's 'on land' on a moonlit beach or john dowland's lachrymae by a river as the sun came up made for experiences as rich and as revelatory as any acid trip. or anything else i can think of.
of course, the material and the surroundings have to come together - hatfield and the north on a coach are unlikely to do it (kraftwek are probably a better bet in that situation). but a couple of days ago i had one of those magic moments. the soundtrack was this and this is what my phone thought the world was looking like at the time...
like most people of a certain age, the late lamented john peel played a pretty big part in my musical education. huddled under my nylon sheets, headphones (or usually earphone) on, i'd be regularly exposed to damascene experiences of all shapes and sizes, from linton kwesi johnson to ivor cutler to god knows what.
so far, so obvious, i suppose. but equally peel often educated me as to what i really didn't like. for instance, his interest in folk music struck me as unfathomable. often he'd play something ineffably fantastic by pere ubu or the raincoats or the slits or whoever, only to follow it with a selection of jigs and reels by the bothy band or some dirge by june tabor about walking out one midsummer morning and seeing a pretty maiden. i could see or rather hear no redeeming features in this music. it felt alien, but not in a good way. it was a culture that had nothing to do with me. surely this was the sort of thing they played on radio 2 for god's sake... though for some weird reason i had bought steeleye span's 'all around my hat' on a single, my aversion to folk music remained very firmly in place for years, despite the fact i did have a soft spot for arran jumpers (i blame my gran's exceptional knitting skills). instead i devoured increasingly industrial amounts of krautrock, jazz, prog, post punk and avant rock. and though i had developed a love for john martyn, that was pretty much as close as i got. and anyway, he wasn't proper folk, was he?
in the late 80s i joined a band called three straw men. their guitarist andy bole had played with a very fine band called the lowest note on the organ. i had one of their singles. he hung out with fred frith and the like. they sent me a demo tape and though it sounded suspiciously like, well, folk music, i assumed all that would change and we'd become some wilfully odd experimental outfit.
i was wrong. andy was about to leave and we only managed one gig together; and i found that the other members were deeply into traditional breton and eastern european folk. but we had lots of gigs and studio time and despite my misgivings about the music, i stayed on, thinking that a broadening of my musical experience was probably not a bad idea.
i was right on that front but it was often a difficult experience. most audiences actually regarded us as a wilfully odd experimental outfit, so i had got my wish i suppose. and though initially the sight of accordions, melodeons, hurdy gurdies, pipes and banjos among our fellow musicians (not to mention their beards) that we shared bills with all over the country filled me with abject terror, eventually i learned at least some tolerance towards them. and their sincerity and passion for tradition began to trigger something slightly more profound in me, though my listening habits remained largely unchanged. while on tour in ireland, i would habitually slink off from some marathon pub session to listen to motorhead on my walkman.
something changed though, and it was probably in ireland that it happened. while i was deeply impressed by what went on in the sessions - the passion, the knowledge, the idea of a shared vocabulary of tunes and the notion of music as a precious and essential part of everyday life, the music itself still refused to speak to me, if that doesn't sound too pretentious. actually this routine by tommy tiernan sums up the pleasures of a good irish session beautifully.
but on my return i found myself with a hankering to hear some of that music. my bandmate ashley compiled a tape of irish tunes for me, and it rarely left my side for months. i still have it. but though i loved it dearly, this was music that was essentially exotica - as foreign to my cultural roots (whatever they were) as john zorn or linton kewsi johnson or ornette coleman.
so began a love/hate relationship with english traditional music that has of late became more of a love/love thing. there's much that still pisses me off about the folk scene (froots magazine, for instance and the indiscriminate use of the term 'folk' for anyone who has an acoustic guitar), though i do find these days i'm probably more on the side of those who'd ban drumkits and amplification from the stages of the cambridge festival; not because i think such things are contrary to the spirit of the music or that it cheapens it, rather than there's enough of that kind of thing elsewhere. i even tolerate accordions for fuck's sake.
i think part of this is might be born of some kind of desire to feel part of a cultural lineage, however bastardised it's been. but maybe it's more a desire to hear something that's somehow unmediated, unaffected, something honest. it's still somehow transgressive to hear someone like chris wood sing about how we wishes he were still a maid, or martin carthy declare his love for a blacksmith....i don't know, it's hard to explain. but increasingly it's the only kind of music i really want to listen to.
off to the queen elizabeth hall to see john adams leading the london sinfonietta in a programme of works by american composers (including, not unsurprisingly, john adams). things kicked off promisingly with john cage's credo in US - a piece i'd not heard before and dating from 1942. scored for piano, two percussionists and 'radio or phonograph' (here, adams had prepared his own samples of american radio broadcasts). it was a lot of fun, sounding at times like charles ives on hallucinogens. i'm not sure if i was hearing things, but at one point the piano part seemed to be cruelly deconstructing ragtime cliches, removing all the usual dynamics and most crucially any sense of swing. it sounded a bit like jools holland. cage was not a jazz fan, and it showed.
