#1: JOHN NEWMAN
"Love Me Again"
Single released: May 2013
To hell with the lot of you.
Don't fret. I've already been there, was given a misguided tour through its evasive portals which lasted for months. I have it on the authority of no less than Mr Georgios Vasilikostas, the surgeon who primarily operated on me in April 2018 and who on a subsequent outpatient clinic visit informed me that I had literally gone through hell. I developed a postoperative incisional hernia which makes me look as though I were thirty-five weeks pregnant, am fitted with a colostomy bag and require a walking stick for back pain because I spent forty-four days in intensive care lying in bed and not moving.
I cannot do anything about any of this because Mr Vasilikostas explained that if I wanted a stoma reversal or the calcified bone around my hernia sorted out, I would need to go back into hospital and undergo the entire procedure again, from the beginning, because they would need to take out the mesh repair, and this time I couldn't be guaranteed of a satisfactory recovery. I would rather perish than be made to relive any of that, if life were indeed the correct term to apply.
Don't fret. I've already been there, was given a misguided tour through its evasive portals which lasted for months. I have it on the authority of no less than Mr Georgios Vasilikostas, the surgeon who primarily operated on me in April 2018 and who on a subsequent outpatient clinic visit informed me that I had literally gone through hell. I developed a postoperative incisional hernia which makes me look as though I were thirty-five weeks pregnant, am fitted with a colostomy bag and require a walking stick for back pain because I spent forty-four days in intensive care lying in bed and not moving.
I cannot do anything about any of this because Mr Vasilikostas explained that if I wanted a stoma reversal or the calcified bone around my hernia sorted out, I would need to go back into hospital and undergo the entire procedure again, from the beginning, because they would need to take out the mesh repair, and this time I couldn't be guaranteed of a satisfactory recovery. I would rather perish than be made to relive any of that, if life were indeed the correct term to apply.
I
described what I "lived" through in the Charli XCX chapter. Mr Martin
Vesely, the plastic surgeon who undertook my subsequent skin graft,
strongly advised me against a revisit or redo; quit while you're ahead,
with which advice I thoroughly concurred. This is as good as it is ever
going to get and if I hadn't gone in for the surgery in the first place I
wouldn't be here to write this. Next time I might not be in a position
to write anything.
Hell is a sunny summer morning with everybody going about their business in sunny flats I could see from the window of the ward except me. Hell is nurses cheerily packing their bags and heading off home for the evening - or in some cases morning - when you yourself are chained to a drain and catheter.
Hell is not being able to tell you the really gruesome aspects of my personal hospital nightmares - I have only tentatively scraped the surface of the surface of the iceberg - because some things need to kept to myself, even after I no longer exist.
For what is the point of writing this book, even if it never gets read or published, other than to provide evidence to a subsequent world - if such a thing is allowed to come to pass - that, once, I was here, I existed, and this is what I saw and felt happening?
Hell is a sunny summer morning with everybody going about their business in sunny flats I could see from the window of the ward except me. Hell is nurses cheerily packing their bags and heading off home for the evening - or in some cases morning - when you yourself are chained to a drain and catheter.
Hell is not being able to tell you the really gruesome aspects of my personal hospital nightmares - I have only tentatively scraped the surface of the surface of the iceberg - because some things need to kept to myself, even after I no longer exist.
For what is the point of writing this book, even if it never gets read or published, other than to provide evidence to a subsequent world - if such a thing is allowed to come to pass - that, once, I was here, I existed, and this is what I saw and felt happening?
What
was my life, and isn't the act of knowing or caring about what my life
was, unless you are a member of my family or otherwise know me, somewhat
irrational? An unknown, like Robert Tucker in the Terence Davies
trilogy, someone destined never to be noticed, let alone remember OH
CEASE THIS WANKING OF PITY AND TELL US THE FUCKING STORY ok
Or
there is a sequential story; not necessarily my sequence although it
would certainly be compatible with it, Saturday 25 August 2001 being
what it was, or shouldn't have been:
But the sea:
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
1974: FIRST CLASS
FIRST CLASSBeach Baby (15 Jun – 13)
"Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so."
(Philip Larkin, "Reference Back," 1955, stanza 3)
The intangible sound of static, just like the beginning of "Telstar." A fragment of a once-happy song emerges from this abstract mausoleum. A disc jockey who doesn’t quite sound American. "This is the summer sound of First Class and their record ‘Beach Baby," yeah man…" And then the strange nasal voice fades, giving way to a solemn organ chord, as though we had inadvertently blundered our way into a funeral service (it is the next chord after "Good Vibrations"), before that too is subsumed, or even drowned, in a sudden tsunami of drums, timpani, strings, brass and finally buoyant, boyish harmony voices bringing us back to…well, trying to bring something back to us. Trying to remember what it was like to live before the end of the metaphorical September which the record inhabits. The record is "Beach Baby" by First Class, and it was the culmination of the life’s work of its creator, one of the most extraordinary operatives in post-war British pop, John Carter.
Carter had spent the best part of a decade working towards this masterpiece, and had done so under a dizzying variety of pseudonyms, greater in number than those of Jonathan King, to whose UK label he was signed in the guise of First Class. As mainstay of the Ivy League in the mid-‘60s, he was responsible for the immaculate melancholy of rueful soft pop classics such as "Funny How Love Can Be" (but under the surface of softness, apprehend the polite sneer of "There she goes, with her nose in the air") and "Tossing And Turning."
It was with the final Ivy League single, 1966’s "My World Fell Down," that Carter ventured to cut the Merseybeat dummy loose. Suddenly the harmonies are dappled in minor oceans of echoing miasma; there are baroque strings and a quietly sobbing solo violin to end. Clearly he had been listening acutely to Pet Sounds, but he had not yet made the transition from artisan to visionary; it was down to America’s Gary Usher, under his studio guise of Sagittarius, to amplify the song’s otherness, with a careful lead vocal from Glen Campbell, Bruce Johnston taking the topline harmony of the chorus and an otherworldly "middle eight" of a seemingly random sound collage abruptly terminated by the slamming of a coffin lid (incidentally, the apocryphal story that said sound collage was an outtake from the "in the cantina" section of "Heroes And Villains" is not actually true – though heavily and naturally influenced by Brian Wilson, Usher came up with it all by himself).
