Live Through This

When I walk to town, and more particularly when I walk back, I have the greatest stories in my head. I have the wittiest articles spiralling out of control through my mind. When I walk.

When I sit down, however, that’s another story entirely. When I sit down I find that the walking words just evaporate. They fly away, picked up and torn apart by the breeze like blossom in March mornings.

But that’s life.

I’ve been reading Everett’s Live Through This these past days, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. I’m not sure what the definition of a great music book would be but I think I’d have to put amongst my criteria the need for the book to make me want to hear the artists referred to, and for the author to refrain from actually writing about music at all. Everett seems to me to fulfil both of these criteria pretty well, the first one the more so because I’ve actually heard most of what he writes about in this book and hated it with a passion as great as his love, and still… you know what? I think, oh maybe I should just go out and listen again… which is stupid, and Everett, I hate you so much for making me think I ought to listen again to Soundgarden. You bastard.

As for the second criteria, well, that’s the one that really seems to separate the bores from the poets. The bores are the ones who will write about music in terms of the tedious things like, oh, song structure and chords and hum hum hum, I’m bored of writing that already; LOOK, here’s what it boils down to: You either produce your art to make sense of yourself in your world, or you just fuck off and take up needlecraft.

Everett writes to make sense of himself, and in the process maybe he makes some sense of your world too, but that’s a bonus and it doesn’t count for much at all, if anything. Maybe.

In a recent Amazon interview Everett suggests that he was/is a cipher, which is a complete load of crap, because at his best Everett was/is never a medium through which anyone else communicates, it’s just himself, reading his world, hearing his sounds and dreaming his stupid dreams, just like the rest of us (ought to be doing). He just manages to capture it in words far better than most.

Hey, I’ll tell you why I love Everett True, and I’ll tell you why I love Paul Morley, and Lester Bangs as well: it’s because they all, in their own ways, realise(d) that whilst music is the greatest thing in the(ir) world, it doesn’t really mean a fucking thing. They realise(d) that what really matters, what really counts, cuts to the quick and draws out the blood and fire, is the soul, the guts, the raw energy, the intellectual philosophising, whatever… depending on what time of the year and day and night it might happen to be when they were writing or you were reading. Because it’s all about context and the moment. Of course.

I’m not entirely sure who’s going to be reading Live Through This, just as I’m not sure who’s going to be reading this, or indeed any number of books that deal with music, or times before this one. That idea of context, of moment, is interesting because although Everett has rightly felt that it’s important to record his truth about the whole matter of, (is it really Nirvana and the whole underground Rock convergence in the ‘90s, I guess in one respect it is…) Nirvana and the underground Rock convergence of the ‘90s, I can’t see that many people are really going to care. Which isn’t a criticism of Everett for writing this book, but rather the opposite, and in fact this is maybe me just feeling down and depressed about the people in the world and painting them in a poor light they don’t deserve, but… but… Why would anyone who listens to Nirvana in 2001 give a shit about the Pastels or Beat Happening or Jad Fair? Because the only thing left of Nirvana is the records, and those records are played on the whole by kids who were barely out of their cots when Kurt was alive and who now alternate their Nirvana record with their Slipknot record and their Linkin Park record. Which again, probably doesn’t even matter, but I’m fucked if I can see any of them reading a book, never mind Live Through This. Either that or they’re thirty something’s who, come to think of it, like Everett, probably haven’t played their Nirvana records for many years and feel no real desire to do so now except to maybe remember moments passed. Whichever.

So that leaves us where exactly? Everett writing a book about the life he lived through the grunge explosion he himself, more than any other, set the fuse to. Everett writing his truth about his world and about the people who populated that world; people that just happened to make Rock and Soul music, in a combination of degrees, depending on your opinions I guess. Everett writing his heart and soul out and making the most ludicrous of claims you could possibly imagine, just because he can and because he feels like it and because he, more than anyone when the flames are fanned just right, can turn those claims to poetry.


posted by duke harringay at 11:46 AM

Public Service Announcement

I got the Mull Historical Society album Loss in the mail yesterday. I was really looking forward to hearing it, having read many enthusiastic words throughout the year about their singles. Having listened to the record, however, I have just one word to say:

Supertramp.

I always hated Supertramp. Supertramp always sounded like lush, orchestrated nonsense of the highest (or lowest, depending on how exactly you twist your neck to look at it) order. And Mull Historical Society sound just like Supertramp. There must be something in the air at the moment, what with Mercury Rev trading on a sound that more and more resembles the dreariest and emptiest of Rock styles imaginable, and, oh, all those miserable bands like Travis and Elbow who sound to me like they lost interest in investing their songs with soul and energy years ago. Mull Historical Society simply join that long line of journeymen rock bands with a handful of melodies and hearts void of passion, and Loss is the sound of airbrushed, asinine, atrophied Rock; just another stab in the dark of the safest of pasts. Maybe it’ll help them sell millions of units. Maybe that’s what they’re banking on.

