PURE FUSION: multiculture versus monoculture
director’s cut, Springerin, December 2000
by Simon Reynolds
It's funny when you suddenly become aware of a tic within your own writing. It's a reflex I share with a fair few other popcult commentators: using the word "purist" as an insult. I go further and frequently use the coinage "impurist", which sounds like it ought to be pejorative, as praise. Behind the tic, there's a broader reflex: the impulse to celebrate artists who draw on a wide range of influences, based on the assumption that mixing up genres is intrinsically more progressive than narrow focus on one stylistic path.
Increasingly dissatisfied with this glib assumption, I almost want to perversely defend purism as an aesthetic strategy--if only because such a lot of ostentatiously border-crossing work is actually far less impressive than it thinks it is. Think of Bill Laswell, leftfield music's most assiduous networker, continually convening one-off supergroups that unite P-Funk keyboard players with free jazz hornsmen with African guitarists with hip hop turntablists with dub producers with... well, you get the picture. The idea is similar to Jon Hassell's notion of the Fourth World (Western hi-tech modernity meets atavistic ethnic spirituality, to each other's mutual enrichment) but Laswell's panglobal superjams almost invariably end up a horrible mish-mash. Then there's those other perpetrators of lameness in the name of hybridity: the "ethnotechno" school of world music sampling electronic outfits like TransGlobal Underground, Banco De Gaia, Loop Guru (who actually had a few moments, admittedly), Juno Reactor...
Trouble is, most of the music I like is hybrid, and its hybridity is high on the list of reasons why I rate it. This raises the question of why some fusions work and others remain composites of disparate sources without any vital spark. The language for judging success or failure in this realm is entirely metaphorical. Successful hybrids invite the imagery of alchemy or metallurgy (crucibles, amalgams, melding, smelting, and so forth), or the essentially similar language of cooking (bouillabaise, gumbo, melting pots, etc). Bad hybrids, like lumpy purees or unsuccessful cakes, are subject to the ultimate put-down: "the end result is somehow less than the sum of its parts".
Good musical hybridity, like good cooking, might be where you can still detect every element's distinctive flavor, but the flavors have interpenetrated each other---a perfect balance of heterogenity and mixture (as opposed to the homogenized taste of a perfectly smooth puree). Then again, music isn't really like cooking--there's no reason why you can't have artists who make a whole dish out of the sonic equivalent of flour, or salt. (And you do--virtuosos of monochromatic concentration like Plastikman and Pole). And yet there's hardly any positive terms in pop critical discourse for fanatical focus or fixated perseverance. Fruitless displays of undistinguished versatility (a/k/a being a jack of all trades and master of none) always run better with reviewers, few of whom seem to be equipped for listening closely to the subtle modulations of what Amiri Baraka called a "changing same" (the groove that just keeps on keepin' on, yet absorbs you with its endlessly shifting inflections and accents). Look at dance magazines, and you will see reviews that approvingly list an artist's forays into genres other than the one whose section they are actually reviewed under. Stylistic inconstancy, generic treason, and dilettantism are, paradoxically, almost supreme values. And often the writer gestures at a vague enemy allegedly outraged by these border-crossing forays and illicit mixtures: the purists.
Why is "purist" such a potent insult? I think it relates to the word's etymological echoes (puritanism, and its related tropes of squeamishness, prudishness, and closemindedness) and its semantic traces from other, genuinely reprehensible bodies of thought: eugenics, racial purity, cultural hygiene. "Impurist" music, or what in an earlier age they called "fusion", allies itself with a more virtuous bunch of concepts: multiculturalism, miscegenation, cosmopolitanism. It's especially heartwarming to ally yourself with words like these right now, when European politics is muddied by upsurges of ethnic anxiety about pollution and mixture: Le Pen, Haider, and similar ultra-nationalist figures in Belgium, Rumania, and Norway; racial attacks on migrant workers, asylum seekers, immigrants. While British neo-fascist parties have declined in recent years, the UK's general population remains deeply divided over issues of multiculturalism and European unity; there was a storm of outrage when a Government-funded independent report on multiculturalism declared that the concept of "Britishness" was latently racist owing to its imperial echoes.
One of the figures involved in drafting that report was Stuart Hall, pioneer of the cultural studies movement at Birmingham University in the 1970s. Paul Gilroy, one of Hall's former associates and, like him, a Black-British theorist about postcolonialism and hybridity, made his own contribution this year to the multiculture debate with Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (also published, in the UK, as Between Camps). If the book has a crux, it's the fatal ambiguity of the word "culture" itself--which simultaneously has an organic, biological resonance (growing plants, germ cultures etc) yet also signifies the antithesis of earthy natural-ness (the civilized, the non-instinctual, the artificial, the sublimated). The first aspect of "culture" connects to notions of blood ties and its inevitable companion blood letting: tribal warfare, ethnic cleansing, Balkanisation or "Rwanda-isation", the rhetoric of roots and homelands, struggles over mother tongues and state control of language.
Aiming to de-biologize the concept of race, reveal it as a pseudo-scientific figment, Gilroy--just like a music journalist--has his set of bad terms and his set of good terms:
essentialism/primordialism/unanimism/fraternalism/ethnic absolutism
versus
syncretic/transcultural/cosmopolitan/diaspora
There are no pure races, cultures, or art forms, Gilroy contends; everything is always already hybrid, contaminated by the other.
Gilroy acknowledges dance music as one of the bastions of contemporary "transculture". And interestingly, club and rave culture are where the discourse of purism versus hybridity is most heated. This is partly because the culture's primary focus isn't individual artists, as it is with rock, but styles and scenes. Because this is the level on which it's most productive to talk about stuff, a huge amount of discursive energy goes into cultural taxonomy, into identifying genres and subgenres like species; into tracing the genealogy of genres, the family trees and evolutionary pathways of different sounds. Artists are typically praised for departing from their chosen genre and taking on ideas from other styles.
Genre has a phantom trace of the concept of the genetic, and almost all the language used to discuss music has connotations of miscegenation: mix-and-blend, mutation, mongrels, the imperative to avoid incestuousness (the downside of all closeknit scenes) and instead widen one's gene pool. Either that, or it's the language of horticulture: grafts, hybrids, cross-breeds, grass roots. Typically, a new genre is discovered and hailed for its distinctiveness. But if it's not careful, this scene will soon become castigated for being purist, for not embracing influences from other genres. Rare indeed is the scene that can maintain for any length of time an equilibrium between self-consistency and flux, absorbing outside influences without flaking off into subgenres or offshoot tribes (with the hype-hungry media eagerly hastening this process in order to have something to write about).
Perhaps the privileging of aesthetic mingling as supreme value echoes the broader "project" of club and rave culture, the premium it sets on social mixing. (Itself an echo of rock'n'roll's original subversiveness--cross-town traffic between different races, the phantom threat of miscegenation that aroused the white Southern establishment's fears of "negrification" and "jungle rhythms"). In dance discourse, a club that draws a mixed crowd is always good; all kinds of scenes echo the credo of pirate station Kool FM, "it doesn't matter what your class color or creed, you're welcome in the house of jungle". Scenes lose their vibe, it's generally believed, when the mix becomes unbalanced (drum'n'bass, it's said, lost it when there were too many boys on the floor, for instance, the girls driven away by techstep’s distorted noise and mechanistic stomp). The exhortation to mix up the styles, keep porous your genre boundaries, has an ethical charge to it: as if somehow an artist could singlehandedly resurrect the lost unity of rave, a unity shattered by, you guessed it, the purists, the schism-makers. Hence the unanimous praise for Basement Jaxx and Armand Van Helden, paradoxically taken as exemplars of their genre (house) yet praised for attempting to leave its borders at every opportunity.
There's a reversibility to dance culture's pro-hybridity rhetoric, for when the "purists" (who do exist, and are often reactionary) talk about protecting their genre from its debasers, their language takes on unfortunate eugenic associations. Detroit techno pioneer Derrick May described breakbeat hardcore (the music that evolved into jungle) as a "diabolical mutation" and declared "I don't even like to use the word 'techno' because it's been bastardised and prostituted in every form you can possibly imagine". His contemporary Eddie Fowlkes described European rave in terms of the "cultural rape" of Detroit, and later put together a compilation of "proper" Detroit-affiliated techno called True People. As Barbara Stafford argues in Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, "the hybrid posed a special problem for those who worried about purity of forms... and unnatural mixtures... The metaphysical and physical dangers thought to inhere in artificial grafts surfaced in threatening metaphors of infection, contamination, rape and bastardy."
Then again, the extent to which these aesthetic issues map onto real-world politics is confusing, to say the least. In the case of Detroit techno versus UK hardcore rave, the irony was that these British kids (white, black, mix-race) who were "corrupting" techno were doing so by mixing it with elements from other forms of black music that the Detroit pioneers (all African-American) disdained: hip hop's breakbeats, dub reggae's bass, dancehall's rowdy vocals. In the cultural politics of Detroit, class division transected racial allegiances: the arty middle class black kids who invented techno were Europhiles who despised hip hop as ghetto music, and feared its fans from the projects. Hardcore/jungle, as a hip hop/techno hybrid, represented the return of Detroit's repressed---which is why Detroit and Detroit-aligned artists resisted the breakbeat revolution for as long as possible.
Then again, is what I cherish about hardcore/jungle, and
find relatively lacking in most Detroit techno, really about the former's hybridity and the latter's purism? Mixing disparate elements together guarantees nothing. There's a whole realm of bland blending out there, which Gilroy acknowledges when he refers to the banal forms of rootless cosmopolitanism in which "everything becomes... blended into an impossibly even consistency." Why is this kind of hybridity so lacking in interest? Is it the scent of tourism--safe encounters with an Other that reassuringly turns out to be harmless, or even the Same? I'm thinking of the world music phenomenon, where white Westerners like Paul Simon discovered the primal innocence and raw spirit of Fifties rock'n'roll alive and kicking, clad in the exotic ethnic flesh of Soweto or Bahia. (But were strangely much less inclined to embrace the forbidding alien-ness of, say, Inuit Eskimo plainsong or Javanese gamelan). The edge-less aura of these hybrids has something to do with their top-down nature, as opposed to more lateral/reciprocal/rhizomatic interactions. The slumming, inspiration-starved, albeit often genuinely enthusiastic, respectful and well-informed rockstars (David Byrne, Peter Gabriel) who seek aesthetic rejuvenation from outside Western pop can be contrasted with the sort of hybrids that emerge spontaneously through long-term proximity of different populations. Think of London's dance culture, which goes back long before rave to when Jamaicans first imported their sound system culture of heavy bass pressure, "blues" (illegal all-night parties), and ganja. The result has been a continuum of creole music: lover's rock, Soul II Soul's "funki dread" sound (imported American soul meets reggae, but only in London), breakbeat hardcore and jungle, today's UK underground garage and 2-step. Or take Bristol, another UK city with a long established multiracial presence, but which produced its own quite differently inflected cross-breed: the Pop Group's dub-funk-jazz charged version of postpunk, trip hop. All of these hybrid sounds have an element of evolutionary random-ness about them, and reflect not just sonic recombination but social exchanges, reciprocal transfers of behavior and ideas. Compare these slowly spawned hybrids with the fusions hatched in laboratory-like conditions by the likes of Bill Laswell. The organic versus synthetic metaphor is perhaps too loaded, but there does seem to be a difference here between interbreeding/grafts and cut'n'paste/collage, a contrast possibly analogous to the difference between analog and digital. Where the first set of hybrids (jungle, 2step, etc) are productively contaminated with the mess of everyday life and street knowledge, the second set has an unmistakeable aura of sterility, the academic.
Ultimately, these are musical values, aesthetic failings, though: lack of "spark" or "vibe" or whatever other vital intangible it is that animates music. And perhaps the whole debate over purism versus impurism is based on the mistaken belief that you can map aesthetics onto politics, find a straightforward equivalence or correlation between worth in one realm and the other. Dick Hebdiges, the famed subcultural theorist (and contemporary of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy), once described the development of UK pop music as "a phantom history of British race relations". I've long concurred with this view, but now I'm not so sure. The racial narrative--above all, the white romance with black music--is just one of many threads in the tangled tapestry of pop culture, and the picture gets confused by a host of other factors and struggles: class, gender, technology. Furthermore, as pop/rock grew older, it started to develop its own internal politics, engage in purely aesthetic struggles, and go through shifts based on a self-reflexive relationship with its own accumulating history (the postmodern feedback loops crystallized in the famous phrase "pop will eat itself"). Working out what a given piece of music, or a particular trend, correlates with in terms of the outside world is hard enough, let alone a specific strand of political reality such as race relations.
Take, for example, the recent issue of Melody Maker that featured the a cover story headlined "UK Garage-- My Arse!" and the sub-headline "Alternative Rock Fights Back". Depicted on the cover is a black man with a striking resemblance to garage superstar Craig David, sitting on the toilet listening to a Walkman with his trousers around his ankles, a piece of toilet paper in his hand. The back story to this is the bursting of Britpop's bubble. The giddy mood of jingoistic triumphalism that consumed the entire UK indie-rock scene--bands, fans, journalists--for a good three year period 1995-97, had now curdled to bitter dismay, as the pop charts became dominated by American R&B and rap, plus the homegrown house/jungle/R&B hybrid known as UK garage aka 2step. Melody Maker’s cover could be seen as a petulant fit of impotent rage from a magazine whose sales had shriveled to a pathetic 30 thousand copies a week.
My initial response, as UK garage fan and a MM veteran of the days when the magazine put Public Enemy on the cover, was to squeal "racism!". The explicit equation of UK garage, a multiracial scene dominated by black musical values, with shit connects unhappily with a little-known dirty secret about the UK music press: market research by IPC, the conglomerate that owns both Melody Maker and its rival NME, discovered that the large market segment of casual readers who pick up one paper or the other depending on who's on the cover wouldn't buy issues that featured black faces on their covers. As reprehensible and sad as the "UK Garage--My Arse!" cover was (the first black man on MM's cover in living memory), though, I'm not utterly convinced that indie-rockers antipathy towards "that garage crap" is really racist. It's a mixture of discontents and repugnances: aesthetic disgust (the smooth, shiny UKG production transgresses indie rock's values of sonic shabbiness), gender bias (UKG connotes girly, pop values like singalong melodies, diva soulfulness, lyrics about sex and romance), class affiliation (garage's working class dress-to-impress fashion and fetish for expensive designer labels versus middle class students's dressed-down scruffiness), rock snobberies about the superiority of lyrics/persona over rhythm/production. Add to that the stinging feeling of being marginalised, a sense of being the underdog, and you have the ingredients for ressentiment. Racism--more on the level of ignorant, stereotyped ideas about black music cultures than hatred--acts as a glue that coheres all these different strands of antagonism together. In other words, it's exactly the same complicated tissue of reactionary and nostalgic impulses that lay behind Morrissey's attitudes to dance music.
Another way of looking at these relationships between aesthetics and politics is to find the least black-influenced music around and see if it correlates with racism, as it ought according to this logic. So take gabba, the hardcore techno subgenre---one of the most ferociously purist forms of music around, and "white"-sounding to most ears. Gabba has been persistently smeared with a Far Right association for years--because of the lack of "blackness" in its rhythmic feel, the aura it emits of a rampaging mob, and the fact that many of its fans have short cropped hair. As a fan of some of this stuff, I'll tell you straight up that there's definitely an aesthetic quality to it that verges on the fascistic, or at least the dark side of the Dionysian: an amphetamine-wired aura of blitzkrieg, sinister pageantry, sturm und drang. Does this cyber-Wagner bombast have any intrinsic politics, though? (Marcus Garvey was into regimentation, drill, uniforms, too).
Dig deeper, and you discover that while gabba has a skinhead following in some parts of Europe, it is also the soundtrack of choice for Far Left anger---for anarchists, squat-dwelling and free party organizing renegades. Even in Holland, where some of the big gabba labels felt the need to clarify things by putting "Gabbers Against Hate and Racism" slogans on their record sleeves, you discover that many of the leading DJs started out spinning hip hop. Some top gabber DJs--Holland's Darkraver, the UK's Loftgroover--are actually black.
