Here's the latest cultural round-up......
MUSIC:
In this section, I’m not proposing to discuss live performances at the Lit & Phil or Saltwell Park by Shunyata Improvisation Group, nor their CDs Balances and Pivot Moments, as such discussion will form part of an article about Shunyata in TQ #56, which I intend to blog on this site in the near future. However, I must say this of the inaugural TQ night at the Lit & Phil in June; it was an absolute pleasure to encounter the pastoral, ethereal beauty of Mobius and also to be present for the debut performance of Hen, where I had the opportunity of hearing Paul Taylor at the old Joanna, in the flesh, for the first time ever. Similarly, my own performance at a spoken word event at The Engine Room on August 2nd and as part of the second TQ Lit & Phil gathering, together with Posset and Chelsea Hare, on August 19th won’t be reviewed, as I’m intending that to be part of an end of year piece for TQ #59, which will also be blogged here. Suffice to say, Tom, as Chelsea Hare, produced a rich and warming set of slightly off-kilter acoustic pop ballads that morphed gorgeously into gooey slices of left-field improvisation and noisome noise. Additionally, Joe Murray’s work as Posset has long been lauded on Tyneside and beyond. A son of Bishop Auckland who cut his teeth 30 years ago singing arcane indie with a dozen bands such as Lumpsucker and Foil, his exquisite use of Dictaphone and found sounds produces beguiling collages that disturb and beguile in equal measures. The free ensemble CD he gave out at the gig, Fresh Like Irish Moss, is on rapid repeat on my turntable as we speak. A glorious no-fi talent I’m proud to call a pal.
Before
I look in detail at my recent musical purchases, let’s examine the only gig
I’ve been to during the period under examination; Sea Power at Cullercoats
Crescent Club on August 6th. Cards
on the table; I was largely unimpressed by both Sea Power’s decision to ditch
their British prefix and their reasons for doing so. This, combined with a
distinctly flat sounding new album, in the shape of this year’s Everything was
Forever had me fearing they were on a distinctly downward spiral. However,
I’ve seen them on 10 occasions at 9 different venues over the years and, being
frank, they’ve walked on water every single time. Despite the obvious
limitations of Cullercoats Crescent Club as a venue, such as unspeakably
hideous beer, the presence of a couple of hundred baffled pensioners out for a
regular Saturday pint and an endless supply of genial, replica shirted middle-aged
men, happily in their cups after NUFC had laced Forest all over, this was a
glorious gig. Admittedly there were no bears in attendance (though this was
compensated by the appearance of more foliage than when Great Birnham wood came
to High Dunsinane hill) and the set included 70% of the new album, though not
the finest track, Lakeland Echo, but from an opening Machineries of
Joy, by way of a stunning Cleaning out the Rooms and a barnstorming Carrion
/ All in It, this was a vital band dialling it up to eleven, as ever. Of
course, the encore did it for us all; an anthemic Great Skua brought the
house down and the lights up but, as is ever the case in these awful
post-Brexit days, the ability to transport us back to kinder, more optimistic
teams a mere decade and a half ago by the loving Cri de Coeur that is Waving
Flags always, and I mean always, reduces me to tears. I still love this
band.
As regards recorded music, I’ve bought quite a few CDs since last time. Even discounting the Shunyata discs and the aforementioned Posset promo, there’s still 7 new purchases to be addressed. Of those I’ve purchased, there is no doubt, or indeed surprise, that my favourite is Alex Rex’s poetic journey into hell, Mouthful of Earth. It is Dante meets Bosch meets LaMonte Young; as eerie, queasy, atonal and uncompromising as you’d expect. To create an album that works both as a collection of poetry and a musical offering is a notable challenge, but with Mouthful of Earth, Alex succeeds with his usual boundless, energetic originality. When Neilson sings, it is often more than singing. As a lyricist, his frame of reference is uniquely wide, and his imagination dark, disturbing and dramatic. His singing encompasses everything from broken Dylanesque, nasal crooning to expressionist, declamatory yelps, often lapsing into a half-spoken, slurred narrative.