Nevertheless, in between innumerable session singing and production duties – including the uncredited lead vocal on "Winchester Cathedral" and writing "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James" for Manfred Mann, as well as several Herman’s Hermits hits and even that other Nuggets staple, "A Little Bit Of Soul" by the Music Explosion – Carter continued to refine his peculiarly but specifically British vision of post-Wilsonian pop; via 1966’s "I Couldn’t Stand Another Day Without You," where the Mersey template dissolves in petals of acid ("I can’t tell day from night"), details such as the quarrelsome guitar line on 1967’s "Time And Motion Man" and the gorgeous, if still derivative, "Am I Losing You," this phase of his art culminated in "Let’s Go To San Francisco," credited to the Flowerpot Men (his preferred soft-psych moniker between 1967-70) and widely derided at the time as a cynical flower power cash-in, but actually an intelligent, heartfelt and enterprising record, particularly when heard in its full six-minute length (complete with "Good Vibrations"-style breakdown halfway through and its ending of a whirlpool of piano feedback).
Indeed the Flowerpot Men seemed to be the
harbour under which Carter could express otherwise inexpressible
emotions – consider the half-hidden "Say goodbye to mother" refrain in
"A Walk In The Sky," and the sad wisdom of 1969’s "White Dove" (hear how
oceanic Carter’s production had become by this stage, with its tolling
bells and pre-Cocteau Twins guitars) and 1970’s moving "Say Goodbye To
Yesterday." Or the Flowerpot Men records which ended up being released
under other names – "Tahiti Farewell" (Haystack, 1969) is "Cool, Cool
Water" with a didgeridoo added. The amazing "A Night To Be Remembered"
(Dawn Chorus, 1969) takes a basic (but tremendous) Ivy League song and
subjects it to a melee of primitive Moog bleeps, banjo picking and Bach
organ chorales. And above all there is "Mythological Sunday," released
in 1968 and credited to "Friends"; a stunningly beautiful and limpid
technicolor dream with vocals which sound strangely like Robert Wyatt
and an innate melancholy which places it somewhere between People’s
"Glastonbury" and Traffic’s "No Face, No Name, No Number."
But the clue
is in the title; four-and-a-half minutes in, as the song appears to be
coming to its natural end, its space is gradually invaded by synthesised
gunfire and a mournful military march ("When Johnny Comes Marching
Home" redone for the Vietnam era) proceeding from channel to channel.
The dream is broken by blood; thus "Mythological Sunday" is also a
forefather of "America No More" by the KLF. And this from someone who,
virtually in the same breath, was writing cheery little McCartney-esque
ditties like "Knock, Knock, Who’s There," Mary Hopkin’s 1970 Eurovision
entry - a "Those Were The Days" variant, but kinder and gentler to
itself.
As the ‘70s dawned Carter moved into a curious mixture of bubblegum and CSNY-type introspective folk-pop. As Stamford Bridge he was happy to indulge in unapologetic post-"Sugar Sugar" candy pop, though under this particular pseudonym he sneaked in some songs which were noticeably close to someone’s bone – perhaps his then principal co-writer and former schoolfriend Ken Lewis, about to quit the music business, beset by depression – such that songs such as "First Day Of Your Life" and "Move Out Of Town" take on an additional if inadvertent poignancy, as did 1971’s brilliantly panscopic "Hello Hello Hello" (released as Stormy Petrel – I hope that you are managing to keep up with all of these names) with its urge to you to come out of your bunker. On the other fist there was the greatest Eurovision song we never had, Kincade’s "Dreams Are Ten A Penny," a huge hit everywhere in 1972 except in Britain. And, as First Class, he was able to make the well-worn template of "feel sorry for the lonely rich superstar" sound fresh and affecting in 1974’s "What Became Of Me," which, in between its Surf’s Up balladic structural peaks rapidly flicks through klezmer, heavy metal and Sousa marches as the protagonist regrets a wasted life ("What became of the girls I went for/And the same cheap scent I bought them all?").
But "Beach Baby" was the five-minute peak of Carter’s art. The lead vocal was not Carter himself, but his former Ivy League colleague Tony Burrows, he of Edison Lighthouse, White Plains (essentially a de-weirded Flowerpot Men) and the first incarnation of the Brotherhood of Man. Burrows’ faux-naif contralto (sounding exactly, and appropriately, like a British Mike Love) is ideal for a song which is about bewilderment, and also about imperfect perceptions of a reality which may never have existed.
"Or, better yet, Dumas does not exist; he is only a mythical being, a trade name invented by a syndicate of editors."
(J Lucas-Dubreton, La Vue d’Alexandre Dumas Pere, cited by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project – section: "The Streets Of Paris")
"Do you remember back in old LA?" asks Burrows, wherein follows a series of disconnected signifiers - "Chevrolet," "the boy next door," "The suntanned, crewcut All-American Male," "the high school hop," "the soda pop" - which don't so much signify Roy Lichtenstein as Philip K Dick, as is evident in the couplet "I didn't recognise the Girl Next Door/With beat-up sneakers and a ponytail," with the emphasis on the "beat-up." Life has beaten her up. We are now in someone's autumn.
In a desperate attempt to resuscitate dead memories, all the record's voices unite, propelling the music
forward like a subaquatic JCB digger trying to pull the Titanic out of the seabed - "Beach baby! Beach baby! Give me your hand! Give me something that I can remember!" - but note how the chorus oscillates between major and minor, ending on the ambiguously augmented major of "Surfin' was fun! We'd be out in the sun every day."
Four drumbeats, like the spluttering of a pacemaker trying to emulate a heartbeat, and then Burrows' voice lowers with the orchestration: "Oooh, I never thought that it would end/Oooh, and I was everybody's friend." Then, heartbreakingly, a distant Leslie Cabinet-modified high-pithced piano tinkles in the background, a remnant of psychedelia (but also an accidental precursor of Ultravox's "Vienna") as Burrows in choirboy mode considers "Long hot days," "Blue sea haze" (which on the record sounds more like "boozy haze") and "jukebox plays," before his voice doubles up in suppressed agony: "But now it's fading AWAY!" And there's one last desperate flourish from the piano before the Fairchild compressors and natural echo of '60s pop are swept away by the harsh, Mazda bulb-lit, two-dimensional reality of London recording studios in the mid-'70s. For this is an English fantasy on a concept of "America" known only through second-hand observations. The voices make one final C major harmonic foray before a cross-channel, tripartite "Do do do" (the third one of which seems to be swept away into the sky) gives way to a rhythm section stomp compatible with the Bay City Rollers which reminds us that, sadly, this is indeed 1974, before the tympani and orchestra re-enter to underscore the song's tragic final verse - "We couldn't wait for graduation day/We took the car and drove to San Jose"
("Do you know the way to San Jose? I've been away so long, I may go wrong and lose my way" - Bacharach/David, via Dionne Warwick)
("Didn't time sound sweet yesterday? In a world full of friends, you lose your way" - Scott Walker, "Big Louise")
"That's where you told me that you'd wear my ring."
