CHAPTER 2

 #99: PLAID

"Dancers"

from the album Polymer

Released: June 2019

 

 

 

One summer following a prolonged stay in hospital which made me question whether I could even ever walk again, let alone dance, I randomly came across the music on late-night radio. From the new album by Plaid, the DJ told me. That nice, constant, politely-blinking star in the far north-eastern corner of the musical firmament, mainly because their music reminds me, as does so much other music on the same label, of the East Neuk of Fife, the lengthening shadows on the boardwalk parallel to the golf course, the icy immensity of the North Sea, the feeling that being in St Andrews has placed you not quite in "the world."

You could listen to a lot of music from the last four or so decades which would remind you of St Andrews in the early eighties. Forget the pain, hunger, ideations and untethered displeasure. Your mind chooses to recall the highlights only. The shade of green that the sun makes the grass at certain times when afternoon is gracefully blending into evening - "Taking Islands In Africa" by Japan, the last verse of "Love Is A Stranger" by Eurythmics, even the instrumental break to "Ooh To Be Ah" by KajaGooGoo (those slightly delayed keyboards, dragging half a beat behind the rhythm, creating a strawberry globe of otherness) would all make a new sense in this unwordly world.

Or you might think of lullabies, soothing pictorial boxes of celestes and rhythms so lightly accented they could bear wings, the music which has stayed with you the longest and deepest, because everything we experience, do or endure in our lives is reliant on the abstractly scattered signifiers you registered when you were perhaps too young to understand much of anything beyond elemental appeal, or appealing to the elements.

So much of what has come out on the Warp record label has appealed to that hardwired first childishness, perhaps more so than the closely-engineered synaptic plays of Ghostbox (watch how the perceived nostalgia cell jumps into, but does not leapfrog, the one permitting awareness). Listening to Boards of Canada or Aphex Twin or even Plone will set you back to an element of character that you've spent your whole adult life attempting to deny. "Aquarius" by Boards of Canada will have you staring at the Pentlands across the bay from Musselburgh on a cold, dark November teatime, seeing eternity in the seagull whose name was Nelson. My lasting memory of Amber by Autechre is listening to it on a Walkman while gathering emergency groceries in a Safeway hidden in a forbidding shopping mall in Shepherd's Bush of a dark Monday evening. Its steel rods of modest vertigo lent the experience the air of more dreamed (and not a good dream, either) than having been lived. The track from it I remember most clearly was, unsurprisingly given what went on to happen in a further, granted lifetime, was entitled "Montreal." The track Aphex Twin calls "Curtains" will always conjure in my mind ceaseless, gracious skating across a frozen lake hidden in a Norwegian forest, light in the darkness. As for "Summer Plays Out" by Plone, that puts me right back in Chadwell St Mary Cemetery; those were its belated, grudging times.

Yet to someone who twelve months previously was in ownership of the almost-definite certainty that he would never dance again, or anything like it, along swam "Dancers" as a buoy of rescue. Its rhythms glide rather than impose, its jetstream streaks unmistakeably and irrevocably from the grand New Classical nobility of Kraftwerk, gleaming like the Neumarkt in Dresden at eight o'clock of a morning in late April. There is love and there is acknowledgement of impermanence and possibly even destruction as the melody wanders its harmonic corridors - rooted in F major, moving to G, then a nerve-altering B minor before settling back in F, though further shades of prepared memory are provided by stray visits to D minor, C and A minor (and thereafter brief but marked visits to A flat and E minor). Its song never settles yet could not be more secure in its settlement. It could go on forever, or beyond the final Chigley bow, or never have happened at all, except inside your head in bed at five in the morning as you dream of bus routes which do not quite tally. You consider it as a dance beyond the end of "time."

Plaid are two people who used to be part of The Black Dog, who have never made a record I didn't like, and Polymer, appropriately their most macromolecular record, was their tenth album and my favourite since their fourth one (2001's Double Figure, Benet Walsh's guitar loop on "Eyen" being a newly-rediscovered harbour in itself). "Dancers" sprang out from its template unexpectedly like a reminding kiss. It sent me facing the front of the world.

 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

 

#100: ANOHNI (as ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS)

"Hope There's Someone"

from the album I Am A Bird Now

Released: September 2005

I.

WILL.

GET.

MY.

SELF.

BACK.

Friday 22 July 2005. The sky is overcast and so is the cemetery. I think it was Chadwell St Mary Cemetery because it was just off the motorway, past Tilbury and the pylons and what will eventually feed into the North Sea. It looked like somewhere in Oxfordshire, semi-rural and moderately opulent. Everybody is here and I'm not sure they believe that they're here, that they ever had to go beyond the farthest eastern boundaries of the city they assumed would forever enclose them all.

Why am I anywhere? Why does it always have to be about me? There are people around me, people with whom I speak all the time over a computer screen. Real, proper close friends of the person we've all come to mourn today. Not nodding acquaintances like me. Do I come across as though I'm pretending to be sad?

There is no pretence about my sadness. I am sad, but not just because of what happened to my nodding acquaintance, and close personal friend to others here who are infinitely more important than me, a family member to yet others, and to one other person their partner in life. One other person who's wandering around slightly dazed and baffled.

But there is also a countenance which I am morally bound to keep. Play it straight and heartfelt. This was a deeply intelligent and lively person who disappeared a couple of Thursdays before because she was on the train to work and that was somehow, obscurely, illegal. The everyday horror which routinely provokes only a shrug until someone you know, even if only vaguely, becomes involved.

It is not about you, yet it's all about you, from your perspective. It's been nearly four years since you were at another funeral. You couldn't get past what happened, or liked to convince yourself that you couldn't. You know this is, for a key nanosecond, ALL about you. You have to prove that you're still fit to live as a human being. You have to show people that somehow you can get beyond the fourth stage, accept and try to get on.

