I don’t often feel it’s necessary for me to add words on the internet about recently deceased artists, but news of Rowland S. Howard’s death from liver damage, at the age of fifty, has prodded me.
There’s a conflict here that I’m trying to understand. Rowland S. Howard made loud, aggressive rock music, right? And I hate loud, aggressive rock music, don’t I? Let me explain how I don’t understand…
I grew up listening to The Birthday Party. The sound I heard first and foremost must have been Nick Cave’s untamed masculine ejacualtions (debates about which I’ve been following recently). But the sound that I remember now is that of Rowland S. Howard and his guitar – something hurt and haunting, but (to my ears) neither macho nor rockist. Howard’s guitar-playing had a particularly lasting influence on me – I more or less gave up on the guitar altogether. To put it another way: Rowland S. Howard is the guitar-player of choice for listeners who value a lack of balance, a lack of power, which is why for me he exists outside of rock music and its conventional vocabulary of force and strength.
I always felt good about records where Rowland S. Howard turned up – as on Fad Gadget’s final album, for instance. When I was younger I developed a confused connection in my imagination between Rowland S. Howard and Robert Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Both were slightly sinister, spiky things that I didn’t quite understand. I hope there will be more musicians who I can’t quite understand.
Houston Wells was the singer of a few Joe Meek-produced fake country records in the early sixties. On his most-remembered songs, Only the Heartaches and North Wind (the latter was actually a b-side), Wells does a halfconvincingly country-cracked croon that adorns Meek’s fabricated Western soundspaces.
The man who Meek transformed into Houston Wells was actually a chap from the Northumbria called Andrew Smith, who was at that point working as a lorry-driver in Essex, which is fairly typical of Meek’s resourcefulness as a producer of music and a producer of personae. However, I suppose that Andrew Smith lent himself well to this transformation due to the fact that he’d arrived in Essex via Canada, where he’d lived for several years in the late-fifties working as a logger north of Vancouver (only the slightest pinch of authenticity is needed as seasoning) and exposing himself to American country music. I’d argue that the Houston Wells persona is a product of Canada, albeit a brilliantly inauthentic and imprecise one (he sings about vaguely imagined Western things like six-guns and gold-miners.
A former mentor of mine, who is operating under the nom de plume Friedrich Strasse and lives and works in West Yorkshire, has been putting together a brilliant home-made magazine called German Bite. The magazine is focused on culture that is German, or German by association; the first issue is full of enthusiasm for (among other things) Kraftwerk, Fassbinder, Fad Gadget, Oskar Schlemmer, Princess Julia. As a true Mute Records aficionado, Friedrich Strasse has a keen sense of the connections between the industrial towns of Germany and of northern England.
This had me thinking about my home in Bradford and how I’ve often imagined a parallel West Yorkshire whose German-ness was fully pronounced, rather than quietly echoed. Some memories from my childhood are populated with Schmidts and Hamms. Bradford has its Little Germany, which was formerly a quarter for the textile industry and is now mostly a set of flats for people who commute to Leeds.
Bradford’s growth as a Victorian industrial centre attracted German-Jewish immigrants who were industrialists and merchants. However, my German-Bradford – call it Breitfurt, can we? – really dates to the beginning of the twentieth century, an age that was really the troubled culmination of this period of industrial growth. By this point, the children of the merchant immigrants have become artists and labour reformers. Their aesthetic and political thought cross-pollinates with that of native Yorkshire artists (also, commonly, the offspring of industrialists). Barnsley-born Michael Sadler tantalisingly characterises the spiritual make-up of northerners around this time as “animism plus methodism”. The political mood is socialist; a conference in Bradford in 1893 had resulted in the foundation of (the throwing of) the Independent Labour Party.
Now, in Germany the succession of movements at the forefront of modernist art and design is readily apparent: Die Brucke, Der Blaue Reiter, the Bauhaus. The extent of northern England’s modernist advances is not as often recognised, but there are some art-historical facts that linger, waiting to be re-processed as outrageous fantasy.
This is from a book by Michael T Saler, concerned chiefly with Northern Modernism (though he calls it “Medieval Modernism”, tracing its attachment to medieval craft guilds as a preferable ethical and aesthetic model):
one of the best known clubs in Bradford was the Schillerverein… Bradford was determinedly Yorkshire and provincial, yet some of its suburbs reached as far as Frankfurt and Leipzig.
Some notable Northern Modernists: William Rothenstein, the German-Jewish Bradfordian; Edward Wadsworth, Cleckheaton’s only Vorticist; Frederick Etchells of Newcastle, contributor to BLAST and translator of Le Corbusier. These artists worked in pursuit of the industrial sublime. The Leeds Art Club had been founded in 1903 by Alfred Richard Orage, a Yorkshireman interested “in Platonism, spiritualism, medievalism, the arts and crafts, guild socialism, and questions concerning the social and political function of art, particularly abstract art.” The cities of Bradford and Hull formed their own branches of the club.
