Saturday, August 16, 2003
America is waiting…
For the lights to come back on?
The other night, in the midst of the blackout, people in NYC were reported to be directing the traffic with the aid of sparklers… I love this world…
Some portentous, Godspeed / Explosions In The Sky style spoken words of the “blackening skies… industrial pain… critical capitalist mass…” type, some diva-esque backing vocals, possibly wordless, a beat, some strings, some squelch, a simultaneously beautiful and ominous video of strange, bleached-orange, future-animated bugs, crawlies, creepies, insects… Very good, stalled my finger on the ‘+’ button of the Sky remote for the remainder of the track (what else held me?- “Senorita”, Robbie Williams [if only to decipher the narrative of the starless video], Muse [their new album is not released until September 22nd over here, yet NME have reviewed it already- why?]; judiciously skipping past Marilyn Manson, “Frontin’” by Pharrell [sorry Emma, but it’s pedestrian and doesn’t do justice to Curtis] and that cunt from that band who did the Spiderman song, earnestly emoting through his fucking chin-beard). So what was this weird thing with the bugs and the beats and the layers that sounded so familiar that I was sure I owned it? “Eye For An Eye” by UNKLE.
Psyence Fiction struck me as over-eager to be classic, striving to cover modern-hipster classic territory that spans a dozen2 albums in a dozen1 tracks, pudding over-egged and far too many cooks messing up the broth. To be Beasties, Prodigy, MBV, Mazzy Star, post-rock, trip-hop, soundscape, psyche-rock and everything else that Lavelle deemed so desperately to be cool all in the space of 50-odd minutes was much too much to ask, “New Grass” sample or not, Richard Ashcroft’s withered husk ruining the best track, DJ Shadow reined-in to someone else’s vision-
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I’m listening to My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and fuck me if this isn’t great2… Thanks to Cozen / David / Mr Howie Jr for the new tags!
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-and it ended up being rubbish. I since traded my copy to Emma in exchange for Pre-Emptive Strike, an altogether more satisfying proposition. But this, this “Eye For An Eye”, it sounds good. The year has already reaped many musical rewards and looks set to continue to do so. Monday sees new records by The Neptunes and Elbow (why has every review of this record that I’ve seen so far appreciated it’s value but misunderstood it’s meaning?- I guess I’ll have to wait til Monday when my own take on it goes up on Stylus), and in the not-to-distant future there are records by Outkast, The Rapture, Luke Vibert and Bark Psychosis to look forward to, plus recent things I haven’t yet got hold of such as Dizzee and Cat Power, and doubtless countless other minor-masterpieces that i don’t even know exist yet. The more music I listen to the more music excites me (read that statement with emphasis on both scope and intensity and the more there is to get excited about in the future.
I’ve just put on the CDR burnt with the four tracks thus far leaked from Codename: DustSucker, Bark Psychosis’ upcoming second album (nine years in the making!- well, 18 months in the making and 7 and a half years in the procrastination and deviation). Please Graham, some word on this soon. There must be record labels excited at the prospect of working with this music. I think part of the reason i enjoy the new Mogwai record is because they seem to be moving ever-more-explicitly close to Bark Psychosis in their sound, adding nuances and layers where before there was only bludgeoning dynamic, however awesome that was. “400 Winters” from DustSucker tails off into a beautiful, minimal coda played out on dwindling piano that slowly slips beyond the horizon, “Miss Abuse” has sparse, disquieting, rumbled bass and an exquisite acid line, while “Burning The City” emerging from the midst of a growing, percussive chaotic stamp into a strange and elegiac pop song which dreams of flying and escape, elliptical acoustic guitars, Graham’s subdued, half-whispered, faltering voice so comforting, and Lee Harris’ drums unmistakable and beautiful…
“Did you ever hear the one? / yeah did you ever hear the one? / about that bird-girl / who went to sea / she took of from the rooftops / and landed next to me / said she’d seen it all…”
I can’t wait for the rest to come…
Carnival always falls on A Level results day and the two in tandem bring much ruin. Six years ago we began drinking at 11am, paused at 4pm, continued at 6pm, and by 8pm Anthony was unconscious beneath a pub sofa and I was supine, double-whisky & coke in hand, on the grass bank of the stream, lights and noise and people skipping through my fucked-up head and winding my alcoholic nausea into a tight ball that contained my sense and balance until I found myself at midnight, half way up a cliff, puking for all I was worth, only barely aware that 14 hours earlier I’d been awarded a couple of As and a fail and that this meant nothing to me whatsoever, not pride, not elation, not relief, not disappointment and shame for fucking-up Politics, nothing except the clear knowledge that now we can go and get pissed… and not stop. I didn’t stop for four years.
