Monthly Archive

Round these parts, the release of new Clientele songs is always cause for celebration, but especially so in the case of ‘Share the night’, which continues to mine the unlikely seam opened up by ‘Bookshop Casanova’, a sound inspired by Alasdair attempting to write a song with the petit four lightness of Spiller’s ‘Groovejet’.  In terms of underlying pick’n’mix, ‘Share the night’ once again manages a blend which in lesser hands would go horribly wrong, but in the Clientele’s becomes an extension of their very particular sound-world – a seaside pier from which to gaze not only at that alien mass of water that is the past but also at the skies of the future, their blues fringed with (a slightly menacing) orange.

Or, as one member of the Clientele Forum puts it, ‘kind of Sister Sledge meets Orange Juice round at Jimmy Page’s house’.  There’s also a little bit of Dylan in there (although as with earlier Clientele songs, it’s strange how you notice the likeness to Bob of Alasdair’s phrasing less with each subsequent listen).  But it’s that confluence of archetypal seventies and eighties guitar styles, chopping up the groove, and chasing the dragon, which brings ‘Share the night’ home more or less level with ‘Bookshop Casanova’.

The That night, a forest grew EP is out soon on Acuarela Records.

Tricky was back performing on Later last week.  Stripped to the waist, his torso covered in hieroglyphics (in addition to the underlying tattoos), and with hair which sprung pineapple-style only from the top of his otherwise shaven scalp, he resembled – presumably was intending to resemble – nothing so much as a native American.  But the war cry delivered by this Iroquois or Apache was called ‘Council estate’.

I could take or leave the music, which leaned a little too much towards the electro-metallic for my taste (though it sounds less like punky Hawkwind in its recorded form), but he remains the convincing, deeply focussed, pugilist performer he revealed himself to be on the same show thirteen years ago.  Then you could almost see inside of Tricky, see the exact point from which the dark articulations of ‘Black Steel’ and ‘Suffocated Love’ were emanating; not because he was being invitingly transparent, but because he was forcibly sucking you in.

Back then I thought he would gradually retreat into the studio, the role of producer being the ideal way to extricate himself from the diminishing returns of his records (though each has had at least something going for it).  But that was to underestimate the force of his character, which subsumes both the natural awkwardness / awkward naturalness of his rhythms and the uncharitable bleakness of his sound.  My guess is that Tricky needs to put himself in the line of fire.  And this time around, with a roots-referencing album entitled Knowle West boy, his battling will be serviced by Domino’s bespoke career rescue service.

This really should have been a Tangents article.

A couple of years ago, Tangents would have been for several reasons the perfect forum in which to rave about Rachel Cohen’s A chance meeting: intertwined lives of American writers and artists (Vintage).  The book explores the moments or points at which pairs or trios of artists’ and writers’ lives intersected or gently touched against each other and in so doing it becomes a celebration of literature, art, photography, and cinema, as well as of the common ideas connecting their forms and the lives of their makers.  Then there is the felicity – almost certainly unknown on the author’s part – of its echo of (the group) Josef K’s finest moment, and its probably known and knowing nod to a Brief encounter-esque sense of romance; for Rachel Cohen’s book is as much about what is left unsaid as about what history records as having been said.  Its acceptance and understanding that writers come in all shapes and sizes, that some write of a life of adventure in snatched moments between one escapade or assignation and the next, and others form adventure from a solitary life of sedentary reflection, is the literary equivalent of the stuff in which Tangents dealt over its ten year history.

