John Gray’s Park

The subject was born about 300 years ago, in some remote community, probably mountainous, for mountains have a peculiar and exhilarating effect on the subject, unknown to the infidels, for it is probably in their territory, where religion and culture have, Deo adiuvante, survived.

What became of John Gray? As a young thing in the 1880s he caught the attention of Oscar Wilde, acting as at least in part as the model for Dorian Gray. He spent the nineties as perfect specimen of the artist in that decade, putting distance between himself and his working class Bethnal Green background and writing short poems in the decadent style for The Yellow Book before committing to Catholicism. He was one of the many posing and practicing somdomites (as the Marquess of Queensbury might have had it), a Uranian poet blessed with exquisite beauty, heaven-bent.

Gray spent a great deal of effort attempting to reconcile his homosexuality with his religion; he became a priest in Edinburgh, and spent the remainder of his life with his partner Marc-Andre Raffalovich. The two men died, within four months of each other, in 1934.

Of course, Gray is not the only artist of this period to have moved towards Catholicism. There were those such as Beardsley and Wilde who were more Catholic at the point of their deaths than they had ever been during life, but what is striking about Gray is that his Decadent mannerisms segue into his later religious temperament with a seamlessness and thoroughness matched only by J.-K. Huysmans. Perhaps every febrile symbolist had spiritual expectations; not all realized them quite so fully.

Gray remained artistically active, composing the bizarre and widely unread novella Park in 1932. Park demonstrates the seamlessness of Gray’s conversion, and is exactly the kind of thing that you would expect to emanate from a mind tuned to the correct pitch by a youth spent dandling symbols and producing powdered, painted poems.

Park, subtitled A fantastic story, concerns a priest named after the Scottish explorer Mungo Park. The real Mungo Park disappeared whilst attempting to find the source of the Niger; Gray’s Mungo Park is shot by a dart while walking in the Cotswolds and wakes up in a utopian community governed by a black African race who conduct all their conversations in immaculate Church Latin. The implication is that we are somewhere in a future world where white people are in decline; Park is thoroughly examined and learns with interest that he is hundreds of years old. Park also comes to realize, with only modest surprise, that he is black – this is a claim that Gray was known to make about himself). Around the same period, Evelyn Waugh wrote a story on a very similar theme called ‘Out of Depth’; perhaps this was a common fancy of the Catholic imagination.

Gray’s enthusiasm for Africa, his piety, his gently alienating use of experimental typography and his reserved interest in modern utopian communities such Eric Gill’s Ditchling project all inform the strange shape of this novella.

Park is a tale about feeling weirdly oriented between a strange future and even stranger pasts. And indeed Gray’s art, like that of the poet-painter David Jones and the sculptor and typographer Gill, is both deeply traditionalist (reaching back to a pre-reformation, catholic tradition in which form isn’t secondary to intellect) and unshowily modernist (in its probably unintentional peculiarity, and it renewal of historical modes of thought.)

As the notes made about Park by his carers / captors have it:

The supposition is that through some great misadventure, whether vicious & excessive indulgence (favoured), bereavement, crime, disgrace, fear of torture, or rash psychic experiment (extremely favoured), he came under the domination of a remote ancestral survival in his consciousness; so thoroughly that he acts, speaks, thinks, and remembers in the person of that ancestor.

Fingering a fad gadget

I’m surprised at how rarely Fad Gadget is spoken of. What I mean to say is that I’m surprised at how rarely Fad Gadget is spoken of in my presence. What the world speaks about when my back is turned is something that I’d rather not dwell upon.

Fads pass. Someone first spoke to me about Fad Gadget when I was studying for my A-levels. The man who taught me English and art history also instructed me in off-curriculum subjects such as Neue Deutsche Welle groups, J.-K. Huysmans novels, films by Fassbinder, and (here’s where Fad Gadget comes in) the history of Mute Records. His enthusiasm for these things was such that contradictory modes of art were categorically banned from his personal cultural canon. I decided to do away with casual listening, lifestyle choices, Sunday shopping. I may not have learnt dialectical thinking, but I did learn that the serious appreciation of art requires a certain level of discipline. And I was serious, at that stage in my life – about everything.

