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Saturday, October 27, 2001
 Great mail today that allows me to plan for 2002 with style and panache. I’ll be looking just fine thank you very much with my Redstone Diary resplendent on my desk, filled with scribbly notes about who hasn’t done their homework, when that visit to the Tate St Ives really ought to happen to optimise my, um, my something or other (see, I’m not much cop at doing all the Business Talk Thing), and of course all those important coffee-house dates with chums and ‘business associates’ during which we will no doubt discuss dubious deals and divine retribution. Either that or what records we’ve heard lately. Also – RESULT! – a neat little pocket in front to stash all those sweetie wrappers and magical assorted discarded ephemera of modern life (rubbish) for making collages and various etceteras. Also invaluable for storing postcards stolen from chip shops. And as if that wasn’t enough to take your breath away, the Redstone 2002 Diary is also chock full of neat pictures for you to dally over when umming and ahing over whether to schedule that nail-clipping appointment for Tuesday or Thursday. The ‘theme’ is broadly Colour, although there’s a definite swing towards notions of the Primary colours, and colour as science rather than Colour as Expression. Which is fine of course because there’s lots of those pesky Expressionists getting their kudos elsewhere in the world. So there’s pages like ‘from the laws of Contrast of Colour and their application to the arts’ by one M.E. Chevreul (Paris 1789); ‘from Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, by Francis Galton (London 1907)’; ‘from Chromatics, or an essay on the Analogy and Harmony of Colours, by George Field (London 1816)’ and ‘charts from The Music of Colour by E.G. Lind (USA 1894)’. All fascinating stuff. There’s contemporary art too, notably in Ceal Floyer’s Monochrome Till Receipt (2000), and David Shrigley’s great Untitled piece from 1990 that encourages the viewer to ‘imagine the green is red’. There are tons more of course, what with each week being given a page for diary entries, and each week accompanied by its own image; which even by my shady Math makes 52 pictures in all. All of which means that not only will my Redstone Diary be proudly gracing my desk in 2002, showing off a nice picture for each week, but it’ll also double as a neat teaching aid. Just as long as I hide that diary entry about the ice cream and the video camera… Friday, October 26, 2001
post-cultural-hierarchy Dull mail today. A glossy press pack for the Chivas charity auction that feels oddly nauseating, and a single by Electric Soft Parade which induces similar feelings. ESP appear to be two brothers, 18 year old Alex White and 16 year old Tom. They make a noise that is, perhaps predictably, obvious and dull indiepop that will no doubt appeal to hordes of ‘the kids’ who can spot a good tune much better in their innocence than I can in my ageing cynicism. Okay, so there are the palest glimmers of hope, like the beginning of ‘Broadcast’ which shimmers like the lost echo of the Boo Radleys at their obtuse, melodic best, but on the whole it’s just lazy modern rock. It got me thinking, though, about why those other White siblings, White Stripes, can make such a genuinely invigorating new sound out of old, whilst this pair just sound obvious and jaded before their times. And it struck me that perhaps the key lies in the fact that White Stripes, with their turbo-charged 21st Century Blues, have in fact taken contemporary rock’n’roll and, if not ignored the past 40 years of ‘progress’, at least torn it away to reveal some kind of roots, with those roots being used as their new foundations. It’s like Vic Godard when he talked about straying off the course of twenty years and out of rock and roll (except White Stripes kind of strayed off the road but ended up emphatically back INTO rock and roll at its primal best), or Wire when they spoke of taking music apart and rebuilding it, only not quite… because White Stripes, unlike ESP, make noises that just don’t quite fit. They make noises that deny the value of the past thirty or forty years of Rock history and simply scream and whisper about the soul essence of being; the sordid and beautiful possibilities in life itself. White Stripes seem like true post-cultural-hierarchy pioneers; all odd and awkward angles, refusing and embracing history on a whim and a prayer. Whilst ESP, on this evidence at least, just seem like a couple of lads who want to fit it with the jaded clique of ‘weird’ kids who hang out behind the bike sheds (do they still have bike sheds?); who want nothing more than to sound like whatever other castrated bands pass for ‘alternative’ these days. Which of course is no alternative at all.