In truth, beyond the shared title, there’s not much to link Rachel Cohen’s A chance meeting with Josef K’s ‘Chance meeting’, other than the somewhat deliberate circumstance of individual taste, and the suggestive nature of the song’s lyric, reprising the tone of David Lean’s film and Noel Coward’s screenplay:

‘The red sky behind you
The feeling you’ve been here before
You lived in the past dear
With things we all gave up then
I met you again there
But this time it weren’t for real’

But connections spark and snake in all directions as you read, inevitably going beyond the ones that Cohen herself makes, or gently presents without comment, like Willa Cather meeting Flaubert’s niece, and writing up the encounter in an essay called “A chance meeting”, or the title of the novel written by one of her subjects, W.D. Howells, A chance acquaintance.  Mention of Joseph Cornell will necessarily stir the attention of any fan of the Clientele’s music.  The story Cohen tells is this:

In 1943, Joseph Cornell wrote to Marianne Moore to thank her for some small amount of praise for a collage of his illustrating a story in an arts magazine.  The salutation was held up by an armadillo, armoured animals exerting a fascination for Moore displayed in her poetry, and Cornell wrote that her words were ‘the only concrete reaction I’ve had so far, and they satisfy and affect me profoundly.’  Cornell was voicing the gratitude that a deliberately lonely artist starved of reaction suffers through long years of obscurity.  His inclination was to fall in love with anyone who paid him attention, all the more so because it was someone he admired.  It led to an exchange of gently romantic letters, and to a meeting, though whether strictly speaking you could call it a chance one is debateable.  Of the meeting itself nothing can be said but that Moore saw Cornell’s basement workshop and his boxes-in-progress.  But Rachel Cohen gives us the tenor of their almost exclusively epistolary relationship and describes presents Cornell sent by post (a valentine of worm-work paper and an ancient book of rare animals), treading softly through the facts to offer from inside each story telling perspectives such as her notion that ‘people very often sent things to Marianne Moore in the hopes of getting back the language with which to talk about them, almost as if they were sending specimens to a zoological expert in order to find out the precise genus and Latin name.’

Along with three dozen other such encounters between writers, artists, photographers, thinkers, critics (and Charlie Chaplin), the book also narrates the second and third meetings between Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, which rested on Duchamp answering a phone call by chance.  Duchamp gives Cornell a present, perfect in its symbolism: ‘He had picked up a red-and-yellow glue carton that said “strength” on one side and, admiring the American phrase, had written “gimme” above it and then signed the whole “Marcel Duchamp,” dated Christmas 1942.’

Cohen’s book is full of such anecdotal gifts, but it is also strong on the way art forms and their purveyors rub off on (and up against) each other, and on the artistic urge which drives their creations, their lives, their relationships with the people to whom they are drawn and the ones from whom they retreat.  With its contextualised counsel from one writer or artist to another, it becomes a creative primer, and a caution against the wasting away of talent.

Carefully chosen photographs inform the text.  Richard Avedon’s 1960 picture of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and dancer Merce Cunningham is terrific; the laughing trio look like a particularly joyful early 1980s New York indie band.  Cohen’s description of the daguerreotype of Henry James Senior and Junior – ‘disturbing in the ghostly aliveness of its subjects’ – also stands for her own book.  She makes what must have been painstaking research seem effortless, stitching it into the whole so that you barely notice the thread binding the material together, and all without a footnote in sight.  There is empathy with all of her subjects, but not always sympathy –  for example, she has little time for the shellac vanity of Katherine Anne Porter.

Neither does she make more of the connections than there is.  Beyond the intrinsic pleasure she presents readers, she concentrates on her essential job, which is to make them want to go away and read the books of those of whom they were previously unaware; in my case William Dean Howells and Sarah Orne Jewett, the lesser known works of Mark Twain and Willa Cather, and maybe even Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs.  But she still allows me to draw the line at Gertrude Stein, and set me imagining the context of meetings that happened between artists of my own cultural acquaintance.  I’ve often wondered whether – as well as serve coffee to Thomas Mann when working in a dining hall – the young Jack Kerouac really did pass Thomas Wolfe on Brooklyn Bridge in a ‘raging blizzard’, as he reports in Vanity of Duluoz, and whether Wolfe might have taken the young football star for a drink if Kerouac had mustered the courage to speak to him.