Teacher, that was a strange guild that you inducted me into. I still make a point of checking myself annually in the hope that I haven’t erred so much as to forfeit my membership.

The last thing I want to do is to start writing a personal music history, like a better, more German Nick Hornby or something. It’s no-one’s business than my own that one winter I came home from a night class on the paintings of Gwen John (I’m hazarding a guess) with the first four Einsturzende Neubauten albums on copied cassettes. My enjoyment of the Birthday Party was what qualified me to receive this gift. I didn’t begin using the internet until a year or two later. I’d thank you not to ask.

In the same course of instruction I also learned about DAF, Boyd Rice, the Associates, Cabaret Voltaire, Marc and the Mambas, Chris and Cosey. I refer merely to the order in which these things reached me, in that period when knowing about music was a slightly slower discipline. At the end of this line came Fad Gadget, otherwise called Frank Tovey.

Blixa Bargeld having thistles pulled out of his soul while I waited for the bus home from Leeds was all very well, but Fad Gadget’s records sounded truly alien to me. As I waited for the bus. Home. From Bradford Interchange. They restructured the station a couple of years later while I was away at Oxford, acting the fool.

In a box

I don’t know where I heard it said that Fad Gadget’s first record, Back To Nature, was recorded in a cupboard. I don’t know where I used to get any of my information from, for that matter. It’s said that Daniel Miller – responsible for recording Warm Leatherette, and for founding Mute Records – was in or around the same cupboard, or at least in close enough proximity to get insect synthesizer sounds on the record. It has never been said that Jacques du Vauconson, Buckminster Fuller and Karel Capek were also in the same cupboard, but neither have I heard evidence to the contrary. For a following trick Fad Gadget recorded a song called Make Room. And another called The Box. The party was evidently a claustrophobic one. Perhaps this is the quality that made Fad Gadget seem a step stranger to me than all the other electronic or industrial changelings I was meeting at the time. He was acting out, in mime and in music, an unnerving impotence. Blixa Bargeld could collapse new buildings; Fad Gadget could even collapse the door of the cupboard in which he was stuck. Blixa was the last beast in the heavens; Fad Gadget was the last beast – the only beast – trapped inside a little box, collecting things he won’t need in a room he’ll never use.

I don’t suppose one writes about a gadget. A gadget is more correctly something that you finger with the filthy fingers of your filthy hands as you go along with the rest of humankind, on its inevitable and filthy progress towards enlightenment.

On the box

I don’t know if there are bands on the television nowadays. On the last occasions that I passed over MTV – as one passes by a train accident – the programming seemed mostly to feature wealthy celebrities showing off their enormous walk-in baseball cap closets, idiotically delighted at their triumph over claustrophobia.

The pop group TV appearance ought really to have blossomed into a distinct artistic form, with its own visual grammar and teasingly breakable aesthetic conventions. I’m thinking chiefly of how a musician (and this applies all the more to electronic musicians) deals with the potential embarrassment of miming through a performance. I’m imagining this embarrassment confronted head on and warped into a grotesque little spectacle like a rewritten antimasque, or some abstraction from the Noh theatre. Sadly pop music, inherently weakened by its origins in two principle mistaken notions – “coolness” and “authenticity” – has proved to be largely incapable of making the necessary leap in this direction, and has remained acutely embarrassed by the taboo of miming. The fact that no-one really cares to see pop groups on TV any more is probably a great relief to the more easily embarrassed (that’s what “alternative” tends to mean nowadays) pop musicians.