But let's focus on one gabba god, German producer Marc Acardipane (a/k/a the Mover and about twenty other alter-egos). Probably the most accomplished producer in the genre, and perpetrator of some of the most Vikings-going-berserker sounding gabber so far, Acardipane is also a big hip hop fan. His formative techno influences are from black Detroit artists Suburban Knight and Underground Resistance, and he also made some early breakbeat-driven rave tunes and jungle tracks. So we're not dealing with a guy with a closed mind or ears. The Mover's decision to pursue such a purist, narrowly focused music path is entirely aesthetic, and entirely productive: he has created a vast, frequently astounding body of work. There are purisms in music that are reactive and reactionary. They couch themselves in terms of a return to something that's been lost---an original vibe, "funk", musicality, emotion--or as honorings/resurrections of some bygone golden age (acid jazz and Seventies fusion; deep house's yearning for the Paradise Garage and the lost eclecticism of Seventies underground disco culture). You could call this kind of purism "fundamentalist" perhaps, gesturing at its religiosity, its attitude of keeping the faith. But other purisms are forward-tilted, emergent, and in some senses self-generating. This kind of purism seems to coalesce in response to the centripetal? pull of a strange attractor, shedding off the residues of other styles and honing down to an aesthetic essence: think of how jungle emerged from the messy chaos of hardcore rave, and how jungle further refined itself into jump-up and techstep. Perhaps there is an optimal point in the arc of any purist music, after which the self-refining minimalism becomes anorexia--the style eating away at itself. (This is what happened to drum'n'bass after it perfected itself circa 1996; to gabba once it had gone beyond a certain extremity of beats-per-minute and distortion and exhausted all the possibilities within its very enclosed terrain).
The Mover's purism is the forward-leaning sort. Title-wise, his tracks often refer to a private mythology based around the apocalyptic future; an obsession with the year 2017 that maybe relates to this idea of exponential arc of intensification (sonic, techno-cultural) hurtling towards a singularity in the near future. If Acardipane were to dabble more in mixing styles or broaden his textural palette beyond the few colors of which he is master, his work would only lose its power, its fanatical focus. There is an undeniable aura of zeal in the music, which begs the question again of its real-life correlates, if any. The "fascism" in this music is the desire, enflamed by the music but also satisfied by the music, to merge with a collective vastness ("Into Sound", as one Acardipane track is titled; see also titles like “Hall” and the Cold Rush label slogan “music for huge space arenas”). This is also the desire to merge with the rave massive: mobilized but aimless, united but apolitical. In a sense, this music isn't about but simply is the desire for mission, insurgency, destination, destiny, singlemindedness, a mobilized and rampaging unanimity; rage without object, belief without creed. And it suggests that fantasies of purity relate to our ancient desires for the absolute. When you come to think about it, music is just about the healthiest, safest place to deal with such longings.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening To Five Mean Years by Greil Marcus
Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism by Chuck Eddy
director's cut, Bookforum, fall 2011
by Simon Reynolds
Rock’s accumulated past is accessible as never before thanks to the Internet’s vast and ever-growing archive. From the most mainstream star to the most obscure lost artist, five decades of music, video and information is just a mouse click or scroll-wheel twirl from our ears and eyes. Yet it is precisely this unprecedented proximity and vividness of the past in the digital present that makes book-length cultural analysis more essential than ever. The emerging Cloud is a messy mass of decontextualized sounds and visuals. Long-form music writing supplies an element of distance and abstraction that cuts through retro culture’s welter of senseless sense-impressions and facts, allowing the clear signal of truth to emerge.
Greil Marcus and Chuck Eddy, two legendary rock critics with new books, have adopted radically different approaches to the pursuit of music history’s elusive truths: the iconographer versus the iconoclast. In a 1986 interview, the young Eddy declared that “the thing that bugs me about rock criticism more than anything else, and this applies to both Marcus and Christgau . . . is what I would call a hero-worship syndrome.”
Marcus has never been quite as reverential as Eddy made out, but he is interested in making the music he loves seem as important as possible. One of Marcus’s writing tics is variations on the phrase “the stakes” which crop up whenever he feels there’s something world-historical and momentous at play in a particular song or performance. Of The Doors’s “Take It As It Comes”, he writes “there’s too much at stake. Too much has been left behind.” Eddy is far less invested in notions of significance and resonance; he’s more concerned with the sheer pleasure of music, which for him includes all the amusement that can be extracted from it, often at the artist’s expense. Eddy’s urge to deride can sometimes seem to over-ride his delight in the music. But it also reflects his gut reflex to demystify—to bring music back into the realm of everyday life, in pointed contrast to the lofty-minded Marcus’s attraction to the instant myths that spring up around rock.
Marcus’s books have always combined a historian’s scrupulousness with facts (unlike his British counterpart Nik Cohn, who never let accuracy get in the way of a good story) with an alertness to the larger-than-life dimensions of what Cohn once called “Superpop . . . the image, hype and beautiful flash of rock'n'roll music.” As rock’s first self-conscious mythographers, The Doors are such a perfect subject for this approach that it makes you wonder why Marcus waited so long to write a book about them.
Too often in his last decade of output, there’s been a feeling of sinewy strain to Marcus’s prose, like an ageing acrobat struggling to pull off the tricks that worked so well before. The Shape of Things To Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, for instance, reached repeatedly for a profundity that eluded the author’s grasp. But last year’s Van Morrison: When that Rough God Goes Riding, a slim volume on the stout singer from Ulster, showed signs of renewed agility. Now The Doors is a firm stride towards the recovery of full powers. Like the preceding book about another mystic-minstrel named Morrison, The Doors is not a rock bio or an exhaustive study of a band’s oeuvre, but a deliberately fragmentary overview that seeks to convey the essence of the band via brief meditations triggered by particular songs and performances.
A long-established Marcus technique is his knack of writing about a song as if it were a drama unfolding in real time, as though the band were discovering what the tune is about during its recording. This is fiction, of course: in most cases, songs are written and honed further through live performance long before being taken into the studio, where the band runs through multiple takes and builds up the sound through overdubs until the recording achieves the definitive and polished form that the world hears. Marcus’s odd insistence on treating song as events rather than constructions can get wearing. The Doors features endless variations on tropes of an “untold story” gradually emerging out of a song. Elsewhere the song is personified: “as the music edged into its seventh minute, it seemed to have developed a mind of its own: you can hear the song musing over itself” But this overfamiliar approach picks up new credence here, because many of the songs Marcus examines are not studio versions but elongated and improvisatory concert renditions bootlegged by fans. Gathered for official release in 2003 as the four-disc set Boot Yer Butt!, these lo-fi recordings are genuine real-time events: We hear the inebriated Morrison ad-libbing, the band struggling to keep up or pushing the music even further out. Many of these versions document, as Marcus writes, “the drama of a band at war with its audience,” reflecting Morrison’s determination to take the Doors out of the realm of entertainment and into confrontational living theater.
This spirit matches Marcus’s own fierce commitment to bringing back a sense of rock as an Event, a series of ruptures in History, and to rescue the music from the dead time of repetition and nostalgia. The latter phenomenon is explored in a brilliant chapter entitled “The Doors in the so-called Sixties”. It starts with Marcus’s surprise at constantly hearing the Doors on his car radio during the late 2000s and his further astonishment that songs like “L.A. Woman” had “never sounded so relentless, so unsatisfied, in . . . 1971 as they did forty years later.” Discussing Oliver Stone’s Doors biopic (which, unusually, he rates highly), Marcus pinpoints the secret reason behind the media’s obsessive drive to commemorate and revisit the Sixties: “A sense that since [then], life had been empty . . . The anniversaries were attempted funerals . . . But the funeral never seemed to end, and the burial never seemed complete.” Although Marcus has himself arguably been complicit in this nostalgia industry through authoring several books about Dylan, he writes about his own resentment of the babyboomers’s stranglehold on rock history, which has burdened subsequent generations with a sense of belatedness: “then was when it all happened.... you were born at the wrong time; you missed it.” Waiting in line to see Oliver Stone’s movie, surrounded by kids in their teens and twenties, Marcus wonders “why they had no culture of their own to rebuke us with.”
In The Doors, though, Marcus comes to terms with the idea that the greatest Sixties music cannot be buried and forgotten—whatever the fate that befell the musicians in the ensuing years: death, disgrace, dwindling powers—because it still feels too alive. Despite the encrusted legends and the attrition of repetition, the rolling majesty of the Doors’s supreme songs and the clarity and mystery of Morrison’s best lines (“learn to forget,” “speak in secret alphabets,” and so many more) ring out with the force of its original newness and nowness. Marcus connects this imperishable potency and promise to specific properties of the band’s playing: “Early on, Robby Krieger developed a way of saying, in a very few quiet, spaced notes on his guitar, that something was about to happen.”
The triumphant sections of The Doors recreate the sensation of hearing these songs for the first time. There’s a thrilling blow-by-blow account of “The End,” two great takes on different “Light My Fire” performances, and many marvelous evocations of particular passages of playing, from the few seconds of eerie Ray Manzarek organ at the start of “Strange Days,” to “LA Woman,” where Krieger’s guitar is “thin and loose, intricate and casual, serious and quick as thought itself.”
The closer that Marcus sticks to the music, the better; he draws strength from its inexhaustible vigor. But when Marcus strays, things get more labored and less convincing, as with the meandering attempt to use “20th Century Fox” as a route through Pop Art. Ultimately, The Doors is rather like a Doors album, or more precisely, those five Doors LPs that followed the matchless self-titled debut: Killer and filler juxtaposed such that it’s hard to believe the same band was responsible.
Marcus stays faithful to how the band’s records impacted him as a first-time, at-the-time listener: blown away by the debut, disappointed by most everything that came after except for the odd twilight track like “Roadhouse Blues”. Exactly eighteen years younger than Marcus, I first encountered The Doors through various “best of...”’s, which means that the overfamiliarity of the debut’s famous tracks ensured that the album, when I finally heard it, couldn’t possibly have the same overwhelming effect; conversely, the later LPs seemed “pretty great” because I adored the nuggets salvaged from them for anthologies like Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine.
This ahistorical perspective, already possible in the late ’70s, has intensified with the ensuing decades: Each new generation hears rock’s sprawling, ever-accumulating past as an out-of-sequence jumble. The link between music and History that has obsessed Marcus from 1975's Mystery Train onwards, and which he wants to protect and resurrect, is corroded by this encroaching atemporality, the result of a revolution in music delivery systems, mechanisms such as iPod shuffle and Spotify that insidiously dissolve the divisions between decades and genres. But fans and critics have also actively hastened this process, eagerly rearranging rock and pop history into new shapes, deposing established greats from the rock pantheon and elevating lesser lights. Foremost among these revisionist critics is Chuck Eddy.
The upstart Eddy began his career voicing frustration with his babyboomer elders (including Marcus) who “miss a lot” (meaning, mainly, new music evolving out of the traditions of metal and disco). Reviewing one of Aerosmith’s mid-90s albums, Eddy jousted again with Marcus, taking issue with the latter’s dismissal of the band as destined to be a mere footnote in rock history. Eddy argued that this was not only condescending to the middle-American masses who raised lighters to songs like “Dream On,” but ignored the way Aerosmith had anticipated and even contributed to hip hop (with “Walk This Way”). The spat contrasted Marcus’s belief in the righteous necessity of a rock canon with Eddy’s compulsion—at once moral and temperamental—to deface and contradict that canon at every opportunity. This attitude infused Eddy’s The Accidental Evolution of Rock ‘N’Roll: A Misguided Tour Through Popular Music (1997) and it can be found on almost every page of his new anthology Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism.
Near the end of the book, sounding sincerely indignant, Eddy rejects his reputation as a contrarian. Still, it’s hard to think of another word to characterize a taste trajectory that’s veered so consistently far from the music that his rockcrit peers consider relevant and praiseworthy. All critics have pet bands that nobody else in the profession has any time for, but Eddy is a bit like the dotty old lady with forty cats. He’s often way out of alignment with critical consensus but he’s not a straightforward populist either. His first book, 1991’s wonderfully heterodox heavy metal guide Stairway To Hell, snubbed mega-selling mainstays of the genre such as Iron Maiden and Judas Priest in favor of minor figures like Kix and Teena Marie.
Eddy’s eccentricity is not only refreshing and entertaining; it’s also valuable. Whether it’s aberrant taste or simple capriciousness (he admits in one early piece, “frankly, if I tried hard enough, I could probably convince myself that any tripe was terrific”), something compels Eddy to pay attention to music that no other music journalist can be bothered with with (Oi!-punk bands still operating today, for instance). Not only is this a vital counterbalance to the critical herd-mind, but it’s also a reminder of how much music-making and music-fandom exist outside the media radar, and never make it into the official narrative.
If rock history written long after the event can’t help but be distorted by a hindsight-wise sensibility, collections of music journalism suffer from the opposite problem, as Eddy notes, writing of “the folly of reviewing records in real time, when ten or twenty years down the line might be more reliable.” His dispatches from the frontlines of music journalism contain many examples of Eddy being precociously on-the-money: he notices the shape-of-grunge-to-come stirring in the Pacific Northwest as early as 1986, and celebrates acid house before hardly anybody outside of Chicago had heard of it. But this clairvoyance is sabotaged by a tendency to prematurely write things off. By 1989, Eddy’s decided that “all that Seattle crap sounded the same and would never amount to nothing.” He would be equally dismissive of acid house’s European progeny, rave culture.
Of course, rock writing isn’t really about racing tips. It can, however, be about a kind of prophetic or messianic mode of utterance, whose cadences are thrilling even when you don’t share the writer’s own faith. That’s one reason why, if I had to choose between Marcus and Eddy, I’d probably go with the author of The Doors. Marcus’s impulse to aggrandize, even deify, his subjects, leads him to godlike music more reliably than Eddy’s impulse to do the opposite: Wisdom trumps wisecracks.
Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism by Chuck Eddy
director's cut, Bookforum, fall 2011
by Simon Reynolds
Rock’s accumulated past is accessible as never before thanks to the Internet’s vast and ever-growing archive. From the most mainstream star to the most obscure lost artist, five decades of music, video and information is just a mouse click or scroll-wheel twirl from our ears and eyes. Yet it is precisely this unprecedented proximity and vividness of the past in the digital present that makes book-length cultural analysis more essential than ever. The emerging Cloud is a messy mass of decontextualized sounds and visuals. Long-form music writing supplies an element of distance and abstraction that cuts through retro culture’s welter of senseless sense-impressions and facts, allowing the clear signal of truth to emerge.
Greil Marcus and Chuck Eddy, two legendary rock critics with new books, have adopted radically different approaches to the pursuit of music history’s elusive truths: the iconographer versus the iconoclast. In a 1986 interview, the young Eddy declared that “the thing that bugs me about rock criticism more than anything else, and this applies to both Marcus and Christgau . . . is what I would call a hero-worship syndrome.”
Marcus has never been quite as reverential as Eddy made out, but he is interested in making the music he loves seem as important as possible. One of Marcus’s writing tics is variations on the phrase “the stakes” which crop up whenever he feels there’s something world-historical and momentous at play in a particular song or performance. Of The Doors’s “Take It As It Comes”, he writes “there’s too much at stake. Too much has been left behind.” Eddy is far less invested in notions of significance and resonance; he’s more concerned with the sheer pleasure of music, which for him includes all the amusement that can be extracted from it, often at the artist’s expense. Eddy’s urge to deride can sometimes seem to over-ride his delight in the music. But it also reflects his gut reflex to demystify—to bring music back into the realm of everyday life, in pointed contrast to the lofty-minded Marcus’s attraction to the instant myths that spring up around rock.