Because you sat at home and brooded under headphones while they went out, danced and had fun. Two of the people on a dancefloor you never visited gone within a couple of months of each other. Do you know where you're going to, Diana Ross once rhetorically asked herself. You know where you might be going if you're not careful.

You need to show these people who you are. You're much better at doing that in person than you are online. A lifetime in the shadow of a ball and chain you've been biologically obliged to haul around with you, or even around your self. They think you're standoffish. Never say anything. They don't get it. Although a few try. They know what key to turn in order to get me functioning and then it's anybody's guess where the rollercoaster lands.

You stand in solemn silence but that's all you need to do, everything that's being asked of you. After it's happened, people look at you differently. You might even say, in some cases, fondly. You don't need to say anything because your left hand says it all.

We'll make sure that you don't end up like I did, you think. But it's all words; what you mean is you'll make sure you don't end up like you did.

It was the end of somebody's life, but also the closure of your premature death. You'll hardly tell anyone, but this is, tragically, the almighty kick in the backside that you needed. How much more life are you going to miss? You walk out of that cemetery, back into the car, heading back to the City, and you know you are different from the collared wretch you had been that morning.

"There's a ghost on the horizon

When I go to bed"

You only know ANONHI (as she later became known) from her cameo at the end of a Rufus Wainwright album the autumn before. She sings on the version of "Perfect Day" you find on Lou Reed's The Raven, too, but you don't really get the connection at that time. This extraordinary voice which sounds beamed down from 195-94 materialises like an old Cape Apples shop poster from the sixties crooning about how something gets him going, and you can't get going away from it, from her.

 

She comes from Chichester but subsequently lived in Amsterdam, San Jose and subsequently Manhattan. She did enough growing up in the UK to hear what radio DJs and manly music critics had to say - mainly spite-filled ridicule - about all the music she intrinsically loved. Her career can be interpreted as her final revenge on all that disused discourse. Ho ho, Marc and the Mambas - ha ha, it helped ANONHI grow up and who remembers any of the jokers hyped up instead?

Later in the summer of 2005 there is an album, I Am A Bird Now, with its cover of Candy Darling on her deathbed, terminally ill and bored with life. I think of later in the summer of 2001, just before that last funeral I attended. I buy the album, take it home and play it, and like all the best albums it's as though the artist is singing, or playing, to me.

"Hope There's Someone" is the first song on that album and it's mostly just ANONHI at the piano with subtle and not-so-subtle vocal overdubs. I listened and thought, here's someone who actually gets what Culture Club were trying to say with the song "Victims" (and, as you'd expect, Boy George himself turns up later on the record, duetting with her on "You Are My Sister"). The piano is hopeful but tense. The voice of ANONHI cannot be pinned down, has to fly out of the church tower's barred window. A high vibrato which doesn't have to exhibit its prowess.

And a soul that is alone, and hurt. Time might be running out for the singer, and she's hoping that when the end comes he will not have to face it alone, in common with all of the rest of us. Confident yet hesitant - the pause before the semi-guilty sigh of "uh-hmm" that heralds the second half of the second verse. The tower of orange defiance which rises with her determinedly climactic "SET MY HEART FREE," the little chuckle of "YEAH," which she permits after the final "nice to hold."

But then she begins to hammer chords of unexpected fury, or is it fear? Multiple ANONHImass voices come in on varying wings of harmony or discordance over a Philip Glass organ arpeggio and violent strings - Joan Wasser on viola, Vancouver's Julia Kent on 'cello - as if to scream, politely, "don't let me die." Reaching a final climax, the music recedes, back down to one voice and its piano, a wordless, sibilant weep seeking permission to go on living.

It sent me out the door, that song, and back towards the world.

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The purpose of this blog is to publish a 117,156-word book that I have written, entitled Uncorrected Bound Proof. I commenced writing it on 1 January 2023 and finished editing it on 3 August of the same year. The book consists of 100 chapters, each based on a song in my personal Your Top Songs 2022 algorithmic Spotify playlist, in ascending order from numbers 100-1. The book’s purpose is to tell the story of my not uneventful life, but I have done so in accordance with the strict numbering order of the playlist. This means that the events of my life are told out of sequence; however, I have done my best to ensure that the central autobiographical narrative has remained united and coherent.

 

I have made a few half-hearted attempts to engage the interest of publishers with regard to this book but none has proved successful. Rather than embark upon an extended commentary about the current state of the British publishing industry, it is far more realistic for me to understand that there are no serious takers for a difficult and challenging book by an unknown writer based on what is now a two-year-old list of music. In truth the book should probably have been rushed into publication in late 2023 while it was still current (or "hot") but in the present environment, or indeed in any environment, that is unachievable.

As a consequence, I have decided to publish the book, chapter by chapter, in this blog since I believe it is the best thing I have ever written and am not keen on waiting until after I am dead before it is recognised as such. Who knows - some enterprising publisher might come across this blog and want to transfer it into print. Books, after all, are still easier for most people to read than a computer screen.

I do not intend to "explain" Uncorrected Bound Proof any further than the description in the first paragraph of this post; to paraphrase Ian McCulloch apropos "The Killing Moon," you don't buy a book of poetry then buy another book to explain what the poems mean. I trust my readers to have sufficient intelligence and enterprise to work it out for themselves.

 

Some of the writing in this book will be familiar. This is because I took the opportunity to include some of what is, in my opinion, the best writing that I have done on various blogs. A kind of "greatest blog hits" if you must, all the better to explain who I am and why I write as I do. Some chapters are extremely brief, others immensely long.

Above all, Uncorrected Bound Proof is a fragmented story of a jumbled confusion of a life which I believe is worth sorting out.