Later this month I’ll be playing my grandest hits at Toronto’s Drake Hotel. It’s part of an evening of Le Grand Magistery-associated artists, and I’ll be happy to play with Scarboro Aquarium Club and Cinéma Vérité.
Poor Louis MacNeice — the Anglo-Irish poet, dramatist and classics don, at first a member of Auden’s thirties crowd and then a frequent postwar broadcaster on the BBC, a handsome devil described by Denys Hawthorne as looking like “a highly intelligent horse, one of Swift’s Houyhnhnms” — came to a bad end.
He was down a pot-hole in Yorkshire, assisting in the recording of some sound effects for his new radio drama about — well, a pot-hole in Yorkshire — and by God he got pneumonia and died. The year was 1963.
Here is some topical humour about musique concrète from Henry Reed’s radio play A Hedge, Backwards, as broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme in 1956. The play belongs to Reed’s series about Hilda Tablet, a faddish bohemian composer. According to Reed, an earlier Hilda play, The Private Life of Hilda Tablet, was notable because “full frontal nudity was heard on the radio for the first time”. Hilda’s dalliance with the avant-garde in this play slightly pre-dates the formation of the concrète-specialising Radiophonic Workshop.
Music for the production was provided by the musical satirist Donald Swann, one half of the Flanders and Swann variety duo:
Hilda: Musique concrète. Concrete music. You know about it?
Reeve: No.
Hilda: You tape it.
Reeve: Tape it?
Hilda: And dub it to disc after. (instructively) Of course, most of the johnnies who do it rely on pure sound, amplified and speeded up and reversed and so on. Needless to say, I have my own little line on the thing. For one thing, I think the discerning listener could probably tell you almost at once that my musique concrète is very much louder than anybody else’s.
Reeve: Is it really?
Hilda: Oh yes, quite a bit. Also, for fair measure I clamp in a few simple little haunting tunes of my own, repeated, over and over. That’s why my own brand is called musique concrète reenforcée; reinforced concrete music…
Hilda goes on to demonstrate her piece, based on the distinctly different sounds of a zip fastener being pulled up, and pulled down.
Reviewing a re-release of David Bowie’s pre-glam, pre-Ziggy, pre-acceptable work in today’s Guardian, Alexis Petridis makes all the usual unnecessary distinctions between Bowie’s “false start” in the sixties, and his better-accepted work from Space Oddity onwards. This dismissal of Bowie’s early songs is one of those conventional opinions that should set alarm bells ringing, signaling a misapprehension or Bowie’s, well, Bowieness – like when people think the best example of Bowie on film is Labyrinth.
Personally I adore Bowie’s sixties work – as Petridis mentions (albeit as condemnation) there’s a lightness and an uncool camp (which is, of course, much more truly camp than the heroic bi-boy posturing of Ziggy Stardust) being played out. He might have considered that the creeping childishness of songs like There Is A Happy Land usually verges on the unnerving. Here, the “happy land where only children play” is a place founded on uncomfortably absolute moral distinctions — “You’ve had your chance and now the doors are closed, Sir, Mr. Grown-up. Go away, Sir” — which pre-empt the mirror utopias/dystopias in, say, Soul Love, Station To Station, Scream Like a Baby, to name just a few.
Part of the commendable weirdness of Bowie’s 60s work is that it really has nothing to do with the “the teenager”, a phenomenon which, in this decade, had really been perfected as the ideal audience for pop music. In these songs, there are adults and there are children, and there are adults who befriend children (The Little Bombardier) or choose to remain as children (Uncle Arthur). When Bowie did go on to write about teenagers (Drive-In Saturday, Young Americans, Teenage Wildlife), cool youth was always a foreign, distant thing.
In a way, I would argue that Bowie’s heroic / iconic phase (the period beginning with Ziggy Stardust’s earthlanding in 1972 and breaking apart with Station To Station in 1976) is the real aberration. This is the period where Bowie chooses to momentarily perform above the inherent awkwardness of his early work, but this awkwardness returns with added nausea for the terrifically uneasy Berlin trilogy. It’s quite possible to imagine the early Bowie singing Be My Wife or What in the World. Of course Bowie’s sixties songs are at times embarrassing (“agonising” is the word used by Petridis) but nuanced pop music probably should be embarrassing, at least in part.
