Endless Artistry

 My two favourite pop groups have just released new records. Unsurprisingly, they are brilliant -:

Music:

The signs are that 2021 will be one of the most important years for recorded music in a long while. After the despair of 2020’s pandemic and lockdown, this year’s models have come out fighting. We might not be in the physical presence of beauty, power and fearsome creativity on the stages in front of us just yet, but records by Arab Strap and Mogwai have already been the next best thing. Soon we will have the latest magnum opus from mad madrigal Alex Rex, but we have recently been touched by the genius of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Teenage Fanclub; two of my most beloved bands of all time, though more disparate outfits you could not imagine.

GB!YE’s seventh album, G_d’s Pee at State’s End!,  finds this extraordinary band at their angriest, saddest and most beautiful; sometimes simultaneously. Revitalised and repositioned by the mirroring of their own internal, artistic turmoil by world events, the album begins with a hypnotic 20 minutes of almost normal clarion-call guitar, displaying a return to rock after 2017’s Luciferian Towers, favoured more ambient drones. It sounds like a disintegrating DIY funeral mass; a rallying cry shot through with despair and disgust. Although G_d’s Pee at State’s End! does not specifically address those fallen to the virus, the band’s swelling compassion embodied in the old world strings and hovering organ aches, brings to mind all those excess deaths.

 

GY!BE have long since made it their business to see outrage everywhere and end times all the time. Theirs is the sound of fires raging at oil installations, lighting up black skies and politicians telling outright lies to justify a land grab for more environment-wrecking. G_d’s Pee at State’s End! received its world premiere online at the end of March. In lieu of a gig, the band’s two film projectionists set up in an empty theatre and accompanied the new album with a compendium of signature black and white film visuals. The word HOPE scratched white on black on celluloid opened the broadcast, as it has at many previous GY!BE gigs; images of pylons, riot footage and oil fires blazing against dark skies all featured.

Even by this band’s lofty standards, G_d’s Pee at State’s End! is a particularly impressive bulletin from their ideological HQ; they are still head and shoulders above most other music that sails under the flag of post-rock. Consisting of four sections, two longer and complex, and two shorter, comprising drone and the pastoral, the album takes GY!BE back to basics: martial drumming, air-punching guitar dramatics, surging drones and sampled found sound, but with the considered nuance of years spent expanding their brief.

The moral bankruptcy of western democracies looms large, as ever, but glaciers, paranoia, prettiness and dedications all feature. Five Eyes All Blind refers to the espionage alliance of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; Where We Break How We Shine seems, by contrast, to suggest a meme about fire flies. Serene closer Our Side Has to Win (for DH) offers up a new dawn in the light of all that has gone before. These are wordless requiems for a saner world, pummelled home with elegiac feeling. The most beautiful thing they’ve ever done. This isn’t the end.

When Gerry Love announced he was leaving Teenage Fanclub, it set off alarms bells for all devotees of the greatest pop band in the history of humanity. Better than the Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Byrds and Big Star, the Fannies had grown up in public with almost 30 years of perfect, rhythmic power pop, with Gerry’s contributions an essential part of the legacy of superb sound. It wasn’t so much his bass playing, as the wonderful Dave McGowan is clearly able to hand 4 string duties, as part of a beefed-up band that saw Norman’s pal Euros Childs installed on keyboards, but the future absence of his songs.

Fiercely democratic, the last few TFC albums had seen songwriting duties split three ways between Gerry, Norman and Raymond. The worry, dare I say it, was not that Raymond couldn’t step up to the mark by producing half a dozen musical nuggets but, whisper it, Norman’s contributions were a plateauing to say the least. Could the man whose energy has driven the band onwards since the 80s were turning into the 90s, show us he still had it in him?

Panic over; Endless Arcade begins with Home, an angst-suffused 8-minute, two-guitar solo epic that is definitely the best thing he’s written since It’s All In My Mind from Man Made in 2005. Live, I would imagine it will be the equal of Everything Flows. Those are not empty words; they are the truth. Endless Arcade has 11 glorious cuts of the finest grade chiming guitars, heavenly harmonies and heartfelt emotion. I have to say I think Warm Embrace is a load of old toffee mind!