next up was paul dresher's two part concerto for violin and electroacoustic band. the electroacoustic bit was actually two keyboardists playing yamaha sample workstations. it's a bit of a meaningless term these days i suppose, but i still think that was pushing it. i've heard a fair bit of dresher's stuff which seems to trawl a fairly barren but not unpleasant stretch of water somewhere between dodgy art rock and proper, serious classical music. this was no different, and as the 'band' took the stage i could see an electric guitarist among them. ooh, radical. there were some nice bits, particularly in clio gould's solo violin parts in the second movement, but the vaguely cosmic prog rock electric guitar just sounded silly (dresher is a guitarist himself and has recorded a lot of competent but boring sub-fripp loop noodling in the past). the electroacoustic bits were confined to prepared piano hits or horrible synthetic strings, which seemed entirely surplus to requirements to my ears. disappointing.
on to david lang, who runs the ubiquitous bang on a can allstars. his cheating, lying, stealing was a short chamber piece for bass clarinet, bassoon, lots of percussion, keyboards and woodwind; there were a lot of 'classic' minimalist techniques on display (it was probably the only piece in the programme that would really merit the term), but they were stretched and played about with in a maximal way. i liked it.
finally, john adams conducted his own son of chamber symphony. adams has never really grabbed me, though i still love a bit of shaker loops on occasion. there was a lot going on here; some nifty instrumental combinations and some very nice double bass lines too. yay. the start of the second movement was beautiful, but soon relapsed into a procession of strident, restless call and response between strings and brass. all very clever, but somehow it all left me a bit cold. i should say i was probably in the minority though.
this was very much the acceptable face of contemporary classical music (not too much dissonance, lots of rhythm etc) so i don't really know why i was surprised at how indifferent much of it left me feeling, even though i was often left in awe by the technical abilities of the players. it says a lot though it's not that surprising that the cage piece was probably the most entertaining and certainly carried the most sense of danger; much of the rest of the music did seem to sum up one of his maxims; 'we've nothing to say and we're saying it'.
i've just finished reading david sheppard's biog of bwianeno. it's a good read, and mr sheppard is both knowledgeable and an elegant writer. and though a fan, he maintains enough critical distance from his subject to avoid hagiography.it's certainly better thanerictamm'srather miserable tome. a couple of things stand out - the book's 439 pages long, yet by page 365 we're only at 1984, leaving less than a hundred pages for the last quarter of a century. the other is the sometimes less than favourable opinions of brain given by his sometime associates. gavinbryars is particularly sour, as is john cale on occasion (but then that's probably to be expected). what certainly comes across is eno's ability to be in the right place at the right time, and his ability to soak up high art conceptualism and squeeze it into pop music with varying degrees of success. a certain steely determination that machiavelli may have been proud of seems to mark some of his dealings, while others are marked by a heartwarming generosity of spirit towards his fellow musicians.
as sheppard says in his intro, there's a huge amount of enoid info out there, so any obsessives are probably likely to find little in the book they hadn't known already. and that's largely true, though i did pick up a few nuggets (as well as spotting a couple of errors, sadsack that i am). nowadays eno seems a rather distant figure to me, and some things about him (particularly his somewhat patronising obsession with africa) kind of grate. let's not mention coldplay or u2 or james or robbiewilliams. so i read the book with a certain detatchment which grew as it went on (the last hundred pages became a bit of an effort). last night i stuck on music for films, followed by another green world. it's no exaggeration to say i know every last note, drone, whirr and hiss of those records. i was relieved to find that despite all the words written by brian or mr shepherd or lester bangs or whoever, there's still an essential opacity, mystery and unabashed beauty to eno's music of that time that those words can't get rid of.
cale is of the opinion that brian's always slightly removed from his music, citing his reluctance to sing as a sign that he likes to hide his real self, his essence. he might have a point, but then again it's the opinion of someone whose music has often been about revealing the dark corners of his own psyche (listen to 'music for a new society', if you can). there's something else at work in what i reckon is brian's most emotionally engaging work; stuff like 'becalmed', 'slow water', 'through hollow lands'. i don't know what it is exactly, but it's way beyond any talk of oblique strategies or systems and in their own quiet way those pieces are as emotionally charged for me as beethoven's late quartets, john coltrane or even mrcale himself. for those pieces to still curl themselves around my core in the same way they did some 30 years ago when i first heard them must count for something.