social reality matrix My scanning woes are behind me. A lovely new HP Scanjet 5470C now sits on the salvaged TV cabinet beside my desk, it’s little screen telling me it is currently in Powersave mode. Well hurrah! for that. As a result I spent the last few days going through boxes of old negatives for which I have long since lost the prints, scanning them into the electronic memory of this darn machine. It’s as well they are in the memory of machines, because the memory of my mind is decidedly shaky. Faces whose names escape me flashed on the screen; places only vaguely remembered and part recognised, coalescing to make a new kind of mythical past. All very sad and tinted with the tang of desperation and solitude. All of which led me to yesterday cast thoughts on those theories of time passing and the creative act; in conjunction with theories put forward by one Rom Harre, who as far as I can tell suggests that we develop as individuals through a ‘social reality matrix’. Um, yes. Put as simply as I can understand it, this means that we pass through distinct phases in our creative processes: We start off in a ‘conventionalization’ phase, which I guess means a state of consumption, or of passing through the world and attempting to make sense of what others have created. We then pass into ‘appropriation’ and then ‘transformation’ in which we would take the world and do something which we would describe as ‘personal’ out of it, before moving onto ‘publication’ in which we deliver our creations for consumption and hence, back to the start again, for that which we have made to become more artefacts in our own and others’ ‘conventionalization’. And thus we make ‘progress’. Of course I like this idea because it emphasises the looping, or cyclical nature of the creative act, or the life of the actively ‘creative’ person. (Don’t ask me how this connects with anyone else, because I simply don’t know). What it doesn’t do is determine what the point is around which this cycle takes place… which is where I come back to my idea that at the centre of the process there is, in very broad terms, the essence of loss. It’s to do with the sense that we feel loss all the time; a creeping sense that there is something past which cannot be cast off, that you missed something back there, that once you’ve done something, it’s done and well, what DO you do next? You think about it and you realise you miss the feeling of … the feeling of? Ache. That’s a personal angle of course and maybe everyone’s centre is different, but I have my suspicions that it’s not; that everyone has as their centre the essence of loss and mysterious solitude. And I think that contemporary culture’s insistence on a positive at all costs attitude is decaying our centres, is causing us as a culture to tip off balance, and lose sight of ourselves. We need more contemplation. We need more sadness, damn it. Wednesday, October 24, 2001
I never knew when to begin. And I never knew when to stop. I always just hung around in stasis, waiting for something, or someone else to make a move. They never did. Looking back, all I see are dark gashes, great black holes into which all of my light has slipped so long ago. The colours just bleed together and make interference patterns. My memory erased. Occasionally there are flashes, but the flashes burn so hot they bring tears to my eyes and my insides choke up and I can’t see the screen to write. And I realise that after twenty years of hitting keyboards I can almost touch type, and the sudden real surprise is that it’s taken so long. I suppose we all want to be remembered. I suppose somewhere inside all of us there’s a desire for that someone else out there to glance over and smile eyes of understanding. It’s sad that it so seldom happens but sadder still that we less often recognise it when it does. Which means nothing of course, except that the leaves are redorange and that the sky is the blue of winter and I can’t reach out to touch the air. Surrounded by images, my life one of pictures; it’s no surprise then to find that those pictures impact deeply and boil my soul. Eyes closed to the Cornish wind, a lip crease. Yellow flags. Suede bag. Well what else? The clouds are streaming past. Earlier I filmed leaves and those clouds made me sick and fall over. Dead birds in the alleyway. Monday, October 22, 2001
fizzle fizzle fizzle, blink, blink, blink My scanner is bust. I plug it in and the scanning light just goes fizzle fizzle fizzle, blink, blink, blink… blink, blink… and nothing more happens. It’s quite sad really. It looks kind of helpless sitting there, and it’s a real shame because it’s been so devout and helpful for the past three or four years. It’s the second scanner I’ve killed in fact; the first one I had gave up the ghost after a few years and just cast a horrid blue swathe down the side of everything. There is a spare one actually sitting downstairs on the shelf of (one of) the spare room(s) but it was cheap and not so very cheerful (I tried it once, the scans looked horrid – the colours even more out than normal from a cheap scanner) so it’s next to useless for my needs. What are my needs? Expensive. I’m an artist, after all. So I need to spend some money that I don’t have and get a new one. Well, what did god invent credit cards for anyway? Exactly. (Major corporations willing to send scanners or other hardware for me to use feel free to send anything at all to: Tangents Hardware and Anything At All In Fact Fund, PO Box 102, Exeter, EX4 6ZA) Well, anything is worth a try. I was going to scan some record sleeves for some words I just scribbled actually, as my feeling my way back to writing ‘articles’ for the Tangents site, but as I now can’t, I’ll just post the words below, as part of this rambling and stupid blog, as I’ve been doing all summer and for the first part of the half term. Half terms are horrid, except when they end, obviously. I need to sleep.
