Tuesday 26 March 2013

a third conversation piece...'now morrissey is a was'

Since when did Stephen Patrick Morrissey become like your horrible new step dad?  And where did the great man lose his muse?

These are burning questions!

Following an unmerited savaging at the mercy of intransigent UK music critics during the second half of the 1990s, as well as a brow-beating handed down to him from the Courts of Justice (who deemed Morrissey ‘devious and truculent’ when summing up The Smiths high profile legal dispute), Moz (as he is still referred to affectionately every now and again) fled to L.A, becoming something of a recluse

This state of self-imposed isolation, albeit broken by a World Tour in 2000/1, ended with his much feted comeback album ‘You Are The Quarry’, three years later.  All of a sudden Morrissey found himself on the Jonathan Ross show (where Ross, as is his wont, asked Moz to join him and his celebrity pals for a game of tennis), in addition to returning to Manchester for an emotional homecoming gig, and gracing the NME front cover.

Inevitably the very same critics, the very same publications that had ganged up on him previously, this time gathered round to proclaim our Stephen a national treasure. 

Sad to say, Morrissey’s ego was stoked, and this time his arch wit, and fiercely individual expression only seemed to surface in interviews - evidence of it on acetate was hard to find.  Sure, the tunes were catchy, if not up to repeat listening, but the words were blunted.

On several cuts from ‘You Are The Quarry’, and in a number from the following album, ‘Ringleader of The Tormentors’, Morrissey for once sounded as if he didn’t really understand what he was singing about.  So a generation of music fans that had grown up with The Smiths and Morrissey Mark I had to put up with songs as perplexing as ‘I Have Forgiven Jesus’, ‘America Is Not The World’, and ‘The Youngest Was The Most Loved’, and yet such was the loyalty to ole’ Moz they actually did.  This in spite of the fact that when Morrissey addressed more typical subject matter – unrequited love, loss, yearning etc – he did so with none of the candour and melodrama: he had either mellowed in his middle age, or descended into a mid-life stupor.

Therefore, when the same fans tuned into BBC Radio 2 in 2009 to watch the inaugural performance of Morrissey Mark II’s third studio album, ‘Years of Refusal’, it was with an air of trepidation.  Would they come out of the ordeal relieved at seeing, and hearing, a singer/song-writer who had indeed reconciled his past and moved on to the next day, or would they witness the desperate flails of a spoiled pseudo-American teen, trapped in a man’s body?

The proof was in the musical pudding, except the pudding turned out to be a dog’s dinner.  Morrissey, once the cat loving, bookish, NHS bespectacled subversive had seemingly become a boorish hound, with a turgid, self-conscious, altogether uninspired group of musicians behind him.

Now the poor boy is without a record deal, and can’t seem to find one for love or money.  The media still enjoys reporting his latest flippant, occasionally barbed remark, but Morrissey as a media personality does not sit comfortably, nor was it ever meant to be that one could simply take him or leave him.

In 1992, on his excellent Your Arsenal album, he sang ‘London is dead..we look to Los Angeles for the language we use’.  London may be dead (the UK music scene now a desert drained of all life blood by Simon Cowell et al) but Los Angeles is dead too, and perhaps it was shot of life even before Morrissey moved there in the late 90s - or perhaps Morrissey was just too far removed from Whalley Range; perhaps he would have done far better to move back up the M6 to the basin of his inspiration, where his intellectual pursuit had free reign.

Monday 25 March 2013

another conversation piece...'mark smith - not appreciated?'

‘He is not appreciated’.  So goes the self-referential and defiant refrain from (one of) The Fall’s most idiosyncratic and recognisable anthems, ‘Hip Priest’, penned by the inimitable, and often cantankerous, Mark E Smith.

Smith divides musos like no other (non)singer/song writer.  For some, including  the late John Peel, he is the finest and most enigmatic lyricist in pop; for others, including Peel’s Radio One producer, John Walters (who memorably dubbed the Fall as ‘the most tuneless rubbish’ he had ever heard), Smith is nothing more than a shuffling drunk, shouting incomprehensible nonsense over frustratingly dissonant and obscene musical accompaniment.

In 1998 Smith was confirmed as a ‘god like genius’ by the NME at their annual award ceremony.  Smith mounted the stage, brushed aside presenter Eddie Izzard with the line: ‘thanks Eddy, it’s not like you to be funny’, before dedicating his gong to anyone actually capable of reading NME from cover to cover.

The word ‘genius’, of course,  is used all too frequently today, especially in relation to individual performers and/or bands that have become enshrined as bastions of British pop - it’s almost as if by virtue of hanging around long enough, in what admittedly can be a ruthless industry, you are entitled to be thought of in this way.  Then again, perhaps Smith deserves the tag.