Marcus’s books have always combined a historian’s scrupulousness with facts (unlike his British counterpart Nik Cohn, who never let accuracy get in the way of a good story) with an alertness to the larger-than-life dimensions of what Cohn once called “Superpop . . . the image, hype and beautiful flash of rock'n'roll music.” As rock’s first self-conscious mythographers, The Doors are such a perfect subject for this approach that it makes you wonder why Marcus waited so long to write a book about them.
Too often in his last decade of output, there’s been a feeling of sinewy strain to Marcus’s prose, like an ageing acrobat struggling to pull off the tricks that worked so well before. The Shape of Things To Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, for instance, reached repeatedly for a profundity that eluded the author’s grasp. But last year’s Van Morrison: When that Rough God Goes Riding, a slim volume on the stout singer from Ulster, showed signs of renewed agility. Now The Doors is a firm stride towards the recovery of full powers. Like the preceding book about another mystic-minstrel named Morrison, The Doors is not a rock bio or an exhaustive study of a band’s oeuvre, but a deliberately fragmentary overview that seeks to convey the essence of the band via brief meditations triggered by particular songs and performances.
A long-established Marcus technique is his knack of writing about a song as if it were a drama unfolding in real time, as though the band were discovering what the tune is about during its recording. This is fiction, of course: in most cases, songs are written and honed further through live performance long before being taken into the studio, where the band runs through multiple takes and builds up the sound through overdubs until the recording achieves the definitive and polished form that the world hears. Marcus’s odd insistence on treating song as events rather than constructions can get wearing. The Doors features endless variations on tropes of an “untold story” gradually emerging out of a song. Elsewhere the song is personified: “as the music edged into its seventh minute, it seemed to have developed a mind of its own: you can hear the song musing over itself” But this overfamiliar approach picks up new credence here, because many of the songs Marcus examines are not studio versions but elongated and improvisatory concert renditions bootlegged by fans. Gathered for official release in 2003 as the four-disc set Boot Yer Butt!, these lo-fi recordings are genuine real-time events: We hear the inebriated Morrison ad-libbing, the band struggling to keep up or pushing the music even further out. Many of these versions document, as Marcus writes, “the drama of a band at war with its audience,” reflecting Morrison’s determination to take the Doors out of the realm of entertainment and into confrontational living theater.
This spirit matches Marcus’s own fierce commitment to bringing back a sense of rock as an Event, a series of ruptures in History, and to rescue the music from the dead time of repetition and nostalgia. The latter phenomenon is explored in a brilliant chapter entitled “The Doors in the so-called Sixties”. It starts with Marcus’s surprise at constantly hearing the Doors on his car radio during the late 2000s and his further astonishment that songs like “L.A. Woman” had “never sounded so relentless, so unsatisfied, in . . . 1971 as they did forty years later.” Discussing Oliver Stone’s Doors biopic (which, unusually, he rates highly), Marcus pinpoints the secret reason behind the media’s obsessive drive to commemorate and revisit the Sixties: “A sense that since [then], life had been empty . . . The anniversaries were attempted funerals . . . But the funeral never seemed to end, and the burial never seemed complete.” Although Marcus has himself arguably been complicit in this nostalgia industry through authoring several books about Dylan, he writes about his own resentment of the babyboomers’s stranglehold on rock history, which has burdened subsequent generations with a sense of belatedness: “then was when it all happened.... you were born at the wrong time; you missed it.” Waiting in line to see Oliver Stone’s movie, surrounded by kids in their teens and twenties, Marcus wonders “why they had no culture of their own to rebuke us with.”
In The Doors, though, Marcus comes to terms with the idea that the greatest Sixties music cannot be buried and forgotten—whatever the fate that befell the musicians in the ensuing years: death, disgrace, dwindling powers—because it still feels too alive. Despite the encrusted legends and the attrition of repetition, the rolling majesty of the Doors’s supreme songs and the clarity and mystery of Morrison’s best lines (“learn to forget,” “speak in secret alphabets,” and so many more) ring out with the force of its original newness and nowness. Marcus connects this imperishable potency and promise to specific properties of the band’s playing: “Early on, Robby Krieger developed a way of saying, in a very few quiet, spaced notes on his guitar, that something was about to happen.”
The triumphant sections of The Doors recreate the sensation of hearing these songs for the first time. There’s a thrilling blow-by-blow account of “The End,” two great takes on different “Light My Fire” performances, and many marvelous evocations of particular passages of playing, from the few seconds of eerie Ray Manzarek organ at the start of “Strange Days,” to “LA Woman,” where Krieger’s guitar is “thin and loose, intricate and casual, serious and quick as thought itself.”
The closer that Marcus sticks to the music, the better; he draws strength from its inexhaustible vigor. But when Marcus strays, things get more labored and less convincing, as with the meandering attempt to use “20th Century Fox” as a route through Pop Art. Ultimately, The Doors is rather like a Doors album, or more precisely, those five Doors LPs that followed the matchless self-titled debut: Killer and filler juxtaposed such that it’s hard to believe the same band was responsible.
Marcus stays faithful to how the band’s records impacted him as a first-time, at-the-time listener: blown away by the debut, disappointed by most everything that came after except for the odd twilight track like “Roadhouse Blues”. Exactly eighteen years younger than Marcus, I first encountered The Doors through various “best of...”’s, which means that the overfamiliarity of the debut’s famous tracks ensured that the album, when I finally heard it, couldn’t possibly have the same overwhelming effect; conversely, the later LPs seemed “pretty great” because I adored the nuggets salvaged from them for anthologies like Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine.
This ahistorical perspective, already possible in the late ’70s, has intensified with the ensuing decades: Each new generation hears rock’s sprawling, ever-accumulating past as an out-of-sequence jumble. The link between music and History that has obsessed Marcus from 1975's Mystery Train onwards, and which he wants to protect and resurrect, is corroded by this encroaching atemporality, the result of a revolution in music delivery systems, mechanisms such as iPod shuffle and Spotify that insidiously dissolve the divisions between decades and genres. But fans and critics have also actively hastened this process, eagerly rearranging rock and pop history into new shapes, deposing established greats from the rock pantheon and elevating lesser lights. Foremost among these revisionist critics is Chuck Eddy.
The upstart Eddy began his career voicing frustration with his babyboomer elders (including Marcus) who “miss a lot” (meaning, mainly, new music evolving out of the traditions of metal and disco). Reviewing one of Aerosmith’s mid-90s albums, Eddy jousted again with Marcus, taking issue with the latter’s dismissal of the band as destined to be a mere footnote in rock history. Eddy argued that this was not only condescending to the middle-American masses who raised lighters to songs like “Dream On,” but ignored the way Aerosmith had anticipated and even contributed to hip hop (with “Walk This Way”). The spat contrasted Marcus’s belief in the righteous necessity of a rock canon with Eddy’s compulsion—at once moral and temperamental—to deface and contradict that canon at every opportunity. This attitude infused Eddy’s The Accidental Evolution of Rock ‘N’Roll: A Misguided Tour Through Popular Music (1997) and it can be found on almost every page of his new anthology Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism.
Near the end of the book, sounding sincerely indignant, Eddy rejects his reputation as a contrarian. Still, it’s hard to think of another word to characterize a taste trajectory that’s veered so consistently far from the music that his rockcrit peers consider relevant and praiseworthy. All critics have pet bands that nobody else in the profession has any time for, but Eddy is a bit like the dotty old lady with forty cats. He’s often way out of alignment with critical consensus but he’s not a straightforward populist either. His first book, 1991’s wonderfully heterodox heavy metal guide Stairway To Hell, snubbed mega-selling mainstays of the genre such as Iron Maiden and Judas Priest in favor of minor figures like Kix and Teena Marie.
Eddy’s eccentricity is not only refreshing and entertaining; it’s also valuable. Whether it’s aberrant taste or simple capriciousness (he admits in one early piece, “frankly, if I tried hard enough, I could probably convince myself that any tripe was terrific”), something compels Eddy to pay attention to music that no other music journalist can be bothered with with (Oi!-punk bands still operating today, for instance). Not only is this a vital counterbalance to the critical herd-mind, but it’s also a reminder of how much music-making and music-fandom exist outside the media radar, and never make it into the official narrative.
If rock history written long after the event can’t help but be distorted by a hindsight-wise sensibility, collections of music journalism suffer from the opposite problem, as Eddy notes, writing of “the folly of reviewing records in real time, when ten or twenty years down the line might be more reliable.” His dispatches from the frontlines of music journalism contain many examples of Eddy being precociously on-the-money: he notices the shape-of-grunge-to-come stirring in the Pacific Northwest as early as 1986, and celebrates acid house before hardly anybody outside of Chicago had heard of it. But this clairvoyance is sabotaged by a tendency to prematurely write things off. By 1989, Eddy’s decided that “all that Seattle crap sounded the same and would never amount to nothing.” He would be equally dismissive of acid house’s European progeny, rave culture.
Of course, rock writing isn’t really about racing tips. It can, however, be about a kind of prophetic or messianic mode of utterance, whose cadences are thrilling even when you don’t share the writer’s own faith. That’s one reason why, if I had to choose between Marcus and Eddy, I’d probably go with the author of The Doors. Marcus’s impulse to aggrandize, even deify, his subjects, leads him to godlike music more reliably than Eddy’s impulse to do the opposite: Wisdom trumps wisecracks.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
FILTHY MIND: IRVINE WELSH
VLS (Village Voice Literary Supplement), September 1998
by Simon Reynolds
Irvine Welsh is shaking his skinny ass, gliding across the floor of a cramped recording studio in South London, an impish grin on his face. He's dancing to his own work-in-progress, a disco track he's made with buddy Kris Needs (a veteran English gonzo music journalist) for an album soon to be released via Creation Records, the label most famous for giving the world Oasis.
Although Welsh pens the lyrics, his musical role in the project seems limited to power of veto and vision-maintenance: right now, he's worried that his partner will smother the'70s disco vibe by bringing in too much of a '90s hard techno edge. "Keep it cheesy, Kris," Welsh admonishes. Needs responds by sampling an orgasmic moan from an obscure gay house-music track, "Mr Policeman," and looping it into the pumping groove.
The scenario of "Mr Policeman"--a cop getting a blowjob--weirdly parallels the most repellent scene in Welsh's new novel Filth (W.W. Norton, 393 pp., $14 paper), which is something like a cross between Bad Lieutenant and Prime Suspect. The book's antihero, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, extorts fellatio from an angelic underage girl after discovering a cache of Ecstasy pills in her bag. Climaxing, Robertson breaks wind: "I'm farting oot loads ay gas, it's burning my eyes. The power of that Lauriston Place Curry Hoose's vindaloo! . . . She's choking, but I haud her heid steady until I'm ready, then I withdraw my cock from her miserable torn face, stuff it in my troosers, zip up and leave her to her tears. . . . I go through the lobby leaving the wee slut to soak up that distinctive curry, Guinness and [semen] atmosphere."
Filth is a novel that starts with a fart, ends with a bowel evacuation, and whose only moral voice emanates from the tapeworm lurking inside Robertson's colon. But then Welsh's fiction has never been polite or pretty. He's peopled all of his books--Trainspotting, The Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance--with characters too unsavory for the sedate drawing room of English literary fiction: junkies, soccer hooligans, Ecstasy-abusing ravers, petty criminals, and other species of British lowlife spawned during the Thatcher-Major government's 18-year-long project of systematically transforming a united, unionized working class into an auto-destructive lumpen proletariat.
Although Welsh has received recognition from the transatlantic literary establishment, he relishes the role of enfant terrible (albeit a babyfaced 40-year-old enfant). Good reviews don't matter to him because his first book, Trainspotting, found a fiercely loyal readership largely through word of mouth. Research by his publishers has shown that a hefty proportion of Welsh's audience doesn't read any fiction at all, apart from books by himself and kindred spirits like Morvern Callar author Alan Warner. Welsh regards these post literati as more competent readers than professional critics, because they have first-hand experience of the subcultural realms he documents: drug-and-dance culture, crime, the black economy, welfare subsistence. He now admits that his last book Ecstasy was deeply flawed, because so many of these ordinary "punters" came up "and told me, 'That was total shite, man.' " Welsh smiles, seemingly relishing this blunt feedback.
Instant success, money, and the translation of his works into other media have made Welsh supremely indifferent to his critical reception. But his hostility toward the London literary world still burns ardently. "You get all these fucking hypocrites in the literary establishment saying, 'Oh, we must get more people reading. . . .' As soon as someone like myself comes along and actually gets people reading books, they turn all sneery. What they mean is they want a market for the books they think people should read."
For a long time, "the enemy"--middle class, Oxbridge educated--was incarnated in the form of Martin Amis. Superficially, Amis and Welsh seem to have much in common: a sharp eye and nose for the textures of squalor, a menagerie of spiritually bankrupt protagonists, an obsession with the myriad shades of the English slanguage. But there's a crucial difference. From Amis's detached vantage point of privilege, the British class system and its attendant grotesqueries merely afford frightful amusement. If you're writing from somewhere closer to the bottom of the social heap, though, the stakes are higher, the reality of wasted potential and distorted lives all too raw and personal.
Welsh grew up in an Edinburgh housing scheme, the equivalent of the projects. At school, the notion of writing as vocation was unthinkable: "Back then, the idea of someone being a writer, you'd think of graffiti spray-painted on the walls," he notes wryly. Welsh's artistic impulses gravitated toward music; for several years he messed around in postpunk bands in Edinburgh and London, flitting between "crap jobs and the dole" and getting "fucked up with drugs, specifically heroin and speed." In the late '80s he swung to the other extreme, straightening himself out and getting on a career track: he worked in local government, took a degree in business management, began to set up a consultancy firm, even dabbled in real estate speculation.
But then the UK's rave explosion--triggered by acid house music and Ecstasy--began to lure him from the straight-and-narrow. Gradually, he got swept up in the mass bohemia of the dance-and-drug culture. And he started writing stories, partly to alleviate the tedium of an office job, but also to cope with the comedown phase after the frenzied high of the weekend. "It's good to write on a drug comedown," he says. "You almost reach that transcendental place where you've got away from how fucking bad you feel. For me, writing was a way of trying to keep the rave vibe and the experience going a bit into the working week."
Although the euphoric utopianism of the early days of rave has deeply affected him, Welsh's stories never conceal the motor behind the incandescent vitality of working-class leisure: desperation. To borrow the title of perhaps his most autobiographical story, Welsh is "A Smart Cunt"--a working-class autodidact too clever not to see through the safety valves (booze, football fanaticism, loveless sex, drugs) and inverted snobberies that hold the working class together in dismal complicity with their own oppression, yet perversely loyal to his social and regional roots. Although Welsh now lives in London with his wife, the Edinburgh underclass dialect will always be his truest literary voice; he still keeps an apartment in his home town.
In person, Welsh has a thick Scottish accent but he rarely resorts to the pungent slang that peppers his books; he comes off as unpretentiously erudite. Early publicity photos played up his barbarian-at-the-gates-of-literature outsider chic, making Welsh look menacing, misshapen and faintly psychopathic. In the flesh, he's actually rather handsome; with his ageless, Tin Tin-like face bobbing atop a tall, willowy physique, he resembles a cherubic skinhead. Dressed in slip-on shoes, jeans, white baseball cap, and striped T-shirt with a pair of sunglasses clipped onto its neckline, Welsh looks the picture of relaxation--just a regular guy on vacation. Only the faded tattoo on his arm--not a trendy nouvelle one but a skull in a harlequin's cap--hints at his street-credible past.
"Filth" is British slang for police, but as a title it seems to acknowledge Welsh's place in the counter-canon of literary abjection. Céline seems an obvious reference point: there's the same first-person, fear-and-self-loathing p.o.v., the same coarse vernacular, the same compulsion to make language "throb rather than reason." Like Céline's Journey to The End of the Night, Filth is also a lacerating anatomy of masculine psychology, a dissection of paranoia, misogyny, and spite.
