FATBOY SLIM, Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars
Village Voice, November 15 - 21, 2000

Featuring samples from a bootleg album of the Lizard King's poetry, Fatboy Slim's new single "Sunset (Bird of Prey)" isn't the first time Jim Morrison's ghost has haunted dancefloors. Back in 1992, Acen's "Close Your Eyes" plucked some ominous exhortations--"forget your name... go insane"--from The Doors's gloriously portentous and pretentious song-cycle "The Celebration of the Lizard" and created a darkside anthem for hardcore ravers. "Sunset" is altogether less Dionysian, closer to a Gerald Manley Hopkins reverie than Rimbaud 'n' roll: Morrison gazes longingly at the soaring bird of prey, dreamily croons "gently pass on by," then changes his plea to "take me on your flight". Riding Norman Cook's backing track, a grid of fluorescent pulses as ear-dazzling as Vasarely's Op Art, the looped phrase "flying high" is the hook that will snag the ravers' brains, lift them right up there with the kites and condors.

Reminding you what amazing presence the now near-universally disparaged Morrison emanated, "Sunset" makes you wish Cook would do his own version of An American Prayer, the poetry album released posthumously with tacked-on EZ-listening backing by the surviving Doors. The single's spiritualized serenity sets the tone for much of Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars, a halfway successful attempt by Cook to stake his claim as Serious Artist. On his brilliant Fatboy Slim debut, Better Living Through Chemistry, and inescapable monstermash "The Rockafeller Skank," Cook brought fun back to an increasingly somber dance culture, reminding listeners of the potency of cheap thrills. But now, like his professed role models the Chemical Brothers on Surrender, he wants to grow beyond obviousness and instantness—beyond all those tired-and-true builds and breakdowns that trigger a dancefloor's Pavlovian reflexes. Like the Chems too,
Cook started work slightly paralysed by how to bypass the exhausted big beat formula. He found his path by partially abandoning breakbeats in favor of house's hypnotic four-to-the-floor, and by bringing in what he's called an "almost gospelly" flavor. You can hear it right off in opener "Talking 'Bout My Baby", with its hollers and handclaps, its phased rolling piano chords and wah-wah flickers, and its testifying soul singer, whose "big bright yellow sun" joyburst is looped into an endless crescendo. It's surprising, though, how much dated, big beat-style pummel you have to endure before the almost-gospel vibe's glorious return. There's the manic stupor of "Ya Mamma" and the equally embarassingly titled "Mad Flava"--one of those midtempo chuggers that Cook uses as album filler, a stale stodge of 303-as-clavinet pseudo-funk, human beatbox, scratching, and other old skoolisms. "Retox" is cool enough: Armand Van Helden-style ruffneck house, with a cute "Just Say Yes" title pun and a Jekyl & Hide chorus-growl about releasing "the freak in me." But "Weapon of Choice" is just ghastly, a Propellerheads-esque, Sixties-into-Nineties pastiche of Hammond, horns, and go-go dancer percussion, surely destined for a discotheque scene in Austin Powers 3.

"Drop the Hate", the first song of the gospel-tinged triptych that redeems the record, is actually more hell-for-leather than holy. The Baptist preacher functions as just another awesome riff alongside the creaky, brain-splitting acid-bassline, its semantic content ("forgive each other") vaporized to leave an electrifying jolt of ersatz emotion. "Demons", featuring Macy Gray, is "Praise You, Part 2": blues licks, deep Stax bass, and a lyric that makes the MDMA/religious rapture equation ("all of your demons will wither away/Ecstasy comes and they cannot stay)." All this Christian imagery and Authentic Black Person huskiness will probably get Halfway tagged as a post-Play move. But you could just as easily see Play as a "Praise You" rip-off. Moreover, house music's always had a gospel flavor, from the melisma overload of ex-choirboy Darryl Pandy on 1986's "Love Can't Turn Around" and the Biblical imagery of Joe Smooth's "Promised Land" to preacher-sampling tracks like DHS's "House of God." Then there's garage producer and true believer Todd Edwards, whose early releases actually went under the name The Sample Choir. Edwards classics like "Never Far From You" and "Sweet Jesus" are dense tapestries of micro-samples, vocal splinters of yearning and devotion crosshatched to hyperventilatingly ecstatic effect.