Without a break or emotional collapse:
"I guess you don't remember anything."
What exactly happened to the Girl Next Door to make her lose, or deny, her memory? Of someone she was going to marry - at least from his perspective?
Or is there a more sinister cause?
"Take a walk along the beach tonight? I'd love to. But don't try to touch me. Don't try to touch me. 'Cause that will never happen again. Shall we dance?"
(Shangri-Las, "Past, Present and Future")
Four ascending string chords seem to cry on the singer's behalf. And then the music stops, and a solitary French horn plays the climactic thematic motif from Sibelius' Symphony No 5 - written in 1915, and a deliberate attempt by the Finnish composer to reinstate unapologetic Romanticism as a protest against a world then, as now, being slowly eaten up by war (it is significant that "Beach Baby," though an English record through and through, was a far bigger hit in America than it was in Britain - it reached #4 in Billboard in the summer of '74, and in that context seemed to symbolise reassurance for, or subliminal protest against, an America being rapidly gobbled up by Watergate and the ashen remnants of Vietnam). The lead trumpets take up the motif while Carter's harmonies multiply in a manner more akin to 10cc than to the Beach Boys (those bass voices especially are far closer to Kevin Godley than they are to Dennis Wilson) before another triple "do-do-do" fanfare announces a repeat of the Bay City Rollers rhythm, but this time with orchestral accompaniment, before the closing mantra of "beach baby" is, if Carter can manage it, set to repeat for eternity, luscious in its foregone decay.
And the single most heartbreaking and poignant moment of the record comes at 4:50, when the song is nearly over, and the same French horn comes forward in the mix and starts to play the tune of "Let's Go To San Francisco." So Carter's intent is made explicit; this is a eulogy for a funeral, the burial of a future never realised, the optimism and good nature of 1967 dying to be replaced by the three-day-week, grey, bleak 1974. It's a reproachful goodbye to psychedelia - from a man who almost simultaneously nearly appeared in this list again with "Please Yourself" by the Tots, an expanded version of a TV advert for Rowntree's Jelly Tots - now you are on your own, preparing for the purgatory which punk will make necessary. Rationalism might never have seemed colder, as blank and as ultimately dead as the waves of radio static, with now indistinguishable words and syllables, into which the song recedes forever.
"’Then, what is Life?’ I said…the cripple cast
His eye upon the car which had now rolled
Onward, as if that look must be the last,
"And answered….’Happy those for whom the fold
Of"
(Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 1822-4, unfinished, as the author was drowned as compensation for failing to reach Hell. ‘Tis in the nurturing waters that we are thus, and thus)
As the ‘70s dawned Carter moved into a curious mixture of bubblegum and CSNY-type introspective folk-pop. As Stamford Bridge he was happy to indulge in unapologetic post-"Sugar Sugar" candy pop, though under this particular pseudonym he sneaked in some songs which were noticeably close to someone’s bone – perhaps his then principal co-writer and former schoolfriend Ken Lewis, about to quit the music business, beset by depression – such that songs such as "First Day Of Your Life" and "Move Out Of Town" take on an additional if inadvertent poignancy, as did 1971’s brilliantly panscopic "Hello Hello Hello" (released as Stormy Petrel – I hope that you are managing to keep up with all of these names) with its urge to you to come out of your bunker. On the other fist there was the greatest Eurovision song we never had, Kincade’s "Dreams Are Ten A Penny," a huge hit everywhere in 1972 except in Britain. And, as First Class, he was able to make the well-worn template of "feel sorry for the lonely rich superstar" sound fresh and affecting in 1974’s "What Became Of Me," which, in between its Surf’s Up balladic structural peaks rapidly flicks through klezmer, heavy metal and Sousa marches as the protagonist regrets a wasted life ("What became of the girls I went for/And the same cheap scent I bought them all?").
But "Beach Baby" was the five-minute peak of Carter’s art. The lead vocal was not Carter himself, but his former Ivy League colleague Tony Burrows, he of Edison Lighthouse, White Plains (essentially a de-weirded Flowerpot Men) and the first incarnation of the Brotherhood of Man. Burrows’ faux-naif contralto (sounding exactly, and appropriately, like a British Mike Love) is ideal for a song which is about bewilderment, and also about imperfect perceptions of a reality which may never have existed.
"Or, better yet, Dumas does not exist; he is only a mythical being, a trade name invented by a syndicate of editors."
(J Lucas-Dubreton, La Vue d’Alexandre Dumas Pere, cited by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project – section: "The Streets Of Paris")
"Do you remember back in old LA?" asks Burrows, wherein follows a series of disconnected signifiers - "Chevrolet," "the boy next door," "The suntanned, crewcut All-American Male," "the high school hop," "the soda pop" - which don't so much signify Roy Lichtenstein as Philip K Dick, as is evident in the couplet "I didn't recognise the Girl Next Door/With beat-up sneakers and a ponytail," with the emphasis on the "beat-up." Life has beaten her up. We are now in someone's autumn.
In a desperate attempt to resuscitate dead memories, all the record's voices unite, propelling the music
forward like a subaquatic JCB digger trying to pull the Titanic out of the seabed - "Beach baby! Beach baby! Give me your hand! Give me something that I can remember!" - but note how the chorus oscillates between major and minor, ending on the ambiguously augmented major of "Surfin' was fun! We'd be out in the sun every day."
Four drumbeats, like the spluttering of a pacemaker trying to emulate a heartbeat, and then Burrows' voice lowers with the orchestration: "Oooh, I never thought that it would end/Oooh, and I was everybody's friend." Then, heartbreakingly, a distant Leslie Cabinet-modified high-pithced piano tinkles in the background, a remnant of psychedelia (but also an accidental precursor of Ultravox's "Vienna") as Burrows in choirboy mode considers "Long hot days," "Blue sea haze" (which on the record sounds more like "boozy haze") and "jukebox plays," before his voice doubles up in suppressed agony: "But now it's fading AWAY!" And there's one last desperate flourish from the piano before the Fairchild compressors and natural echo of '60s pop are swept away by the harsh, Mazda bulb-lit, two-dimensional reality of London recording studios in the mid-'70s. For this is an English fantasy on a concept of "America" known only through second-hand observations. The voices make one final C major harmonic foray before a cross-channel, tripartite "Do do do" (the third one of which seems to be swept away into the sky) gives way to a rhythm section stomp compatible with the Bay City Rollers which reminds us that, sadly, this is indeed 1974, before the tympani and orchestra re-enter to underscore the song's tragic final verse - "We couldn't wait for graduation day/We took the car and drove to San Jose"
("Do you know the way to San Jose? I've been away so long, I may go wrong and lose my way" - Bacharach/David, via Dionne Warwick)
("Didn't time sound sweet yesterday? In a world full of friends, you lose your way" - Scott Walker, "Big Louise")
"That's where you told me that you'd wear my ring."