I mean, it worked for Supertramp.



posted by duke harringay at 5:17 PM

kissing the earrings of snow angels

It’s been good reading the words of both Rupert Loydell and Kevin Pearce today, both of whom contribute to Tangents with articles about their recent listening habits. It’s something that I’ve been meaning to write about here for a while, although somehow just never seemed to get around to. Maybe the fact that the world suddenly seemed to big or too small for words about Pop, but then as Kevin says, music is surely one of the unifying forces that can keep us going…

And so, on that note, here goes nothing:

McCarthy. I started listening again to McCarthy last weekend after reading an interview with vocalist and lyricist Malcolm Eden on the Pennyblack Music site. McCarthy, in case you were wondering, made some of the most fantastically barbed, politically charged Pop in the mid to late’80s, and with often-times label-mates Wolfhounds made some of my most treasured records from that time and ever. A few years ago I wrote at some length about their sleeve art (largely the work of Andy Royston) and in that article I guess I touched on their music and why it meant so much.

Oddly enough, the songs of McCarthy echo eloquently and meaningfully for me again, in the face of recent events. I mentioned here last week I had listened to ‘Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill’ again with new opened ears, and I could as easily say the same about any of their songs. ‘The Fall’, though, with it’s lines about skyscrapers crashing down to the ground, ‘Should The Bible Be Banned’, ‘I’m Not A patriot, But’, ‘Take The Shortest Way With the Men of Violence’ seem particularly pertinent; all of them songs full of wisdom, often twisted inside out through Malcolm Eden’s use of character narrative.

So I’ve played a CDR of the McCarthy singles, and I’ve played their album highlights, and I’ve wondered who might be making such inspiring and pertinent observations in today’s Pop world.

I’m still wondering.

Kevin mentioned Phil Ochs in his article, and I too have been playing Phil Ochs the past week, notably his All The News That’s Fit To Sing LP from 1965, and of course also ‘I’m Not Marching Anymore’, wondering who out there could fill the shoes of Phil Ochs when we need them filled the most. Who has the strength to stand and sing and tell the truths?

Who indeed.

It occurred to me whilst I wrote that, as it occurred to me earlier in the week when I was writing such things to Marino, that in fact perhaps the best politicised protest ‘songs’ of recent years have been those coming from Hip Hop circles. And I say ‘perhaps’ because I am not sure if there HAVE been such records, or if there too the politicised edge of groups like Public Enemy and the Goats have been supplanted with something less intelligent, less cutting. I just don’t know.


Big Group Hug from Dublin’s Saso is a treat of subdued, sparse luxuriance. There are supple rhythms and fine textures, perfectly spaced and punctuated with occasional vocals that recall nothing less that Talk Talk at their late peak. If Big Group Hug were a room, it would be a modernist delight full of natural light and surfaces of slate, pear and glass etched with the sound of rain sprinkled with old books and movie projections; it would in short be a room where tranquil balance is offset by the wonderful leaving-behinds of humanity. Which is all you really need from music, perhaps, and is all you really need to know about Saso at the moment. Except to say maybe that you’ll no doubt be hearing a lot more about them in the months to come.

And in fact, whilst we’re on the subject of rooms, you ought to check out My Living Quarters, which is the weekly/monthly/whatever log describing the contents of the occupier’s desk and room, the occupier being in this case Sethe Jordan, and isn’t that a Pop Star of Peculiarity name if you ever heard one?

Clem Snide is also a name of peculiar Pop lineage, carrying a William Burroughs connection, but being Burroughs illiterate I wouldn’t recognise it. I had to be told. I picked up their album The Ghost of Fashion on a whim because I liked the name and I liked the sleeve, which reminded me of ‘50s / ‘60s illustrations, and hence those old Cher Doll graphics I loved so much. And then there was a track called ‘Joan Jett of Arc’ and that sold me. Totally. The more so since E4’s showing of the Freaks and Geeks series had just ended, and sadly brought to an end our fervent nightly singalong to the theme, but that’s another story of course.

Clem Snide make a wonderful sound, at times like a distant cousin of the often monumental Red House Painters at their most intimate (as on the gorgeous, fragile, cracking break of ice thawed in spring sunlight of ‘The Curse of Great Beauty’), at others like the younger siblings of Lambchop, with their odd just off-centre take on country.

I’ve also been playing a clutch of releases on the Matinee label recently, most notably the Slum Clearance compilation by late ‘80s forgotten should-have-been-stars The Siddeleys. The Siddeleys made just a couple of singles in their time that were beloved of fey indie-popsters and that’s maybe why I sold mine for too much money back in the times when records were less vital than food, regardless of the fact that really I thought songs like ‘What Went Wrong This Time’, ‘Are You Still Evil When You’re Sleeping’ and ‘Sunshine Thuggery’ were really rather masterful slices of Pop exuberance with a glinting silver edge. They still sound so today, and the wonderful sleeve notes by singer Johnny Johnson which talk of outsiders, nail varnish, the importance of hairdressers and tailors and strange glamour-rockers Raymonde make the point that really The Siddeleys were way beyond the dreary dress-senseless middle-classes who seemed for a long time to epitomise the kinds of UK ‘indie-kids’ who bought their records first time around, and were in fact out somewhere else, inhabiting their own world, orbiting somewhere just out of reach. Which is probably why they got forgotten at the time.