What's striking about Norman Cook is how little he gets into "vocal science", the techniques of micro-editing, resequencing and signal processing at which Edwards is a virtuoso, and which have spread across the dance music spectrum from 2step garage to Madonna's latest big bag of nothin'. Even Darren Emerson gets into vocal vivisection on his otherwise lame "Sunset" remix, making an iridescent, foamy lather of Morrison's voice. Cook, though, tends to just loop his pilfered phrases and let 'em roll, rather than create biomechanical chimera--perhaps because, like Moby, he wants you to hear the humanity not the technology.

Which is not to discount the creativity involved in recontextualizing these voices, or Cook's skill at breaking up the original phrasing to create new cadences. On Halfway, you can see this in the contrast between "Star 69" and the final "Song For Shelter." The first track is a rampage of heavily filtered house featuring a a Biggie soundalike sneering "they don't know what is what/they just strut/what the fuck?!" On "Shelter", another black voice—Roland Clark, the singer on Van Helden's gorgeous "Flowerz"—extemporizes a beat poet paean to house music, exalting it as a haven of real-deal family values in a hostile world, and word-jazzing about how its rhythm "goes in my blood like alcohol, gets me drunk." It's a shock when the "don't know what is what . . . What the fuck" lick of "Star 69" suddenly rematerializes in "Shelter" in the middle of the singer's wonderstruck, beat-poet flow. As a component of Clark's monologue, the "don't know what is what" signifies not B-boy menace but the house convert's pity for those unbelievers who've never experienced the dancefloor's state of grace. "What the fuck" is revealed as a parody of thug toughness, the callous(ed) character armor that house music melts. Using the same sample twice to such different effect is Cook's way of saying "don't underestimate me, there's more to my art than meets the ear".

"Song For Shelter" is a gorgeous vision of disco heaven, from the poet's blissed babble about dancers with "wings for feet" and Jesus being a DJ, to the way the track's spangled billow winds down to a drone-rock gulf of light that could be Labradford or Stars of the Lid, before catching flashback echoes of the idyllic piano chords from "Talking 'Bout My Baby" and then finally going out with a cupola of radiant reverberance. Using another's voice to spell out his personal creed, "Shelter" is Cook, the king of shallow, making his bid for deepness. It makes you wish he'd had the nerve to shed his party-fodder provider persona altogether and instead make an entire album in the halcyon space between "Sunset" and "Song for Shelter." Maybe next time.

SIMON REYNOLDS

version as printed at http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0046,reynolds,19808,22.html

THE BEAUTIFUL SOUTH, interview
Melody Maker, late summer, 1990
by Simon Reynolds


HULL. Rhymes with "dull", "lull" and "null". Also rhymes with
"mull", as in ruminate morosely over the impasses and dead ends of
your life. It's surely no coincidence that you say the word "Hull"
and barely have to open your mouth doing so.

Today, Hull isn't putting up much of a fight against the
stereotype. The sky is the colour of the grey bits in fishfingers.
The complexions of passers-by are redolent of the filling of
fortnight old cornish pasties. The buildings are ashen. But Hull is
essential to The Beautiful South. It's the stolid ground on which
their feet are firmly, defiantly placed. It's the solid basis of
bathos at the heart of their glossy, sugary pop; the barb that
"punctures the bubble", as they put it, of pop unreality.

Talking of bathos, The Beautiful South have played a little
trick on us. We've been told to rendez-vous at The Grafton Hotel,
which has been described to us as a grand old building packed with
golden photo opportunites. Inevitably, the Grafton Hotel turns out
to be one of those redbrick, characterless, Seventies pubs that
typically rose like boils after the old working class quarters were
rationalised by the town planners. We arrive at midday to find the
place deserted bar a gaggle of old biddies, who eye us
suspiciously. Since we've been assigned the role of yuppie
mediacrat invaders, we ham it up: Sheehan gets out his portable
phone, I complain volubly about the unavailability of Grolsch, Sol
or Dos Equis, while brandishing my Filofax ostentatiously.