Without a break or emotional collapse:
"I guess you don't remember anything."
What exactly happened to the Girl Next Door to make her lose, or deny, her memory? Of someone she was going to marry - at least from his perspective?
Or is there a more sinister cause?
"Take a walk along the beach tonight? I'd love to. But don't try to touch me. Don't try to touch me. 'Cause that will never happen again. Shall we dance?"
(Shangri-Las, "Past, Present and Future")
Four ascending string chords seem to cry on the singer's behalf. And then the music stops, and a solitary French horn plays the climactic thematic motif from Sibelius' Symphony No 5 - written in 1915, and a deliberate attempt by the Finnish composer to reinstate unapologetic Romanticism as a protest against a world then, as now, being slowly eaten up by war (it is significant that "Beach Baby," though an English record through and through, was a far bigger hit in America than it was in Britain - it reached #4 in Billboard in the summer of '74, and in that context seemed to symbolise reassurance for, or subliminal protest against, an America being rapidly gobbled up by Watergate and the ashen remnants of Vietnam). The lead trumpets take up the motif while Carter's harmonies multiply in a manner more akin to 10cc than to the Beach Boys (those bass voices especially are far closer to Kevin Godley than they are to Dennis Wilson) before another triple "do-do-do" fanfare announces a repeat of the Bay City Rollers rhythm, but this time with orchestral accompaniment, before the closing mantra of "beach baby" is, if Carter can manage it, set to repeat for eternity, luscious in its foregone decay.
And the single most heartbreaking and poignant moment of the record comes at 4:50, when the song is nearly over, and the same French horn comes forward in the mix and starts to play the tune of "Let's Go To San Francisco." So Carter's intent is made explicit; this is a eulogy for a funeral, the burial of a future never realised, the optimism and good nature of 1967 dying to be replaced by the three-day-week, grey, bleak 1974. It's a reproachful goodbye to psychedelia - from a man who almost simultaneously nearly appeared in this list again with "Please Yourself" by the Tots, an expanded version of a TV advert for Rowntree's Jelly Tots - now you are on your own, preparing for the purgatory which punk will make necessary. Rationalism might never have seemed colder, as blank and as ultimately dead as the waves of radio static, with now indistinguishable words and syllables, into which the song recedes forever.
"’Then, what is Life?’ I said…the cripple cast
His eye upon the car which had now rolled
Onward, as if that look must be the last,
"And answered….’Happy those for whom the fold
Of"
(Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 1822-4, unfinished, as the author was drowned as compensation for failing to reach Hell. ‘Tis in the nurturing waters that we are thus, and thus)
Or there is the loss of love:
What About All The Dreams That You Said Were Yours And Mine?: “MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris
The story begins with Bones Howe, a producer who, along with
Jimmy Webb, worked on the first two albums by The Fifth Dimension – Up, Up And Away and The Magic Garden. This work was a happy affair, and while putting
these records together Webb regularly confided in Howe about how he would like
to expand the vocabulary and structure of the popular song. Spellbound, as with
so many others, by Pet Sounds and Pepper, he was looking to do something
similarly (if amiably) disorientating.
Upon completion of The
Magic Garden, Howe urged Webb to be as good as his word and compose the
epic song that was in his head. Webb responded with a twenty-minute,
multi-movement cantata – i.e. one whole side of an album – which he called
“MacArthur Park.” Howe instantly thought of another of his production clients,
The Association, who in late 1967 were looking towards the experimental and
adventurous.
Webb and Howe duly approached the group with this great
notion. Figuring that The Association accepting it would be a mere formality,
Webb performed the song in its entirety, and both he and Howe were rather taken
aback to discover that the group didn’t particularly care for it and, indeed,
turned it down (there are tales of tapes of The Association recording the
full-length work sitting in a Warners archive somewhere, but such tales are
strictly apocryphal). Irked, Howe told the group that when the song went top
ten – by whoever would finally record it - that would be the day they would
receive his letter of resignation as their producer.
Webb did some more work on the song, editing it down
somewhat. Then at a fundraising event in East Los Angeles in late 1967 he met
Richard Harris; indeed, he was providing the music for the event. Fresh from
his stage success in the musical Camelot,
Harris fancied the idea of making a record and asked Webb to write something
for him. Webb initially thought the actor was kidding but a little while later received
a telegram from Harris asking him to come to London to work on songs that he
could sing and record.
Webb duly took himself off to Harris’ apartment in
Belgravia, and played him some songs. Harris liked them but wasn’t sure that
they fit with his idea of what a record made by him should be about. As a last
resort – virtually as an afterthought – Webb pulled out a seven-page lead sheet
and informed Harris that somebody else had recently turned this song down;
would he be interested? Intrigued by its length, Harris asked Webb to play it.
He sang and performed “MacArthur Park” in its entirety. Once the song had ended, Harris
– by then in a rapture – immediately told Webb, “Well, we must do it!”
Webb returned to L.A. mildly elated but still slightly
baffled. After all, Harris was known as an actor – he did his best with Camelot but anyone could tell that he
wasn’t the world’s greatest singer. A singing actor? Webb thought it over and
grew to like the idea. The melodrama, the projecting
of it all – it is very likely that The Association’s cool reaction to the song
was based on the improbability of six voices singing what was, essentially, a
soliloquy.
He came up with some more songs – some of which may have
evolved out of the original twenty-minute cantata – to build a concept album
centring on “MacArthur Park.” In L.A. he recorded the instrumental tracks with
The Wrecking Crew’s finest. The next move was to cross the Atlantic again and
meet Harris with a view to recording the vocals. On this occasion they met, not
in London, but in Dublin. Delighted to see him, Harris took the young
songwriter under his wing and gave him a guided tour of the great city and its
environs, pointing out his old childhood haunts and showing him the best pubs.
When it came to laying down the vocal tracks, Harris opted to use the small
Lansdowne Road Studios. The vocals were recorded pretty quickly and
professionally; a bottle of Pimms was always to hand, but Harris insisted that
this was simply to help lubricate his vocal cords. Certainly Webb has confirmed
that the songs were too complex for Harris to get through while drunk; there
was no funny business in that respect.