Another name from the past resurfaces with Matinee, this time with some new material from The Would Be Goods. I was never much of a fan of the Would Be Goods, I have to say, and their too-neatly coiffed pop of three of the four songs on their new EP leave me cold. Lead track, ‘Emmanuelle Beart’, however, is a storming blast of catchy euro-Pop that swipes the magnificent riff from Stereolab’s ‘French Disko’ and takes it for a carouse round Parisian café tables. Left bank, naturally.

Also on Matinee, the new EP from The Windmills shows more than ever that here is a band who have been listening closely to their East Village records. Which is to be applauded of course. |And which in fact is to do The Windmills a disservice because the four tracks on their ‘When It Was Winter’ EP fuse a fine penchant for minor chords (okay, I THINK it is minor chords; I know nothing about music, but I think that’s what a I mean. I mean the ones that go shimmying up and down your spine like a dark bruise…) and a tension that might be akin to that felt by the great Last Party, or Hellfire Sermons even, at their most melodic and least abrasive.

Which leaves the final release by Matinee, being Australia’s Simpatico, who turn in a clutch of tunes right out of the mists of time inhabited by the Field Mice circa ‘Missing The Moon’, which is to say some mighty fine mists indeed. The sound of holding your breath and kissing the earrings of snow angels, no less.



posted by duke harringay at 9:32 PM

I feel like I'm living a dual life at the moment. All the usual stuff carries on: listening to records, reading books, watching movies, falling in love... And then there's also the other part, the part that looks out for proof that the world isn't completely loopy; that there are people with intelligence and wisdom out there still. I'm happy to report that there's lots of them...

Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. "Mindless" may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.
It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
posted by duke harringay at 7:28 PM

Thank you for the chocolates

Three ladies, one gentleman, all in their eighties, sit in the movie theatre. One of them thanks another for the chocolates. She likes nice chocolates.

They’re ready to watch the K Foundation burn a million quid.

Wind chimes tinkle in the dark. A piano starts to play quietly, an improvised accompaniment to the K Foundation burning a million quid.

It feels like we’re watching a historical record of a by-gone age, and, this being filmed back in the mists of 1994, I guess we are. Bill Drummond throws wedges of fifty pound notes into the fireplace of a deserted boathouse on Jura; Jimmy Cauty does the same. They stir the ashes with a big stick, and flakes of burning cash erupt from the chimney like a roman candle. The piano plays. The wind chimes chime. The three old ladies and the old gentleman sit and watch the K Foundation burn a million quid.

There’s a small audience, and no-one talks. This is very different to most of the previous screenings of the movie, in 1995, when audiences heckled, made shadow puppets on the screen, cat-called and switched on radios to accompany the screening. In 2001 two people walk out after fifteen minutes, another one joining them ten minutes before the end. Maybe they’ve seen it before and know how it ends.

Everyone else, the ladies and gent included, watches, it appears enthralled, to the end. In silence. I watch the beauty of money burn, of the edges of fifty pound notes catch aflame and fold in on themselves, turning the Queen black and to dust. One lone note sits in a crag on the chimney, attempting escape, but of course there is no escape. This is the K Foundation burning their million quid.

I watch the shadows and silhouettes of perhaps the most successful of late ‘80s/early ‘90s Pop Acts (certainly the most intriguing Pop Mavericks of the era) burn their million quid. In my head I hear ‘Build a Fire’ and I wonder if we will ever see their like again.

The final bricks of cash flicker in the fireplace. Cauty stirs his stick around, seeming almost desperate for it to finally be over. And then it is. The screen is black. There’s just wind chimes in the silence.

The K Foundation have burnt their million quid, and we have watched them. Eight years after the fact.

The Brick, as a sequel, is of course an anti-climax. People talk over the Brick, even though, visually, it is only marginally less interesting than the preceding film. It’s still a million quid, after all, or so they say. A brick made from the ashes of the million quid, so they say. The piano plays some edgy jazz.

And then stops.

The lights in the theatre come up. A few people applaud, me included, but most people don’t. Most people just sit and wait for… what? Bill Drummond to drop in from his Dartmoor home to break his contract with Cauty that says neither will talk about the burning of the million quid for 23 years? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

I walk out into the night air, and it’s cold. I wonder if the lady enjoyed her chocolates.


posted by duke harringay at 10:09 PM

I don't expect that horrendous, repulsive outbursts like the one below are in any way isolated opinions, which is yet more reason for reason in these times, of course.

God Gave U.S. 'What We Deserve,' Falwell Says (washingtonpost.com) "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' "
posted by duke harringay at 10:04 AM