Paul Heaton and his songwriting partner David Rotheray live in
the same road as the Grafton, but are late. Paul bears gifts
(gingerbread men, or rather gingerbread Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles). He sits down and almost immediately starts smoking a
cigar. Incongruous. My opening gambit involves a frank, but
possibly un-strategic confession. I'm no great fan of The Beautiful
South's music. (I've a secret sweet tooth as regards pop, but it's
for the pralines, marzipan and glistening gateaux of Prefab Sprout.
After Paddy Macaloon's deluxe confectionery, The Beautiful South
seems like Quality Street. You might stuff your face, but you'll
soon feel sick). But, I add, I've always been intrigued by The
Beautiful South's attitude. "Song For Whoever" and "You Keep It All
In" make me think of the Python sketch about the sadistic chocolate
manufacturer and his "Spring Surprise"; bite through the rich,
mouthwatering surface, and two steel bolts spring through your
cheeks.

"Yeah," mutters Heaton. "There are a few barbs. It's just the
way I write. Unfortunately. I'd like to be able to write just
straight, in some ways. Straightforwardly moving stuff. I think
there's a bit of immaturity in the way I write actually."

David: "The humour happens because it's difficult for us to
sustain the taking ourselves seriously for long enough. I don't
think we could manage it for a whole song, without wanting to burst
the bubble."

You seem to have an incredible facility for writing hit
material, but little faith in the ultimate worth of pop.

"But I don't really like the fact that people see us as cynical.
I don't think we are. It's just that he bubble of unreality is
there and there's not many people bursting it. So we took it upon
ourselves to burst a few small bubbles".

Paul: "People think we're cynical about the punters who buy our
records, that we like to pull the wool over their eyes. And it's
almost like we're being double cynical, like we're commenting on
the exploitative nature of the industry, but making money out of it
as well, and laughing behind our hands. But we have a lot of pride
and affection for what we do. We've got a lot of belief that the
people who buy the records understand what we're on about."

Did you feel that there was a delicious irony in 'Song For
Whoever' being a massive hit, when it's all about the
manipulation involved in a certain kind of lovey-dovey lyric-
writing?

David: "'Song For Whoever' had to be a hit, for the lyrics to
make sense and be funny. It would have been embarassing singing
'the Number One I hope to reap' if it'd only got to Number 39!"

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Heaton and Rotheray seem to have a bit of a problem with
getting down to the job in hand, and keep straying off to regale
the motleg gaggle of mates they've brought along (a transgression,
I might add, of all the protocols of the interview).

"I bought some boxer shorts, after our argument about the
relative merits of Y-fronts and boxers," announces David apropos of
sod-all. "And they were a a total disaster. They're terrible. I
mean, they're comfortable, I can see your point there. But in
terms of 'unwanted arousal embarassment', boxers are terrible.
Because your knob's down your leg. So this fucking growth is sticking
out of your upper thigh. So I'm going back to Y-fronts. Although
boxers do look good, when you're getting undressed. But erectile-
ly, boxers are a disaster. There's no restraint in the material."

Paul: "But anyway, Simon, aren't you gonna ask us if we feel
threatened by the current hegemony of dance music, eh? And whether
we're going to make a move in that direction?"

All in due time. Oh, all right - go on then. Tell us what
you think about your old mate Norman Cook's recent activities, and
all his claims to the effect that he was never into The
Housemartins indie janglepop thing?

"He's no mate of mine. Hahahaha! No, I feel so chuffed for the
lad. The bastard. No, I think Norman's a really really good
producer, and I like the stuff he's come out with so far. But as to
idea that he was never into the Housemartins music... you could
have fooled me. He enjoyed performing live with us, and I think he
enjoyed recording those songs. But it is true that the music he
listened to was always dance music. But then the stuff I listen to
isn't like the Beautiful South. I listen to Penderecki's "Threnody
For Hiroshima", me. Miles Davis' On The Corner and Dark Magus.
Really gets you going in the morning. "He Loved Him Madly" off
Get Up With It, is dead sad, a thirty minutes long elegy for Duke
Ellington. New sonic architecture, that's my bag.