In every one of his songs over his double decade career, Neilson has revealed himself to be a poet, though Mouthful of Earth is the first spoken-word Alex Rex album. It collects poems written before the pandemic and sets them to experimental drone music from 2006 created by Neilson, Alastair Galbraith and Richard Youngs. The result is moving, brooding and darkly funny; all those things you associate with Alex Rex and Trembling Bells, but more concentrated, more resonant. Things are weird, as we hear of birds screaming, birds gouging confessions in the sky; ‘Epileptic birds with eyes of light.’ Hysterical starlings. It is a love poem of sorts, but with results that are as brutal as they are surreal. Such bizarre imagery drenches the whole album. On It Must be Love, Neilson describes his future self as a profane, decrepit clown and describes a personal apocalypse drenched in artificial colours.
The music may have been composed or improvised years ago, but it is entirely relevant to the poems; the screams and wails and drones of Andromeda Chained to a Rock have a mythic, wild eeriness. Wastwater is backed by something between shimmer and clatter. Alcoholic’s Parabola reclines on dissonant chimes and broken, wordless voices while Neilson examines two separate curves of his life, drinking and music. The misanthropic bird’s nest of Dog Person offers up a world-weary philosophy in little over a minute, the words seeming to take their cue from the unstable percussion.
Neilson is known for his collaborative spirit as much as for his experimental predilections and both come to the fore on Charity Shop Prophet, wherein Lavinia sings a witchy, wordless backing vocal while Neilson’s own free-jazz drumming underpins a piece that juxtaposes historical and biblical reference with sexual desire. This kind of fractured beauty can be found all over Mouthful of Earth, even amongst the weeping sores and river-coloured piss and shitty jogging bottoms of Slight Return. The repeated insistence that “I love you” and the reassurance that “it will all be over soon” represent the bleak irony of hope.These poems bring with them the feeling that we are all dancing on our own funeral pyre, but that doesn’t mean that we should stop dancing.
If you’re keen to dance on the graves of the Ruling elite, then the eponymous Freakons album is just the thing for you. A collaboration between The Mekons, with Jon Langford and Sally Timms the most prominent members, and Freakwater, from Chicago and the Commonwealth of Kentucky, singing broken-hearted mineworker ballads of death, despair and defiance. It is a sombre but stirring brew. This is a raw, sprawling, folksy, transatlantic country juggernaut. Stories of mining disasters, ecological catastrophes and bad times all round. Twelve cuts: traditional tunes and selected originals that sound just like they too were crafted over the centuries. Proper stirring subject matter all round. Janet Bean and Catherine (Freaks) are the singers per se, Langford and Timms are more of the hollering and protesting persuasion. It works as a whole, with expert help from talented harmony singing and guitar playing friends. Alternate tracks jump back and forth across the big pond like a belching steam ship.
Standout tracks? Phoebe Snow is Appalachian country noir, dragged up from the Kentucky and West Virginia coal seams. A pained, screaming fuzz guitar solo charges through the campfire folk. Mannington Mine Disaster is self-explanatory. A rousing defence of men lost underground due to the boss man’s cruel negligence. For connoisseurs of The Mekons, the band have you covered with rabble rousers Abernant 84/85. The two seams blend together best on opening track Dark Lords of the Mine. In totality, Freakons is a warm and roughly hewn collection that feels like a beery, teary lock-in you wish you’d been invited to.
The third of the more commercial artists (you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet…) to be considered, are the venerable Wire and their long-overdue official release of Not About to Die. Originally, it was a bootleg cassette of scrappy Wire demos recorded in the late 1970s that circulated among EMI employees in the early 1980s. Wire were in the middle of hashing out some ideas for what would be their second and third albums, Chairs Missing and 154, respectively, but Not About to Die was considered to be nothing more than a work-in-progress that was certainly not for sale. While some rock bands have tolerated bootleg recordings being passed around among their fanbase, plenty of groups have tried to seize the cassettes so they can sell the music themselves, though Wire never seemed too keen on Not About to Die. They had no problems with Document & Eyewitness, a warts-and-all live show known for being especially confrontational, but they ignored these demos for decades until now, when Not About to Die has been granted an official release.
