There are two Ernest Hellos. One of them was a well-connected man of letters in nineteenth century Paris, a complicated Catholic with connections to some of the more mystical strains of French literature. This Ernest Hello no longer exists.
The next Ernest Hello hasn’t really much to do with the first. This Ernest Hello is claiming, slyly, to be responsible for the release and promotion of the new Idle Tigers album. And he also sings, shyly, on some tracks by Young Truck. You can hear them below. Like the Symbolists who followed on from his namesake, he’s just an unearthly kind of voice, his mind full of vapour, his body not substantial at all. It’s not yet clear what his intentions are.
These might still be tweaked by the supremely brilliant Young Truck, but here are a couple of song pieces for now: Teethcake, a sparse electronic song suitable for morning listening; and The Angler, which is a crucifixion image as visioned by a boy on a fishing trip with his dad.
Give us a nug!
Young Truck + Ernest Hello, Teethcake
Young Truck + Ernest Hello, The Angler
It’s fun to see my friend Lauren Kirshner making high profile public appearances all over the place in support of her ace debut novel Where We Have To Go. Lauren’s work is fiction, not autobiography, but nevertheless the fact that the novel introduces its protagonist as an eleven-year-old girl growing up in the Toronto got me thinking about my own eleven-year-old self in Bradford.
Other than that, I have no real reason to tell this story now, except that green seems to be the Idle Tigers colour of choice right now.
I am a schoolchild, perhaps 11 years old. I’ve recently left my comprehensive middle school, because I’m the embarrassed and reluctant recipient of an “assisted place” at a local school that classes itself as “independent” – neither a grammar school nor the classic public school, but some semi-antique product of northern Methodism where morning assemblies are soundtracked by Wesley’s Hymns and Psalms and the playing fields are used more for egg-chasing than football. Unlike those other types of private school, there are at least girls here, but I have no idea what they’re about.
Unsurprisingly, for the first couple of years my closest friends at the school will also be going there for free. Most of the other pupils, the ones who’d come through the prep school named after the Brontes, keep telling me that I have a thick Yorkshire accent, which seems to me like the most bizarre and stupid observation anyone’s ever made. My Dad will later point out that since I was born in Yorkshire and am living in Yorkshire, it would be much stranger if I were to have an Irish or Chinese accent, and I see his point. In the evenings I meet up with my old friends who stayed on at the comprehensive school, and spend most of the time flushing self-consciously, aware that I’ve made myself weak by going to the “posh” school. My natural shyness around brasher boys is exacerbated by a violent mix of crippling class consciousness and oddly-placed guilt. I don’t know this yet, but I’ll never quite finish my expected career at the posh school, and will leave in a horrible rage a few years later to sit on a park bench for five months and then resume my A-levels at an inner-city college in Leeds.
I don’t eat well. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that this is a class thing; based on experience I’d say that all eleven-year-olds are grimy little bastards when it comes to nutrition. After all, this is well before Jamie Oliver has even decided to be a cockney. What I’m saying is, the fact that I’m not particularly good at identifying different types of vegetables by sight isn’t as unusual as it may seem. Nevertheless, when it comes to a break-time ruckus beside the school’s vegetable patch, I’m there or thereabouts, by God, despite my ignorance of fresh fruit and vegetables, despite my natural shyness. You see, having learned quickly that in my new school, any old semi-insolent remark made to a teacher earns guaranteed laughter from classmates, due to my accent being just a bit thicker than theirs, I’ve volunteered myself as a bit of a clown. Even a plainly offered translation in French class, such as “’Ow much are t’carrots?” (now there’s a vegetable that I do know about) will get a response. A resourceful little mite even at eleven, I’ve started to trade on my provincialism. I’m a very able student when prompted, but by habit rough and unbookish, always enjoying being thrown in the boy-high rhubarb. At eleven, I’m known for calling most things in life, whether obviously enjoyable or not, “a beaut laugh”. Strangely, a few years later I’ll be known for finding most things in life simply painful.
I don’t know how the great Brussels Sprout fight begins, or through what series of negotiations I turn from innocent bystander to rogue participant. Whatever the case, it’s every man for himself and the situation turns grim when several of the principal sprout-chuckers are caught and immediately marched to the deputy head master’s office. I flee and hide out nonchalantly by the special needs centre for a few minutes, before being caught and sent belatedly to the same office, like forwarded mail.