Harris was not even fazed by the fact that the backing track
for “MacArthur Park” was pitched a little too high for his vocal comfort range;
indeed, it is the yearning, perhaps even the straining, in his voice which
gives the song the drama it demands. He begins it as though already halfway through
the song – “Spring was never waiting for us, girl” as if the listener had
stumbled into the midst, or at least within earshot, of a private conversation.
He then mourns what has happened – all in a very low-key fashion – before
reminiscing about the times he had known in that park with that lover,
remembering details and people because he is afraid that they might otherwise
be forgotten, or have never existed.
Then the song’s clouds break to allow in minor sunshine.
This is the second section; the first was subtitled “In The Park” and the
second “All The Loves Of My Life.” The music relaxes back into a cautious major
key as he thinks about his life, about love, how they intertwine, what might
happen to him and how, in the end, he goes back to thinking about her – and,
crucially (and radically for a sixties love song, even one this late in the
decade) cannot understand why.
The music then charges up into the third “Allegro” section,
where the spotlight switches to the backing musicians, including Mike Deasy’s
lead guitar and Webb himself at the harpsichord, expressing the tumultuous
urgency and pain running around inside the singer’s head. Then the orchestra
rises up again towards a piteous climax in which Harris returns for a reprise
and extension of the chorus, knowing he has lost something that can never be
replaced or reproduced, until he is finally overcome by his despair, so much so
that the backing singers take over the final high notes prior to the song’s
resolution – of sorts.
The subsequent story was almost a rerun of "Like A Rolling Stone."
Columbia turned the record down, and it was eventually released on the
Dunhill-ABC label. FM disc jockeys played it and AM disc jockeys were
initially
reluctant to play it in its entirety because of its length, but were
ultimately
forced to do so because that was what was happening on FM radio. It
became a
hit, peaked at number two and sold a million, and The Association had
notice of
Bones Howe’s resignation.
Webb has always stated that the song was inspired by the
relationship he had with Susie Horton, slightly earlier in the sixties. They
would regularly meet at MacArthur Park. But there was no angst to draw on here;
the couple parted, but amicably, and even after Horton married another man –
Linda Ronstadt’s cousin – they remained great friends. After that relationship
ended, Webb stayed for a while at the L.A. house of the singer Buddy Greco, and
indeed composed “MacArthur Park” on Greco’s piano (returning the favour, Greco
would conclude his own stage act with the song for the next four decades).
It is said that Webb’s break-up with Horton was the initial
inspiration behind his writing “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” but that was no
more than a catalyst; the song was first (and quite fittingly) recorded by
Johnny Rivers for an album, then Glen Campbell heard the record and was taken
by it – hence it unwittingly became the first chapter in the Webb/Campbell
Pentateuch (also including “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” the self-referential
“Where’s The Playground, Susie?” and the coolly cathartic “Honey Come Back”).
Harris’ album was entitled A Tramp
Shining, which summed up its concept fairly neatly – the old man down on
his luck, looking back on his life and loves (“Didn’t We?”) but not leaving
himself bereft of hope. Beyond its cynosure of “MacArthur Park,” the album is
surprisingly quiet and reflective, which provides an excellent counterpoint to
its centrepiece.
But what of the song’s wider impact? In 1968 one of the
major trends in pop was what I would call orchestral maximalism – in the
slipstream of Pepper and Pet Sounds, the objective was to express
something as ornately and (preferably) loudly as possible, to re-examine and
re-constitute what was then perceived as the model for the popular song. This musical
and lyrical tendency would eventually develop, or retreat (depending on your
viewpoint), into progressive rock. But in 1968 the boundaries between what one
might still term “easy listening” and progressive music were by no means
clearcut.
In Britain, the expatriate American Scott Walker led the
way, patiently pushing out the MoR envelope with Scott 2, the emotional canvas of which ranged from Brel to
psychotropic disorientation. On a more basic level, the likes of Keith
Mansfield and Johnny Arthey were hired to provide expansive backdrops for pop
groups like Love Affair and Marmalade, but even at this level there was some
chafing – Arthey’s work in particular was notable in helping shift the
boundaries; in America, “Yesterday Has Gone” was perhaps too subtle a
production for Little Anthony and The Imperials, but Cupid’s Inspiration, and
particularly their lead singer Terry Rice-Milton, shoved out all the song’s
implications into plain sight – their “Yesterday Has Gone” is purposely over
the top, but it’s exactly what the song needs (with Rice-Milton’s hysterical
interjections – “LIVE FOREVER!,” “FORGET THE PAST!”). And there were always the
Bee Gees in the middleground, getting Odessa
together. Even Billy Fury punctuated that year with his incredible orchestral take on "Wondrous Place."
In the States, Song
Cycle by Van Dyke Parks got close to dismantling the popular song
completely. The Four Seasons released the remarkable, and misunderstood, Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. Even
Sinatra was drawn into the game with Watertown,
which was a sequel of sorts to the Four Seasons record (also written and
produced by Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes). Meanwhile, many “MacArthur Park”
disciples of records appeared on the market, notably Gene Pitney’s “Billy,
You’re My Friend” and Roy Orbison’s “Southbound Jericho Parkway,” which latter
is somewhere just beyond extraordinary (and actually quite terrifying in its
trembling narrative patience). Indeed, Orbison’s performance reminds us that
there has been nothing quite like “MacArthur Park” in this story so far since
the time the Big O appeared in it. Even if it were nothing else, Harris makes
it clear in his delivery that this is an aria.
There was, of course, a shortlived craze for “long” pop
singles, one of which will appear in this list the week after next. But perhaps
the two people in Britain who took “MacArthur Park”’s challenge most seriously
were the Ryan twins from Leeds, former pin-ups Paul and Barry – at a party in
London hosted by Harris, Paul Ryan announced that he was writing songs in the
same vein. The two agreed that Paul would write the songs and Barry sing them,
and the initial and most explosive result was "Eloise," a record which helped
to inspire, amongst many other things, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” By the end of 1968
it seemed that any notion of The Pop Song, as one’s parents might have known
it, was hanging on by the scantiest of threads.