Even in these few years Bowie / Jones was shifting his identity left right and centre, from Edwardian music hall star to folk child to unconfirmed mod – and then there’s the ghastly abstract concrète of Please Mr. Gravedigger. Remember that Bowie’s late-60s records were made right under the very audible influence of mime / choreographer Lindsay Kemp, without whom there would have been no Ziggy, no Thomas Jerome Newton (though he probably still could have done Labyrinth). I suppose what I’m really suggesting is that even at this stage, the mutability of Bowie was already in full effect, so it makes little sense to root through the catalogue and separate the iconic from the awkward.
This series on Resonance FM promises to be brilliant, with participation from Ghost Box artists, Moon Wiring Club, Mordant Music and related spirits.
The broadcasts, happening every night at midnight from the 25 of January to the 1st of February, will involve “weird fiction with sonic backdrops”. The curator, one Jonny Mugwump, has described the events as “something of a hauntological dream project”. Sounds like a good case of Englische Hörspiele to me.
Of course, when I say “midnight” I really mean 5 o’clock in the morning, Toronto time. Perhaps I should experiment with the early morning.
Californian Mortician Mr. Joyboy (Rod Steiger) “transfigures” the corpse of Sir Francis Hinsley (John Gielgud) in the 1965 film of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.
More than a little self-regarding, this. I decided to discover what search terms, in the whole history of the The Ideal Tiger, have caused people to come to this blog. Here are the top-ten terms, with similar terms added together:
1. lego. Lego? Ah yes, Lego! Sometimes, more speifically, “what to do when lego goes up vacuum cleaner”. Glad to help!
2. highwayman.
3. nu rave. Unfair – I only mentioned nu rave once, and that was years ago, and certainly not with a friendly smile on my face.
4. panda bear person pitch. Again, resulting from a single mention of a record that I have a moderate amount of respect for.
5. baby dee.
6. idle tigers. Good to know that someone cares.
7. the spirit.
8. cottingley fairies.
9. plus twos.
10. cricket insect.
Other popular searches include “adoration of the magi” (especially around Christmas time), “ghost shrimp”, “jake thacrkay”, “hauntology”, “huysmans”.
You know, I thought I’d been wasting my time, but I see now that I’ve created a world made of lego in which plus-two-wearing highwaymen run amok amongst the fairies and the ghost shrimp, soundtracked by the songs of insects, Baby Dee, Jake Thackray and myself.
Here’s some unforgivable nineties retro nonsense. Don’t ask me why, but I ended up browsing through the Archived Music Press website (“Scans From the Melody-Maker and NME circa 1987-1997″).
I focused my browsing on the later years of that period, which were of course the years of decline. I was twelve in 1994, when I first had a look at the music papers; I turned thirteen in the summer of 1995, which is when the Britpop thing really came to the boil. The Melody Maker died a few years after completely losing its dignity, and something calling itself the NME is still apparently published. I am alive and well and living in Toronto.
Not every newsagent in my part of Bradford could relied upon to have lots of copies of the NME and Melody Maker waiting on their magazine racks for me early on a Wednesday morning – even though I was employed by one of the fuckers. One of the newsagents, not one of the newspapers, that is. I’d estimate that there were about five or six newsagents within a two-mile radius of my house, and one or two of them would stock one copy only of one or both of the papers. Wednesday mornings would often involve a tour of several newsagents, and I’d feel that I’d better buy some chewing gum or perhaps a Solero from the ones that didn’t have what I was looking for. Imagine Beckett’s Molloy, if he were interested in reading about Britpop. In late 1995 things became much easier because I could get the both of them from Morrisons, probably with a bag of donuts. Why am I telling you this?
Anyway, a few points that came up during my reminiscence:
- Even at this stage in the papers’ history, the quality of the writing is good. But then Simon Reynolds, David Stubbs, Taylor Parkes and so on makes for an impressive set of writers. There are times, of course, when these writers are really conjurors, fabricating intellectual significance from the most apparently hopeless sources. All those fleeting faddish bands are really things that the journalists play upon.
- Which makes one think, of course, of the undercooked shite that was regularly served up with ceremony. Take this Melody Maker article on the admittedly deplorable Menswear – “We’ve only been together as a band for six weeks!”, the idea of the “debut gig” as a industry event – all symptoms of a pop culture peckish for a a new fad, certainly, but in a sick way this is quite wonderful when set next to the superserious music journalism of today, fatly fixed on professionalism and integrity.