There is nobody who sings, or vocalises, like Smith; no group that sounds like the Fall; no one performer, or group that has ever replicated the sound of Smith or the Fall.  And while, as Smith has testified in infrequent, sometimes alarming and eventful (at least for the journalist posing the questions) interviews over the years, he has mined many of the same influences as his contemporaries from Joy Division to Morrissey, there remains something unfathomably wonderful and entirely unique in the way he expresses thoughts and ideas through language, as well as his unrivaled talent for a catch phrase.

Meanwhile, Smith famously runs the Fall (his ‘group’) like a prison chain gang, with tight, sometimes draconian discipline.  The Fall, due to release their 30th studio album in 34 years, are all about work ethic – but a work ethic instilled in them and inspired by the restless creative belligerence of their founder.

Although the current line-up has survived since 2008, membership of the Fall, or indeed membership of the ex-Fall club is approaching sixty.  It has been said you could step out of your office on your lunch hour and likely as not run into somebody who has been, at one stage or other, an active member of the Fall.

‘If it’s me and your granny on bongos then it’s the Fall’, Smith once remarked, further underlining his unerring belief in himself, as well as his intellectual stamina.  Under Smith’s direction, tutelage, call it what you will, the Fall’s songbook incorporates everything from garage punk, to psychedelic jungle, as well as rousing chart hits including ‘Victoria’ and ‘Touch Sensitive’, and they once staged and provided the score for a ballet.

Smith keeps on going: still beady eyed and critical of everything, he is doing far, far more than simply surviving.  After all, he likes to think he hasn’t even started yet.

Thursday 21 March 2013

a conversation piece...'david bowie is'

In an interview with BBC Radio in 2002 David Bowie says he eventually plumped for a career in pop because he felt it would enable him to involve and indulge his disparate interests in music, literature, art, theatre and fashion.  Indeed, throughout his career these interests have often combined and informed one another when it comes to articulating who David Bowie Is.

(At least for a given moment in time).

David Bowie is responsible for perhaps the most iconic personas in entertainment history including Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Young American and The Thin White Duke, all of which (and many more) have explored the theatricality of pop, making use of musical motif, impressionistic narrative, striking visual imagery, elaborate stage production, and a remarkable wardrobe – it’s as if Bowie adopted the immersive Stanislavski approach to his work.

Take the 1972 album Ziggy Stardust (and the Spiders From Mars): the songs about rocket men, intergalactic daydreams, and outer space; the iconic sleeve, Bowie, dressed in his turquoise leopard suit, posing on a dimly lit, deserted side-street, as if he had just fallen to earth. 

Or the ambitious Diamond Dogs tour of 1974, with a set built to resemble Hunger City – a dystopian vision of future metropolis, where Bowie played detective – which included a movable catwalk, a glass asylum, a giant hand, and a cherry picker that would send Bowie sailing over the audience during nightly renditions of ‘Space Oddity’.

Or the Young Americans LP from 1975, and the Plastic Soul Man.  Gone the make up, the paranoia; in it’s place, a seemingly unaffected air of nonchalance, swanky R&B rhythms and Philadelphia Soul.

And yet a later Bowie appears on stage as The Thin White Duke, cabaret suited, aloof and cocaine cool, with a collection of songs about romance delivered with agonised intensity, while at the same time feeling nothing – ice masquerading as fire. 

A masquerade: perhaps the choice word to describe who David Bowie Is; throughout his career an ever-changing artistic pastiche, paradoxically very often ahead of the curve, fueled by raving intellect and unparalleled creative abandon.

Tuesday 19 March 2013

a sixty seventh story...'the rubber tree'

The dogs are dead.  Died within a week of each other.  The dogs, my best friends when I was growing up.  We buried them at the end of the garden, underneath the rubber tree.  If you cut the bark of a rubber tree in a crosshatch fashion, a white, milky colloid issues forth.  This is latex, from which you get natural rubber.  You’re supposed to catch it in an old paint can, or at least that’s what I used to do as a child.  Then you store it up.  The whole process is called ‘tapping’.

When I was young, my father took me to a commercial rubber factory.  The dogs came too - although they had no interest in our rubber tree, beyond it’s convenience as a urinating post.  I remember saying to my father that the rubber being manufactured looked like large loaves of bread or great rolls of shit.  He cuffed me around the ear, told me not to use language like that.  Language like what? I replied.  Goodness knows where you learned to talk that, he sighed.  Then he showed me a part of the factory where the workers – bare-chested Iquitos, naked torsos moist with sweat – were making vulcanised rubber.  The rubber is heated, and sulphur, sometimes carbon are added to improve resistance and elasticity.  When we got back to the car, my father pointed out that the tyres on his Jupiter were made of vulcanised rubber.