In terms of post-punk, the “punk” side of Wire’s inner equation was doing most of the heavy lifting in their early days. By the time the band recorded these demos, their sound was in a state of flux that only proper studio time could fully capture. Songs that appeared on Wire albums like Being Sucked in Again and Two People in a Room unsurprisingly sound like late 1970s stripped-back post-punk. Not About to Die still has some surprises, like an adrenaline-fueled thrashing of The Other Window where Colin Newman takes the lead vocal instead of Bruce Gilbert. An early version of I Should Have Known Better appears as Ignorance No Plea, replacing the final product’s dramatic gloom with some rhythmic, pounding back up Graham Lewis. Indirect Inquiries sounds nothing like how it does on 154, stripping away all of the song’s subtleties and nuances and replacing them with clanging guitars.
Tracks that Wire recorded professionally but were released as b-sides are represented here with Options R and Former Airline. Underwater Experiences, the song Wire recorded and performed many times over the years without committing it to an album, is one of Not About to Die’s more sprawling moments. Lastly, there are the songs you would have otherwise never encountered if not for Not About to Die. The album gets its title from the lyrics to Stepping offtToo Quick, a two-minute song that Newman promoted as having “the best intro to any song ever”. As one guitar hammers out harmonics, the other repeats an ascending triad. Just as Lewis’ slowly walking bass reaches the root, everyone bashes out the same chord while Robert Grey attacks his hi-hat. It’s all rather polyphonic for punk music, and it totally flies in the face of the rousing tune that follows. This may sound like a cliché, but with Wire, even the discards and demos are better than most artists’ entire careers.
Browsing on Bandcamp, I checked out the TUSK page, in light of the news there won’t be a festival in 2022. I was pleased to see an offer of 3CDs for £5. These were: Good Cop, Bad Cop by Derek Bailey, Tony Bevan, Tony Hession and Otomo Yoshihide, A Spoonful of Yeast by Herb Diamante and Friends, and Other Thunders by The One Ensemble Orchestra. The latter is my favourite; a live recording of the Scottish unit, which combines the sedate beauty of Dirty 3 with the Penguin Café Orchestra. It is certainly something I’ll listen to often, unlike the first named set. Yes, I realise the late guitarist was a genius, but he can be a bloody uncomfortable listen and I’m not sure I can bear another 80 minutes risking tinnitus to get through it again. The one in the middle features a (presumably) pseudonymous singer fronting the likes of Sunburned Hand of the Man on standout track Riga. For the most part this is a dirty, sludgy ersatz Cramps style stomp, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, even if I know nothing about the project or the titular crooner.
So finally, we come to Tabhair mo ghra go Conamara (Bring My Love to Connemara); a set of 22 Sean-nos field recording performances, supervised by Terry Yarnell in rural Galway in 1970. I’d come across Veteran Records, the label that released this and many other field recordings of that era, in an Other Lives obituary in The Guardian. A quick perusal of the catalogue saw this one stand out for me. As a devotee of the genius of Seosamh Ó hÉanaí and Darach Ó Catháin, I am always on the lookout for similar styles of material. While this is of variable quality, two sets of performers, the Keane sisters (Rita and Sarah) and Sean ‘ac Donncha are good enough to be spoken of in the same breath as Joe and Dudley. The heartbreaking Keane sisters’ composition The Home I Left Behind is matched by ‘ac Donncha’s take on Joe Heaney’s The Bogs of Shanaheever, which is possibly the saddest song about a dog I’ve ever heard. Of equal import is Tom Phaidin Tom’s rendition of the hitherto unknown, to me at least, Brave Hynes and Bold Dermody. This CD is an absolute treasure and a glorious gateway to a world that is lost forever. I’m intending my own musical tribute, entitled Sean Noise soon enough…
BOOKS:
By and large, I try not to buy new books, except when absolutely unavoidable. Mainly this is to do with the negative impact on the planet of the superabundance of superfluous printed matter. This position is one which does restrict my access to freshly released material, especially as I have an utter disinclination to read on-line in whatever form that may be, so at times, I must be a hypocrite. I had no choice but to purchase a virgin copy of Sunbathers in a Bottle by Magnus Mills, as he is one of the few authors whose entire works I must read. This latest one is the follow up to 2020’s The Trouble with Sunbathers and is a continuation of the depiction of life in a theme park version of England that has been purchased by a foreign power. It’s daft, it’s mad and it’s deeply allegorical. As in every Mills novel, the nameless first-person narrator is hopelessly out of his depth and utterly unable to control a series of increasingly insane events, the significance of which seem to pass everyone else by. It’s Kafka meets Eric Sykes, and I will endlessly hoover up Mills’ madcap world view.
