Man, he used to be so cool....

Just trawling the internet, trying to recover from a mild hangover and avoid writing a lesson plan, when I came across this interview that I did for a guy in Sweden's hipsterish music website back in the olden, golden days of AHRC funding, no pressing deadlines, Truck Festival etc etc. In celebration, a few Teknikov highlights:

- Sharing a stage with DFA's occasionally excellent Prinzhorn Dance School. It wasn't the gig or the company that made this evening memorable, however: it was the post-show shenanigans which allowed our reputation as Norwich's most immature band to spread beyond the confines of the fine city. Yes, we had 'handbags'. Mat and I stole Tony's hat for the nth time that week. Retrospectively, I can understand why he was a bit annoyed. Anyway, he retrieved said item of clothing and started hitting me around the face with it, provoking an unsightly tussle from which no-one emerged with any credibility.

- The Art School gig. This was a great night. The support act was an American chap who none of us had ever met before and he turned up at the venue, guitar in hand, precisely half an hour after he was supposed to be on stage. Our set got really squeezed because we were on late. Naturally, we spent the intervening period drinking cheap Oranjeboom and getting more and more nervous about the delay, an anxiety which transformed into adrenalin the moment we went on. About halfway through the set, and midway through a song, someone figured out how to turn the hall lights down and the backlights came on completely unexpectedly, at which point everyone went mental. There was a moshpit! People were dancing!

- Truck 2006. This was amazing. We spent three or four nights in Abingdon prior to this show doing what we do best, namely going to the pub, arguing, telling each other ghost stories, talking about football, and failing to do any rehearsal whatsoever. Somehow, this cocktail of procrastination worked wonders. We were the first band on and the atmosphere was incredibly tight, as one of the biggest thunderstorms I have ever seen in the UK was half an hour from breaking. I had sweat running into my eyes before we started playing. The tent was absolutely packed as we were one of the first bands of the weekend and, from the stage, we could see more people running across the field to come and see us. We then spent the rest of the weekend getting drunk, arguing, telling each other ghost stories and talking about football...

- The MacBeth. Our pre-Christmas 2007 jaunt to Hoxton was probably my favourite of our London gigs. Once again, we were incredibly late onstage thanks to the previous band, who took ONE BLOODY HOUR to get their equipment offstage. The gig organiser, who gave the impression of just having escaped from rehab (probably not uncommon in a known haunt of Amy Winehouse and Peter Doherty) had to plead with the stern barlady to let us play at all, and he only did this because we were all devoting energy to being conspicuously angry and walking around kicking our amplifiers like Ian Brown on the Late Show. Anyway, we got on and all of our instruments went absolutely mad. The Roland sounded as if it had fallen victim to some antagonistic nanotechnology and (as so often happens) my guitar string snapped during the very first song, meaning that I had to play the atrocious spare guitar for the entire gig. When we finally got going, though, we were ace, albeit in a frighteningly distorted, No Wave kind of a way.

Obviously, I won't go into all the times we were crap, or apathetic. Can you tell that, contrary to what I've gone on and on and on about in the past, I'm missing Teknikov rather a lot?

Some things turn out well in the end...

The man responsible for the song with the greatest pop-sax break in the world ever, although - controversially - not responsible for the sax break itself, turns up after having been missing for a worrying amount of time.



Were I ever to write a novel intending to capture the essence of the British 1970s, that video probably contains all the research material I should need...

Snow day, Budapest

Yes, it's snowing here today, although not with the same spectacular effects as I've heard England is party to at the moment. Last night we went to see excellent French garage rock groups The Magnetix (goggle-eyed man hanging his guitar from the ceiling; tired-but-still-game lady drummer) and Jack of Heart (naughty little boys; tall moustachioed male singer who looked like the young Donald Sutherland, even though he was wearing hotpants and tights). They played on a boat moored just under the Erzsébet Bridge, making my first gig ever in a foreign country also my first ever on a boat. Although there haven't been many contenders, this probably shares my 'show of the year' title with The Fall. Incidentally, the French garage rock thing: surely this was always meant to be a French genre? The brazen rejection of self-consciousness, the campy, Baudelairean deaths-head imagery, the skinny sweaters, the chain-smoking? It certainly makes the woeful British appropriation (well, reappropriation) of garage, with its depressing blokishness and latent conservatism, seem pretty silly. If you want to hear it done with Make-Upesque soul tinges and Gainsbourgian lover-lovering, by the way, there's a link to the marvellous (now London-based, more fool them) John et Jehn at the bottom of the page.