The thing about the deputy head, Mr. Wilberforce, is that he is a man who lives up to all the might and severity of his surname. He has a fat bald brainy head, and two little lights on the outside of his office door labeled “Enter” and “Wait”, and he responds to knocks on the door by pressing a button that lights up one message or the other. I’ve never seen anything like it. By the time I’m deposited in Mr. Wilberforce’s office, the rest of the gaggle are already several minutes into their proper bollocking, augmented with all the usual feats of rhetoric: hints of violence, general appeals to the Christian spirit and unspecific aspersions cast on the boys’ manliness. At least two of the lads are in tears.
He addresses me. “Why are you here?” is his standard question.
It’s a classic disciplinarian’s tactic – it’s a horrid thing to have to name your crime, especially so just minutes after having been caught. I flounder a bit, but get it out. “I was throwing things.”
The answer obviously seems incomplete to Mr. Wilberforce, and he is not pleased. He probes, painfully. “What were you throwing?”
It’s a simple question, but one that I’m honestly not able to answer. I certainly don’t know that the missiles I’d been sending and receiving were sprouts. I could play it safe and just say vegetable, but I don’t know for sure that it’s a vegetable – you can’t be too certain what’s a vegetable and what isn’t, when there are untrustworthy articles like tomatoes and cucumbers at large.
He asks again: “What were you throwing?”
I decide that what I should do is go for a wholly descriptive answer. Resolute, I tell him straight: “Them little green things.”
Don’t mean to be a bore about this, but clicking on the tab at the top of the site will now lead you to all the lyrics for Persisting Like a Racehorse, with a few pictures to keep you happy. You should be able to order a copy online by this time next week.
Yours,
The Merchant.
My new album cover is under construction. It features an animal. It’s good – perhaps almost as good as the cover that Leonard Cohen designed (and Sony subsequently rejected) for the Canadian’s Ten New Songs.
The thing about adopting a name for yourself, as an artist, is that you might spend your entire career attempting to make an art that looks or sounds or feels like that chosen name. I’m listening to David Sylvian’s Manafon for the first time, and I think I can confirm that this is exactly the kind of song that someone called David Sylvian should be singing. It’ll take me further listening to explain exactly why, but I think it’s something to do with the fact that Manafon is all one creeping song, its purposes all hidden, its confessions shifty; Sylvian has never sounded quite so sylvanian, so much like the kind of forest that might grow in the future if all our media and information and small disturbances were left to plant themselves in a waste land and sneak up, centuries later, when no-one is left to scrutinise or subjectivise. There’s a cruel objectivity here, the kind of objectivity found mostly in nature and in the news media, but rarely in art. As I’m typing, Sylvian is singing “his aspirations visited him nightly, and amounted to so little”, in that voice of his that comes to mean more, the more detached the intonation.
And needless to say, in the unlikely event that I look as good as David Sylvian when I’ve over fifty, I’ll be rather pleased with myself.
(Particular thanks to my favourite radio programme for allowing me to hear this by playing the record in its entirety!)
(Later edit: I swear that when I wrote this I had no idea that the cover of Manafon looks like this:
— which is probably about as sylvanian as Sylvian could have managed!)
Over two years ago I wrote about the state that Bradford’s city centre was in. In fact, the city has been in much the same state since, and I’d given up on much being done with the site.
Fancy my surprise, then, on hearing that sound-architect / turntable collagist / Philip Jeck collaborator Janek Schaefer has worked on a permanent sound installation to surround the new park that will occupy the current wreck-space. The Bradford Soundpool will be up and running by 2012.
The work makes use of bioacoustical materials (“no Disney or Jean Michel Jarre”, Schaefer reassuringly specifies), playing with birdsong as “a sound icon of migration”, which is an interesting way of addressing the city’s multiculturalism. Chris Watson – that’s Cabaret Voltaire’s Chris Watson, and David Attenborough’s Chris Watson – will be chipping in with field recordings.
I also look forward to something called the “Bradford Blowhole”, which is “a piece written for uplifting brass band drones to coincide with the daily Bradford Blast fountain feature”. I have to say that this project is a million times more promising than another row of chain pubs or mobile phone shops. Note that the sounds that Schaefer is proposing to use are supposed to reassure by their echoing of nature and of a familiar local past; this isn’t going to be astonishingly transgressive sound art. I do hope, though, that there might be something gently disorienting about the ambient sound cycles that he intends to surround Bradfordians with. Ideally these layered historical echoes should intersect unpredictably with the still-present, undesigned sounds of the current moment. Which might include, of course, the nightly row from said rows chain pubs nearby. The interesting parts of urban atmospheres occur when the ideal meets the not-ideal, and clearly Schaefer’s intention is to introduce sounds that integrate rather than impose themselves, which in itself might suggest a model for cosmopolitan tolerance.