With all this in mind, Fad Gadget’s television appearances – mostly on European stations, as far as I tell – appear almost other-worldly. Taking the requirement of “miming” quite literally, he puts on sinister pantos and dumb shows; he switches between the roles of Pierrot, Harlequin, Mr Punch; the sprite and the harpy, Everyman and Death. For Ricky’s Hand he appears with a Black and Decker; for Collapsing New People he is tarred and feathered.
If these appearances are part puppet show, they also contain some of the certainty of the morality play. Like Brecht, perhaps, Fad Gadget was at times direct and didactic in a way that probably seemed irrelevant ten years ago, but that now has a profound relevance to our current state of affairs. Take his song Under The Flag: “The story begins on the Isle of Dogs, in a time of world recession – ”… and the morality play (or interlude, as a medieval audience would have known it) goes on, its end not in sight. Fad Gadget came increasingly to stage pageants against bad government, his career growing up during the early years of Thatcherism. He eventually reincarnated himself as a kind of folk singer, with an aptness that I only now fully appreciate, before dying prematurely in 2002, shortly after re-adopting the Fad Gadget role. Perhaps someone new will make morality-mimes in the shadow of Britain’s next Conservative government.

No

No talking in the library.

No talking to drown the still small wailing and whining of humanity, to make more supportable its shame and less ignoble its misery, in the library.

No big talking ball, howling behind my dissertation, in the library.

However

“You’ll never walk alone” — what a horrifying thought! I get spiritual replenishment from a nice solitary walk round the block, and I can’t look too kindly on the prospect of being disallowed this pleasure for evermore, and squashed into an existence of persistent company. Memento mori and goodnight!

Nevertheless, tidings of comfort and joy.

Serene discipline

You won’t often see me writing about children’s television, although the subject interests me. I’m put off by the way that kids’ TV has been a major area of focus for the boring nostalgia industry that is popular culture in this century-so-far: you know, guffawing about how trippy and “random” Bagpuss or the Clangers were. There was nothing “random” about how Bagpuss and the Clangers were created; these programmes were beautifully, lovingly crafted by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Smallfilms company.

It’s this attention to the craftsmanship involved in these shows that I like so much about the clip below, in which Charlie Brooker celebrates Postgate, who died earlier this month. Brooker’s sincere tribute, from his Screenwipe programme, starts about four-and-a-half minutes into the video below (although it’s also well worth watching the first half of the video, devoted to a bizarre Christian Science puppet show).

I should also mention that I came into the world a bit too late to watch any of Postgate’s programmes the first time around. But watching these clips, I was moved by the serenity and warmth of them, the sense that these programmes are the beloved product of a media “cottage industry” — which is an atmosphere I also get, by the way, from the works of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, three hours of which is streaming here.

Speaking of radiophonics, I especially enjoy Brooker’s focus on the sheer gorgeousness of the sounds in the Smallfilms programmes; Bagpuss’s yawn deserves particular mention. I also appreciate the schoolmasterly manner in which the narrator gently scolds the misbehaving Clangers. This all seems so far away from the kids’ TV presenters who themselves come acrosss like screaming brats. Maybe it’s just a feeling that I myself need a kind of serene discipline from time to time.

The Adoration of the Magi

Without futher ado I present this year’s Idle Tigers festive song. It can be downloaded below. The Adoration of the Magi becomes, if you stick with it for long enough, a nativity story. Although it’s also a tale of music piracy and sheep theft, a rewrite of Waltzing Matilda, and part of my current crop of electronic pastoral songs. I suppose it’s also written somewhat in the manner of my song Jonah. Prizes to anyone who can figure out where the plot / scenario is borrowed from.

The Adoration of the Magi mp3.

Of course, the song isn’t quite a fully mastered version yet, so you’ll just have to turn the volume up a little and be happy with your lot. If you’re in the mood, there’s also last year’s Christmas song, A Kissed Mouth (Child’s Christmas in Eccleshill).

Season’s greetings!

Koreatown Tiger

Keep off!

Joemus by Momus (carrying on with strange ideas)

It’s taken me a while, because I waited for my copy to arrive from Darla and then allowed myself adequate time for digestion, but I can now tell you what I think about this year’s Momus album, Joemus.

Here’s Momus with Joe Howe. Joe is Momus’s collaborator on Joemus, is half of Gay Against You, all of GERMLIN, a specialist in bit-crushed bleeps, the man to go to for self-collapsing song stutters.