Putting aside the temptations of new-mown paperbacks for one second, I am delighted to note that at almost every turn, there is access to a plentiful, if not unlimited, supply of unwanted, pre-owned books that I feel the urge to read. One such source was the Auntie Joy 2 gig at Ryton back in March, where I finally picked up a copy of Mystery Train by Griel Marcus, often lauded as the greatest book about popular music of all time. I’m not sure if it’s that good, but it is one hell of a read. Chapters on Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, The Band, Sly Stone and Elvis Presley educate, inform, fascinate and provoke by turn. The only part that fails to ring true, for me at least, is the section about Randy Newman who, with the benefit of hindsight, was and is a zero-trick pony of minimal talent and even less importance.
I did have a delve among them and a few grabbed my interest; first up was Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters by Edinburgh-based, Middlesbrough-supporting, all-round smarmy know-it-all Daniel Gray: a man so lacking in humility he makes The Blizzard’s Jonathan Wilson seem like Ghandi by comparison. The premise of the book is, having resided in Edinburgh for getting on for a decade, Gray has become detached from what it means to be English, so he decides to embark upon a series of apparently solo boozy weekends that take him from Kenilworth Road to Brunton Park and all points in between. The actual travelogue of decaying grounds, disappointing pubs and dismal curry houses is worth your time, but the banal pretension of the overarching theme of cultural deracination is neither convincing nor remotely intriguing. No doubt if you told Gray, Wilson or any other camp follower of the cult of David Conn-Artist that their scribblings are pretentious drivel, they’d smile knowingly and quote Derrida and Lacan right back at you.
Stan Ternent was born in in Stoneygate at the bottom of The Felling; a place where they took the kerbstones in before last orders. Like many areas of NE10, it had a significant number of Irish emigres as its core population. Hence the bloke who played for Burnley, Carlisle and his boyhood team the Mackems (did you ever set foot in the Columba Club on a match day?), who probably thought Derrida and Lacan played centre half for St Etienne, namechecks the like of Corny O’Donnell and Father Stronge in their roles at the Felling’s foremost Fenians on the Fulwell End. This is the part of Stan’s story, reflecting on Pat Stronge’s sermons that denounced Newcastle United as true-blue agents of the counter reformation, that appealed to me, but we don’t get enough of it. Instead, after about 80 pages, it’s time for Stan to regale us with anecdotes about his time as a diet Neil Warnock in the manager’s seat at Blackpool, Hull, Bury and Burnley. It was published when he still held command at Turf Moor, before his star descended with woeful stints at Gillingham and Huddersfield, before he went out of the game in 2008 or thereabouts. Frankly, I can’t imagine Stan the Man shifted many copies as it is a niche read, but I’m glad to have read it, even if only to discover what an appalling shit and problem boozer Ian Porterfield was.