But what did the song mean,
and I don’t necessarily confine that to what Webb has told us that it means,
since I think it meant a whole lot more than a love affair ending. The
metaphorical cake dissolving in the rain was only too real to a lot of people
in the America of 1968; note that the record peaked at number two a fortnight
after Bobby Kennedy was shot. What had happened to all the promises 1967 had
made, not just with music, but to the world? In 1968 it felt that it was all
coming apart, from King’s assassination to the Chicago Democratic convention
(the latter unforgettably restaged as “Circus ‘68/’69” by Charlie Haden’s
Liberation Music Orchestra the following April), via LBJ’s decision not to run
again, all set against the seemingly unending backdrop of Vietnam and an older,
more conservative constituency intent on sidelining the young forever. In this
context it is hard not to view “MacArthur Park” as a requiem for a world that
nearly was. It hit hard to those with ears generous enough to receive it. In
that sense it is not too dissimilar from “Surf’s Up” (the phrase “Are you
sleeping, brother John?” spells out what the song is really about), but where Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks allow that
song to end with a ray of hope and optimism (the child being father to the man,
etc.) – was there ever a pop record that ended with such a powerful,
unambiguous, decisive and frightening expression of “NO!”?
The world turned, and later in 1968 Webb and Harris made a
second album, the exceptional The Yard
Went On Forever, which – again, depending on which way you look at it – is a
seamless half-hour meditation on life after a divorce, or the end of a love
affair, or the world after a nuclear war. Apart from the suitably bleak 1969 non-album
single “One Of The Nicer Things,” Harris would not release another album until 1971’s
My Boy, which was swiftly followed by
1972’s Slides – both excellent
records with significant (though not sole) input from Webb. But there is no
getting away from the central “NO” of “MacArthur Park,” splitting its
environment as surely as Westlake Avenue divides the real MacArthur Park. A
decade later, Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder realised that the only way to
deal with the song’s challenge was to laugh right in its face and escort it to
the last disco in town. And yet an underlying hope doesn't fade. Not just yet.
Date Record Made
Number Two: 22 June 1968
Number Of Weeks At
Number Two: 1
Record At Number One:
“This Guy’s In Love With You” by Herb Alpert
UK Chart Position: 4
Or the stupid fucking mistakes you make while drowning and attempting to grasp the bank:
“I Would Have Thought In The Middle Of The Atlantic In The Middle Of The Night That Rockets Must Mean Trouble”: “I’m Not In Love” by 10cc
"watching for night,
with absinthe eye
cocked on the lone, late,
passer-by."
(Sylvia Plath, "Prospect," 1956)
This story begins in 1954, before most people had really recognised anything called rock, and a pop record which is half-perfect. That record, which stayed at number one in our charts for ten weeks, was “Cara Mia” by David Whitfield with Mantovani and his Orchestra and Chorus. Now, Whitfield was never the most subtle of singers and his in-your-face bellowing is somewhat distracting – it is significant that he was the first British reality media star (not from television, because at that time Opportunity Knocks was only broadcast on Radio Luxembourg) since his climactic high C at the end of “Cara Mia” is like a display of gymnastics, or an athletic field event; can he do that triple loop or throw that javelin beyond the stadium? It proves that technical prowess can often render itself unlistenable.
But the magic here lies in the extraordinary arrangement provided by Mantovani, who indeed co-wrote the song; the record begins with, and is secretly, if serenely, powered by a high-voiced cluster of ethereal choir. Lena pointed out to me that it was probably directly inspired by the closing “Neptune, the Mystic” movement of Holst’s Planets Suite, then less than forty years old, the ending of which Imogen Holst described as “unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women's voices growing fainter and fainter...until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence.” Mantovani’s trademark sleep-well-Britain strings are also in evidence. But the remarkable moment in the record comes halfway through where the song actually pauses; the choir stops and everything hangs suspended in a momentary mid-air limbo before a key change is gently introduced.
Whitfield did not live long – and, like so many of his contemporaries, was more or less obliterated by the oncoming rock ‘n’ roll boom, conveying them all to a Talking Pictures TV land of grey, sepulchral ghosts (listening to old pre-rock pop of the fifties is now largely akin to viewing faded parchment from unplaceable history). And I cannot imagine a surviving seventy-year-old Whitfield doing “Miss Sarajevo.” All I will say is that some records would have been likely to leave an indelible impression on children of an impressionable age growing up in, say, fifties Manchester.
with absinthe eye
cocked on the lone, late,
passer-by."
(Sylvia Plath, "Prospect," 1956)
This story begins in 1954, before most people had really recognised anything called rock, and a pop record which is half-perfect. That record, which stayed at number one in our charts for ten weeks, was “Cara Mia” by David Whitfield with Mantovani and his Orchestra and Chorus. Now, Whitfield was never the most subtle of singers and his in-your-face bellowing is somewhat distracting – it is significant that he was the first British reality media star (not from television, because at that time Opportunity Knocks was only broadcast on Radio Luxembourg) since his climactic high C at the end of “Cara Mia” is like a display of gymnastics, or an athletic field event; can he do that triple loop or throw that javelin beyond the stadium? It proves that technical prowess can often render itself unlistenable.
But the magic here lies in the extraordinary arrangement provided by Mantovani, who indeed co-wrote the song; the record begins with, and is secretly, if serenely, powered by a high-voiced cluster of ethereal choir. Lena pointed out to me that it was probably directly inspired by the closing “Neptune, the Mystic” movement of Holst’s Planets Suite, then less than forty years old, the ending of which Imogen Holst described as “unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women's voices growing fainter and fainter...until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence.” Mantovani’s trademark sleep-well-Britain strings are also in evidence. But the remarkable moment in the record comes halfway through where the song actually pauses; the choir stops and everything hangs suspended in a momentary mid-air limbo before a key change is gently introduced.
Whitfield did not live long – and, like so many of his contemporaries, was more or less obliterated by the oncoming rock ‘n’ roll boom, conveying them all to a Talking Pictures TV land of grey, sepulchral ghosts (listening to old pre-rock pop of the fifties is now largely akin to viewing faded parchment from unplaceable history). And I cannot imagine a surviving seventy-year-old Whitfield doing “Miss Sarajevo.” All I will say is that some records would have been likely to leave an indelible impression on children of an impressionable age growing up in, say, fifties Manchester.
* * * *
My chief prompt for this piece was White Star Liner, the new E.P. by the group Public Service Broadcasting which comprises four pieces commissioned to commemorate the Titanic. The work begins with jaunty, boisterous chords as the ship is assembled in Belfast and then sets sail, before descending into unsteady ambient drones as the ship comes to its inevitable end before being raised from the sea many decades later. The words of survivor Eva Hart are heard, with particular emphasis on her protest that there weren’t enough lifeboats on the ship and that hundreds of people died needlessly. Comparisons with the current refugee crisis sprang instantly to mind.