Anyway, today. We went for a long walk, again, and saw the following three 'archetypically capital city things'...Item 'A': policemen putting chalk on the road and interviewing excitable bystanders after an RTA just outside the synagogue. Item 'B': a motorcade and 13-car police escort for Canadian governor-general Michaëlle Jean. Item 'C', my personal favourite: a man carrying a kestrel on the underground at Moszkva Tér. I hypothesised that he'd been out for some early morning hunting in the Buda Hills, though he didn't seem to have much of a catch with him.

Right. Photos soon. I believe I should be 'preparing for my viva' now...

A few vids for 1990s indie pervs...

The Auteurs, Light Aircraft on Fire



Lush, Hypocrite




Dubstar, Stars

But...

...there's never that much cause to whinge when the internet lets us watch stuff like the following 24/7...





How cool is Phil Lynott? Also, why are all the audience just bumbling around like they were watching Leo Sayer or something? Don't they know how lucky they are?

Mogwai: Are Free

Well, not to download. But they have put the whole of their new album The Hawk is Howling up on MySpace, where I presume it shall remain for a few more weeks.

First impressions are that it's better than Rock Action and Happy Songs for Happy People and about equivalent to Mr. Beast (with plenty of 'grower' potential).

A surefire winner...

...if it induces a sense of extreme morbidity combined with a frisson of retrofuturist apocalypticism:

BBC release script to be used in the event of a nuclear attack.

Shudder.

Shudder.

Grrrgle.

I'm fascinated by the 'you cannot see it, you cannot feel it, but it is there' line. It contextualises the sixties-through-eighties preoccupation with the 'scientific' supernatural (Doctor Who, Hammer House of Horrors, The Stone Tape). I guess this line also sums up the remit of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: 'it has no sensory presence, but how might one go about symbolising the absence of sensory presence in sound? If the nuclear age presents a kind of unrepresentable Real for language, how might sound narrate that crisis in representation?'

Well, Delia Derbyshire was either thinking that, or 'that would sound cool.'

Worth a listen, at least

While admiring the second-generation music player on MySpace (that has to be the most, or only, web-familiar phrase I've ever composed) I noticed that My Bloody Valentine have their AMAZING cover of Wire's AMAZING song 'Map Ref 41N 93W' up at the moment. You shouldn't still be reading; that link should be open by now.

Joe

Urusei Yatsura/ The Delgados

One of the plus points of spending eons in front of a computer as I finish up is that it's given me time to rediscover my love of Scottish boy - girl indie bands. Here's two more from the surprisingly rich seam of Central Belt noise pop:

Urusei Yatsura - 'Hello Tiger'



The Delgados (Of 'Alan, show us yir watch' fame' - 'Everything Goes Around the Water'

By way of making up...

...for tipsy late-night rambling about Manchester United, here's a new Sons & Daughters clip (where they're being introduced by Steve Jones, who bears an uncanny facial/ vocal similarity to my old flatmate.)

Ha ha ha ha. Funny because true.

The real reason to hate the poet Philip Larkin is not that he was a racist and a masturbator (I find it amazing that these two "sins" were somehow equated in the so-called liberal press), but that he sat as jazz reviewer for the Daily Telegraph and denounced every development since Benny Goodman as scandal and degeneracy. Philip Larkin - in his hidebound, parochial, British way - has nothing remotely useful to say about jazz. Adorno, using his highly developed vision of modernity, had an extraordinary sensitivity to the way that marketing and mass production effected art. His analysis of jazz and television is not a conservative critique, but a revolutionary one.

Ben Watson, 'Theodor Adorno and Mass Culture'

Voodoo Lounge: Update

Having gorged myself at tremendous 'northside'* South Indian eatery Spice Paradise this eveing, I've come home to discover that, if you type 'sharks will cry' into Google, this blog comes up third. That's a bronze in our current hyperolympian imaginary.


* AKA Norwich beyond the river, also - inspirationally - known as 'Norwich ultra aquam'. In practical terms, Magdalen Street, St. Augustines, Silver Road etc.