Raymond, whose contributions to the last album Here were of a uniformly high standard, raises the bar yet higher. Not only is there the glum but golden Everything Is Falling Apart that hinted the album was underway, but The Future and Silent Song are up there with the best songs he’s ever contributed.  It won’t be until next April before I get to see the lads, in Leeds not at Barras sadly, but I can’t wait until I do. Incidentally, other gigs include Arab Strap at the Boilershop, Alex Rex at the Cumberland and, wonderfully, Godspeed You! Black Emperor at the Barras in January 2022.

 

Books:

In my last cultural update, I waxed lyrical about Cane Warriors by Alex Wheatle, the Brixton-born author whose early biography was portrayed in one of Steve McQueen’s acclaimed Small Axe films on BBC1 late last year. Recently I’ve had the pleasure of reading Wheatle’s Crongton quartet for young adults: Liccle Bit, Crongton Knights, Straight Outta Crongton and Home Girl. Set in the fictional South London satellite Crongton, which appears to be more Thamesmead than Brixton, the books tell the story of the tribulations of growing up in such an area when your disinclination to carry a weapon marks you out as weird and vulnerable.

Wheatle is superb in both his descriptions and his characterisation. We really get inside the heads of the teenage protagonists, understanding their motivations and miseries in a realistic way. Admittedly the plot is episodic and predictable, but in many ways that doesn’t matter; we’re more concerned with the minutiae of the characters’ lives than the realism and importance of events. I thoroughly enjoyed these books, but feel I’ve done my bit with Wheatle’s oeuvre. I’d definitely recommend him to those of you with mid teen kids or grand kids; fast-paced, gritty and uplifting tales from the wrong side of the tracks.

David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, is also an accomplished writer. His two-wheeled travelogue, Bicycle Diaries, ostensibly takes us around the world to cities Byrne has explored on his foldaway bike. Except it isn’t really about cycling at all; it’s as much a guidebook as Animal Farm is a treatise on agricultural husbandry. This is not the place to come if you want to know how to fix a puncture or what kind of bike to buy, though the appendix does offer some cursory tips on security and maintenance.

Byrne's journey begins in London. His first route is from Shepherd's Bush to Whitechapel, measuring his progress by using the city's monuments as markers. He doesn't tend to dwell on the actual journeys, though, but ruminates instead on the people and places he encounters en route. These thoughts often lead on to deeper thoughts about, among other things, buildings and food. Once you have surrendered to Byrne's discursive style and lateral way of thinking, the book starts to make more sense.

This is an engaging book: part diary, part manifesto, where we discover he has cycled in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Manila and Sydney. He has even cycled through Baltimore, where he grew up, though, interestingly, there is nothing here about cycling in Dumbarton, where he was born. Even more impressively, he once cycled from the centre of Detroit to the suburbs, where the desolation makes him think of postwar Berlin, as "one of the most memorable bike rides I've ever taken". Byrne also acknowledges the growing problem of the aggressive urban cyclist in his chapter about cycling in New York. "I might be unrealistic," he writes, "but I think that if bikers want to be treated better by motorists and pedestrians then they have to obey the traffic laws just as much as they expect cars to."

One of the great rewards that comes with editing glove is the chance to see people I’ve published going on to greater things. Of course, my role in their successes is an irrelevant, minimalist one, especially in the case of the stellar talents that are Jim Gibson and Gwil James Thomas. Jim, who came to prominence with Hand Job magazine and then Low Light, which he edits, is a kind of Flannery O’Connor of the East Midlands; spinning tales of gore and misfeasance on the places DH Lawrence stood, but never understood. His latest chapbook, volume 2 of Hidden Valley is a superb and stressful read. The hills have eyes round there. Keep away after dark.

Of a much gentler hue is Lonesome, Wholesome Soup by Gwil James Thomas. These deeply personal, cathartic poems are shot through with ironic self-criticism. When he runs himself down it isn’t because he wants to spare us the bother, but because he knows he doesn’t need to, but feels better for having done so. If Jim Gibson makes you recoil in horror, Gwil’s work makes you snort with sympathy and reach out to put an arm round his shoulder and buy the fella a good hot meal. Two minor classics by a pair of brilliant, individual voices.

Looking ahead, there are some huge new publications on the horizon: James Ellroy, David Keenan and David Peace are all ready to drop new titles in the next few weeks. In addition, Bob Stanley’s Excavate is still on my bedside cabinet, though I’m still feeling a bit MESmithed-out after a surfeit of Fall books last year.