"But Norman, I think his musical direction's good. I think
it's a bit Jive Bunny at times. It's a bit frivolous. A bit up, if
you know what I mean. Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep. Another thing: I
think Norman's surrounded himself with some hideous artists. Some
of the singing on those records is piss-poor. Lindy Layton is just
one of the long dark list. And I think Beats International should
disassociate themselves from her, after her notorious campaign on
television, advertising for the Army. I don't think the ad has been
shown down South yet, but basically there's these three girls on a
bus, and one girl's boyfriend is in the Army and the others are
jealous, cos he's a real man. So I think they should disassociate
themselves from the advert immediately. If you've got one of these
collective, cooperative type things, you just can't let anybody
walk in. You've got to have a word with them first, otherwise
they'll be coming out with all kinds of shit in interviews. Apart
from that I'm dead chuffed for him."

I read somewhere that even you thought The Housemartins had
been too mired in Britishness. Do you have a love/hate thing for
Britain?

"Not really. I think I was just pointing out where the limits
were. The Beautiful South are very British too, but it's a bit
more open-ended. We could do pretty much anything apart from out
and out dance. We could do a Housemartins type song, or we could go
real plush. The Housemartins couldn't really go anywhere but where
they were. Mind you, I am thinking of reforming the band, if this
new single flops, and rereleasing 'Happy Hour' the dance mix, and
moving to Manchester!"

"You Keep It All In" - your best moment, the only one that
verged on tickling my fancy - seemed to be all about the British
disease, or at least, the specifically male complaint of emotional
constipation.

"I'm happy to a certain extent with being British. But there
is this reserve. Whereas the Europeans embrace each other. It's
very strange when you go to Italy, where the men are so physical,
towards other men. There was this bloke who kept putting his arm
round me, and I thought he was after me, but of course he was just
trying to show his affection. They touch each other all the time.
And it put me on edge a bit."

Unlike the denizens of the New World, or the Continentals, we're
an island race, we're all trapped in our own own personal space.

"I'm a bit like that meself, and it's reflected in the lyrics.
I tend not to tell people things. A lot of men bottle it up.
Usually, with me, I think: 'why the fuck should I tell anyone
else?'"

David: "The irony is it makes people think you're really deep,
doesn't it? You can keep an image of deepness just by keeping your
gob shut."

I've been reliably informed that "Tonight I Fancy Myself" off
the next album is an anthem to masturbation.

Paul: "Not really. It's just got one line in it that suggests
that on this particular occasion, it's better to go off and have a
wank, than be out with those sort of people."

David: "It's not worth the price of what you have to go through.

You mean, it's better to go off and relieve yourself rather than
have casual sex.

"Relieve yourself!," splutters Heaton. "I like that, it's so
bloody doctorish, isn't it. 'Could you just relieve yourself into
this bag, sir. I keep all me own spunk, you know."

David: "I actually tried that, honest. When I first started
wanking, I attempted to save it all, to see how much I could build
up over a certain period of time."

Paul: "What vessel did you use?"

David: "It was like a tupperware container. But the problem is
that it basically all evaporates. Even though it seems quite solid
really, it must be 95% water. You just get this filmy, greasy,
scum. I didn't persevere with the experiment. I used to keep all my
bogies too. I had this special place in the house, underneath the
mantelpiece. Every bogie I had, I put there. After a year, the
bogie construction fell off. And it was like a perfect mould of the
the underside of the mantelpiece."

"Hideous!", grimaces Heaton. "But to get back to "Tonight I
Fancy Myself", I was on this train in Italy, and there was this
couple, and they were tongueing each other all the way to bloody
thingibob. Venice. I felt embarassed, and I felt a song coming on.
So I went to the loo, had a quick wank, and wrote it all down. But
there is one line on it that goes 'tonight I choose/Self abuse'."

Any other bold departures on the album?

"'I've Come For My Award' is all about a burglar who goes to
one of these business enterprise centres where they give out prizes
for entrepreneurial get-up and go."

Is that like the idea that Happy Mondays and Flowered Up and
that lumpen milieu are Thatcher's illegitimate children, with their
dealing, blagging, bootlegging, their rave-promoting, their extra-
legal take on the "work hard, play hard" ethos.

"Kind of. The villain's saying that he's shown lots of pluck,
he's darted past all the security cameras, he's a perfect
enterprising character. Thieving is the ultimate form of free
entreprise, isn't it?"

Have you ever committed any criminal acts?.

"I've done a bit of petty theft. I was addicted at one point.
They had to alter the shop I used to go into. Change the sightlines
to get rid of this blindspot where me and my brother used to pocket
things."