stumbling through a field of movie-dream memoirs It’s been ages since I picked up a new 7” slab of vinyl so I was delighted when two of them popped through my letterbox recently. The first, the ‘If You Don’t Want Me’ EP by the very lovely, self-styled ‘king of swing’ Richard of Lowsley recording artistes Ricky Spontane is a treat of quirky delights that comes sleeved in a painting by one Nick Sykes that looks like Mondrian meets Paul Klee, which is a fine start to proceedings. On the back of the sleeve, Richard looks like a pale and interesting soul, perhaps with a pile of early Pulp records under his bed (no bad thing, I have to say, and if I have to say that I have to add that in fact ‘Little Girl’ remains one of my very favourite songs of dark seedy aches ever) and perhaps a Momus tattoo on his left buttock, which is a fine second step. However, finally slipping the disc from the bag, slapping it on the record deck and listening to ‘If You Don’t Want Me’, it all reminds me less of the aforementioned, and more of the Househunters, who were a madcap troupe of Edinburgh noiseniks who made at least one Jowe Head produced single for the 53rd & 3rd label, and then promptly disappeared. Or I forgot to watch what happened to them. Or both. Anyway, on ‘If You Don’t Want Me’ Richard sounds just like Stefan Vogel of Househunters, delivering deadpan vocals over a cool drum-machine beat which in Richards case is care of Baxendale’s Tim Benton and incidentally, whatever are Baxendale up to now? I could do with a new blast of their iconic Steps-on-Ecstasy-and-a-half-of-bitter-shandy electric Pop shimmy right now. Oh yes I could. Househunters’ dynamic electro-punk beat on the other hand was made by the very wonderful Trudi (Mercedes – this is a different Mercedes to the cat that lives behind us, obviously – provided singing and bass whilst Lucy blasted an Alto Sax, kind of like Lora Logic, to just clear up who did what with Househunters) and in times like these I wonder if perhaps Trudi is Tim Benton’s big sister. Or his auntie. Which just goes to prove that holidays are a bad thing. Speaking of cats, the label image on the Househunters’ ‘Cuticles’ single features a portrait of a svelte young thing wearing a, … what would you call that? A tiger hat /wig type affair? Perhaps. It reminds me of the photo that graced the sleeve of the Alive In The Living Room album on Creation; that bizarre band of street troubadours all decked out in animal costumes, delighting the crowds of Oxford Street. Well, I say Oxford Street, but I’m sure it wasn’t. It was probably in Paris because the animals look French. I always loved that sleeve, and I loved that album because I never got to go out much when I was young, and I played that album on my record player and my bedroom became the Living Room. I couldn’t play it in our own living room of course because my mum and dad wouldn’t have been as delighted by the raw raucous noise of the Jasmine Minks doing Love as I was. Such is life. I listened to the Real Audio stream of the Jasmine Minks Popartglory album launch radio show the other day, (catch up with it on their ace website at www.jasmineminks.com) and listened to Alan McGee talking about the Minks, and Creation, and all sorts. He was talking about Lawrence, about how he listened to ‘The Final Resting Of The Ark’ the other day and was struck by how Lawrence had in fact been singing about all the things like the Warhol factory scene, not just from a consuming point of view, but from a deep desire to recreate those times. How Lawrence is currently in a ‘dark place’ as a result of that journey. It seemed fair enough, and whilst I think it’s dangerous and probably ultimately pointless to re-live someone else’s past, I can’t help but envy Lawrence the determination to be so totally immersed. And I can’t help wishing that either, or both of us had had the energy and wherewith-all to persevere with that biography we had planned. It would have made a classic Pop book. It still could. I was partly immersed in the early Creation