Yet another new occasional series with little potential for longevity

This one is called 'crap albums you listened to on your Walkman on holiday because you were too young to buy your own tapes and your parents couldn't be relied upon to always listen to good records even if they are (like mine) respectably pop-savvy'

Today's contender: Voodoo Lounge by the Rolling Stones (on the MV Bretagne in 1993). This record is so bad it can only be described by one of those words people use in PG-R family comedies like Beethoven or Honey I Shrunk the Kids. You know, words like 'crapola'. There is something curiously abject about this record which I am still haunted by to this day and, trust me, it's been fifteen years since I last heard it. Not a day goes past when I don't find myself humming a tune and thinking 'that sounds familiar' only to have my intimate mental space violated by an image of Mick Jagger singing the following delightful lines:

.

Sparks will fly

When I finally get myself

back on you, baby

Sparks will fly

When I finally get myself

back on you, baby

I'm gonna step on the gas

I want to get there really fast

I want to fuck your sweet ass

Sparks will fly

Sharks will cry

Sparks will fly

.

So many things are wrong with this verse, not least the fact that 'gas' and 'ass' is, to put it mildly, an unfortunate rhyme within the erotic context Jagger is trying to create here. I'd love to perform an incisive critique of the line 'sharks will cry' but every time I think about it I break down in hysterics. Does he have the Crap Sharks from Viz in mind here or is it just his (oh-so-coincidentaly rhyming) idea of an event that would be really exciting and sexual?

.

Him: Will the sharks be crying tonight, darling?

.

Her: Not tonight luv, I've got a headache.

.

In fact, I'm thinking of sending a letter to the advertising people who make commercials for Bacardi or Disarrono or another spirit which requires a sexually-charged brand image and suggest that the next time their sales pitch involves a nightclub full of scantily-dressed beautfiul people dancing to funky house they should add a couple of sharks weeping in the corner.

.

NEXT: Fleetwood Mac, Tango in the Night (Hold on, can't do that one, it's actually quite good.)

Reading/ listening

Here's my update for the last week.

Reading:

David Peace, 1983. Finally finished the Red Riding Quartet now: I anticipate the nightmares will stop in around 2013. It certainly alters your perceptions of the West Riding, that's for sure. Last month, I had to change trains at Wakefield Westgate on my way to Saddleworth and I couldn't wait to get out of the place.

I know I'm not the best at following complicated plots, but the RRQ has left me pretty muddled. My friend MW reckons you have to read it three or four times to 'get' it, but I'm usually of the opinion that as long as there are new books in the world to conquer one should avoid going back. I have made exceptions, of course. Anyway:

1 - Who killed everyone?
2 - What was all that about the priest who went round trepanning people?
3 - Did Hunter die at the end of 1980?
4 - How exactly did the conspiracy work?
5 - How the hell are they going to film that for TV without, er, watering it down?

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

I read this because I stayed up late one night last week and realised (with a slight sense of shame) that it was a significant gap in my mid-century repertoire. No point in 'reviewing' Orwell as such, is there? His novels always succeed at what they set out to do, good characterisation etc etc. Orwell's never big on subtlety, but I find that strangely commendable.

M. John Harrison, Climbers

Absolutely amazing. Don't think I'll get over this one for a while, and it's contributed to my ideas for future research (as has the RRQ, but you'd probably guessed that already). I'll write more about this when I'm sitting at home with some red wine, I think. I read The Course of the Heart a year or so back and it didn't grab me but I can go back to it properly now. This is the sort of thing that reminds you that contemporary fiction need not be a disgusting, narcissistic love-in between Sebastian Faulks, Phillip Hensher and Zadie Smith. Furthermore, it reminds you just how bad it is when mainstream authors attempt to co-opt sci-fi or fantasy to their cause: when, say, Martin Amis 'borrows' these genres it's as if there's always a big neon sign up saying 'Hey, I'm Martin Amis, and I know I'm above all this really.' With Harrison, as with Peace, there's a complete absence of framing: there's no trendy self-consciousness, no caveating metafiction. This is strange and unsettling in the way that fiction should be.