Over the last six years Dawlish carnival has expanded almost exponentially. What had once been constituted by a Beautiful Baby competition, a display by some Majorettes and a half-arsed procession that was to Notting Hill what Starsailor are to Tim Buckley, now contains air displays, fairground rides, steel bands, closed-off streets, park & ride systems, raft races, pram races and 7 days of sheer, hellish miasma… The climax is Thursday evening, the middle of August, the height of summer, and a day of displays by the Red Arrows, by parachute display teams, by adrenaline-crazed ‘wing-walkers’ strapped to the top of dairy-endorsing biplanes… The population of Dawlish is approximately 12,000, which swells to probably double that for the six weeks of school holidays in the summer. On Thursday there were an estimated 120,000 people in Dawlish for the afternoon’s events… The sea just offshore teemed with boats both private and commercial, bay trips that normally cost £3.50 inflated to £10 a head for the duration of the displays and the boats crowded like Delhi buses, everyone with a sea-worthy vessel within ten miles ensconcing themselves beneath the vast field of sky that makes up the canvas for the planes, helicopters and parachutists…
Many years ago, the first time the red Arrows performed at Dawlish carnival, a handful of us got incredibly stoned that lunchtime and then climbed Red Rock, a sandstone promontory at the root of Dawlish Warren, so that we could lay on our backs, stare upwards and be terrifyingly baffled by the manoeuvres of the smoke-trailing jets.
Two years ago I went to the carnival procession intending to get properly drunk with four friends, re-united after completing university, our first proper session to just get pissed and laugh at each other and remember that how much we enjoy each other’s company in nearly three years. One no-show, one couldn’t stop, one got diverted by newer friends and I spent the evening showing in off in front of a girl who, two years later on, I’m still showing off in front of…
This year… I missed most of it. At work in the library during the air displays, arrived home on the train just before 5pm to find 300 people on each side of the platform, all of them eager to get back to their hotels / tents / caravans / homes / tables booked for summer evening meals, and fought my way through the crowds, still dispersing, still enormous, up the cliff, and home. I spent the early evening writing (a review of the new Shack album, which you’ll find on Stylus later this week) and finally walked down into town at about 9pm, like a salmon fighting upstream as people flocked back up the hill in the opposite direction to mine. Emma was working until 10pm, so for 50 minutes or so I wandered around, saw the fairground rides still on the lawn, the grass turned to dust by 240,000 feet, lights and noise, an 8-piece steel band on the bandstand, amped up to a PA that blasted back at them from behind the audience to swell their numbers to 16 and approach quadraphonic sound, walked up Queen Street past the chip shop that, for one day only, hadn’t opening hours as such but rather kept frying until the potatoes and pies and fillets of cod had all gone, around the corner to the Lansdowne Hotel, the maddest pub in Dawlish (which is, believe it or not, a town full of mad pubs), the landlord a cycling nut and music aficionado named Ray, rickety scaffolding erected at the pub’s front and sticking out into the road by nearly half-a-dozen yards, at the top of which, some 20-feet up, was perched a band, Dawlish’s oldest band, old men with electric guitars and feathers in their hats drinking real ales from pewter tankards that they carry with them from pub to pub, playing “Smoke On The Water” and “Stand By Me” and a verse of “Hit Me Baby One More Time” for kicks, traffic halted and hesitant because of the crowds of people occupying the street below, glasses in hands, voices raised, cheering and singing and dancing outside the best Chinese takeaway in Dawlish (best because it is closest to a pub!- for a crafty pint whilst waiting for the family’s chow mein to fry), like The Beatles playing “Get Back” on the roof only mentalist and infinitely better and more important to the people below, because this is real and present and fucking good fun too… and what’s more it happens every year!
I met Emma and her brother and her workmates at 10pm and we went for a couple of noisy, crowded, standing-in-the-road pints, recurrently stepping from the path of traffic, and then we went back to her friend’s house for pizza…
Next year I’m taking the week off for it.
Make everything more colourful…
Make pop music strange and intriguing and amusing and fascinating. Take the formula and stretch and strain it into unusual shapes so that we know something is going to happen but-OH! we don’t know what. To this end I’ve been listening to Brian Eno, Mouse On Mars, Boredoms, Endless Summer by Fennesz, Outkast… Jazz, football, pop music, Maradona using his hands, Cantona puffing his chest out, Bowie wearing a pair of tights, Ian Brown making a mockery of miming, Bjork on the back of a truck, holding your arms out and your hands with palms upwards and staring into the rain as it drops from above and smiling, Remarkable… We may spend most of our time being bored but we don’t have to allow that boredom to be miserable, we can make it colourful and light and shimmering… If the lights go out, direct the traffic with sparklers… Not only does it make sense but it’s beautiful…
Maybe the heat has finally got to my brain.
8/16/2003 09:11:00 pm
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