myth for a while, but I never much believed in the whole rock and roll deal, so when I called my own club night The Living Room towards the end of the 20th Century it was more from a playful doff of a cap than anything else. I’m not sure that we ever played any Creation records at The Living Room, although I tell a lie because I did used to play the Love Corporation regularly and the Weatherall remix of My Bloody Valentine was a favourite too. Instead we used to spin and mix up pretty much anything with a mad beat, topped off with movie samples and looped dialogue from spoken word tapes. So there would be a Squarepusher, Optical or Alec Empire track rampaging with Kerouac floating on top, or Kafka read by Stephen Berkhoff because there was a line about sitting in the living room. That kind of thing. In fact, not unlike that other 7” single that came in the mail; the DJ Ordeal single ‘Maureen’, on the very ace Johnny Kane records, Johnny Kane being of course the label that released the Clientele’s yearning ‘All The Dust and Glass’ single, as well as the Relict’s ‘Southern Way’, and the two bands’ split single which had the Clientele rope in Indie-queen and Black Tambourine/Pines vocalist Pam Berry to record ‘(I Can’t Seem To) Make You Mine’, which although sadly not a cover of the timeless Seeds classic was nevertheless as gorgeous as an Autumn morning with the orange of leaves on your tongue. But DJ Ordeal sounds nothing like the Clientele, or The Relict, and sounds instead like a rogue field recorder stumbling through a field of movie-dream memoirs, stitching the sounds onto a quilt of scratched beats. Kind of like if Shiori Satanaka in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s terrific Afterlife was making records instead of movies. Haunting, groovy, out-there and utterly essential late night listening.
Blatant advertising (even though I get nothing for it) Can I recommend Pur:phuel Nourisher cream? It costs a bomb (twenty notes or so for a dinky, but tiny little pot with a neat little spout) but like I said; my needs are expensive. It’s about the only thing that seems to have a measure of my face at the moment. They also do a nifty facial cleanser that swells sweet and doesn’t pull my face off, which is no mean feat and a grand enough reason for a recommendation. And for shaving, sir? Well you can’t beat the Australians… the Vitaman ‘Smooth as Shave’ is terrific; again pretty much the only thing that doesn’t leave my face on fire. And where would you find all these things? At my favourite website of the moment: www.mankindonline.co.uk Advert over. Sunday, October 21, 2001
My thoughtlessness, my gracelessness, my courage and my crying When I was sixteen I had the words to Scritti Politti’s ‘Lions After Slumber’ written on the cover of my English book. Of course I had to try and decipher them from the record, skipping the needle back every few seconds as I struggled to record Green Garfield’s stream of consciousness in black ballpoint, there being no lyrics sheet with the Songs To Remember album. I don’t know if I was even close to accurate. It’s tempting, for a fraction of a second, to repeat the exercise today, nearly twenty years on, using the cover of my termly school planner as canvas (and with the benefit of printed lyrics), but for some reason I think ‘No’. Which is probably for the best; thirty five not really being the best age at which to indulge such adolescent obsessions as memorising lyrics, after all. Instead, I’m listening to the just re-issued debut Scritti Politti album and wallowing in… well I’m not entirely sure what, to be honest. I have no real memories that went with the record, unless you count contemplating those scribbled lyrics on my English book whilst gazing across the class at Shirley Campbell, Katy Watts and Audrey Simm and dreaming the kinds of magnificent dreams Dan Treacy was singing about at the time. No, instead of being redolent of fractured splendid moments, Songs To Remember is more the sound of kind of a just missed and vaguely