Gilbert Adair, The Holy Innocents

The complete opposite to the above. Self-consciously 'transgressive' arse from a journalist. I bought this in Oxfam when I picked up Climbers because I like novels which feature A) the 1960s, B) 'French people kissing French people' and C) lots of sex (don't we all). I'm glad it was only 99p, it's absolute bollocks. The characters are too achingly beatnik - handsome, incestuous (!), teenage cinephiles (but of course) - in Paris '68. This is one of those books where all the dustjacket props clearly come from friends of the author: it's just awfully badly written. Moreover, all the 'erotic' bits are lifts from Bataille's The Story of the Eye. Down with this sort of thing, as they say on Father Ted.

(On that note, I've just found an online bookstore selling this novel. Unfortunately, they seem to have got the author mixed up with another 'famous' Adair...)

Derek Raymond, The Crust on its Uppers

This is how you're supposed to write about the sixties. A bit of a surprise after reading some of Raymond's Factory novels (How the Dead Live; I Was Dora Suarez), but good all the same.

There you go, then: my novels of the week.

Listening...to not much really. The second CD of Stereolabs BBC Sessions has been on a few times, and Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works. But I'm always listening to that, anyway.

Ride, 'Leave Them All Behind'

Bit obsessed with Ride at moment...been listening to Nowhere repeatedly while tinkering. Unfortunately, the song I wanted to put up here - 'Here and Now' - was only available in the form of one of those pointless home-made 'videos' where it's just a static image. Instead, here's the opening song from Going Blank Again. Vintage Cherwellian effects pedal music...

Hello, July

Home of American Independence, Gallic Boisterousness, and (of course) my birthday.

It is bloody hot in Norwich today. I walked around town before heading up to campus and it felt, dereal-isingly, like being in a foreign city. Down by Cow Tower (pictured) all the crims and fishermen had their tops off: that's when you know it's properly hot in England.

Quick Thoughts:

1 - Slagging off Noel Gallagher is the new hip (but not hop) thing to do, because - to paraphrase Kennedy (not me, or my Dad, or my brother) - 'we are all rappers now'. I can't help but feel the point has been slightly missed here: Jay Z did precisely what Gallagher predicted he would, namely gooning around on stage like a hyperactive six year old while boasting about how tough/ rich/ virile he was. NG is being made out to be some Tebbity throwback who 'doesn't even know what hip-hop is': my feeling is that his sentiment about 'hip-hop not being right for Glastonbury' was shorthand for 'bling-based twat-hop' not being right for Glastonbury. I've read interviews with NG where he espouses the virtues of Public Enemy et al, and anyone who keeps an eye on the music press knows Gallagher is a hell of lot smarter than he's given credit for in the London media. I get the impression that the people who are hailing Jay Z as a genius striking a blow against the hegemony of rock music in this country (like, er, Westwood) are ignoring two crucial facts, namely that a) bad hip-hop and r&b is more or less ubiquitous, and is purchased by many of the same people who buy the worst kind of anodyne guitar rock (Coldplay) and b) Jay Z is a knobhead. If Gallagher had made the same statement about someone who isn't willing to collaborate with any pasty white rock musician who fancies a bit of easily-accessible 'credibility' (ie, Chris Martin) I'd have been a lot more surprised.

2) The media/ blogging response to the Jay Z/ Gallagher spat smacks of gross white-boy/ girl paternalism, not racial equality.

3) Why is it that musicians from the north-west of England (Ian McCulloch, Ian Brown, Noel Gallagher, Richard Ashcroft) are constantly represented as arrogant plebs stepping above their station by music writers? Why is it more critically acceptable to like Ride than it is to like the early Verve records (pre-'A Northern Soul', I mean)?

4) Is this debate (secretly) less about rock v hip-hop than about south v north?

Sons & Daughters - 'This Gift'

A while ago, I left a post declaring this to be my favourite single - and, indeed, song - of 2008 so far. I've now found a video for it, and it almost does the tune justice - I'm not usually a huge fan of 'live performance' vids, but this one works. Take note, all you Minibertines: this is what it's supposed to be like.

On another note, I'm glad to see S&D rigorously maintaining the historical links between the west coast of Scotland (where they're from) and C&W. And they're nice people as well: they once came down to Sonic after a show and danced with everyone instead of piously going back to their hotel room (this is the unglamorous reality of the touring indie band, in my experience: a couple of cans of warm Red Stripe after the show, then the manager bundles everyone into the van so they can go and eat Pot Noodles in a Travelodge.)