well, i haven't been gracing the blogosphere with any of my usual gobbets of wisdom of late. mainly because i've been dragging my double bass all over the shop, and even playing it on occasion.
so maybe it's time to cast a critical ear over what i've been up to.
clang sayne after much post production wizardry by the redoubtable mr conor curran, clang sayne's 'winterlands' has snuck out into the big bad world. it's a beautiful looking thing and it sounds good too, though as laura ruefully remarked t'other day, it's a bit too long. making it was hard work - not that it was difficult or unpleasant as such - it just became hard to generate a 'definitive' performance while the tape was rollin'. or rather, while the hard disk was whirrin'. yep, that old chestnut. anyway, the wire liked it enough to stick a track on the last wire tapper cd. hurrah. we've done four gigs, including a launch gig for the album last week at cafe oto. that gig was a bit of a curate's egg for me, but the others have been pretty good. it's got to the stage where we can start to take liberties with the songs, recasting them on the fly much like john martyn or tim buckley might have done. laura's off in new york for three months so we're taking a wee break...chiz.
lucy jane playing with lucy seems to get better and better, even if the playing conditions aren't always as great as the music. the rather lovely mr paul may has chosen to play with us when he can and a recent gig hinted that we could have a very fine trio on our hands; it was a thing of beauty. we've also been moonlighting as a (ahem) jazz quartet with the wondrous ralph littlejohn on saxophones, taking liberties with tunes by everyone from nick drake to dusty springfield. lucy constantly amazes me with her musicality and her fearlessness. she's well good, and if someone doesn't take a serious interest in her soon it will prove to me once and for all that the world (and particularly the music business) is going to hell in a handcart.
sonnamble conor and i wheeled out the sonnamble project for our first gig a few weeks back at the fleapit, alongside platform and paul may (trading as shaded monocle for the evening). we also brought in the v. wonderful ian r watson for a spot of trumpet, playing as duos, a quartet and a quintet. despite a few tech issues it was a good night and touchingly well attended. conor and i intend to get a release sorted by the end of october.
rick jensen i've been gigging with rick for a year or so now. i have a thorny relationship with free improv having had what's felt like a huge amount of poor quality experiences playing it. but what's nice about rick is while i ponce around worrying about it, he doesn't give a fuck - he just goes for it. and sometimes (as at last week's gig at hoxton square's macondo) it all comes together. i always have a ball playing with paul (and our trio with watty needs some serious kicking back into touch); he generates this beautiful free swing that's such a joy to play with - airy, delicate but still intense as fuck when it needs to be...
i've been a gradual convert to the joys of spotify. as a music 'discovery' service it's quite passive, and its recommendations are patchy and sometimes unfathomable, unlike last or amazon or whatever. but for checking out all those things you meant to listen to but never managed to get round to (or had completely forgotten about), it's undeniably great. and i've even been moved to buy a couple of things as a result. ooh er.
the ads are increasingly annoying though - not so much because of their frequency but their naffness. those made by the spotify people themselves are the worst - they seem to be recorded on a webcam mic (the plosives could blow sensitive speakers) and i'm certain it's the same bloke doing a lot of them using slightly different voices. my favourite though is the one featuring a rather nervous sounding amy macdonald plugging her new album, which ends with this line - 'the guys at spotify believe that everyone loves music, and i'm sure you will too'. er, what? is amy sure that we'll believe in the somewhat radical notion that everyone loves music, or that, hey, we'll love it too now thanks to spotify. i don't think she's suggesting we'll love her music, which is probably just as well.
equally awful are the 'punters' voice messages telling us how great spotify is but wouldn't it be even greater if we could listen to the entire beatles back catalogue on it. again, some of the early ones seemed to have rather similar voices to those on some of the other ads...hmmm. certainly if the bloke with the comedy irish accent who says he'd love more dance music so he can get his dancing shoes on really talks like that i'd be very surprised and not a little sympathetic.
still, all this is unlikely to make me (or anyone else i know) actually shell out for a subscription to get shot of the ads, so it looks like that's where they're going to have to earn a crust for the next while...
on the other hand, i'm not sure if any artists make anything out of their plays at all. and i can understand why the likes of robert fripp have gone to quite considerable lengths to make sure their music is off it and be very public about their distrust of the operation. lob's last album is on there - not sure if anyone gave permission for that, but it's ok with me. it's not like anyone's going to listen to it, is it?
i'm not long back from three gigs in manchester with lucy. despite horrible blisters that meant i had to play each of them with my fingers bound up with surgical tape, it was a great few days. lucy's friend jules joined us on percussion and did a most admirable job; i'll miss him. and even though i'm as southern as it gets, i have to say that the north rocks.