Instead of doing his detective job (the plot concerns a mysterious homicide that may be racially motivated), Robertson devotes most of his energy to what he calls "the games"--the artful engineering of humiliations and career setbacks for his friends and colleagues. His keenest pleasure is schadenfreude (perverse delight in others' misfortunes), but he can't wait for it to occur naturally--he ensures it happens. "Every cunt has their Achilles' heel, and I always make a point of remembering my associates' ones. Something that crushes their self-image to a pulp."
Robertson is such a powerful character, so queerly and corrosively charismatic, that as I plunged deeper into Filth, I found myself becoming a progressively nastier person: short-tempered, brusque on the phone, malevolent-minded. Which begs the question: if reading Filth is a corrupting experience, what can it have been like to write it?
"It was horrible," laughs Welsh. "I was pretty difficult to be around when I was writing the novel. And what was really weird was, I had this big sty come out around my eyelid. I couldn't get rid of it, I tried for a year, all different creams, but it kept getting bigger. It might have been something as simple as repetitive eye strain from banging away on the VDU. But I do think it was psychosomatic, all the horrible stuff coming out, 'cos as soon as I typed the end, it just went. . . . But y'know, there's actually a perverse delight in writing about somebody you hate. You hate his racism, his sexism, even his music taste, everything about him. But when you dive into that kind of cesspool, it's quite creepy, because you do get into it. You have to, to make it believable."
Softspoken, subdued, a real gentle man--it's hard to imagine Welsh accessing the kind of monstrous psychic muck that fuels Robertson's careening trajectory through the novel. A prime inspiration for the character came from a nightwatchman Welsh once worked with. "He'd have these really dodgy, beaten-down, broken-up women come and visit him. And he was just unremittingly misogynistic. But when you're with someone like that for eight hours on a late shift, you do get pulled into the awfulness of his world."
Robertson is a creature of compulsions and cravings, vainly trying to staunch the insatiable void within. A typical day consists of any or all of the following: endless snacks on fat-saturated sausage rolls and bacon butties; starting an evil rumor about a fellow employee by daubing graffiti on the toilet wall; fiddling his overtime forms; making an obscene phone call to his best friend's wife, as part of a long-term scheme to ruin said best friend's life; enjoying an adulterous liaison, possibly involving erotic auto-asphyxiation; clawing the itchy rash on his buttocks and thighs until blood is drawn; getting drunk at the Masonic lodge; taking a cab home (remembering always to pay the driver the exact fare, no tip, and to savor the disappointment on his face), then passing out while ogling a porn video.
Although Robertson is constantly numbing himself or hyperstimulating himself, and halfway through the narrative develops a coke habit, Filth is less concerned with drug culture than any of Welsh's previous books. There is a sense, though, that Robertson's soul is pure cocaine--insofar as that drug makes every vice attractive and stimulates every appetite (except hunger). "Cocaine is the ultimate consumer capitalist drug," nods Welsh. "And Robertson's got that ideology of pure consumption. You can see that in the worm as well," he adds, referring to the tapeworm whose thoughts interrupt the text, and which evolve from blind id-like voracity ("eat eat") to super ego-like meditations on the psychological damage that made Robertson into the walking catastrophe that he is.
The drugs featured in Welsh's previous books--heroin in Trainspotting, Ecstasy in The Acid House and Marabou Stork Nightmares--all retain some aura of Romantic utopianism. These chemicals are sacraments of dissident subcultures, surrogates for thwarted dreams of social transformation. If these drugs can't change the world, they can at least change the way some individuals walk through the world: In Marabou, a soccer thug for whom "swedgin' " (hand-to-hand combat) is "my dancing" is transformed into a New Man thanks to the ego-melting power of Ecstasy and rave music. But Robertson and his coke-fiend detective partner Lennox don't want to get in touch with their inner child. Lennox tells an Ecstasy dealer that he never takes pills: "Tried them once, but they didnae go wi the job. Made me feel too good aboot everybody. Nae use in my game."
Filth's shift to cocaine--a drug that gives the user the illusion of control--parallels a departure in Welsh's writing. In the past, he's dealt with the dispossessed and disenfranchised; now, for the first time, he's exploring the psychology of power and privilege. Robertson is a class traitor: he grew up in a coal mining community, but joined the police around the time of the doomed miners' strike of 1984 because he wanted to join the power rather than fight it. Robertson lovingly recalls wielding his truncheon against union pickets and is eager to participate in a raid on a commune of anarcho-hippy ravers.
Robertson is the anti-raver: someone who (initially, at least) thrives on his own self-alienation and who regards techno music as a threat to the British way of life. Instead, he listens to heavy metal. Some of the funniest passages in Filth involve Robertson's earnest musings about the metal canon and the relative merits of specific albums by Deep Purple and Saxon--a subject Welsh seems suspiciously well informed about, although he claims he gleaned it all from a metal maniac friend. "I think I'll refuse to sell the film rights to Filth, 'cos I'd hate the fucking album that'd be made out of it!" he guffaws, nearly choking on what passes for bruschetta in England. "The soundtrack would fucking kill me!"
Although dance music and Ecstasy figure only on the periphery of Filth, Welsh continually alludes to rave culture as an analogy for what he does stylistically. He talks of trying to engage the attention-depleted, overstimulated sensorium of the postliterate generation, kids who've grown up on an entire spectrum of "rush culture" which bypasses meaning and instead works through sonic, visual, and tactile sensation.
"Special effects blockbuster films, or theme parks with bigger rides, they're all really rush-fix, adrenaline-buzz oriented. These strong psychoactive buzzy things, whether it's computer games or drugs, are all part of this pure escapist culture--people trying to outrun the nastiness in society, the disequilibrium in people's lives today." Welsh says that these days he's more enthused about writing for television or the silver screen (a movie version of The Acid House is due out early in 1999), and eagerly anticipates the outmoding of the traditional novel by the interactive book: CD-ROM novels that interface with sound and visuals, and offer readers multiple plot options. "The idea of the Book isn't that appealing to me right now," he shrugs. "I'm getting to that state where I think I've said everything in that format."
As part of his determination to catch up with the aural and optical intensities of music and film, Welsh has been experimenting with literary form for some time: breaking up the text in a manner akin to split-screen cinema for some of the Acid House stories; deploying different typefaces and multiple tiers of narrative in Marabou Stork Nightmares; superimposing the tapeworm's monologue over the main text in Filth. "For me, the process of the book is as important as the content--the process of how people engage with it. It goes back to rave music. Because of drugs and music, but also because of advertising and soundbites, people want to be engaged. Something's got to happen on every page in books. So when you get all these critics moaning about the death of the novel, the only reason is 'cos nothing's happening there. There's no point in describing what it's like watching the sun come up. What people want is almost like a steady beat to the writing. For me the device that works is using the dialect, both in narrative and dialogue, 'cos it's a very rhythmic, performative type of language," he says, comparing his use of it to the pulsating drive and flow-motion aesthetic of a great DJ.
Yet for all his scabrous subject matter and formal experiments, the pleasures of a Welsh novel are in some ways quite traditional--great characters, ring-of-truth dialogue, gripping plots, psychological insight, even moral weight (albeit voiced by a worm in the butt). He might loudly disdain traditional literary virtues as effete, enervated, and irrelevant, he might seek to align himself with more commercially viable sectors of pop culture, but in truth, Welsh's writing operates on a higher plane than the cheap thrills of Godzilla or Mortal Kombat. Discussing the British boom in clubbing-and-drugging fiction that he almost singlehandedly catalyzed, Welsh comes close to acknowledging this. "I don't think you can think of yourself as a 'rave writer,' " he says, wincing at the cliché often applied to him. "If you haven't got characterization and storyline, it doesn't matter what culture you come from or how clued up you are."
And then, as if to prove he really is the "rave author" after all, Welsh slips out of his seat and is dancing again to the pounding beat of his own record--shimmying with rubber-limbed fluency, giving me a thumbs-up sign and cheeky grin.
TRAINSPOTTING
Artforum, Summer, 1996
by Simon Reynolds
In Britain, pop culture and drug culture are almost synonymous these days. From Oasis' anthems of coked-out glory-lust to Pulp's number-one hit "Sorted for E's and Wizz" (a brilliantly ambivalent evocation of the dream and lie of rave), from the ganja-delic paranoia of Tricky to jungle's journeys into the dark side of Ecstasy culture, British pop is all highs and lows, uppers and downers. Other sectors of the culture industry lag behind music in reflecting what every British kid takes for granted: the sheer omnipresence and banality of recreational drug use. Which is why Irvine Welsh, chronicler of the "chemical generation," has become such a cult figure, and why the movie of his 1993 debut novel Trainspotting has become such a sensation in England, a sort of UK counterpart to Kids.
A big source of Welsh's appeal is the shock of encountering a writer who deals with British drug culture in a matter-of-fact, nonjudgmental way, while never concealing either its physical and psychic costs or the desperation that fuels it. The backdrop to his tales of lumpen-prole life in the deprived "housing schemes" of Edinburgh is postindustrial unemployment and the humiliation of a socialist Scotland within a Tory-ruled UK. He seldom confronts this political deadlock explicitly, but when he does, his anatomy of curdled idealism and hope is unsparing. In the novella A Smart Cunt (part of the story collection The Acid House, published in England in 1994), a left-wing militant tries to recruit Brian (Welsh's most autobiographical protagonist). "I'm thinking, what can I do, really do for the emancipation of working people in this country, shat on by the rich, tied into political inaction by servile reliance on a reactionary, moribund and yet still unelectable Labour Party?," muses Brian. "The answer is a resounding fuck all. Getting up early to sell a couple of [political pamphlets] in a shopping centre is not my idea of the best way to chill out.... I think I'll stick to drugs to get me through the long, dark night of late capitalism."
In Welsh's world, even nonravers are on drugs, literally (state-sanctioned chemicals like alcohol or tranquilizers) or metaphorically (TV, videos, computer games, the adrenaline rush of football violence). But Welsh - an ex-junkie and still a fervent raver - is mostly preoccupied with illegal forms of raising and razing consciousness. The Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares, published in England in 1995, and the forthcoming Ecstasy: Three Chemical Romances largely concern the rave scene's drugs of choice: MDMA, LSD, and "jellies" (slang for the downer Temazepam). And Trainspotting focuses on Edinburgh's heroin subculture of the mid '80s, when Pakistani smack had glutted the UK market, becoming, for thousands of ordinary people mired in unemployment, a cheaper means to oblivion than alcohol.
Welsh captures this moment by contrasting the "honest" junkies Renton, Spud, and Sick Boy with their mate Begbie, a sociopath who boasts that he "wouldnae poison ma body with that shite" while consuming gallons of booze, smoking like a chimney, and finding his own twisted form of release in gratuitous violence. But Welsh's junkies aren't just renegades from the "hard man" mentality Begbie represents; they're also in revolt against Scotland's "work hard, play hard" regime. Welsh describes the smackhead as a "closet romantic," someone who refuses to accept life's limitations.
It is from this one among many of Welsh's stray insights that director Danny Boyle and writer John Hodge (the team responsible for the 1994 film Shallow Grave) launch their movie. Putting a mischievous spin on the slogan "just say no," their version of Trainspotting fanfares heroin as a romantic renunciation of mediocrity. In a monologue superimposed over an exhilarating chase scene after a bungled shoplifting, Renton (Ewan McGregor) sarcastically itemizes the meaningless options available to the good citizen. "Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth.... Choose your future. Choose life." Then the punch line: "Well, I chose not to choose life.... And the reasons? Who needs reasons when you've got heroin."
This is up-front stuff, and before you've caught your breath, Boyle cuts to perhaps the most true-to-Welsh aspect of the movie: a paean to self-poisoning. "People think heroin is all about death and misery and despair.... What they forget is the pleasure of it.... After all, we're not fucking stupid." The scene is the glamorously squalid council flat (the grot and grunge have a glossy, hyperreal feel) where Renton and his pals cook up and inject. The camera clings to their pasty faces, screwed up in need and anticipation, relief and rapture. Allison (Susan Vidler), a single mother (her baby crawls happily among filth and comatose bodies), is shot up by Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) in a parody of sexual penetration; as her face spasms with the rush, she gasps, "That's better than any meat injection, better than any fucking cock in the world." Renton's voice-over attempts to quantify the experience: "Take your best orgasm and multiply it by a thousand." (This is inflation: in the book, it's only by twenty.)
Predictably, Trainspotting has been accused of glamorizing drugs, and indeed the film is riveting in precise ratio to the extent that it glosses over the tawdry torpor of the druggie lifestyle. Welsh's writing gets round the banality of drug use, and the dreariness of the environment that the junkies seek to "obliviate," by the vividness of his dialogue - rich with slang and expletives, and mostly in dialect. Toning down the verbals (Welsh-speak is hard for non-Scots), Boyle vibes up the visuals. This and his film's sheer pace conspire to make its wasters and psychos appear dynamic and charismatic, people you'd love to hang out with.
Speaking to Premiere magazine, Boyle was surprisingly candid about the liberties he took. Researching the movie, he "met a lot of real junkies. That was really, really depressing. Suddenly there didn't seem any real energy to build the film on other than the book. When you meet the real things it's like all the life has been taken away and there's nothing left but victims.... It's a debilitating experience rather than something that gives energy and life." In the novel, Renton is plain, zit-plagued, and unhealthy; as played by McGregor, he's dead sexy. And though Boyle knew that "real junkies ... [are] quite chubby," he made McGregor shed 28 pounds in order to achieve "the stick thin, artificial version ... that is the conceived idea of a heroin addict."
The fakeness of Trainspotting is both what's problematic and what's most engaging about it. Breaking with the gritty, quasi-documentary feel we've come to expect from British cinema (Ken Loach, Mike Leigh), Boyle opts instead for a kind of social surrealism. Struggling to kick, Renton procures some opium suppositories to ease his withdrawal pangs. (The dodgy-dealer cameo is played by Welsh himself.) But his habit has caused chronic constipation, which, minus heroin, wears off, and he's forced to relieve himself in a filthy public toilet. Realizing too late that he's also voided his precious narcotic orbs, Renton plunges his arms into the blocked toilet, then literally dives down the bowl. Suddenly he's swimming through a beatific subaquascape to the soothing Mantovaniesque strains of Brian Eno's "Deep Blue Day," and triumphantly scooping his lost gems from the rocky seabed.This amniotic vision was probably inspired by a passage in the book that imagines heroin as an "internal sea," the only trouble being that "this beautiful ocean carries with it loads ay poisonous flotsam and jetsam ... once the ocean rolls out, it leaves the shite behind, inside ma body."
Elsewhere, though, Trainspotting's visual brio subverts the book's meaning. Having successfully kicked, Renton confronts the real challenge - coping with the dreariness of unaltered consciousness. Keeping him on a close leash, his parents take him to the pub. But Boyle and Hodge deal with this supposed tedium by speeding up the film, so that the pub's middle-aged bingo players whizz around the inert Renton; the filmmakers can't even let boredom be boring.
Departing from the book in the film's last segment, Boyle and Hodge give us a brief vignette of a London rave that hints that the heroin scene of a few years earlier was but a prequel to Ecstasy culture. This interlude seems like a nod to Welsh's reputation as the "rave author"; indeed its paean to a new, Ecstasy-sponsored spirit of androgyny was probably inspired by Marabou Stork Nightmares. Another aspect of rave - its surrogate sense of community and belonging as a reaction against Tory-imposed social fragmentation - isn't spelled out, but can be read against another key sequence (also absent from the book) that shows Renton thriving as a London real estate agent at the height of the quick-killing economic boom of the late '80s. Describing his pleasure in scamming clients with dodgy apartment conversions, Renton paraphrases one of Margaret Thatcher's most infamous proclamations: "There's no such thing as society."
