Robert Wyatt & Friends

Theatre Royal Drury Lane 8th September 1974

Hannibal/Rykodisc

Observer Music Monthly, November 20th 2005

By Simon Reynolds

Long bootlegged, this glorious live album documents an intriguing moment in UK rock history, when the rock mainstream and the outer-limits vanguard were in bed together.  Three decades on, it’s hard to imagine a contemporary equivalent to the supergroup that Wyatt convened in September 1974: multiplatinum-selling musos Mike Oldfield and Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason rubbed shoulders with out-jazz players Julie Tippetts  and Mongezi Feza, and with avant-proggers such as Henry Cow’s Fred Frith, Hatfield and the North’s Dave Stewart, and Soft Machine alumnus Hugh Hopper. There’s also a cameo appearance from Ivor Cutler,  John Peel’s favorite comic eccentric. Peelie himself features as the show’s compere, informing the long-haired, afghan-wearing audience that the musicians will be uncharacteristically sober tonight, because the door to the Theatre Royal bar has been locked for fire-and-safety reasons.  

The wondrously woozy music played that evening must have been intoxication enough, surely, for performer and listener alike. After the Dada-esque sound-daubings of “Dedicated To You But You Weren’t Listening”, the bulk of the set consists of a run-through of Rock Bottom, the Wyatt album released earlier that summer, a crushingly poignant masterpiece shadowed by the singer’s paralysis following his fourth-floor tumble during a wild party. “Sea Song”,  as mysterious and beautiful an oceanic love ballad as Tim Buckley’s “Song To the Siren,” opens up into a fabulous extended improvisation, a malevolent meander of fuzz-bass and glittering keyboards that’s something like an Anglicized Bitches Brew. Wyatt’s falsetto spirals up into ecstastic scat arabesques, as though his spirit is trying to escape his shattered body.  “Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road” --its title a whimsy-cloaked allusion to the accident--is equally stunning. Feza’s trumpet again channels Miles, while Wyatt’s delirium of anguish is only slightly softened by the English bathos of lines like “oh dearie me, what in heaven’s name..”  The singer actually miauows at the start of “Alifib,” a gorgeous quilt of shimmering keys and glistening guitar (courtesy of Oldfield, then regularly voted the top instrumentalist in the UK by music paper readers). The feline thread is picked up with “Instant Pussy,” originally recorded by Wyatt’s shortlived band Matching Mole and featuring yet more gorgeous abstract vocalese from the wheelchair-bound bound singer. “Calyx”, a different sort of love song, features killer lines like “close inspection reveals you’re in perfect nick”, and the set ends with a rampant, edge-of-chaos take on  “I’m A Believer,” the Monkees cover that took Wyatt into the UK hit parade. Alarming but true: the best record released in 2005 is a time capsule from 31 years ago.

                                                                                                

FRANZ FERDINAND

You Could Have It So Much Better… with Franz Ferdinand

Domino

Blender

by Simon Reynolds

In an early short story by Ian McEwan, a female novelist struggles to follow up her acclaimed, best-selling debut. The psychologically macabre twist in the tale comes when it’s revealed that the manuscript she’s been toiling over for months is actually a painstakingly typed-out, word-for-word reiteration of the first book. Now, You Could Have It So Much Better is far from a note-for-note duplicate of Franz Ferdinand. Still, for a band dedicated to the resurrection of arty pop, there are surprisingly few risks taken on their sophomore album. It used to be a matter of honor for art-rockers to make giant leaps with each successive record. But on You Could Have, the attitude seems to have been “let’s not mess with a winning formula, lads, shall we?”

As formulas go, it’s a winsome one: brittle white-boy funk topped by Alex Kapranos’ suavely crooned vocals and witty, sexually piquant lyrics. Franz are master exponents of that distinctly British forte for using abrasive guitars in a way that feels pop rather than rock. And they’re equally adept at that other Britpop ploy whereby fey young men seduce the girls in the audience by acting like they’re really more interested in boys.  Last time, it was the bisexual epiphany of “Michael”;  this time, it’s the homo-erotic ardor of “This Boy” and the saucy boast “your famous friend/well I blew him before you” in “Do You Want To.”  A glorious, gleeful romp jam-packed with quotables, that song is the album’s strongest stab in Franz’s  main mode of  oddly fussy, flustered discopunk, closely followed by “The Fallen” and “I’m Your Villain” (one section of which actually recycles the riff from “Take Me Out”). In a rockier vein, “Evil And A Heathen” stomps like Iggy Pop circa Lust For Life. But You Could Have’s only real departure is “Fade Together,” a piano ballad whose ebbing waltz-time  rhythm gorgeously matches the langorous nihilism of the lyric, which could be about a suicide pact, or sharing a needle, but either way is alluring and disturbing in equal measure.

“Fade” is far and away the best thing on the record, in large part because it’s the least Franz Ferdinand-like. The song makes you wonder what this group could achieve if they actually pushed themselves, and the envelope, a wee bit, in the spirit of the art-rock ancestors--Roxy, Bowie, Wire, Gang of Four, Josef K--they either invoke or echo sonically.  Art-into-pop should be about vision and ambition, over-reach and the possibility of falling flat on your face. It shouldn’t just entail spicing up indie plain fare with a smidgeon of androgyny and a pinch of pretension. So here’s hoping for a torturously difficult third album. 