The Vamp

Ah, another idea for an occasional series. This one is called 'Concepts for Discussing Narratology that Originate in Pop Performance'.

Actually, the vamp might be the only one I can think of. You'll know the vamp if you've seen Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line: at the start of the movie, Cash's band get up on stage and begin playing the intro to 'Cocaine Blues' as the man himself (played by Joaquin Phoenix) ruminates in a backroom and meaningfully plays with a circular saw. This is a vamp. Obviously, it's a pretty long one as the film opens in media res with the vamp and cuts away to the life story before Phoenix emerges on stage (we finally see this happen about an hour and a half in; it's pretty cool.) Anyway, in less extreme cases- and in the one I've just outlined, the vamp is being used with a high degree of narratival self-consciousness anyway- the technique is just a way of building tension before the centrepiece of the performance comes on stage. The Fall do good vamps, playing for four of five (or twenty-five, on a bad day) minutes before Mark E. Smith appears to harangue the audience.

Anyway, it's a slightly harder concept to apply to written fiction. In film, there are a number of good ones. Of course, we all know from the promotional materials that, at some stage in Batman Begins, Christian Bale will become the caped crusader himself. That doesn't stop it being exciting when he's revealed in all his rubbery glory. You get it in the pre-credit sequences in Bond films too - You Only Live Twice is a prime example. In terms of words on the page, the best example I can think of right now is 'The Adventure of the Empty House', which is the Sherlock Holmes story in which the missing-presumed-dead hero does not unmask himself to Watson until halfway through the story.

Anyway, I'm trying to collect literary vamps. Let me know if you can think of any good ones.

J

The Nigel Kneale School of Debt Settlement

Because I had to pay my bill, I just phoned Anglian Water's call centre, which I believe is in the comparably fine (if rather more strenuous on the legs) city of Lincoln. It's one of those things that you choose to do first thing on a Monday morning so you can't procrastinate about them later in the week - I thought I was being canny. Unfortunately, I am now terrified in a way that I can only describe as being comparable to the edmotional state of the heroine of a Hammer Horror film about 75% of the way in. Their automated courtesy message - the one that says 'Thankyou for waiting, your call is valuable to us etc etc' (well, of course it is) - altered the longer you were on the phone. After a couple of minutes, it began to sound incredibly harrassed and claimed to be 'really' sorry that I had been kept waiting: I don't think I've ever heard an automated message in the throes of a panic attack before. However, what really made the whole experience worthwhile is their choice of hold music. I understand that selecting tunes to play in the dead time of caller waiting is difficult, what with PRS laws and the like, and I have been slightly irritated recently by the unoriginality and downright emotional manipulation of using Pachebel's Canon (Eon, or EON, or whatever they want to be called). Anglian Water, however, have gone the other way, eschewing the pseudo-calming effect of Classic FM recognisability in favour of deliberately trying to evoke an atmosphere of inscrutable evil. In a move worthy of Nigel Kneale or Ray Bradbury, Anglian have decided to use some crackly-sounding Wurlitzer fairground waltz to 'soothe' customers on hold. Utterly inspired. I would love to have been a fly on the wall at that marketing meeting. I swear I'm going to have dreams about being chased around some rural fair by a bearded lady screaming that she's 'really sorry' for having made me wait to pay my water bill tonight.

If anyone else would like to experience Anglian Water's inventive approach to customer services, please call 0800 1693630. As it's Glastonbury week, maybe you could tell them you're only 'here for the music'...

Lyrics

When I was writing the last post, I stuck Prolapse's majestic The Italian Flag on to kick my arse into 'getting stuff done' gear. The second song, 'Deanshanger' is a vitriolic assault on 80s revivalism, and contains such nuggets of wisdom as the following:

'The Miners' Strike, always on the end of the news'

'Gdansk was crap/ Warsaw was crap/ Solidarity was crap'

'The papal visit promised much but didn't deliver'

Needless to say, the chorus goes 'the hair was crap/ the clothes were crap/ the music was crap/ except one.' I remember John Peel or Mark Radcliffe saying that the 'one' was Ian Curtis, but surely that was in the 70s?