Renton's buddies, too, have come up with their own nefarious take on "enterprise culture": Sick Boy is a pimp and a pusher, Begbie's done an armed robbery. Thatcher's illegitimate children, they embroil Renton in a massive heroin deal. Taking self-help and initiative one step further, Renton rips off his homeboys and absconds with the loot. The movie ends as he strides into a bright tomorrow, the camera close-up on his maniacally grinning face as he recites a mantra of affirmation: "I'm cleaning up and moving on, going straight and choosing life," followed by an incantatory list of all the things ("indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing the gutters, getting by") that he'd earlier repudiated.
Welsh's book, though, ends on a more ambivalent, tentative note. Renton screws over his mates precisely in order to burn his boats; he can never return to Edinburgh for fear of Begbie's retribution. "There, he could not be anything other than he was. Now, free from them all, for good, he could be what he wanted to be."
Still, both book and film share a blind spot on the creepy subtext of Renton's escape. Not only has he broken the blood-brother ties of his surrogate clan, he has paid for his one-way ticket out of the proletariat with the proceeds of a heroin deal, thereby further enmiring thousands of his erstwhile fellow addicts. Both these betrayals reinforce the proposition that "there is no such thing as society." In the absence of any hope of collective amelioration, the only way out is class defection. For those who remain behind, drugs - taking them, selling them - is all that's left in "the long dark night of late capitalism."
VLS (Village Voice Literary Supplement), September 1998
by Simon Reynolds
Irvine Welsh is shaking his skinny ass, gliding across the floor of a cramped recording studio in South London, an impish grin on his face. He's dancing to his own work-in-progress, a disco track he's made with buddy Kris Needs (a veteran English gonzo music journalist) for an album soon to be released via Creation Records, the label most famous for giving the world Oasis.
Although Welsh pens the lyrics, his musical role in the project seems limited to power of veto and vision-maintenance: right now, he's worried that his partner will smother the'70s disco vibe by bringing in too much of a '90s hard techno edge. "Keep it cheesy, Kris," Welsh admonishes. Needs responds by sampling an orgasmic moan from an obscure gay house-music track, "Mr Policeman," and looping it into the pumping groove.
The scenario of "Mr Policeman"--a cop getting a blowjob--weirdly parallels the most repellent scene in Welsh's new novel Filth (W.W. Norton, 393 pp., $14 paper), which is something like a cross between Bad Lieutenant and Prime Suspect. The book's antihero, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, extorts fellatio from an angelic underage girl after discovering a cache of Ecstasy pills in her bag. Climaxing, Robertson breaks wind: "I'm farting oot loads ay gas, it's burning my eyes. The power of that Lauriston Place Curry Hoose's vindaloo! . . . She's choking, but I haud her heid steady until I'm ready, then I withdraw my cock from her miserable torn face, stuff it in my troosers, zip up and leave her to her tears. . . . I go through the lobby leaving the wee slut to soak up that distinctive curry, Guinness and [semen] atmosphere."
Filth is a novel that starts with a fart, ends with a bowel evacuation, and whose only moral voice emanates from the tapeworm lurking inside Robertson's colon. But then Welsh's fiction has never been polite or pretty. He's peopled all of his books--Trainspotting, The Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance--with characters too unsavory for the sedate drawing room of English literary fiction: junkies, soccer hooligans, Ecstasy-abusing ravers, petty criminals, and other species of British lowlife spawned during the Thatcher-Major government's 18-year-long project of systematically transforming a united, unionized working class into an auto-destructive lumpen proletariat.
Although Welsh has received recognition from the transatlantic literary establishment, he relishes the role of enfant terrible (albeit a babyfaced 40-year-old enfant). Good reviews don't matter to him because his first book, Trainspotting, found a fiercely loyal readership largely through word of mouth. Research by his publishers has shown that a hefty proportion of Welsh's audience doesn't read any fiction at all, apart from books by himself and kindred spirits like Morvern Callar author Alan Warner. Welsh regards these post literati as more competent readers than professional critics, because they have first-hand experience of the subcultural realms he documents: drug-and-dance culture, crime, the black economy, welfare subsistence. He now admits that his last book Ecstasy was deeply flawed, because so many of these ordinary "punters" came up "and told me, 'That was total shite, man.' " Welsh smiles, seemingly relishing this blunt feedback.
Instant success, money, and the translation of his works into other media have made Welsh supremely indifferent to his critical reception. But his hostility toward the London literary world still burns ardently. "You get all these fucking hypocrites in the literary establishment saying, 'Oh, we must get more people reading. . . .' As soon as someone like myself comes along and actually gets people reading books, they turn all sneery. What they mean is they want a market for the books they think people should read."
For a long time, "the enemy"--middle class, Oxbridge educated--was incarnated in the form of Martin Amis. Superficially, Amis and Welsh seem to have much in common: a sharp eye and nose for the textures of squalor, a menagerie of spiritually bankrupt protagonists, an obsession with the myriad shades of the English slanguage. But there's a crucial difference. From Amis's detached vantage point of privilege, the British class system and its attendant grotesqueries merely afford frightful amusement. If you're writing from somewhere closer to the bottom of the social heap, though, the stakes are higher, the reality of wasted potential and distorted lives all too raw and personal.
Welsh grew up in an Edinburgh housing scheme, the equivalent of the projects. At school, the notion of writing as vocation was unthinkable: "Back then, the idea of someone being a writer, you'd think of graffiti spray-painted on the walls," he notes wryly. Welsh's artistic impulses gravitated toward music; for several years he messed around in postpunk bands in Edinburgh and London, flitting between "crap jobs and the dole" and getting "fucked up with drugs, specifically heroin and speed." In the late '80s he swung to the other extreme, straightening himself out and getting on a career track: he worked in local government, took a degree in business management, began to set up a consultancy firm, even dabbled in real estate speculation.
But then the UK's rave explosion--triggered by acid house music and Ecstasy--began to lure him from the straight-and-narrow. Gradually, he got swept up in the mass bohemia of the dance-and-drug culture. And he started writing stories, partly to alleviate the tedium of an office job, but also to cope with the comedown phase after the frenzied high of the weekend. "It's good to write on a drug comedown," he says. "You almost reach that transcendental place where you've got away from how fucking bad you feel. For me, writing was a way of trying to keep the rave vibe and the experience going a bit into the working week."
Although the euphoric utopianism of the early days of rave has deeply affected him, Welsh's stories never conceal the motor behind the incandescent vitality of working-class leisure: desperation. To borrow the title of perhaps his most autobiographical story, Welsh is "A Smart Cunt"--a working-class autodidact too clever not to see through the safety valves (booze, football fanaticism, loveless sex, drugs) and inverted snobberies that hold the working class together in dismal complicity with their own oppression, yet perversely loyal to his social and regional roots. Although Welsh now lives in London with his wife, the Edinburgh underclass dialect will always be his truest literary voice; he still keeps an apartment in his home town.
In person, Welsh has a thick Scottish accent but he rarely resorts to the pungent slang that peppers his books; he comes off as unpretentiously erudite. Early publicity photos played up his barbarian-at-the-gates-of-literature outsider chic, making Welsh look menacing, misshapen and faintly psychopathic. In the flesh, he's actually rather handsome; with his ageless, Tin Tin-like face bobbing atop a tall, willowy physique, he resembles a cherubic skinhead. Dressed in slip-on shoes, jeans, white baseball cap, and striped T-shirt with a pair of sunglasses clipped onto its neckline, Welsh looks the picture of relaxation--just a regular guy on vacation. Only the faded tattoo on his arm--not a trendy nouvelle one but a skull in a harlequin's cap--hints at his street-credible past.
"Filth" is British slang for police, but as a title it seems to acknowledge Welsh's place in the counter-canon of literary abjection. Céline seems an obvious reference point: there's the same first-person, fear-and-self-loathing p.o.v., the same coarse vernacular, the same compulsion to make language "throb rather than reason." Like Céline's Journey to The End of the Night, Filth is also a lacerating anatomy of masculine psychology, a dissection of paranoia, misogyny, and spite.
Instead of doing his detective job (the plot concerns a mysterious homicide that may be racially motivated), Robertson devotes most of his energy to what he calls "the games"--the artful engineering of humiliations and career setbacks for his friends and colleagues. His keenest pleasure is schadenfreude (perverse delight in others' misfortunes), but he can't wait for it to occur naturally--he ensures it happens. "Every cunt has their Achilles' heel, and I always make a point of remembering my associates' ones. Something that crushes their self-image to a pulp."
Robertson is such a powerful character, so queerly and corrosively charismatic, that as I plunged deeper into Filth, I found myself becoming a progressively nastier person: short-tempered, brusque on the phone, malevolent-minded. Which begs the question: if reading Filth is a corrupting experience, what can it have been like to write it?
"It was horrible," laughs Welsh. "I was pretty difficult to be around when I was writing the novel. And what was really weird was, I had this big sty come out around my eyelid. I couldn't get rid of it, I tried for a year, all different creams, but it kept getting bigger. It might have been something as simple as repetitive eye strain from banging away on the VDU. But I do think it was psychosomatic, all the horrible stuff coming out, 'cos as soon as I typed the end, it just went. . . . But y'know, there's actually a perverse delight in writing about somebody you hate. You hate his racism, his sexism, even his music taste, everything about him. But when you dive into that kind of cesspool, it's quite creepy, because you do get into it. You have to, to make it believable."
Softspoken, subdued, a real gentle man--it's hard to imagine Welsh accessing the kind of monstrous psychic muck that fuels Robertson's careening trajectory through the novel. A prime inspiration for the character came from a nightwatchman Welsh once worked with. "He'd have these really dodgy, beaten-down, broken-up women come and visit him. And he was just unremittingly misogynistic. But when you're with someone like that for eight hours on a late shift, you do get pulled into the awfulness of his world."
Robertson is a creature of compulsions and cravings, vainly trying to staunch the insatiable void within. A typical day consists of any or all of the following: endless snacks on fat-saturated sausage rolls and bacon butties; starting an evil rumor about a fellow employee by daubing graffiti on the toilet wall; fiddling his overtime forms; making an obscene phone call to his best friend's wife, as part of a long-term scheme to ruin said best friend's life; enjoying an adulterous liaison, possibly involving erotic auto-asphyxiation; clawing the itchy rash on his buttocks and thighs until blood is drawn; getting drunk at the Masonic lodge; taking a cab home (remembering always to pay the driver the exact fare, no tip, and to savor the disappointment on his face), then passing out while ogling a porn video.
Although Robertson is constantly numbing himself or hyperstimulating himself, and halfway through the narrative develops a coke habit, Filth is less concerned with drug culture than any of Welsh's previous books. There is a sense, though, that Robertson's soul is pure cocaine--insofar as that drug makes every vice attractive and stimulates every appetite (except hunger). "Cocaine is the ultimate consumer capitalist drug," nods Welsh. "And Robertson's got that ideology of pure consumption. You can see that in the worm as well," he adds, referring to the tapeworm whose thoughts interrupt the text, and which evolve from blind id-like voracity ("eat eat") to super ego-like meditations on the psychological damage that made Robertson into the walking catastrophe that he is.
The drugs featured in Welsh's previous books--heroin in Trainspotting, Ecstasy in The Acid House and Marabou Stork Nightmares--all retain some aura of Romantic utopianism. These chemicals are sacraments of dissident subcultures, surrogates for thwarted dreams of social transformation. If these drugs can't change the world, they can at least change the way some individuals walk through the world: In Marabou, a soccer thug for whom "swedgin' " (hand-to-hand combat) is "my dancing" is transformed into a New Man thanks to the ego-melting power of Ecstasy and rave music. But Robertson and his coke-fiend detective partner Lennox don't want to get in touch with their inner child. Lennox tells an Ecstasy dealer that he never takes pills: "Tried them once, but they didnae go wi the job. Made me feel too good aboot everybody. Nae use in my game."
Filth's shift to cocaine--a drug that gives the user the illusion of control--parallels a departure in Welsh's writing. In the past, he's dealt with the dispossessed and disenfranchised; now, for the first time, he's exploring the psychology of power and privilege. Robertson is a class traitor: he grew up in a coal mining community, but joined the police around the time of the doomed miners' strike of 1984 because he wanted to join the power rather than fight it. Robertson lovingly recalls wielding his truncheon against union pickets and is eager to participate in a raid on a commune of anarcho-hippy ravers.
Robertson is the anti-raver: someone who (initially, at least) thrives on his own self-alienation and who regards techno music as a threat to the British way of life. Instead, he listens to heavy metal. Some of the funniest passages in Filth involve Robertson's earnest musings about the metal canon and the relative merits of specific albums by Deep Purple and Saxon--a subject Welsh seems suspiciously well informed about, although he claims he gleaned it all from a metal maniac friend. "I think I'll refuse to sell the film rights to Filth, 'cos I'd hate the fucking album that'd be made out of it!" he guffaws, nearly choking on what passes for bruschetta in England. "The soundtrack would fucking kill me!"
Although dance music and Ecstasy figure only on the periphery of Filth, Welsh continually alludes to rave culture as an analogy for what he does stylistically. He talks of trying to engage the attention-depleted, overstimulated sensorium of the postliterate generation, kids who've grown up on an entire spectrum of "rush culture" which bypasses meaning and instead works through sonic, visual, and tactile sensation.
"Special effects blockbuster films, or theme parks with bigger rides, they're all really rush-fix, adrenaline-buzz oriented. These strong psychoactive buzzy things, whether it's computer games or drugs, are all part of this pure escapist culture--people trying to outrun the nastiness in society, the disequilibrium in people's lives today." Welsh says that these days he's more enthused about writing for television or the silver screen (a movie version of The Acid House is due out early in 1999), and eagerly anticipates the outmoding of the traditional novel by the interactive book: CD-ROM novels that interface with sound and visuals, and offer readers multiple plot options. "The idea of the Book isn't that appealing to me right now," he shrugs. "I'm getting to that state where I think I've said everything in that format."
As part of his determination to catch up with the aural and optical intensities of music and film, Welsh has been experimenting with literary form for some time: breaking up the text in a manner akin to split-screen cinema for some of the Acid House stories; deploying different typefaces and multiple tiers of narrative in Marabou Stork Nightmares; superimposing the tapeworm's monologue over the main text in Filth. "For me, the process of the book is as important as the content--the process of how people engage with it. It goes back to rave music. Because of drugs and music, but also because of advertising and soundbites, people want to be engaged. Something's got to happen on every page in books. So when you get all these critics moaning about the death of the novel, the only reason is 'cos nothing's happening there. There's no point in describing what it's like watching the sun come up. What people want is almost like a steady beat to the writing. For me the device that works is using the dialect, both in narrative and dialogue, 'cos it's a very rhythmic, performative type of language," he says, comparing his use of it to the pulsating drive and flow-motion aesthetic of a great DJ.
Yet for all his scabrous subject matter and formal experiments, the pleasures of a Welsh novel are in some ways quite traditional--great characters, ring-of-truth dialogue, gripping plots, psychological insight, even moral weight (albeit voiced by a worm in the butt). He might loudly disdain traditional literary virtues as effete, enervated, and irrelevant, he might seek to align himself with more commercially viable sectors of pop culture, but in truth, Welsh's writing operates on a higher plane than the cheap thrills of Godzilla or Mortal Kombat. Discussing the British boom in clubbing-and-drugging fiction that he almost singlehandedly catalyzed, Welsh comes close to acknowledging this. "I don't think you can think of yourself as a 'rave writer,' " he says, wincing at the cliché often applied to him. "If you haven't got characterization and storyline, it doesn't matter what culture you come from or how clued up you are."
And then, as if to prove he really is the "rave author" after all, Welsh slips out of his seat and is dancing again to the pounding beat of his own record--shimmying with rubber-limbed fluency, giving me a thumbs-up sign and cheeky grin.