But this was not the first experimental musical work inspired by the disaster. Gavin Bryars composed The Sinking Of The Titanic in 1969 but it was not performed until 1972 (with some revisions) and was not released on record until 1975 as half of the first album on Obscure Records, the experimental music label set up by Bryars’ old friend Brian Eno (who himself was swimming in suspended waters throughout his own Another Green World at the time). The work takes its lead from the account of the ship’s wireless operator Harold Bride (who was badly injured but survived) who noted that as the ship sank, the brass band on deck appeared to continue to play – an episcopal hymn entitled “Autumn.” From this, Bryars imagined how the hymn would sound underwater and how its tones would reverberate throughout the atmosphere. In its original recording, it is a moving portrait of unwanted stillness – and Eva Hart’s voice can, again, be heard in places – with no moorings or even gravity audibly present.
That might also have had an effect on what 10cc did.
* * * *
The song begins with a chord, if it can be called a chord, hitherto unknown to the charts; a cluster, but not quite whole tones; augmented but not dissonant; a choir not exclusively of human voices. There is something not quite human about that cluster, or the patiently pulsing drum machine heartbeat which paces it. The opening suspended chord was Graham Gouldman’s idea.
Then two floating Fender Rhodes electric pianos, slightly overlapping in their overdubs, enter on the left channel, with a modest acoustic guitar being strummed on the right. One gets the feeling that this is bossa nova for the 30th century; but there is nothing restful or zestful about the tempo or chord sequence, which may have owed something to Ace's hit of several months previously "How Long" or even Hall and Oates' "She's Gone" from 1973. Then the chords swerve into an indecisive minor key as the choir swells temporarily, to allow the small and troubled voice of Eric Stewart to sing with as much defiance as his tiny resources allow: "I'm not in love, so don't forget it/It's just a silly phase I'm going through." Then, slightly bolder in the hope that this may postpone a scent or punch, he proclaims: "And just because I call you up/Don't get me wrong, don't think you've got it made."
Why is he "not in love"? The contralto section of the choir (Lol Crème) responds: "It's because..." but then every "because" dissolves into the uncertain ether, with no actual reason being stated. But the singer's fear systematically increases in the second verse; there is a quiet relish of desperation as he almost begs: "So if I call you, don't make a fuss/Don't tell your friends about the two of us." Or, some might comment, even tell the police.
Now I don’t wish to dispute what Eric Stewart, who co-wrote the song, has said about its inspiration. I am sure that the idea did indeed come from his wife who once complained to him that in all the years they’d been married he rarely, if ever, said to her “I love you.” Although Stewart protested that if he did say it all the time, it would be rendered a cliché, he did think about writing a song about loving someone which determinedly avoided saying “I love you.”
But once released into the air, music becomes intangible, open to as many alternative interpretations as there are listeners. But as with "Every Breath You Take" (and, unfortunately, "Knock Three Times") it is startling, or possibly amusing, to see how many couples use or used this song as a romantic, arms-around-each-other last-dance-of-the-evening number when its subject matter could be perceived as anything but - that, however, was 10cc's modus operandi; as with two years previously, when they got folk dancing to a jaunty little bubble-rock song about a prison riot and massacre, "I'm Not In Love" leaves me with a feeling of bemusement that what could easily be interpreted as a grim study of the mind of a stalker should have proved so...enticing.
A second "it's because" vanishes with the song's heartbeat into a diffuse black hole, through which the neurological scanner camera now passes to reveal a state of indefinable collapse; choral drones, backed either by kazoos or a very early prototype of the Fairlight sampler, glide at right angles to plucked piano and synthesiser tones. A bass guitar meanders briefly but sturdily through this matrix of the random, then gives way to a whisper whose gender is not immediately identifiable, a looped whisper of "Big boys don't cry," proceeding steadily from left channel to right. Not only does this recall Holst, Mantovani and Bryars – not to mention Mike Oldfield, or the Beach Boys – but the abrupt irruption of a rational female voice amidst introspective male musing will be heard again seven years later: “I care enough to know I could never love you.”
The song's structure reasserts itself, but the singer's mind continues to batter itself to death with its own and only vaguely remorseful denial. Stewart's teeth and lips bear down with subtle aggression on the "nasty stain" section of the line "It hides a nasty stain that's lying there" - and he puts undue passion and despair into the sudden octave leap of "lying" (and we’ll have to think about that “nasty stain” at length). There is a third "it's because" before the song proceeds into its most conventional section, as Stewart maintains "Ooh, you'll wait a long time for me" - the only part of this record which recalls the Beatles - before the first verse is repeated, this time with a tumescent fear ("so don't forget it" gets an extra intermediary syllable in "forget" as though underlining it with genuine threat, and "got it made" stops just short of being howled).
"I'm not in love," concludes the singer; then, with one final, agonised glance at the world which he is about to vacate, repeats it half an octave higher before he too disappears into a madness. The opening motif returns, but the choir increases in intensity and number until it is almost oppressively flooding the speakers with tones which nearly go beyond any recognisable music (Ligeti's Atmospheres is the nearest useful comparison point) as though steadily annihilating the mind. Finally, the opening distant cluster and pulse return, but now in stasis, the disintegrating icicles of keyboard confirming that the support system is about to be switched off, or the iron door to be closed shut forever.
The above refers to the full, six-minute version of the song which appears on the official 45 rpm single issue (as opposed to the unsatisfactory 3:30 radio edit which still gets most of the radio plays). It used to be that I was very apt to take the song and performance for granted; but then I heard it again, somewhere in the middle of the last decade, in the context of Radio 2's Pick Of The Pops, featuring the Top 20 from that week in 1975, and was reminded what a radical break it actually represented. Look through the rest of that list and there are the gloomy fag-ends of glam rock, cynical by-the-book singles from artists too long in the game to try harder, ghastly MoR offcuts, even ghastlier novelty hits and bizarrely inexplicable reissues. In that chart are really only “Autobahn” by Kraftwerk and “Disco Stomp” by Hamilton Bohannon to point towards the future in different but comparable ways. And then, at the end, at number one, came "I'm Not In Love," and in comparison to nearly everything which had preceded it, the record sounded like 200 years from tomorrow. It's easy to see how this inspired the young Trevor Horn - Dollar's "Give Me Back My Heart" is an explicit homage, and could even serve as a sequel, to "I'm Not In Love" - but given the common factor of Strawberry Studios in Cheshire, which 10cc owned and where they made their records, the innovations of Martin Hannett's work with Joy Division also come to premature mind (hear "The Eternal" towards the end of Closer and the influence is quietly evident). So, yes, "I'm Not In Love" served as a harbinger for much of what I loved in pop music at a crucial age, but also continues to stand alone as a portrait of emotional and mental collapse rare in its acuity and unsentimentality. The ice is sufficiently cold to form a pick. Or the singer's end, the choir of gas emanating from the oven adjacent to the window he neglected to keep open.