When the Blue Rider advances on the West Riding, I’ll see you at the Schillerverein!
Perhaps you will find this short advertisement persuasive. One day I will revert to using written language. Until then…
The season finale: Leonard Bastard has a conversation with his master’s sister.
Pants and Tie provide entertainment at Labspace Studio, Toronto.
The Sound Unbound conference / symposium / performance series that’s been happening at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus this week has been hugely enjoyable and improving, so for later recollection’s sake I thought I’d better do a little roundup.
By coincidence, the art gallery that acted as the venue for some of the performances (including my own) was also housing the vBox, an interactive instrument created by artist Ellen Moffat as part of her Phoneme Project. The vBox is a long cabinet full of switches that play samples of disjointed spoken phonemes from the twelve inbuilt speakers. The gallery visitor is free to play around with the switches (and alter the speed of the looped recordings) to find any number of overlapping patterns and create a kind of unpredictably reassembled speech. Here’s an mp3, from Moffat’s website, of what the results might sound like. Naturally, I encouraged my audience to turn these knobs at their leisure during my performance. This friendly background chatter was infinitely better quality than the type you get when playing in bars.
Nobuo Kubota’s presentation (of his films, of himself) was superb, and covered a whole range of his activities as architect, film-maker, sculptor, sound artist, and vocalist. He finished up with an ace performance similar to this one, which I linked to earlier. Unlike some artists working in a similar vein, Kubota considers himself more a vocalist (perhaps a singer) than a poet. His vocalisations in the video linked to at the foot of this page come close to those of scat singers, and exist further from meaning than the great readings given earlier by Gerry Shikatani, an associate of hugely important (and Canadadaist!) concrete and sound poetry group The Four Horsemen. I should say that I also appreciated Nobuo Kubota’s demonstration of an ornithological book he’d recently bought, with built-in speakers that play examples of hundreds of types of bird song.
Speaking of bioacoustics, I was sorry to miss a talk at the end of last week on animal communication, but I hear that it involved a discussion of the sounds made by male spiders when trying to impress a mate. Sure enough, there’s a video on Youtube showing this behaviour… some of the commenters on this video suggest that the sounds are faked, but I do believe that these are the actual noises made (recorded using a contact mic attached to the surface that the creatures are on), not by the spider’s legs (though it looks like he’s tap-dancing) but by some other part of his surprising anatomy.
Finally, tonight there was an intelligently improvised performance by Chris Cogburn (objects teasing the resonance of drums by playing on their skins), Bonnie Jones (exposed circuit boards), Chandan Narayan (contact-mic’d autoharp) and Liz Tonne (cracked abstracted voice). Subway trains beneath us added their own low frequencies.
Leonard’s working day…
Simon Reynolds, in yesterday’s Guardian, writes about the typically bearded appearance of bands in this dying decade – a piece that I like to think I pre-empted somewhat in my recent song Svengali’s Off-Day: “there are fifteen nineteen-year-old men with beards just living on my street”.
Now, I have nothing against a handsome beard, and I rather admire the facial hair of several of my own friends and colleagues. However, I’m curious about the adoption of this look as a uniform. What, asks Reynolds, does beardedness among young, white creative types signify? He links to a video by Fleet Foxes: “Here, beardedness is tantamount to a visual rhetoric, almost a form of authentication, as though the band are wearing their music on their faces.” (And that, for the most part, is why I remain beardless: I have no desire to hide my fake, inauthentic, mincer’s face behind good honest facial hair. I have made my own disdain for “authenticity” in music quite clear.)
Reynolds focuses mostly on beardedness amongst new American folk types, alluding to the purely theoretical longing of New Yorkers for a never-known American wilderness; he also makes the unavoidable point about the tedious and perpetual return of music to a golden age of rock. However, I also suspect that beards have become a uniform for a couple of other reasons. The male hipster is largely unadult and emasculated, and the beard is perhaps worn (with varying degrees of irony) as compensation. The beard is also, perhaps, a little glimmer of the class consciousness that North Americans reputedly lack, although a certain amount of irony confuses things here too. As I noted before, young playful Torontonians despise the city’s streetcar drivers and garbage collectors for going on strike (spraying graffiti on station walls telling drivers that they should “go to university”), but they certainly love dressing like the lumberjacks and truck-drivers that their parents never were.
Leonard Bastard’s monologue: “see if that fat bed-presser no longer comes around with his purple nose and his clinking coins.”