TRAINSPOTTING
Artforum, Summer, 1996
by Simon Reynolds
In Britain, pop culture and drug culture are almost synonymous these days. From Oasis' anthems of coked-out glory-lust to Pulp's number-one hit "Sorted for E's and Wizz" (a brilliantly ambivalent evocation of the dream and lie of rave), from the ganja-delic paranoia of Tricky to jungle's journeys into the dark side of Ecstasy culture, British pop is all highs and lows, uppers and downers. Other sectors of the culture industry lag behind music in reflecting what every British kid takes for granted: the sheer omnipresence and banality of recreational drug use. Which is why Irvine Welsh, chronicler of the "chemical generation," has become such a cult figure, and why the movie of his 1993 debut novel Trainspotting has become such a sensation in England, a sort of UK counterpart to Kids.
A big source of Welsh's appeal is the shock of encountering a writer who deals with British drug culture in a matter-of-fact, nonjudgmental way, while never concealing either its physical and psychic costs or the desperation that fuels it. The backdrop to his tales of lumpen-prole life in the deprived "housing schemes" of Edinburgh is postindustrial unemployment and the humiliation of a socialist Scotland within a Tory-ruled UK. He seldom confronts this political deadlock explicitly, but when he does, his anatomy of curdled idealism and hope is unsparing. In the novella A Smart Cunt (part of the story collection The Acid House, published in England in 1994), a left-wing militant tries to recruit Brian (Welsh's most autobiographical protagonist). "I'm thinking, what can I do, really do for the emancipation of working people in this country, shat on by the rich, tied into political inaction by servile reliance on a reactionary, moribund and yet still unelectable Labour Party?," muses Brian. "The answer is a resounding fuck all. Getting up early to sell a couple of [political pamphlets] in a shopping centre is not my idea of the best way to chill out.... I think I'll stick to drugs to get me through the long, dark night of late capitalism."
In Welsh's world, even nonravers are on drugs, literally (state-sanctioned chemicals like alcohol or tranquilizers) or metaphorically (TV, videos, computer games, the adrenaline rush of football violence). But Welsh - an ex-junkie and still a fervent raver - is mostly preoccupied with illegal forms of raising and razing consciousness. The Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares, published in England in 1995, and the forthcoming Ecstasy: Three Chemical Romances largely concern the rave scene's drugs of choice: MDMA, LSD, and "jellies" (slang for the downer Temazepam). And Trainspotting focuses on Edinburgh's heroin subculture of the mid '80s, when Pakistani smack had glutted the UK market, becoming, for thousands of ordinary people mired in unemployment, a cheaper means to oblivion than alcohol.
Welsh captures this moment by contrasting the "honest" junkies Renton, Spud, and Sick Boy with their mate Begbie, a sociopath who boasts that he "wouldnae poison ma body with that shite" while consuming gallons of booze, smoking like a chimney, and finding his own twisted form of release in gratuitous violence. But Welsh's junkies aren't just renegades from the "hard man" mentality Begbie represents; they're also in revolt against Scotland's "work hard, play hard" regime. Welsh describes the smackhead as a "closet romantic," someone who refuses to accept life's limitations.
It is from this one among many of Welsh's stray insights that director Danny Boyle and writer John Hodge (the team responsible for the 1994 film Shallow Grave) launch their movie. Putting a mischievous spin on the slogan "just say no," their version of Trainspotting fanfares heroin as a romantic renunciation of mediocrity. In a monologue superimposed over an exhilarating chase scene after a bungled shoplifting, Renton (Ewan McGregor) sarcastically itemizes the meaningless options available to the good citizen. "Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth.... Choose your future. Choose life." Then the punch line: "Well, I chose not to choose life.... And the reasons? Who needs reasons when you've got heroin."
This is up-front stuff, and before you've caught your breath, Boyle cuts to perhaps the most true-to-Welsh aspect of the movie: a paean to self-poisoning. "People think heroin is all about death and misery and despair.... What they forget is the pleasure of it.... After all, we're not fucking stupid." The scene is the glamorously squalid council flat (the grot and grunge have a glossy, hyperreal feel) where Renton and his pals cook up and inject. The camera clings to their pasty faces, screwed up in need and anticipation, relief and rapture. Allison (Susan Vidler), a single mother (her baby crawls happily among filth and comatose bodies), is shot up by Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) in a parody of sexual penetration; as her face spasms with the rush, she gasps, "That's better than any meat injection, better than any fucking cock in the world." Renton's voice-over attempts to quantify the experience: "Take your best orgasm and multiply it by a thousand." (This is inflation: in the book, it's only by twenty.)
Predictably, Trainspotting has been accused of glamorizing drugs, and indeed the film is riveting in precise ratio to the extent that it glosses over the tawdry torpor of the druggie lifestyle. Welsh's writing gets round the banality of drug use, and the dreariness of the environment that the junkies seek to "obliviate," by the vividness of his dialogue - rich with slang and expletives, and mostly in dialect. Toning down the verbals (Welsh-speak is hard for non-Scots), Boyle vibes up the visuals. This and his film's sheer pace conspire to make its wasters and psychos appear dynamic and charismatic, people you'd love to hang out with.
Speaking to Premiere magazine, Boyle was surprisingly candid about the liberties he took. Researching the movie, he "met a lot of real junkies. That was really, really depressing. Suddenly there didn't seem any real energy to build the film on other than the book. When you meet the real things it's like all the life has been taken away and there's nothing left but victims.... It's a debilitating experience rather than something that gives energy and life." In the novel, Renton is plain, zit-plagued, and unhealthy; as played by McGregor, he's dead sexy. And though Boyle knew that "real junkies ... [are] quite chubby," he made McGregor shed 28 pounds in order to achieve "the stick thin, artificial version ... that is the conceived idea of a heroin addict."
The fakeness of Trainspotting is both what's problematic and what's most engaging about it. Breaking with the gritty, quasi-documentary feel we've come to expect from British cinema (Ken Loach, Mike Leigh), Boyle opts instead for a kind of social surrealism. Struggling to kick, Renton procures some opium suppositories to ease his withdrawal pangs. (The dodgy-dealer cameo is played by Welsh himself.) But his habit has caused chronic constipation, which, minus heroin, wears off, and he's forced to relieve himself in a filthy public toilet. Realizing too late that he's also voided his precious narcotic orbs, Renton plunges his arms into the blocked toilet, then literally dives down the bowl. Suddenly he's swimming through a beatific subaquascape to the soothing Mantovaniesque strains of Brian Eno's "Deep Blue Day," and triumphantly scooping his lost gems from the rocky seabed.This amniotic vision was probably inspired by a passage in the book that imagines heroin as an "internal sea," the only trouble being that "this beautiful ocean carries with it loads ay poisonous flotsam and jetsam ... once the ocean rolls out, it leaves the shite behind, inside ma body."
Elsewhere, though, Trainspotting's visual brio subverts the book's meaning. Having successfully kicked, Renton confronts the real challenge - coping with the dreariness of unaltered consciousness. Keeping him on a close leash, his parents take him to the pub. But Boyle and Hodge deal with this supposed tedium by speeding up the film, so that the pub's middle-aged bingo players whizz around the inert Renton; the filmmakers can't even let boredom be boring.
Departing from the book in the film's last segment, Boyle and Hodge give us a brief vignette of a London rave that hints that the heroin scene of a few years earlier was but a prequel to Ecstasy culture. This interlude seems like a nod to Welsh's reputation as the "rave author"; indeed its paean to a new, Ecstasy-sponsored spirit of androgyny was probably inspired by Marabou Stork Nightmares. Another aspect of rave - its surrogate sense of community and belonging as a reaction against Tory-imposed social fragmentation - isn't spelled out, but can be read against another key sequence (also absent from the book) that shows Renton thriving as a London real estate agent at the height of the quick-killing economic boom of the late '80s. Describing his pleasure in scamming clients with dodgy apartment conversions, Renton paraphrases one of Margaret Thatcher's most infamous proclamations: "There's no such thing as society."
Renton's buddies, too, have come up with their own nefarious take on "enterprise culture": Sick Boy is a pimp and a pusher, Begbie's done an armed robbery. Thatcher's illegitimate children, they embroil Renton in a massive heroin deal. Taking self-help and initiative one step further, Renton rips off his homeboys and absconds with the loot. The movie ends as he strides into a bright tomorrow, the camera close-up on his maniacally grinning face as he recites a mantra of affirmation: "I'm cleaning up and moving on, going straight and choosing life," followed by an incantatory list of all the things ("indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing the gutters, getting by") that he'd earlier repudiated.
Welsh's book, though, ends on a more ambivalent, tentative note. Renton screws over his mates precisely in order to burn his boats; he can never return to Edinburgh for fear of Begbie's retribution. "There, he could not be anything other than he was. Now, free from them all, for good, he could be what he wanted to be."
Still, both book and film share a blind spot on the creepy subtext of Renton's escape. Not only has he broken the blood-brother ties of his surrogate clan, he has paid for his one-way ticket out of the proletariat with the proceeds of a heroin deal, thereby further enmiring thousands of his erstwhile fellow addicts. Both these betrayals reinforce the proposition that "there is no such thing as society." In the absence of any hope of collective amelioration, the only way out is class defection. For those who remain behind, drugs - taking them, selling them - is all that's left in "the long dark night of late capitalism."
Monday, January 30, 2012
POSTPUNK LONDON
Time Out, April 2005
by Simon Reynolds
If you want to get a vivid sense of what London felt like in the late Seventies, rent the DVD of Rude Boy. Filmed during 1978-79, the Clash's semi-documentary teems with great footage of Rock Against Racism carnivals and National Front demonstrations. But what really strikes the contemporary eye is how crap everything looks. With its washed-out colour schemes, shabby clothes, and grey faces, London resembles an Eastern Bloc city compared to today's design-conscious and style-saturated metropolis.
Beneath the drab surface, though, late Seventies London was culturally vibrant in ways that make the sharp-dressed and monied capital of today seem frankly impoverished. Rock music, avant-garde art, critical theory, and militant politics cross-contaminated each other to create a ferment of creativity and dissent. Although the capital was getting an early taste of Thatcherism--spending cuts, attacks on public transport and council housing--courtesy of the Conservative leadership that took over the GLC (Greater London Council) in 1977, London still had plenty of spaces for alternative lifestyles. Squat culture and low-rent bohemia thrived during what was effectively the glorious last blast of the counterculture.
1977 was supposed to be Year Zero, as far as the punks were concerned. They scorned the lank-locked hippies, rolling joints on their gatefold album sleeves and blissing out to noodly guitar solos. Yet in truth punk rock was really a historical blip, a brief interruption in the continuum of progressive music and culture that stretched from the psychedelia of 1967 to the avant-funk and industrial dub of 1979. This explains why Ladbroke Grove and its surrounding neighbourhoods were so key during the postpunk period. Former stomping ground of Pink Floyd and Hawkind, home to the epoch-defing progressive labels Island and Virgin, the Grove segued seamlessly from the era of kaftans, flares and Afghan coats to the Doc Martens, drainpipes and holey out-size jumpers of postpunk.
One thing shared by the hippies and the postpunks was the white Brit boho veneration for reggae as the ultimate "roots rock rebel" sound. Former Island Records press officer, reggae journalist, and maker of the dubby post-punk single "Launderette", Vivien Goldman lived in W11 during this era. She remembers there being at least half-a-dozen illegal sound systems within walking distance from her house on Ladbroke Grove. Known as "blues," the parties typically operated out of someone's flat or house. "You'd pay a quid on the door, get a spiff and a Red Stripe, and rave all night to dub and lover's rock. Ladbroke Grove was much more scuzzy in those days, and much more like a village. It really was a scene where you'd run into everybody on Portobello on Saturday afternoon without fail, whether you wanted to see them or not."
A major hangout for West London's postpunk community was the Rough Trade record shop, which took over a building on Kensington Park Road that had formerly been the site of the UK's first hippie "headshop. "Rough Trade became a real magnet," says RT co-founder Geoff Travis. "You could just hang out and browse without anyone harassing you, and there were chairs and huge speakers pumping out all the reggae pre-releases. We made the connection with punk really early." Ladbroke Grove was The Clash's manor, after all. Their lyrics were shadowed by the Westway flyover and the Brutalist monstrosity of Trellick Tower (which now looks almost charmingly quaint with its utilitarian design), while "White Riot" was inspired by the disorder of the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival.
Rough Trade the label started almost exactly two years after the record shop opened for business in February 1976. Operating out of a little shed at the back of the store, between 1978 and 1981 Rough Trade released many of postpunk's defining records, some from out-of-towners like Swell Maps, Cabaret Voltaire, Kleenex, and The Fall, and others from London vanguard outfits like This Heat, Scritti Politti, and The Raincoats. As striking as its discography, though, was the idealism that informed the way Rough Trade operated. Despite being a privately owned company, it was run as a cooperative, with all the staff enjoying equal pay and equal say (just like Time Out, in those days).
Travis embodied the continuity between the counterculture and postpunk. He talks about growing up during the era of Schoolkids' Oz and the Grosvenor Square demonstrations, and living in squats all across London. "Mile End, Camden, Bloomsbury... I was living in a squat when the Rough Trade store opened." Later he became Vivien Goldman's housemate and tested her patience with the endless succession of Rough Trade bands from outside the city who kipped on the floor when in town to make records or play gigs.
A short walk from Rough Trade, at the far end of Portobello beyond the Westway, stood the former premises of Sixties underground paper International Times. By the late Seventies it was occupied by a company called Better Badges. Wearing your allegiances--political or musical--on your lapels was the thing to do in those heady days, and Better Badges was the market leader. But the guy behind Better was no "breadhead." An original hippie who had worked as an editor at International Times and legendarily hadn't cut his locks since 1968, Jolyon McFie started an idealistic "print now/pay later" scheme to help fledgling fanzines like Jamming get off the ground. The editors could then lug the copies down the road to Rough Trade, whose burgeoning distribution network would get them into independent record stores across the nation.
On their way from Better Badges to Rough Trade, the spotty zine kids would pass Acklam Hall, a venue tucked under the Westway flyover. Later renamed Subterrania, Acklam Hall started out hosting benefit gigs (including ones for Rock Against Racism), survived a neo-fascist arson attack, and blossomed as a crucial performance space for postpunk groups. Scritti Politti made their live debut there in November 1978, playing a four song set (because that's all the tunes they then had) and going down so well, the audience insisted they play the 15 minute set again. On the same bill were Latimer Road postpunks pragVEC, whose offshoot band The Atoms featured comedian/actor Keith Allen singing ditties like "Max Bygraves Killed My Mother."
Another key West London venue was The Chippenham, a dingy upstairs room of a Westbourne Grove pub, where bands performed without a stage. In 1979, it was the place to see Rough Trade's gloriously shambolic feminist postpunkers The Raincoats and lesser-known absurdists like The Tesco Bombers and The Vincent Units. Raincoats bassist Gina Birch lived nearby in the squat-infested Monmouth Road. "Some of the houses had been burnt out and were literally uninhabitable," she recalls. "The one we lived in was not a pretty sight. People would say, 'we're making a post-holocaust film, can we shoot in your house?' We had mushrooms growing out of the toilet wall."
Vicky Aspinall, the Raincoats' violinist, was recruited after she spotted the band's ad--"female musician wanted: no style but strength"--in Camden's late lamented radical bookstore Compendium. There were postpunk outposts across the city--John Lydon and PiL's bunker at Gunter Grove in the grubby end of Chelsea, the Cold Storage studio on Brixton's Acre Lane where This Heat recorded, Throbbing Gristle's 'Death Factory' HQ in Hackney--but in truth Camden was Ladbroke Grove's only real rival during this period as an alternative culture stronghold. It was home to Scritti Politti and the clutch of likeminded do-it-yourself bands who clustered around them, and to the London Musician's Collective.
"Being in Camden, it just felt like you were in the right place," recalls LMC co-founder David Toop. He says that the area's bohemian prime really kicked off with punk. "One time I took this musician from America to a local café, and the guy was utterly astonished when the Clash walked in. But that was actually totally normal at that time." The Clash were doubtless taking a break from rehearsing at their practice space, a disused British Rail storage shed on Chalk Farm Road. The LMC also repurposed British Rail property, taking over a former BR laundry-cum-social club on Gloucester Avenue and turning it into a performance space.