David: "I used to be addicted to doing runners from restaurants. That's a definite buzz. There's quite a complex of strategies you can use, depending on the shape of the restaurant. You've got to position yourself correctly, you've got to consider
your line of sight as regards the staff, you've got to consider
your escape route, and the best corner to run round once you're out
the door. Timing's important. You should always have something
still to come when you do the runner. Dessert or coffee. I've
only been pursued once, when I was with Dave Hemingway from the
band, and he got caught. He lost his nerve in the doorway, the
waiter caught him, and he explained that I'd just run off for no
reason and he'd tried to stop me. But I've got ethics about it.
I'll only do runners from large restaurant chains, or if I've been
served crap food."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The new single, "A Little Time" is kitchen-sink realism, a C&W
tinged duet between a man who keeps making excuses and a woman who
won't be fobbed off anymore.

Paul: "Yeah, it's commonplace. I wanted to write about
something that happens regularly, an emotion that comes out
regularly."

A emotional bowel movement.

"Ha! He's good, this one," says Heaton, then abruptly turns
away to talk about football. Rotheray changes the subject. "First
time in Hull, Simon?"

Aye. You've lived all your life, right? Never been tempted to
live.

"I like to go away, but I like coming back too. It's my home, I
suupose. Hull, it's a kind of end of the line place. What's the
opposite of transient? Static. People stay here, they're not
moving through. It gives it an air of tradition, and sort of
pleasant stagnation."

And a lot of Beatuiful South songs are about emotional
stagnation, about relationships that have gone a bit mouldy round
the corners.

"And emotional double standards. Where men are in a power
position in relationships. What I like about "A Little Time" is
that it ends with the women leaving him. And that's a happy ending.
It's not a reconciliation, which would be the soft ending, the
Hollywood ending. I just think it's good for a love song to say
that staying together isn't always best, sometimes it's better to
have the strength to walk away. Those kind of recriminations,
they're really commonplace emotions, but you don't often hear them
in pop songs."


* there is a falsified Paul Heaton quote inserted in this piece, see if you can spot it.

SAINT ETIENNE Presents Finisterre: A Film About London
Directed by Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans
(Plexifilm)
Village Voice, November 30th, 2005


“Finisterre”, the title track of Saint Etienne’s 2002 album, was an aesthetic manifesto that among other things imagined leaping straight from the Regency Era
to Bauhaus-style modernism, in the process skipping almost the entire 19th Century. In a way, that’s what this DVD-- an enchanting meander through London that’s less a documentary than a visual poem--does too. You get little sense of the city as Dickens would have understood it: the hustle-bustle of a place somewhere people work and produce. Finisterre’s first images are a suburban train heading into London at the crack of dawn, before the commuter crush, and the only sense of commotion and congestion come much later with footage shot at various gigs and bars.

There’s a sense in which the city could only be made beautiful by minimizing the presence of its inhabitants, who are either absent or typically appear on the edge of shot. Directors Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans strip away the hubbub to reveal a secret city of silence and stillness, reverie rather than revelry. The film is literally composed largely of stills--buildings, graffiti, faded posters, half-deserted cafes, store fronts. People, when they appear, are rarely in motion. The gaze of this flaneur-camera aestheticizes everything: a homeless man becomes a compositional figure (mmmm, look at the curvature of spine) and a neglected playground generates attractive patterns of rust-mottled metal and stained brickwork.

It would have been heavy-handed to use such images as signifiers of urban decay and dysfunction, but a teensy dose of Ken Loach wouldn’t have gone amiss. A different Ken (Livingstone, the Mayor of London) gives his thumbs-up in the DVD booklet, and no wonder: it’ll trigger a tourism micro-boom by luring Saint Etienne’s already Anglophile fanbase abroad. Watching Finisterre made this London-born expatriate yearn to hop on the next flight home, too. But I suspect this is actually the last word in a certain way of looking at, and living with, a city that’s unmanageably vast and often pretty grim. File it next to Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic walking tours or the greasy spoon memory-work of Adrian Maddox’s Classic Cafes-- forms of mourning for a city that’s always dying. Finisterre is a beautiful film about London. But beauty is only half the story, because cities are always rebirthing themselves too, and birth ain’t a pretty sight.

SIMON REYNOLDS