It was on the way home from the rubber factory one of the dogs started whining.  And in evening they were both off their dinner.  It’s the heat, said my father.  It’s always hot, I said.  They’ll be alright, he said.  I went to bed worrying about them all the same, but sure enough the next morning on their walk they seemed happy enough – chasing dragonflies, and at regular intervals disappearing into the scrub to ferret out whatever prizes they could find. 

Memory is an interesting thing.  I am typically forgetful.  The kind who goes upstairs and then on the landing wonders what I am doing and why I am there.  What am I looking for? I think to myself.  Then again, there are passages in my life I can recall with near clarity, where events have crystallised in sequence, forever enshrined in the vestiges of my mind.  The week we went to the rubber factory is one of those times.

I can’t say for sure if my recollection stems from the visit to the rubber factory, my first experience of industry of any kind, or now that the dogs are dead, what may have been the first signs of the internal bleeding they would both succumb to, or whether it’s the discovery we made on our morning walk - the dogs and I.

We were about to turn home, on our usual mile long circuit around the plantation grounds, when the dogs, who had disappeared off the overgrown path, started barking loudly and excitedly.  I picked up a broken branch and began beating my way through the brush towards them.  As I approached I became aware of a fetid stench, so bad I had to pull the collar of my shirt over my nose, fighting back the tall grass with my free hand until I saw why the dogs were making such a noise.

If I came upon it now, now that I am middle aged, more easily moved, afraid even, I think it would affect me more than it did back then.  It’s a strange thing, memory.  For when I set eyes on the girl, who could not have been much beyond my eight years, stripped of her clothes, neck snapped, swollen body, blackened and bruised, daylight in her eyes, I recall she reminded me of a discarded Cream of Wheat doll, whose blue and unkissed lips had never, at any moment, breathed life or looked the sallow mask of death in the face.

Wednesday 13 March 2013

a sixty sixth story...'dafoe'

We were throwing white crystal salt balls into the turquoise sea off the Alfalfa peninsula.  These days it’s a seedy place; the arcane marble pontoon covered in mean looking gulls, mangy vultures, sometimes swarming flocks of white ocean bats you want to avoid – there are bird carcasses strewn everywhere.  We, in our navy blue suits, complete with golden trim, we were recruiting.  A pimp’s press gang.  Off the Alfalfa peninsula, the frigates, cruiser ships come in, drop anchor, and the sailor boys and girls strut up and down the varnished wooden decks: the boys flexing their vaselined muscles, the girls showing off their long, tan, shiny legs, pointy breasts, breasts that under their tight uniforms remind me somehow of small gun turrets.  I hurl another crystal salt ball down onto one of the decks below trying to catch the crew’s attention and at last a tall, fair skinned young sailor picks up.  I beckon to him.  Soon he climbs the gangway and is ready to sign on.   They’re always nervous at first.  My boss, Dafoe, wants ambidextrous new recruits – don’t ask me why – so he asks that they be able to sign their names with both hands, and in time, learn to forge his signature – with both hands.  My boss, Dafoe, has a movie home sunk into the marsh reeds around the bay.  Like something Corbusier would have designed, like the Villa Savoye, all open plan, fluid lines, free standing walls.  But Dafoe prefers to keep himself to himself these days.  In truth he’s become a shell of a man.  And he’s prone to darker and darker moods.  When these come you better ensure you have the Chinese servant Jom drop all the blinds, in case the Jap tourists with their cameras and prying gook eyes should see in.  He’ll then call on me to gather his harem, and I will do: the American, who’s been on a virtual pleasure cruise for five years (hasn’t removed her red sequined headphones, star glasses for as long as I can recall), and a couple of Jap girls, tourists Dafoe bagged, kidnapped when he found them snooping around his botanic aqua garden.  The Jap girls are his sex slaves, and go about their business albeit reluctantly.  Dafoe is a shell of man since his op.  Where his penis used to be there’s just a hole, uses sterilised corks shaped into dildos for contraception, and also penetration – he has one of his Jap girls bring them from a nitrous oxide refrigerator .  Dafoe, his moods, he can scare the life out of me – his features become hard and set, his face becomes a skull mask, his irises turn black and his voice drops to a low death rattle.  Of late he’s taken to trimming the skin on his eyelids with a pair of surgical scissors since he thinks his eyes will become hoods, and he blind should he not.  He’s crazy, and his moods – sex (or his version thereof) is the only release from their terrible stranglehold.  And this is when the Jap girls have to go about their business.  When they begin, I tend to take my leave if at all possible, out the back door, through the botanic aqua garden, out of the marsh reeds and back toward the relative normality of the old port town.