Stan Ternent may seek to present himself as a flinty disciplinarian of the old school, even if he comes across as a low-carb Terry Butcher, but he has nothing in his career as a player or manager to hold a candle to the achievements of the late, great Eddie Turnbull. Firstly as a player, as one of the sainted Famous Five, then as manager of the well named Turnbull’s Tornadoes, Eddie was an Easter Road legend. Simply put, he was one of Hibernian’s greatest players and greatest managers who served the club with distinction and was always proud to wear the emerald, green shirt of Leith’s finest. His long-overdue autobiography Having a Ball tells the career of a true gentleman, who also served Queen’s Park and Aberdeen with some renown as a manager. Of course, as a player, he was a one club man and, to his dying day, his club was Hibs. I’d recommend this avowedly nostalgic read about a bygone era from the pen of a long dead football hero to anyone sickened by the avaricious mercenaries in the professional game these days.
A slightly sobering read is the almanac of woe that is Motherwell, On This Day by Derek Wilson. Unlike comparable tomes on Celtic or Liverpool, for instance, this is a series of unending misfortune, whereby each May tells of broken dreams as seasons end fruitlessly and August recounts early optimism dashed by another Old Firm thrashing before the leaves turn golden. Seemingly, not a day has gone past without a hammering at Fir Park or a thrashing on the road. It’s enough to turn you to drink, which is the only explanation for how Jimmy Greaves put his name to the risibly plotted and woefully character-led football novel The Final, written in conjunction with booze-fuelled hack Norman Giller. Make no bones about it, this book is tripe; the story of a priapic pisshead playboy being kneecapped by the cuckolded vice-chair of the club he’s about to leave to scupper a dream move abroad. Definitely a toilet read, especially when you run out of paper.
Of course, there are other sources of books than Percy Main FC and other celebrities who’ve apparently written landfill fiction. Take Barry Norman’s Sticky Wicket for instance; I got this from the Literary & Philosophical Society when I played the gig there. It’s slightly wordier than Jimmy’s magnum opus, but the plot is no better. Here we have a TV news anchor of little or no merit, professionally or personally, whose only leisure interest is playing for his village cricket team. However, in the week leading up to their annual challenge game with the Lord of the Manor’s select XI, who just happens to be the hated father-in-law, Andrew (the eponymous left arm orthodox spinner and would-be lothario) gets an unbelievable amount of female attention, as well as a private detective following him around, snapping away. Anyway, in a breath-taking denouement, they win the game by a solitary run, his wife leaves him for an archaeologist, he loses his job and shacks up with a bit of stuff he’s had his eyes on for years. Tripe.
The selection of chaff I got from the Lit & Phil demonstrates that there are many different types of celebrity dross that made it in to print. Take for instance former Ask the Family host Robert Robinson’s portentous screed of hokum, The Conspiracy, which tells of a secret decision by all the heads of state of constituent members of the UN signing up to a hush hush protocol whereby a sterilising medicament is added to the water supply to solve the problem of overpopulation in a humane way. Of course, this news leaks out and some liberal longhairs (this is set in 1968) decide to sabotage the programme. They do, but the tracing paper thin plot has an elusive, portentous aspect to it that I failed to grasp, so I wasn’t sure whether to feel sad or elated at the end of the book.
The very worst book I’ve read this last while was Joe Orton’s Head to Toe. Unlike Orton’s properly lauded dramatic comedies of manners, this picaresque piffle is ostensibly a novel. It isn’t really; it’s a sprawling, formless pastiche of Swift meets Peake, failing to impress either in imagination or execution. If this was how Orton saw his writing career progressing, then perhaps Kenneth Halliwell did us all a favour in that Islington bedsit back in 66.
Currently, I’m just finishing off Dangerous Ground, the leaden-footed autobiography of Roger Cook. Oh, it really is boring; the way he repeats, in tedious detail, every punch, kick and headbutt he endured making his dull documentaries about subjects we cared little about in the 80s and mean even less nowadays. I’d suspect the number of thumps and bumps he received switched off his ability to produce emotions. Still, it’s a good preparation for David Keenan’s Industry of Magic and Light, I guess. Well, once I’ve finished Monument Maker it will be…
No comments:
Post a Comment