Monthly Archive

I networked hard in the first issue of Pantry, 1986-style, reviewing – linking to – twenty-odd fanzines, all of which I would have laboriously written off for enclosing the obligatory SAE and coinage, following up reviews in other fanzines, the music press, and John Peel’s frequent plugs on his Radio One show.  The graphic limitations of the page itself stop me from offering it as a scan here, but the names are a treat:

Are You Scared To Get Happy?
Anarchy In Wonderland
Adventure In Bereznik
Baby Honey
Bandits 1-5
Big And Bouncy
Bludgeoned
Coca Cola Cowboy
Cursing This Audacity
Debris
Diana Rigg
Hand On Heart
Hello! Good Evening, And Welcome
The Hip Priest
Hungry Beat
The Legend!
1965 Kitchen
Pure Popcorn
Repose
Simply Thrilled
Skipping Kitten
Snipe
Trout Fishing In Leytonstone
When Saturday Comes

It wasn’t always the case that a fanzine’s name was the best thing about it.

Among the editors of these mostly forgotten screeds I can count:

One editor of Smoke: a London peculiar
One publisher of Plan B
One member of Teenage Fanclub
One Soup Dragon (as I recall)
One June Bride
One transvestite
At least one anarchist, possibly three or more
One Mancunian cultural commentator
One reviewer of computer games
One freelance sportswriter
And two folk with Kentish connections who remain very good friends to this day.

As for the others… I wonder what became of them all.

In the final part of Krystof Kieslowski’s Three colours trilogy, Red, there is a dazzling opening sequence in which the camera follows red cables from the starting point of a phone call made in Geneva through switches and under the sea to England, only for the call to be rebuffed at the last by the flashing red light of a busy telephone.  It’s imagery that ‘The wires’ by Rachael Dadd from her new album The world outside is in a cupboard brings to mind.  Wires are also what puppeteers use to manipulate their creations – another recurring theme of Kieslowski’s films – but here I think we’re talking about wires and distance, like the ‘Lines running north’ that the young Del Amitri sang about.  ‘The wires’ has all the elements that go to make up the best of Rachael Dadd’s songs – the trueness of the singing voice, the rising, reaching melody and harmonics, the gentle dynamics which occasionally engulf you, and unsparing personal observation.  In its execution, though, this song alone establishes a connection to the way Minnesotan trio Low make their music – there is that same purity of purpose.

Listening to ‘The wires’ I can’t help thinking of Red; listening to the rest of The world outside…, I can’t help thinking of a record called Blue, a record I admire more than like, for all the listening I’ve given it.  But The world outside… is a warmer kind of self-portrait than Joni Mitchell’s, though it travels from January blues to the autumnal end of a day’s work, from fear and bravery to a state of golden-maned happiness.  The last is a token of an engagement with the natural world that belies the album’s title, for throughout, there’s a weight of animal threatening to burst out of the cupboard, or into the world.  Not unconnected with this, there are moments – ‘And when I cannot dream’ is one – where The world outside… comes close to the mellifluous, pain-tinged joy that Tim Buckley perfected on Blue afternoon.

But Rachael Dadd is obviously not in thrall to the blues of Tim or Joni any more than she could be to the red of Kieslowski.  Though her music occasionally tips its hat to tradition, hers is folk music which is not mired in the past.  It has the quality of, if not timelessness, then the closest any of us mortals can come to that, either as listeners or music-makers.  She shows no sign of the quirkiness which undoes some who do things the Fence Records way.  The world outside… may not be pop in its immediacy, but it is immediately affecting.  Like her recordings with Kate Stables and Virpi Kettu as Whalebone Polly, it doesn’t necessarily imprint itself on first listen, but instead floats and flies free.  Listening brings its rewards.  Songs like ‘Caught in the weight’, ‘Hawk for a heart’ and ‘The party’ share unassuming beginnings, but where they travel melodically and harmonically remains surprising.  Her music retains the simple acoustic warmth of previous releases, though added now are loops and rumbles of piano, while ‘Ships’ has a metronomic beat and ‘Bold bear’ an electric guitar; but at root there is a familiar and welcome sense of space.  To my ears Rachael Dadd is more Leaf than Fence, with a musical sensibility as fine-tuned and essence-seeking as Colleen, although the latter is a composer of quite distinct minimalist instrumental pieces.  There is even a resemblance between the artwork for Everyone alive wants answers and The world outside is in a cupboard.

Rachael Dadd never pretends to be something she isn’t.  There is no bar code on this CD.  In as far as it’s possible for it to be so, this is music unaffected by the commercial processing of the music business.  You can’t get The world outside… on Amazon (instead you need to go here, from where it’s but a short hop to the Hand – Rachael in combination with kora wiz Wig Smith – whose excellent Berries from the rubble EP is also well worth hearing).  That’s alternately frustrating and partly why the music of Rachael Dadd appeals as much as it does.  I hope her audience continues to grow, slowly but surely.

A lot has been made of the very particular urban trajectories that the music of Burial typifies and soundtracks, but Untrue sounds as reflective of the surroundings in which I listen to it as I know it must of the night bus home across the city from a steaming Hackney nitespot.  And those are surroundings completely free of a coating of grime, let alone decades or centuries of the stuff: driving in the morning dark on a narrow, winding and little-used country road out in the shires, the mist rising from the great pond, a startled deer caught in the headlights before it canters up the embankment through which the road burrows.

And it would probably sound as great on headphones and the 2:00 a.m. walk home from the local town’s one night club through residential streets sleepy with enchanted dreams as an hour or two later on a journey through the atria and ventricles of the city.

The common thread is darkness, night as thick as blood entombing the beats and the bass.  It’s hard to imagine wanting to play Burial in the middle of a sunny day, and if you did, it would surely evaporate into nothingness, like a vampire caught short, napping, out.

Only the sampled snatches of young singing voices, as melancholic in their way as anything on Hatful of hollow, ground Burial’s music in time and space.  But otherwise Untrue – lighter than its seriously dark predecessor – remains sufficiently free to adapt to its environment; to adapt to a world away from the neighbourhood in which it was formulated and recorded.  And the mind is capable of infinite re-imaginings, plausible stories for why art works out of the context in which it was created, and in the context into which it has been brought.