He rejuvenates by surprise. Joe, I think, is mostly something that happens to the songs. The collisions are exactly the right kind.

But what about the songs themselves? When historians of song, in further future years, return their attention to Momus’s great world of work (about 20 albums by my estimation) how will these specimens be taxonomized?

Maybe it’s the result of having young Glaswegian Joe hanging round the inbox, or maybe it’s to do with Momus’s forthcoming Book of Scotlands (more mention of which, later) but this is the most Scottish Momus album — not counting the Summerisle collaboration with Anne Laplantine, of course. Perhaps those future historians of song will see fit to box up a retrospective disc (unavailable on any sort of disc, in practice) entitled The Scottish Momus, on which Spin Thread Annie, The Tailor of Dunblane, Lute Score, The Laird of Inversnecky, Tinnitus, Scottish Lips (and so on) are joined by Joemus tracks like Goodiepal, Mr Proctor, and The Cooper o’ Fife.

There’s a Scottish voice speaking throughout the record which, as on The Laird of Inversnecky (”God it made you glad to be alive!”) is both serene and, for unstated reasons, rather sad. The Scottish voice expresses the extraordinary with a friendly matter-of-factness, remaining unflustered whilst listing off a series of marriages to boys with Pastels badges and drunks with Special Brew, or dismissing with nonchalance an inadequate
Ulysses returning from “the scrotum of the sea”. “Earthy” doesn’t even come close to describing what’s going on here.

There’s another voice that sneaks in and out of the album. A mutant Cockney, advancing rotting from a less-than-salubrious corner of Momus’s Ultraconformist album, takes the lead on Strewf! (either Momus’s knowledge of Cockney slang far exceeds my own, or most of this song consists of nice fat greasy coinages) and is put to death in the closing song The Vaudevillian. Incidentally, how many of Momus’s albums end with a meditation death (real or figurative), and why? Another retrospective collection might be called The Mortal Momus.

If the Scottish voice comes over as weirdly friendly in its dismissiveness, the Cockney voice is terrifying and threatening because it might just be trying to be our friend. Mr Proctor — an earlier version of the song is in the video embedded below — has these two voices in opposition. The way the song gets hi-jacked once, doesn’t learn from its naivete and then gets hijacked a second time makes for excellent drama.

What I’m trying to suggest, I suppose, is that it wouldn’t be quite true to say that Momus has thrown narrative out of his songwriting. It’s there all the time but, like the music itself, subjected to fabulous distortions, threatened by necessary hooliganism, had in stitches by its own foul sense of humour.

Of course some would point out that not many of these songs have the narrative thrust of a Momus classic such as, say, Bishonen (and for those who like that kind of thing, apparently Ubuweb is about to host mp3s of all of his albums for Creation records, and believe me they deserve a place in any e-library). But the fact is, Momus doesn’t belong in the Royal Academy of songwriting. I imagine that Momus, making Joemus at the same time as writing two books, had found other uses for conventional narrative devices. The fun in Joemus, then, is found in the static interruptions. The static interruptions then begin conveying their own messages.

I recently read an idea in a book about radio that to early broadcasters, for whom clarity of message was a considerable technological challenge, regional accents and faltering sound were equivalent problems that made a mess of the “information function” of the medium. That kind of Reithian-prescriptivist, “BBC English”-privileging attitude misses the point that regional accents and faltering sound themselves both communicate an awful lot of information. I suppose that Momus is both undoing and redoing that “information function” that his songwriting is probably best known for, and it’s interesting that he should play with these two devices.

If dressing the character is what you’re after, then there’s always Widow Twanky. This is a song where the singer attempts to embody a lost lover by becoming a pantomime dame, and earlier this year I did my own version of the song. The song in my hands is unclothed and then stripped to less than a skeleton. I did have my own reasons for singing a version of this song, though. I’d just released my own modest album and it soon became clear that for very good reasons my work was known mostly to Momus enthusiasts: in many ways an ideal audience, needless to say, but I did develop a bit of anxiety about my own “identity” as an artist (foolish!). I’m rather proud of how I tackled this anxiety. It became clear that the way to be obviously less like Momus would be to sing a Momus song. Clear? Then here, for pity’s sake, is the song in its lush and fully-clothed form:

And I feel much better now, by the way.