A provincial tradition tends to be that local people get prickly when an artist is commissioned to tell them something about their own city, but at this early stage I’m full of optimism.
As a brief sequel to my earlier post on doo-wop, I should mention that like most sensible people, I do like to root around the Ubuweb archives when I fancy something tasty, and one of my recent favourites has been their mp3s of Celtic mouth music. Otherwise known as didling, lilting, puirt a beul, cheek music… some accounts speculate that this music came about following the banning of pipes after the Jacobite uprisings in 1745, which if true is testament to a certain resourcefulness.
I have been a busy boy. Four songs from a soon-to-available Idle Tigers album are available for pre-hearing at the usual places, such as here or, if you prefer, here.
These songs are in a mode that might be called poisoned pastoral. I was seeing perhaps a shade moving over a landscape, or the moment described in Auden and Isherwood’s The Dog Beneath the Skin: “When the green field comes off like a lid, Revealing what was much better hid”.
Those who know me might also know that some parts of these songs, particular the thing now known as Valley Parade, go back a long way, so there are quite a few layers of faulty memory going on here. Further explanations will, inevitably, follow.
You know doo-wop – from a strand of rhythm and blues came this sugary mess that spilled all over the streets of northern American cities, around the time that children’s music became the dominant commercial music of America. That’s one way of hearing it. And perhaps only an infantile music could produce that nonsensical phonetic backing-babbling that doo-wop is defined by. And after all, which other musics are identified firstly by what the backing vocals, not the lead vocals, are up to?
The simple pleasures of sounds in the mouth – the musical prompts also come, of course, from harmony groups and from scat singing. In another mood I imagine doo-wop backing singers thinking back to Edward Lear, or forwards to Bob Cobbing who was also, in his way, a doo-wop vocalist.
And perhaps – the thing about me is that a part of me is a concrete poet for whom the concrete hasn’t quite set.
I don’t want to suggest that doo-wop records trade only on the pleasure of re-gargling the unsignifying sounds that bubbled up in our infant mouths, although this is certainly part of the appeal. The pastoral songs found in Elizabethan literature (Shakespeare’s ‘Hey Nonny Nonny’ and Spenser’s ‘Hey, ho, silly sheep!’ are two of the most famous examples) attempt the unlearning of our too-refined language to achieve an idealized return to the land, as a kind of final folksy jig before submitting to our culture’s historically inevitable enlightenment and reformation; and I suppose that the later white teen-oriented doo-wop songs, fraught with their adolescent troubles, seem to tremble on the verge of adulthood, with half a mind to retreat back to the nursery.
Nevertheless, doo-wop’s joy and pain is not (at least not for me) entirely the joy and pain of returning to what was once familiar. A well-executed doo wop record never fails to impress me as something absolutely alien and never-known. Just wait until Arthur Lee Maye’s vocal comes in on The Crowns’ Hey Pretty Girl (below) – what on earth could compel someone to sign like that? Nothing on this earth, as far as I can tell.
Perhaps I find doo-wop alien-sounding because I’ve never been to a drive-in movie, I’ve never cried because someone didn’t turn up on time to drink milkshakes with me; but I suspect it’s also something more fundamentally part of the sound. You see, the doo-wop sound also has an unnerving habit of swooping down from whatever planet it comes from (a place where the very thought of simple things like walking and talking is enough to send a singer into spasms) and landing with its otherworldly sugar-crystal sparkle on absolutely familiar territory. Below is The Robins’ take on Vera Lynn’s World War Two hit, (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover. As far as I’m concerned, there might very well be UFOs flying over the white cliffs of Dover, and the effect couldn’t be any more weird.
Of course, that doo-wop sounds like something from outer space is exactly what Bowie picked up on when he made Aladdin Sane (famously his “Ziggy goes to America” record in which the alien visitor is left to prowl a still stranger land), hence Drive-In Saturday and Prettiest Star. Now what’s gargling and bubbling in the mouth is neither infant spittle nor soda and bubble gum; it’s a chemical element from another planet. At the very crass opposite pole of the glam planet you’ll find humans such as Showaddywaddy and The Rubettes, who even in their role as commercial revivalists managed at a pinch to retain some of the strangeness. And what wouldn’t we give now for our sugariest pop records to sound so unworldly?