Originally born out of the UK's free improvisation scene, the LMC began to attract discontented ex-punks like Viv Albertine of The Slits and Mark Perry of Sniffin' Glue/Alternative TV, who chafed against the strictures of conventional rock. Fans of the early, chaotic incarnation of the Slits, Toop and LMC co-founder Steve Beresford wanted to foster a dialogue between the virtuosos of British improv and the non-skilled DIY types who'd emerged from punk. A spirit of irreverent playfulness and quirked-out whimsy informed the LMC scene's music, symbolized in a shared penchant for toy pianos and other unusual instruments. On one memorable night, Bendell from LMC regulars The Door and the Window played a solo set using the room's radiators. "The whole idea was 'to make music you don't need to have a musical instrument," says Perry. "'Fuck the rules'."
In 1979/80, the LMC became a real vortex of activity. "The monthly meetings were hugely well attended, and quite fractious," says Toop. Anarcho-feminist ideas were in the air, and inevitably there was a tension between wanting to dismantle conventional power structures and actually getting anything done. "A lot of people's typical LMC gig was, you arrived at 8 o'clock, nobody was there, so you'd go to the pub," recalls Toop. "You'd come back and somebody was collecting money on the door, but the musicians weren't there. Gradually the musicians might drift in, somewhat pissed. And it might be a great gig musically or it might just fall apart. Usually there was no PA system." In the end, Toop got worn down by being the de facto organizer and quit the LMC. "That's the main argument against collectivism--it's just too exhausting!"
Over the road from the LMC was The Engineer pub, whose back room became "the court of Scritti," according to Steve Beresford. Scritti Politti were also a collective. The core trio of musicians were surrounded by a think-tank of some 20 people who vigorously debated all aspects of the group's existence. As well as attending regular meetings at the band's Carol Street squat, some members of the collective would also come onstage at Scritti gigs to add extra clamor and commotion to the group's "scratchy-collapsy, stop-start mistakes, falling-over sound", a style that singer Green christened "messthetics."
"The squat was pretty squalid, there wasn't even a bathroom," recalls Green. Oi! band Skrewdriver lived a few doors down the road, and the contrast between Scritti (members of the Young Communist League) and the Far Right Skrewdriver neatly captures the political polarization of the time. In the May 1979 general election, the National Front ran candidates in every electoral seat in the country, prompting Rock Against Racism to retaliate with the 40 date "Militant Entertainment" tour. 1979 was a banner year for racial attacks and street violence, inspiring songs like the The Jam's "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" and Fatal Microbes' postpunk classic "Violence Grows", on which singer Honey Bane describes people looking the other way as someone gets "kicked to death in a London pedestrian subway." Green remembers the threat of aggro as a constant presence. "A lot of my friends in Camden were beaten up. We'd get attacked coming back from gigs. I was doing some part-time work at the Communist Party HQ in Covent Garden and there were letter bombs while I was there."
Today the average price of a house in Camden is £420,000. At the tail-end of the Seventies, though, it was an edgy place to live. Compendium served as a crucial resource for radicals of all stripes, crammed as it was with small press periodicals, activist pamphlets, fanzines, critical theory paperbacks, and early translations of French post-structuralist philosophy of the sort that would eventually inspire Green to write a catchy ditty entitled "Jacques Derrida." "You could go downstairs in the basement and root about, spend hours in there," recalls Green. "It was a really important place."
One member of Scritti's sprawling collective in those days was Ian Penman, the legendary music journalist (in)famous for introducing the jargon of deconstruction to the ink-smutted pages of NME. He occasionally blew freeform saxophone onstage with Scritti, as well as playing on pragVEC records under the pseudonym "Reeds Moran." According to Penman, life for the amphetamine-fiending postpunk aesthete was organized around a clandestine cartography of "grotty squats, grotty art house cinemas, grotty record shops." All-night cinemas like Screen on the Green or the Scala were crucial hang-outs. This was an era, remember, before the mire of entertainment options offered by video stores and DVDs, satellite and cable. If you craved culture, you had to go to specific locations to find it, meaning that you would experience it not in the solipsistic pod of your living room, but in a collective environment, surrounded by fellow freaks and night creatures.
Postpunk bohemia started crumbling in the early Eighties when the Thatcher effect kicked in. It was time to "get real," clamber onto some kind of career(ist) track, whether within pop music or outside it. Hence New Pop, in which squat-punk fellow-travelers like the Thompson Twins followed Green's lead and ditched their saxophones and hand-percussion in favor of synths and drum machines, and embraced the aesthetic and promotional possibilities of video. Boy George had lived in squats in Kentish Town and Warren Street, alongside characters like gender-bender Marilyn and Haysi Fantayzee's Jeremy Healey, but then his band Culture Club stormed the charts with a pop reggae sound even more sugary than Scritti's failed crossover bid "The 'Sweetest Girl'." Camden became synonomous with New Romantic club the Camden Palace, and with Madness, whose latterday hits included a cover of "'The Sweetest Girl.''
Partly impelled by losing hit-hungry bands like Scritti to big labels with the muscle to get them in the charts, Rough Trade tried to shed its "brown rice" collectivist image and adopted competitive practices in tune with the Eighties. They overhauled their managerial structure and hired radio pluggers. For those who didn't take the chartpop entryist route, the alternatives were to continue making marginal music in an increasingly discouraging environment, or... get a job. Sue Gogan, vocalist for pragVEC, briefly worked as a road sweeper for Camden Council after the band fell apart. One cold morning in 1984, working her broom at the bottom of a short steep hill near a photographer's studio, she saw "a pretty flash motor pull up. The driver got out and opened the back door of the car. Out stepped Green. I guess he'd 'made it'. Funny."
Time Out, April 2005
by Simon Reynolds
If you want to get a vivid sense of what London felt like in the late Seventies, rent the DVD of Rude Boy. Filmed during 1978-79, the Clash's semi-documentary teems with great footage of Rock Against Racism carnivals and National Front demonstrations. But what really strikes the contemporary eye is how crap everything looks. With its washed-out colour schemes, shabby clothes, and grey faces, London resembles an Eastern Bloc city compared to today's design-conscious and style-saturated metropolis.
Beneath the drab surface, though, late Seventies London was culturally vibrant in ways that make the sharp-dressed and monied capital of today seem frankly impoverished. Rock music, avant-garde art, critical theory, and militant politics cross-contaminated each other to create a ferment of creativity and dissent. Although the capital was getting an early taste of Thatcherism--spending cuts, attacks on public transport and council housing--courtesy of the Conservative leadership that took over the GLC (Greater London Council) in 1977, London still had plenty of spaces for alternative lifestyles. Squat culture and low-rent bohemia thrived during what was effectively the glorious last blast of the counterculture.
1977 was supposed to be Year Zero, as far as the punks were concerned. They scorned the lank-locked hippies, rolling joints on their gatefold album sleeves and blissing out to noodly guitar solos. Yet in truth punk rock was really a historical blip, a brief interruption in the continuum of progressive music and culture that stretched from the psychedelia of 1967 to the avant-funk and industrial dub of 1979. This explains why Ladbroke Grove and its surrounding neighbourhoods were so key during the postpunk period. Former stomping ground of Pink Floyd and Hawkind, home to the epoch-defing progressive labels Island and Virgin, the Grove segued seamlessly from the era of kaftans, flares and Afghan coats to the Doc Martens, drainpipes and holey out-size jumpers of postpunk.
One thing shared by the hippies and the postpunks was the white Brit boho veneration for reggae as the ultimate "roots rock rebel" sound. Former Island Records press officer, reggae journalist, and maker of the dubby post-punk single "Launderette", Vivien Goldman lived in W11 during this era. She remembers there being at least half-a-dozen illegal sound systems within walking distance from her house on Ladbroke Grove. Known as "blues," the parties typically operated out of someone's flat or house. "You'd pay a quid on the door, get a spiff and a Red Stripe, and rave all night to dub and lover's rock. Ladbroke Grove was much more scuzzy in those days, and much more like a village. It really was a scene where you'd run into everybody on Portobello on Saturday afternoon without fail, whether you wanted to see them or not."
A major hangout for West London's postpunk community was the Rough Trade record shop, which took over a building on Kensington Park Road that had formerly been the site of the UK's first hippie "headshop. "Rough Trade became a real magnet," says RT co-founder Geoff Travis. "You could just hang out and browse without anyone harassing you, and there were chairs and huge speakers pumping out all the reggae pre-releases. We made the connection with punk really early." Ladbroke Grove was The Clash's manor, after all. Their lyrics were shadowed by the Westway flyover and the Brutalist monstrosity of Trellick Tower (which now looks almost charmingly quaint with its utilitarian design), while "White Riot" was inspired by the disorder of the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival.
Rough Trade the label started almost exactly two years after the record shop opened for business in February 1976. Operating out of a little shed at the back of the store, between 1978 and 1981 Rough Trade released many of postpunk's defining records, some from out-of-towners like Swell Maps, Cabaret Voltaire, Kleenex, and The Fall, and others from London vanguard outfits like This Heat, Scritti Politti, and The Raincoats. As striking as its discography, though, was the idealism that informed the way Rough Trade operated. Despite being a privately owned company, it was run as a cooperative, with all the staff enjoying equal pay and equal say (just like Time Out, in those days).
Travis embodied the continuity between the counterculture and postpunk. He talks about growing up during the era of Schoolkids' Oz and the Grosvenor Square demonstrations, and living in squats all across London. "Mile End, Camden, Bloomsbury... I was living in a squat when the Rough Trade store opened." Later he became Vivien Goldman's housemate and tested her patience with the endless succession of Rough Trade bands from outside the city who kipped on the floor when in town to make records or play gigs.
A short walk from Rough Trade, at the far end of Portobello beyond the Westway, stood the former premises of Sixties underground paper International Times. By the late Seventies it was occupied by a company called Better Badges. Wearing your allegiances--political or musical--on your lapels was the thing to do in those heady days, and Better Badges was the market leader. But the guy behind Better was no "breadhead." An original hippie who had worked as an editor at International Times and legendarily hadn't cut his locks since 1968, Jolyon McFie started an idealistic "print now/pay later" scheme to help fledgling fanzines like Jamming get off the ground. The editors could then lug the copies down the road to Rough Trade, whose burgeoning distribution network would get them into independent record stores across the nation.
On their way from Better Badges to Rough Trade, the spotty zine kids would pass Acklam Hall, a venue tucked under the Westway flyover. Later renamed Subterrania, Acklam Hall started out hosting benefit gigs (including ones for Rock Against Racism), survived a neo-fascist arson attack, and blossomed as a crucial performance space for postpunk groups. Scritti Politti made their live debut there in November 1978, playing a four song set (because that's all the tunes they then had) and going down so well, the audience insisted they play the 15 minute set again. On the same bill were Latimer Road postpunks pragVEC, whose offshoot band The Atoms featured comedian/actor Keith Allen singing ditties like "Max Bygraves Killed My Mother."
Another key West London venue was The Chippenham, a dingy upstairs room of a Westbourne Grove pub, where bands performed without a stage. In 1979, it was the place to see Rough Trade's gloriously shambolic feminist postpunkers The Raincoats and lesser-known absurdists like The Tesco Bombers and The Vincent Units. Raincoats bassist Gina Birch lived nearby in the squat-infested Monmouth Road. "Some of the houses had been burnt out and were literally uninhabitable," she recalls. "The one we lived in was not a pretty sight. People would say, 'we're making a post-holocaust film, can we shoot in your house?' We had mushrooms growing out of the toilet wall."
Vicky Aspinall, the Raincoats' violinist, was recruited after she spotted the band's ad--"female musician wanted: no style but strength"--in Camden's late lamented radical bookstore Compendium. There were postpunk outposts across the city--John Lydon and PiL's bunker at Gunter Grove in the grubby end of Chelsea, the Cold Storage studio on Brixton's Acre Lane where This Heat recorded, Throbbing Gristle's 'Death Factory' HQ in Hackney--but in truth Camden was Ladbroke Grove's only real rival during this period as an alternative culture stronghold. It was home to Scritti Politti and the clutch of likeminded do-it-yourself bands who clustered around them, and to the London Musician's Collective.
"Being in Camden, it just felt like you were in the right place," recalls LMC co-founder David Toop. He says that the area's bohemian prime really kicked off with punk. "One time I took this musician from America to a local café, and the guy was utterly astonished when the Clash walked in. But that was actually totally normal at that time." The Clash were doubtless taking a break from rehearsing at their practice space, a disused British Rail storage shed on Chalk Farm Road. The LMC also repurposed British Rail property, taking over a former BR laundry-cum-social club on Gloucester Avenue and turning it into a performance space.
Originally born out of the UK's free improvisation scene, the LMC began to attract discontented ex-punks like Viv Albertine of The Slits and Mark Perry of Sniffin' Glue/Alternative TV, who chafed against the strictures of conventional rock. Fans of the early, chaotic incarnation of the Slits, Toop and LMC co-founder Steve Beresford wanted to foster a dialogue between the virtuosos of British improv and the non-skilled DIY types who'd emerged from punk. A spirit of irreverent playfulness and quirked-out whimsy informed the LMC scene's music, symbolized in a shared penchant for toy pianos and other unusual instruments. On one memorable night, Bendell from LMC regulars The Door and the Window played a solo set using the room's radiators. "The whole idea was 'to make music you don't need to have a musical instrument," says Perry. "'Fuck the rules'."
In 1979/80, the LMC became a real vortex of activity. "The monthly meetings were hugely well attended, and quite fractious," says Toop. Anarcho-feminist ideas were in the air, and inevitably there was a tension between wanting to dismantle conventional power structures and actually getting anything done. "A lot of people's typical LMC gig was, you arrived at 8 o'clock, nobody was there, so you'd go to the pub," recalls Toop. "You'd come back and somebody was collecting money on the door, but the musicians weren't there. Gradually the musicians might drift in, somewhat pissed. And it might be a great gig musically or it might just fall apart. Usually there was no PA system." In the end, Toop got worn down by being the de facto organizer and quit the LMC. "That's the main argument against collectivism--it's just too exhausting!"
Over the road from the LMC was The Engineer pub, whose back room became "the court of Scritti," according to Steve Beresford. Scritti Politti were also a collective. The core trio of musicians were surrounded by a think-tank of some 20 people who vigorously debated all aspects of the group's existence. As well as attending regular meetings at the band's Carol Street squat, some members of the collective would also come onstage at Scritti gigs to add extra clamor and commotion to the group's "scratchy-collapsy, stop-start mistakes, falling-over sound", a style that singer Green christened "messthetics."
"The squat was pretty squalid, there wasn't even a bathroom," recalls Green. Oi! band Skrewdriver lived a few doors down the road, and the contrast between Scritti (members of the Young Communist League) and the Far Right Skrewdriver neatly captures the political polarization of the time. In the May 1979 general election, the National Front ran candidates in every electoral seat in the country, prompting Rock Against Racism to retaliate with the 40 date "Militant Entertainment" tour. 1979 was a banner year for racial attacks and street violence, inspiring songs like the The Jam's "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" and Fatal Microbes' postpunk classic "Violence Grows", on which singer Honey Bane describes people looking the other way as someone gets "kicked to death in a London pedestrian subway." Green remembers the threat of aggro as a constant presence. "A lot of my friends in Camden were beaten up. We'd get attacked coming back from gigs. I was doing some part-time work at the Communist Party HQ in Covent Garden and there were letter bombs while I was there."
Today the average price of a house in Camden is £420,000. At the tail-end of the Seventies, though, it was an edgy place to live. Compendium served as a crucial resource for radicals of all stripes, crammed as it was with small press periodicals, activist pamphlets, fanzines, critical theory paperbacks, and early translations of French post-structuralist philosophy of the sort that would eventually inspire Green to write a catchy ditty entitled "Jacques Derrida." "You could go downstairs in the basement and root about, spend hours in there," recalls Green. "It was a really important place."