                                                                                             

FRANZ FERDINAND
You Could Have It So Much Better... with Franz Ferdinand
Domino
Blender (different mix)

by Simon Reynolds

The paradox of Franz Ferdinand’s second album is that the best thing on it is the least Franz Ferdinand-like. Instead of the band’s trademark mode of flustered discopunk, “Fade Together” is a gorgeously torpid piano ballad, whose ebbing waltz-time rhythm matches the langorous nihilism of the lyric (which could be about a suicide pact, or sharing a needle, but either way is equally alluring and disturbing). Elsewhere on the album, though,  Franz’s attitude seems to have been "och, let's not mess with a winning formula, shall we lads?" 

Then again, why not, when the formula--gawky whiteboy funk topped by Alex Kapranos’ suave croon-- is so winsome?   Franz Ferdinand either delightfully resurrect Orange Juice (if you’re ancient enough to remember that early Eighties Scottish band) or feel as revitalizing as a glass of freshly squeezed OJ (if you’re young enough to neither know nor care). They’re the latest in a long lineage of British bands who use scratchy guitars in a way that somehow feels pop rather than rock,  fronted by fey young men who seduce girls by making like they’re more interested in boys. Last time, it was the bisexual epiphany of "Michael"; this time, it's the homoerotic ardor of "This Boy" and the saucy boast "your famous friend/well I blew him before you" in “Do You Want To”. A glorious, gleeful romp jam-packed with quotables, that song is this album’s “Take Me Out” (whose riff actually gets recycled on another killer tune, “I’m Your Villain”). In a rockier vein, "Evil And A Heathen" stomps like Iggy Pop circa Lust For Life.

Contrast Franz with the plain fare that passes for Britrock nowadays--the steady drizzle of rhythmically inert  post-Coldplay mope--and the piquant appeal of the group’s funked-up grooves, dandy verve, and mischievous wit is easy to understand. But when you compare Franz with the art-rock ancestors they invoke or echo--Roxy, Bowie, Wire, Talking Heads--their achievement seems more modest. With that breed, it was a matter of honor to attempt a giant leap on each successive album. Apart from “Fade Together,” Franz’s second effort shies away from such challenges. It’ll do just fine for now. But here’s hoping for a torturously difficult third album.

 

Art Brut

Bang Bang Rock & Roll

Banana Recordings/Fierce Panda import

* * * *

Blender, 2005

In 2005, few things could be less “rock’n’roll” than playing rock’n’roll. Real estate speculation, starting a restaurant, modern art--all have stronger claims to the cutting edge. Yet rock groups infest the land,  fresh droves of them arriving each month bearing ever stupider names. “Formed A Band,” the opening track on the debut album by London’s Art Brut (not actually a stupid name, always a good sign), hilariously skewers the presumptuousness of taking the stage and demanding attention like it’s a birth right. Yet tangled up inside the self-mocking chorus--“look at us, we formed a band!”--there’s a primal yelp of idiot-glee. Almost despite itself, the song exalts the exuberance and cameraderie of ganging up with your mates to make noise.  

Dark droning punk with a twist of Wiry weirdness, “Formed” also recalls Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild”, in the sense that this is the group’s defining, all-too-perfect song, the immaculate mission statement Art Brut may have problems surpassing. Hitting the listener with your best shot straightaway is a strategic blunder in terms of album sequencing, but there’s plenty of further excitements within Bang Bang. “My Little Brother” is shouty ‘n’ jumpy New Wave with another funny lyric, about being embarrassed by a younger sibling who’s only “just discovered rock’n’roll” and throws spazzy shapes on the dancefloor.  On the title track, singer Eddie Argos demands “no more songs about sex and drugs and rock’n’roll/It’s boring,” while “Bad Weekend” mournfully confesses “popular/culture/no longer/applies to me.”  But Bang Bang isn’t wall-to-wall meta.  “Emily Kane” pines for a long-lost girlfriend (although Argos does imagine the song being such a hit that “kids on buses” will be “singing your name”) and “Rusted Guns of Milan” is an oblique account of erectile dysfunction, suffused with a hangdog seediness faintly reminiscent of Pulp.

On the downside, Argos’ half-spoken delivery means he sometimes seems to operate “outside” the music, in the mode of punk poets such as Jim Carroll and John Cooper Clarke, rather than in the thick of it, while the Art Brut sound occasionally verges on merely mundane liveliness.  At their slightest, Art Brut come over like indie-rock’s equivalent to The Darkness (in “Good Weekend” Argos even eggs on Chris Chinchilla’s solo with a “go guitar!,” just like Justin Hawkins on “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”).  But at their most thrilling, Art Brut fuse the spiky cool of Elastica with the witty self-consciousness of an LCD Soundsystem. They mean it, sort of, maaaaan. 

“Art Brut, we’ve only just started,” Argos declares on “Formed.” For once, this isn’t just an empty promise.