In White bicycles: making music in the 1960s Joe Boyd writes of playing Nick Drake to John Cale, and of the amazed and excited Cale going round to see the young singer there and then, a seemingly improbable meeting of the confident Welshman and the diffident Englishman which the very next day resulted in the recording of ‘Northern sky’ and ‘Fly’.  The fleshed-out story behind an easily missed credit on the sleeve of Bryter later.

These connections, both real in terms of lives touching each other, and imagined, in the sense of the artistic repercussions of such encounters, are made of much the same stuff that informs A chance meeting.  And any regular readers of Tangents who have ventured into these obscure parts are guaranteed to enjoy it as much as I did.  Or your money back.

Elif Batuman’s recent piece in the Saturday Guardian’s Review section was unusual, in that music is rarely if ever covered there in and of itself, except as the subject of a book review.  Elif’s in-depth analysis of Vampire Weekend’s leading light, Ezra Koenig, contains within it precisely the same ingredients which render the Vamps intensely irritating to some, namely their preppiness, the associated perception of an air of dominion over both the earth and the sum of its inhabitants’ knowledge, and apparently a blithe disregard for what the world might be like for the 99.9% of its population whose schooling was either non-existent or fell short (seriously or otherwise) of the preppy mark.  But Elif gives much more than a glimpse behind both the hype and the pop surfaces of Vampire Weekend’s music, and in particular brings out Ezra’s pre-emptive refusal to allow his group to be straight-jacketed by the perceptions about their education and upbringing (a refusal I tried to elucidate here).  Elif digs out the following quote from a blog Ezra kept in 2005-06:

‘What is authentic for a guy like me?…  Growing up Jewish, you are presented with three images of your people:

- DESERT NOMADS BUILDING PYRAMIDS

- EASTERN-EUROPEAN SHTETL-DWELLERS WITH BIG BEARDS

- AMERICAN LIBERALS WHO EAT CHINESE FOOD ALL THE TIME

Now do you see where I’m coming from?’

The Vamps have already minted some great pop songs that leak, as James used to sing, down the left side, but Elif Batuman’s article suggests to me that their potential is greater than the goods delivered so far, assuming that they can keep their heads amid all the attention and don’t develop feet of clay.

Interesting to note in this interview with David Peace that the first game of football to which he was taken by his father was also the very first of Brian Clough’s time at the helm of Leeds United, a friendly against Huddersfield Town.  That goes a long way to explaining the psychological genesis of the idea for The damned Utd, as few things can make a greater impression on a youngster than their first sight of the emerald green turf at the centre of a football stadium slowly filling up with tens of thousands of people.

XTC managed to interpolate themselves among the indie-popsters in the pages of my second fanzine.  But I was extremely harsh on (a) Colin Moulding – why I didn’t have time for ‘Grass’ back then is a mystery to me now; (b) Todd Rundgren, whose music a friend subsequently converted me to with a tape entitled ‘Todd is God’, and who – though his interpersonal skills were evidently lacking – can hardly be blamed for wanting to get XTC to make a great record; and (c) Skylarking in general – only half of it of value?  A letter Mark Fisher was good enough to publish in his excellent XTC fanzine Limelight the same year (1987) was much kinder, though I still had it in for Colin.  I also suggested that ‘Dear God’ – the subject of the latest Backed with - ‘could well be my favourite XTC song… mmm… ever!’ and that it should have been on the LP instead of ‘Earn enough for us’, contradicting what I wrote in my own fanzine about that song.  Teenagers, eh?

Graphically a good idea inexpertly executed.  I would get better at this kind of textual shaping later on.

The Brilliant Corners have not loomed large in my life since those times – whereas hip-hop has.

This excellent piece of (self-)analysis over at Unpopular rather neatly kicks off with a reference to XTC and then moves on to my other subject here: fanzines of the 1980s.  My fanzines, too, were ‘written out of some desperate need to communicate and make connections’, and Alistair was, of course, one of those with whom I connected.