One member of Scritti's sprawling collective in those days was Ian Penman, the legendary music journalist (in)famous for introducing the jargon of deconstruction to the ink-smutted pages of NME. He occasionally blew freeform saxophone onstage with Scritti, as well as playing on pragVEC records under the pseudonym "Reeds Moran." According to Penman, life for the amphetamine-fiending postpunk aesthete was organized around a clandestine cartography of "grotty squats, grotty art house cinemas, grotty record shops." All-night cinemas like Screen on the Green or the Scala were crucial hang-outs. This was an era, remember, before the mire of entertainment options offered by video stores and DVDs, satellite and cable. If you craved culture, you had to go to specific locations to find it, meaning that you would experience it not in the solipsistic pod of your living room, but in a collective environment, surrounded by fellow freaks and night creatures.
Postpunk bohemia started crumbling in the early Eighties when the Thatcher effect kicked in. It was time to "get real," clamber onto some kind of career(ist) track, whether within pop music or outside it. Hence New Pop, in which squat-punk fellow-travelers like the Thompson Twins followed Green's lead and ditched their saxophones and hand-percussion in favor of synths and drum machines, and embraced the aesthetic and promotional possibilities of video. Boy George had lived in squats in Kentish Town and Warren Street, alongside characters like gender-bender Marilyn and Haysi Fantayzee's Jeremy Healey, but then his band Culture Club stormed the charts with a pop reggae sound even more sugary than Scritti's failed crossover bid "The 'Sweetest Girl'." Camden became synonomous with New Romantic club the Camden Palace, and with Madness, whose latterday hits included a cover of "'The Sweetest Girl.''
Partly impelled by losing hit-hungry bands like Scritti to big labels with the muscle to get them in the charts, Rough Trade tried to shed its "brown rice" collectivist image and adopted competitive practices in tune with the Eighties. They overhauled their managerial structure and hired radio pluggers. For those who didn't take the chartpop entryist route, the alternatives were to continue making marginal music in an increasingly discouraging environment, or... get a job. Sue Gogan, vocalist for pragVEC, briefly worked as a road sweeper for Camden Council after the band fell apart. One cold morning in 1984, working her broom at the bottom of a short steep hill near a photographer's studio, she saw "a pretty flash motor pull up. The driver got out and opened the back door of the car. Out stepped Green. I guess he'd 'made it'. Funny."
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
DEATH IN VEGAS
Spin, 1999
by Simon Reynolds
"Have you got any Jack Purcell's?" asks Richard Fearless.
The burly sales clerk in Sports Authority looks blank.
"It's a make of trainers," Fearless explains.
The sales clerk looks blanker still.
"Sneakers, Rich-- in America, they call 'em sneakers," translates Tim Holmes, Fearless's sound engineer partner in Death In Vegas.
Arriving in New York, the first thing British bands --especially those affiliated to dance music--tend to do is hunt down the latest lines of name-brand sneakers. It seems typical of Richard Fearless that his holy grail is a ultra-obscure brand named after a post-war tennis champion; a brand he became obsessed with after spotting them on Elvis Presley's feet in a classic 1950s stage photograph. Style is something of an obsession for Fearless, who's reknowned in Britain for his mod-influenced sharp-dressed look, who recently turned down a Calvin Klein TV commercial, and whose prized pair of Patrick Cox snakeskin loafers were stolen when he passed out after DJing at a club.
Today, hitting the street again after the fruitless footwear quest, he's looking relatively under-dressed in a long sleeve pink shirt and faded jeans with the silver letters AC and DC stenciled on alternate buttocks. Still, in many ways Fearless and his band represent every Anglophobe's nightmare of style-over-content Limey art-rock. After getting an art scholarship at a boarding school aged 13, Fearless went on to study Fine Art at college, before switching to a graphic design degree course at the London College of Printing. It's in his blood: his mother is an art teacher and his sister designs shoes. Even his voice has the classic UK art school rock accent--middle class, but slurred and mumbly in a downwardly mobile effort to suppress its innately posh crispness and clarity.
Wandering the streets of mid-town Manhattan, Fearless's aesthete's eye is constantly
captivated. "What a marvellous little old man!" he enthuses as a dapper, David Lynch-
esque geezer waddles past. Fearless keeps stopping to take snaps of showroom dummies
in store windows--the mis-shapen, poorly executed physiognomy of mass-produced
mannequins fascinates him. One of his many projects on the go--which encompass a
movie about India influenced by Sixties experimental film-maker Harry Smith, a
documentary about Elvis fans, and a film score--is putting together an exhibition of his mannequin photos.
Over lunch at a noodle diner near Times Square, Fearless explains how Death In Vegas's
visuals are equally as important as its sonics. His record contract includes a clause that gives him total control of all aspects of the band's presentation--not just the cover art, but the advertisements too. Better still, he notes gleefully, the record company "has to pay us separately for the art work--including any amendments." For Fearless does it all himself, right down to the fonts--like the Gothic typography used on Death In Vegas's new album The Contino Sessions, which he hand-copied from Luftwaffe insignia.
Inspired by a James Ellroy character, Contino Rooms is the name of Death In Vegas's twin studio HQ in North London. With Holmes tweaking the music in one room and design partner Will Bevan finessing the imagery in the other, Fearless flits back and forth all day overseeing the work-in-progress. "With the new album, we were designing the sleeve while we were making the music," he says, a boyish grin brightening his pallid features.
Death In Vegas's dark 'n' dubby debut 1997 Dead Elvis was lumped in with the Big Beat
scene, largely because of Fearless's DJ residency at the Heavenly Social, the London club made famous by The Chemical Brothers. But with Contino, Fearless has broken decisively with that scene's relentlessly cheery antics and pledged his allegiance to moody, tripped-out trance rock---Sixties garage punks like Thirteenth Floor Elevators and Chocolate Watchband, the manic-depressive mantras of Velvet Underground and The Stooges, and, most of all, all the late Eighties neo-psychedelic resurgence of My Bloody Valentine, Loop, and Spacemen 3 that so enthralled Fearless when he was 17.
Contino Sessions mostly consists of instrumentals, such as the album's highpoint "Flying"--a celestial pageant of ringing, iridescent guitars that recalls Neu! and Harmonia, Fearless's Krautrock faves. But there are vocal cameos from archetypal leather-trousered rockers such as Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, Jesus & Mary Chain's Jim Reid, and Iggy Pop, who contributed a psychosis-by-numbers monologue to "Aisha".
"Iggy was just a stab in the dark," explains Fearless, wolfing down food from the three
heaped and steaming dishes he's ordered. "We wrote a track for him, got our manager to
contact his manager, sent him a letter. It was a bit of a dream really that he said yes." The session took place in New York's Electric Ladyland studios. "Iggy turned up in a torn black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, blue drainpipe Levis, and black biker boots," recalls Holmes. "He did the vocal, and we just stood there open-mouthed." Holmes was was so buzzed by this encounter with his hero that he rushed out immediately afterwards and bought a pair of sneakers, only to find out later they were "three sizes too small".
Despite the duo's love of all things Iggy-esque and the new album's boycott of the
dancefloor, Death In Vegas remains very much a product of the last decade of UK rave
culture. Fearless describes the late Eighties acid house revolution as "my punk rock," and when he DJ-s he mostly plays Detroit techno. "I'm still excited by dance music, but with Contino we were trying to get away from that whole electronica tag, which seemed to be exploding here. It would have been too easy to make an album that would have ridden on that wave."
Although it sounds like incandescent rock'n'roll, Contino's mode of construction owes a lot to dance music. "What I love about the best dub reggae and techno is how hypnotic and monotonous it is," says Fearless indistinctly through a mouthful of fried rice. "When there is a change, you notice it so much more. That's what we tried to do with our album, but using live musicians."
Fearless can't play any instruments himself. Instead, he and Holmes operate as sound painters--sketching the outlines of songs, then using "real" musicians as a palette of colors. "We get the guys to play along to the tracks, and then we sample and rework the best bits, " explains Holmes, looking glum because his cellophane noodles with sliced pork haven't materialized. On Contino Sessions, the result
is a DJ's simulacrum of psychedelic rock--fuzzed-out, distorted, but looped and layered electronica-style.
If there's a drawback to this DJ/designer's sensibility to arranging sound, it's that it is necessarily somewhat detached. Unlike their inspirations from Moby Grape to
Spiritualized, Death In Vegas songs don't seem to be driven by urgent emotions. Adapting the Velvet Underground drone-rock aesthetic into a sort of wallpaper-of-noise, The Contino Sessions works as gloriously cinematic mood-food rather than soul-wrenched expression.
All the words on the album are written by the guest vocalists. "For me, it's all about sound," says Fearless. "I just can't take what goes on in my head and put it onto paper as lyrics. Being extremely dyslexic doesn't help." He claims that his brand of chronic dyslexia doesn't affect his reading abilities, only writing and arithmetic: "When somebody leaves a phone number on my answer-machine, I have to get someone else to write it down!"
And then, incorrigible art school rocker that he is, Fearless is pivoting 180 degrees in his seat and training his camera on a waiter at a distant table. The boy just can't help it.
Spin, 1999
by Simon Reynolds
"Have you got any Jack Purcell's?" asks Richard Fearless.
The burly sales clerk in Sports Authority looks blank.
"It's a make of trainers," Fearless explains.
The sales clerk looks blanker still.
"Sneakers, Rich-- in America, they call 'em sneakers," translates Tim Holmes, Fearless's sound engineer partner in Death In Vegas.
Arriving in New York, the first thing British bands --especially those affiliated to dance music--tend to do is hunt down the latest lines of name-brand sneakers. It seems typical of Richard Fearless that his holy grail is a ultra-obscure brand named after a post-war tennis champion; a brand he became obsessed with after spotting them on Elvis Presley's feet in a classic 1950s stage photograph. Style is something of an obsession for Fearless, who's reknowned in Britain for his mod-influenced sharp-dressed look, who recently turned down a Calvin Klein TV commercial, and whose prized pair of Patrick Cox snakeskin loafers were stolen when he passed out after DJing at a club.
Today, hitting the street again after the fruitless footwear quest, he's looking relatively under-dressed in a long sleeve pink shirt and faded jeans with the silver letters AC and DC stenciled on alternate buttocks. Still, in many ways Fearless and his band represent every Anglophobe's nightmare of style-over-content Limey art-rock. After getting an art scholarship at a boarding school aged 13, Fearless went on to study Fine Art at college, before switching to a graphic design degree course at the London College of Printing. It's in his blood: his mother is an art teacher and his sister designs shoes. Even his voice has the classic UK art school rock accent--middle class, but slurred and mumbly in a downwardly mobile effort to suppress its innately posh crispness and clarity.
Wandering the streets of mid-town Manhattan, Fearless's aesthete's eye is constantly
captivated. "What a marvellous little old man!" he enthuses as a dapper, David Lynch-
esque geezer waddles past. Fearless keeps stopping to take snaps of showroom dummies
in store windows--the mis-shapen, poorly executed physiognomy of mass-produced
mannequins fascinates him. One of his many projects on the go--which encompass a
movie about India influenced by Sixties experimental film-maker Harry Smith, a
documentary about Elvis fans, and a film score--is putting together an exhibition of his mannequin photos.
Over lunch at a noodle diner near Times Square, Fearless explains how Death In Vegas's
visuals are equally as important as its sonics. His record contract includes a clause that gives him total control of all aspects of the band's presentation--not just the cover art, but the advertisements too. Better still, he notes gleefully, the record company "has to pay us separately for the art work--including any amendments." For Fearless does it all himself, right down to the fonts--like the Gothic typography used on Death In Vegas's new album The Contino Sessions, which he hand-copied from Luftwaffe insignia.
Inspired by a James Ellroy character, Contino Rooms is the name of Death In Vegas's twin studio HQ in North London. With Holmes tweaking the music in one room and design partner Will Bevan finessing the imagery in the other, Fearless flits back and forth all day overseeing the work-in-progress. "With the new album, we were designing the sleeve while we were making the music," he says, a boyish grin brightening his pallid features.
Death In Vegas's dark 'n' dubby debut 1997 Dead Elvis was lumped in with the Big Beat
scene, largely because of Fearless's DJ residency at the Heavenly Social, the London club made famous by The Chemical Brothers. But with Contino, Fearless has broken decisively with that scene's relentlessly cheery antics and pledged his allegiance to moody, tripped-out trance rock---Sixties garage punks like Thirteenth Floor Elevators and Chocolate Watchband, the manic-depressive mantras of Velvet Underground and The Stooges, and, most of all, all the late Eighties neo-psychedelic resurgence of My Bloody Valentine, Loop, and Spacemen 3 that so enthralled Fearless when he was 17.
Contino Sessions mostly consists of instrumentals, such as the album's highpoint "Flying"--a celestial pageant of ringing, iridescent guitars that recalls Neu! and Harmonia, Fearless's Krautrock faves. But there are vocal cameos from archetypal leather-trousered rockers such as Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, Jesus & Mary Chain's Jim Reid, and Iggy Pop, who contributed a psychosis-by-numbers monologue to "Aisha".
"Iggy was just a stab in the dark," explains Fearless, wolfing down food from the three
heaped and steaming dishes he's ordered. "We wrote a track for him, got our manager to
contact his manager, sent him a letter. It was a bit of a dream really that he said yes." The session took place in New York's Electric Ladyland studios. "Iggy turned up in a torn black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, blue drainpipe Levis, and black biker boots," recalls Holmes. "He did the vocal, and we just stood there open-mouthed." Holmes was was so buzzed by this encounter with his hero that he rushed out immediately afterwards and bought a pair of sneakers, only to find out later they were "three sizes too small".
Despite the duo's love of all things Iggy-esque and the new album's boycott of the
dancefloor, Death In Vegas remains very much a product of the last decade of UK rave
culture. Fearless describes the late Eighties acid house revolution as "my punk rock," and when he DJ-s he mostly plays Detroit techno. "I'm still excited by dance music, but with Contino we were trying to get away from that whole electronica tag, which seemed to be exploding here. It would have been too easy to make an album that would have ridden on that wave."
Although it sounds like incandescent rock'n'roll, Contino's mode of construction owes a lot to dance music. "What I love about the best dub reggae and techno is how hypnotic and monotonous it is," says Fearless indistinctly through a mouthful of fried rice. "When there is a change, you notice it so much more. That's what we tried to do with our album, but using live musicians."
Fearless can't play any instruments himself. Instead, he and Holmes operate as sound painters--sketching the outlines of songs, then using "real" musicians as a palette of colors. "We get the guys to play along to the tracks, and then we sample and rework the best bits, " explains Holmes, looking glum because his cellophane noodles with sliced pork haven't materialized. On Contino Sessions, the result
is a DJ's simulacrum of psychedelic rock--fuzzed-out, distorted, but looped and layered electronica-style.
If there's a drawback to this DJ/designer's sensibility to arranging sound, it's that it is necessarily somewhat detached. Unlike their inspirations from Moby Grape to
Spiritualized, Death In Vegas songs don't seem to be driven by urgent emotions. Adapting the Velvet Underground drone-rock aesthetic into a sort of wallpaper-of-noise, The Contino Sessions works as gloriously cinematic mood-food rather than soul-wrenched expression.
All the words on the album are written by the guest vocalists. "For me, it's all about sound," says Fearless. "I just can't take what goes on in my head and put it onto paper as lyrics. Being extremely dyslexic doesn't help." He claims that his brand of chronic dyslexia doesn't affect his reading abilities, only writing and arithmetic: "When somebody leaves a phone number on my answer-machine, I have to get someone else to write it down!"
And then, incorrigible art school rocker that he is, Fearless is pivoting 180 degrees in his seat and training his camera on a waiter at a distant table. The boy just can't help it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