Well, this is not even half of what I think about this exceptional album. I could tell you how Goodiepal is simply more likeable than any song I’ve heard this year, and The Man You’ll Never Be (this is the one I’m most into, if you must know) achieves a rare combination of the comic, the sentimental and the vulgar. In fact, I’m certainly enjoying telling you what I think about Joemus, and it’s rather a shame that I will finish here. Goodbye!

(Note! The title of this post is borrowed from an old poem by a friend of mine)

Return to form

I’ve been away (from all of this) for quite some time. I was busy having my portrait done.

I’m not sure who exactly the artist is (someone called Roxanne Ignatius) but this picture appeared recently on Torontoist and it looks like the kind of thing that would be happening on stage in one of Walter Sickert’s paintings of music hall audiences. And for that I’m grateful.

Insulted by the two fingers of chance

Last night a brief conference on Futurist dramaturgy at the University of Toronto was brought to a close with a cabaret of Futurist performance, presented by the university’s graduate drama centre.  I don’t know how the conference itself dealt with the difficulties in hosting Futurism (which by its nature resists intellectual discussion) in the academy, but the perfomers at the cabaret seemed to employ a few counter-strategies:

– The evening had a distinctly retro feel.  Mock-ups of manifestos, scrapped-up and shredded and stuck all over the walls — cabaret-seating strewn with streamers — a  hostile birthday party in anticipation of the centenary of Marinetti’s Founding Manifesto Futurist (next year).

– Marinetti himself was brought onstage in effigy, roundly abused, shouted at through large red horns in the name of “the Russian team”: Russians 1, Italians 0.

– Did I mention that my girlfriend was insulted by a futurist artist?  This evening was not so much a celebration of, as an argument with the Futurists and all of their reprehensible pronouncements.  A passeist tableau vivant — three ladies passive-aggresively pop bubble wrap at Marinetti’s ambitions to glorify contempt for women.

– You can’t say I didn’t enter into the spirit of the thing: given the choice between paying the standard price for entry, or rolling dice to determine how much I would pay, I thought I ought to enter into an aleatoric experiment.  I rolled a 19 on a 20-sided die.  Insulted by the two fingers of chance.

– There Is No Pig: in a re-writing of a Futurist piece called There Is No Dog, a small mechanical pig, spotlighted, travels slowly across the darkened stage.  It shuffles forward three steps, pauses, makes a timid grunting sound, and progresses.  Most of the audience hurl abuse and missiles at it.  Others applaud.  A similarly hostile response is given to a vacuum cleaner, left alone onstage following a  dance with Susan Bertoia, as it is inelegantly pulled of from the wings, by its cord.

– Katherine, sometime-collaborator with Idle Tigers, dances in a short film called Vita Futurista. She is as superb as ever.  There’s also magic tricks, aerialists, whiteface dancers on stilts.  The performers are welcome to confront you at any time.

– Just as the room had got fully warmed up and quite accustomed to insulting or otherwise hijacking performances such as a musical piece scored for power tools, and Francesco Cangiullo’s famous gun lowered into the audience, Toronto artist Ulysses Castellanos arrives as a guest performer.  No-one except one brave soul boos or hisses.  He’s swinging a hatchet and yelling “thankyou” repeatedly over a dissonant sound-collage.  In a way his performance is far more menacing, and for better or worse closer to the original intentions of Futurism, than the comparatively safer re-workings of Futurist originals.  The rest of the evening falls a little flat, the cartoon hostility of the remaining pieces (dance pieces set to the onstage shredding of books) not quite meaning the same.  By the end of the evening theatre was not so much abolished, as restored.

– Me, I don’t feel remotely hostile.  I leave the theatre with nothing but admiration for the pig and the vacuum cleaner.