- I’ve no idea at all whether this chap below was any good, or what he sounded like (if that indeed was the point), but who would write about him today? No-one, that’s who. The advert for Rancid below the review makes for a stimulating / disgusting juxtaposition.
- All those lengthy features about bands going on tour in America! This was the time just before sending a band to America stopped being like sending them on an adventure through space and time. Probably a nice reason for a holiday, too.
- Everyone remembers the papers’ overhyping of retro dadrock in the mid-90’s, creating an environment in which Shed Seven and The Bluetones could realistically hope to have top-ten singles. Thanks for that, NME and Melody Maker. However, it’s only fair to remember that there was always a counter-argument – in 1995 we find David Stubbs declaring Oasis finished, and this was even before they’d played that show to a crowd of 16 million or something.
- Then the disgraceful Maker Makeover -
From this:
To this:
- Looking closer at that Super Furry Animals cover – wasn’t it weird when they decided to write about those rubbish American bands that no-one cared about? Screaming Trees: Is “Dust” this year’s rock masterpiece? It is not. Also, does anyone know whether Pornography on the Internet was actually the name of a band? It was the internet, of course, that wiped the newsink from our fingers for good… fast forward to Luke Haines in 1999, ever so deadpan: “You developed late. Weren’t the nineties great?”
Here’s an orthodoxy I’d like to challenge: the one that says that the very worst thing about contemporary music is the use of autotuned vocals. All our singers sound robotic! All our pop anthems sound synthetic! Well…
According to my own private estimations, people don’t talk about pop music as much as they used to do. They talk instead, perhaps, about things they’ve seen online, or about the world.
Even so, if you’ve heard anyone talking about popular music in the last couple of years you will almost certainly have heard people reacting strongly against the use of autotuned vocals in popular rap and r&b songs. I am rather late to this discussion – Jay-Z has already declared the Death of Autotune. But I still hear people talking. We’re talking about what people do to their voices.
The offense that people take at auto-tune interests me. There is probably plenty to dislike about current trends in music production – for me it’s the general desire for fullness and devastating presence at all costs, and the fear of being boring resulting in the very boring attempt to be constantly interesting and attention-stealing, as if pop music knows that people’s interest is wandering elsewhere. I would agree that all the pop records that play when I go in and out of shops sound terrible on the whole, but the altered vocals are neither here nor there.
What people are actually talking about, I suppose, is conspicuous autotune, rather than the inaudible autotune that is employed to simply straighten out vocals by producers who mistakenly think that pitch should always be perfect. Conspicuous autotune is actually a deliberately misuse of the technology for textural effect, which is much the same story as the development of any standard audio effect – phase-shifting results from an imperfect filtering of a signal, and distorted guitar sounds really just developed from an imperfection in amplification. And so on. Autotune has got people talking (pro-voked them, raised their voices) because it’s an effect that’s applied to the human voice, rather than to instruments. In this sense the reaction is one against the abuse of a sacred human instrument, perhaps akin to the historical fear of tattooing and body-piercing – but no-one cares about those things anymore.
The reign of conspicuous autotune prods at listeners’ concerns about fakeness / realness in music. The Quest For Authenticity in Popular Music, detailed by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor a few of years ago, continues interminably. These are quaint attitudes indeed.
When I talk about a general dislike of autotune I should qualify a little. Obviously someone likes these records, which is they’re all over what’s left of commercial radio and music TV. What’s really going on, then, is a division – between sincere and insincere, between folk and fake, between street and studio, between grunge and glam, between man and machine. You’ll have noticed that none of the first things in these pairings actually exist.
Or is it that people want transparent evidence that the singer can actually sing? And that an audience that’s spent the best part of a decade consuming competition-TV wants to play the role of the nasty judge, and feels robbed of its ability to be Simon Cowell (a grave predicament) when the singer’s “ability” matters little to the overall sonic texture.
Of course, these autotune hits of the last few years will probably go the way of Les Baxter and Martin Denny records –unserious schmaltz in their time, but loved by followers in later generations to whom their artless novelty sounds like an unearthly weirdness that a previous age produced unwittingly. I do not have their ears.
Maybe it’s just that I’d be very reluctant to entirely dismiss a means of making sound. Ideally, all sound-possibilities will remain open. How often have you heard this: this would have been a great song, if it weren’t for that! No. Sounds in themselves are good. Songs in themselves are not good. Or: condemn the product, but not the means of production.
Vocoder and autotune are not the same thing, but even so – who in their right mind would condemn a treasure like…
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.