mislaid early ‘80s Pop and probably as a result sounds even finer on the kind of pale October 2001 morning it’s now gracing. Which means that songs like ‘A Slow Soul’, ‘Rock-A-Boy-Blue’ and ‘Sex’ sound both remarkably contemporary and disarmingly naïve at the same time; a confession that says that where the ‘80s seemed at the time to be obsessed with notions of commerce, glamour and sex, the current climate is one that is taking those obsessions and making them ever more explicit and garish. Certainly in Pop circles. And which of course means that ‘Sex’, for example, is raunchier and far sweeter than a Destiny’s Child song because… well because metaphorically speaking it’s got more clothes on, and I don’t know about you, but the allure of the hidden is immeasurably more seductive than the blatantly obvious, surely? So similarly, ‘The Sweetest Girl’ is wrapped up in a winter coat and hat, like Natasha Kinski in a Dostoyevsky novel; all icy pale mauve and blanched sky blue. It’s simply one of the finest love songs you will ever have grace your ears, slicing deep to your heart like an icicle, and following on as it does from ‘Gettin’ Havin’ and Holdin’’ which itself is surely one of the most deliciously perceptive musings on the nature of existence ever penned, well, it makes for as great a conclusion to an album as you will ever hear. Songs to remember indeed.
A Different Lifetime Sunday morning, listening to the sounds of the new Spearmint album A Different Lifetime. I have no idea what I’m meant to think about Spearmint. They seem to me to be one of those bands that are either too cool for words, or one of those ones that all the ‘real’ hipsters sneer at for being… for being… well, not cool enough. I have no idea. I suspect that if I were younger and more in touch with such things I’d know, but I don’t, and do I care? No sir, I do not. Not a jot. Instead I just love Spearmint for being dumb, beautiful, arch, sensitive souls with an occasional grasp of what makes fine Pop music. Witness, if you will, the terrific ‘Julie Christie!’ with its line about taking the essence of Felt and Vic Godard, blasting into space and making… well, and making this exquisite noise. And not caring that in fact that noise sounds nothing like what the essence of Felt and Vic Godard would sound like at all, at least not if I were brewing it up, but that’s context for you I suppose. If anything in fact it sounds more like the essence of Stephen Duffy and his Lilac Time and surely it’s no coincidence that Duffy also had a song called ‘Julie Christie’ on his undervalued I Love You album. Then there’s ‘The Flaming Lips’ which is hilarious retro-rock with a sing-a-long chorus you could write in the shower and sing in the bath. And you just have to love a band that can write a song called ‘Scottish Pop’ as some kind of daft homage to the likes of Stephen Pastel, Stuart Murdoch, Edwyn Collins, Bobby Gillespie et al, and make it as silly, self-deprecating and full of hooks and melody as you would expect. Spearmint have a funny thing about ‘concepts’. The last album, Oklahoma! was a kind of weird concept album about being a student at Christmas and going home and such like, and it was at turns hilarious, moving, irritating and perceptive. A Different Lifetime seems to be a concept album about falling in love, about being in love and about saying goodbye. Which is to say, what every great Pop album should be about. It’s quite sweet really. Like when you were sixteen and wrote your own daft pop musical movies. At least I did, because I was sad beyond belief. I expect sixteen year olds these days won’t. Or don’t. Because they are too immeasurably cool and know a lot more about life than I did. Mate. Still, in A Different Lifetime Spearmint have made an album that seems to travel beyond the facades of contemporary life and resonates with a sense of how love affairs can spin, tumble, soar and collapse. And if they only occasionally reach as high as the moon and as deep as the oceanic depths, at least they make the effort. |
