Dancing About Architecture #1

The very wonderful TQ zine (https://tqzine.blogspot.com/) has just published issue #70/71. Please buy it & not just because it includes my piece on David Keenan's England's Hidden Reverse & Nige Tassell's Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?

When an author decides to write a book about a particular aspect of music, whether that be based on a specific time, place, genre or even combination of all three, their first task is to set the parameters of their project. In David Keenan’s case, his decision to focus on Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, is an arbitrary one, when arguments could be made for the inclusion of Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse or many other outside acts. However, such is the strength of Keenan’s writing that his project is a convincing one. Sometimes, as in the case of Nige Tassell’s lovingly researched and affectionately written Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?, which was the music book I liked the most during 2023 and, happily enough, Shelley’s Christmas present to me (finished on Boxing Day morning I have to admit), the boundaries are easy to circumscribe. His task, which he executes with great flair, is to track down the 22 bands who contributed to the NME’s era defining cassette of jangly pop, C86. Tassell, author of half a dozen other books about football and music, is a journalist by profession, but a nice one. He isn’t a jaundiced, negative naysayer without a good word to say about anyone or anything to do with his chosen subject. Instead, he's a fan; he loves music, football and films as well. He’s the sort of writer I can get into bed with; metaphorically at least.

Then again, if you approached a project intended to find out what happened to 22 apple cheeked, musically maladroit and, generally forgotten late teen and early 20s indie bands from the thick end of four decades ago, with the default position of a cynical lip curl and snide put down, I’d suggest you were writing the wrong book. Of all the bands who appeared on this cassette, apart from an oft mentioned widespread regret that they gave away obscure unreleased tracks or substandard B-sides to be included, while naively hoping their records labels, whether cottage industry or megalithic major, would put out better products to get them a degree of fame on their own terms, only The Wedding Present, The Soup Dragons, Half Man Half Biscuit, The Pastels and Primal Scream achieved anything like sustained fame and acclaim throughout their career, however you wish to recognise such terms. Incidentally, if you’ve ever suspected Bobby Gillespie is an egomaniac, then the opening pages of this lovingly researched tome will prove you are right. There are some in here who have never got over their brush with stardom; Cath Carroll, writer and vocalist with Miaow has retreated from public and professional life, as have an enduringly embittered The Mighty Lemon Drops.  For the vast majority of bands involved, international superstardom wasn’t their goal; a 7” single, a John Peel session and a few gigs around the country was all they were after. Some didn’t even get that far.

There are tales of bands who disappeared almost as soon as C86 came out; The Bodines, whose track Therese is my favourite of the whole cassette, The Wolfhounds, A Witness, The Shrubs and McCarthy were basically all done in by the time the chimes for 1987 were heard. Big Flame, the anarcho syndicalist post punk noise trio had called it a day even before C86 came out; two of them are architects and the other is on the board at Doncaster Rovers, interestingly enough. There are sad tales as well; three quarters of Bogshed died young, as did Alex Taylor, whose beautiful voice was the USP of the massively underrated Shop Assistants, while Mick Lynch of Stump drank himself to death in some of Cork city’s least salubrious shebeens. Even the kooky Fuzzbox were tainted by loss in recent years. Happily, there are success stories too The Servants and The Mackenzies may have exhibited zero commercial potential, but their singers, by turns, became an Oxford academic and founded the Fopp chain of record shops. Age of Chance, once so snazzily attired in cycling outfits, are involved in haute couture in Harrogate, of all places.

Perhaps, most charmingly, Glasgow’s The Close Lobsters and Birmingham’s Mighty Mighty are still going; rehearsing, gigging, producing demos and using Bandcamp and Soundcloud to get their music out there. If this book got them even a dozen listens and a handful of purchases, then their resolutely independent stance has paid dividends and worked wonders as they keep on going, proudly amateur and uncompromising, to the bitter end. I strongly recommend this book to you and intend to investigate Nige Tassell’s other work when I get the chance.

In contrast, I’ve read every single thing David Keenan has published. Formerly a member of Byrds-influenced west of Scotland indie bands 18 Wheeler and Telstar Ponies, Keenan progressed to wholeheartedly embracing the experimental, noise aesthetic in outfits such as Tight Meat Duo, with fellow Volcanic Tongue records employee Alex Neilson, and Dream / Aktion Unit with his partner Heather Leigh and a certain Thurston Moore. Turning to writing, Keenan’s first novel This is Memorial Device, told the story of “the greatest band you’d never heard,” who were the sadly fictional, main figures behind Airdrie’s post punk scene in the late 70s. Since then he’s produced four further novels of stunning imagination and dense plotting, written in an almost hallucinogenic prose style that makes the reader question whether the narrator is experiencing events or simply dreaming.

However, before his brilliant debut novel, there was Keenan’s fascinating biography of three of post-punk scene’s most arcane and enduringly challenging acts; Coil, Current 93 and Nurse with Wound and the personalities behind them, telling the tale of how these “bands,” for want of a better term, evolved, at various stages, into experimental, outsider, industrial, neo-folk and dark, brutal dance acts. Keenan’s experience as a performer in the alternative and experimental music milieu, when running Volcanic Tongue, gave him the ideal exposure to acts featured in this lovingly curated and endlessly fascinating account of some of the most uncompromising music imaginable. Cards on the table, I do have a problem with power electronics outfits who utilise imagery related to the Holocaust, mass murder, sexual abuse and other forms of human degradation, as well as lyrics that I find at best distasteful and at worst repulsively bigoted. I don’t listen to the likes of Whitehouse or Sutcliffe Jugend any longer. While I am a devotee of Throbbing Gristle, I never really got Coil, partly because of their grindingly fierce undertones and backbeat. Reading this book, I’m vindicated that I’ve made the right decision to swerve them. Jhonn Balance may have been an inspired and tragic artist, but Sleazy Peter Christopherson was simply a scatological bully and boor whose work I can live without. That may appear to speak ill of the dead, but there is nothing in this incredibly detailed book that vindicates the personal conduct of those musicians. I’m sorry if that seems censorious, but I struggle to see how any listener can separate the artist from their work.

In contrast, the ethereal, almost angelic David Tibet, who lived in Benwell in the mid to late 70s when he was doing his degree at Newcastle University, was an obsessive collector of Noddy merchandise (seriously) and continues to work with la grande dame of English rural folk music, Shirley Collins. I bet he fitted in well with the locals on Armstrong Road and Adelaide Terrace back in the day. I have to say I’m not entirely familiar with his oeuvre, but he comes across as a loving curator of all that is both obscure and charmingly aesthetic, straying just on the right side of pretention over the years. I should really find out more of his work. The same is true of the magnificent Steven Stapleton, as I’ve loved every note I’ve heard by Nurse with Wound, as well as being enduring fascinated by the world and manner in which he lives, almost off grid, in County Clare, on the south west coast of Ireland. Fair play to the lad. The length and detail of the book are never a problem, because Keenan is a superb wordsmith, whose prose is polished until it shines. It is, perhaps, a more arcane read than Tassell’s gleeful amateurism, but I suppose that is the nature of the subject matter. In short, I recommend both books unreservedly.