Alternatively, is somebody likely to say something about moments in love?
"Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?"
(Plath, "Elm [for Ruth Fainlight]," 19 April 1962)
Date Record Made Number Two: 26 July 1975
Number Of Weeks At
Number Two: 3
Records At Number One: “The
Hustle” by Van McCoy and The Soul City Symphony, “One Of These Nights” by Eagles
and “Jive Talkin’” by The Bee Gees
UK Chart Position: 1
Other Information: The
song was initially tried out as a straight bossa nova ballad but nobody liked it and the group therefore turned their
attention to the epic, multi-sectional “Une Nuit A Paris” which, with its
florid piano, quasi-operatic choirs and hilarious non-sequiturs, may or may not
have influenced “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Then Godley and Crème, or Godley, or Crème,
depending on different sources, suggested redoing the song with voices rather
than instruments. Much of what you hear on this record comes down to the four
musicians “playing” the studio console, sliding volume sliders up and down
(10cc can fairly be divided into the pop minds – Stewart and Gouldman – and the
experimental minds – Godley and Crème). There also originally existed a vocal bridge but, again, nobody liked it.
Or there are the reckoning, and the resolution:
Sometime in April, 2002
GILLIAN WELCH
Real radicalism doesn't come bulldozing towards you, waving its
primary-coloured flags and raising imagined arms towards an inexpertly
perceived future. It doesn't shout at you. Neither does it come trotting
up to you and licking your face like an ineptly trained puppy. It
simply pitches up its tent and sets up its stall. Thus was Gil Evans a
thousand times as radical as Giuseppe Logan. Hence was Sibelius a
hundred times as radical as Hindemith. And thus it is that I have to
inform you that the most radical record of the last 12 months was not
conceived in a DJ mixing booth in south-western Australia, did not
emanate from the Winstanley Estate in south-west London but rather was
recorded on two guitars with occasional banjo and mandolin in a vintage
studio in Nashville which in the past was utilised by Elvis Presley. The
record is "Time (The Revelator)" by Gillian Welch. Assisted by her
partner David Rawlings. Two impeccably-dressed actors - too impeccable
to be real; not enough dirt on her boots, not enough creases in his
suit.
But then that's the point. Starting with four defiantly
hammered-out flattened-fifth chords, the tolling of a bell not quite
concurrent with that of St John the Divine, Welch sets out her
particular stall from the first line of the first track "Revelator."
"Darling, remember, when you come to me/I'm the pretender and not
what I'm supposed to be/But who could know if I'm a traitor?/Time's a
revelator." They come to detonate the received notions of country - and
indeed those of alt.country (which is now no alt) - within its very
epicentre. Wandering around, surf parties, dismissals of white wedding
gowns - "leaving the valley and fucking out of sight" she intones
demurely in her indeterminate Southern accent - an LA-born offspring of
Carol Burnett's old musical director, an attendant of Berklee. "Every
word seen in the data/Every day is getting straighter." How distorted is
this data to begin with? How much history has she received? How much of
it is received?
At the song's climax Rawlings thrashes out some bitonal,
aggressively-struck chords, the intimately-miked thwack of fingernail
against nylon recorded as closely as Carthy on "Out of the Cut" or
Bailey on "Aida."
"My First Lover" continues this not-quite-in-focus lamenting.
Recalling an old failed partner and her reluctance to don said "white
wedding gown" Welch drifts inexplicably into Steve Miller's "Quicksilver
Girl" - itself as much of a virtual "folk song" as anything here.
But this is not the callous aspic-worship of Wynton Marsalis. Nor
does it parallel the gratuitous cynicism of Garth Brooks, armed with his
MBA.
A pair of comparatively straight love songs follow, but still not
traditional. "Dear Someone" is on the face of it as conventional as any
Patsy Cline ballad (if the latter could be said to be "conventional")
but the singer seems to be now revelling in her roving solitude, now
anxious at her seeming lack of anchor, human or otherwise. Then there's
"Red Clay Halo" the only song here whose lyrics have turned up on Welch
websites, all about a poor lass who can't get a guy as she has to walk
through red clay (why?) to attend the dance. Her gown will only become
golden in the afterlife with a red clay halo around her head. This is
not comfy Opry fare.
Next is the first part of a duologue "April the 14th" ostensibly a
recollection of Welch visiting a no-budget outdoor festival with a
"five-band bill and a two-dollar show ... no one turned up from the
local press." The event passes as the sun sets and the sky becomes red.
But the song is topped and tailed with seemingly random interjections of
disasters which also occurred on April the 14th; the Titanic (the
iceberg coming at it like Casey Jones), the Oklahoma dustbowl evacuation
and the assassination of Lincoln ("the Great Emancipator took a bullet
in the head"). She whispers "hey!" in the fadeout. A warning or a sob?
And then it's the epicentre of this album - which has to be listened
to in full and in sequence - "I Want To Sing That Rock And Roll"
recorded live at the Opry. Only 2:47 long. Exhausted with travelling and
with her guitar, and with "everyone making a noise, so big and loud
it's been drowning me out" she wants either to join or to
subvert/destroy. The Opry audience whoops its approval of Rawlings'
Scotty Moore licks in the middle. It's only when you realise that the
track is extracted from the artfully engineered film "Down from the
Mountain" that you understand that the audience is one which has seen
"Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" So they're all conspiring.
After that, a meditation on the consequences of wanting to sing that
rock and roll. "Elvis Presley Blues." In the chorus it's unclear
whether Welch is singing "I was thinking that night about Elvis - the
day that he died" or "did he die?" She ponders his sexuality - "he
grabbed his wand in the other hand and shook it like a hurricane ... and
he shook it like a holy roller with his soul at stake." At the end of
his life, "in long decline" he thinks "how happy John Henry was ...
beating his steam drill and he dropped down dead." Welch climaxes with a
murmured "bless my soul, what's wrong with me?" A tribute which Freddie
Starr will never sing.
Back to "Ruination Day" which picks up from where "April the 14th"
left off, but with the chords no longer pensive but askew and
disjointed, as with the lyrics. "It was not December and it was not
May/Was 14th of April that his ruination day/That's the day that his
ruination day." Data is scrambled, the flattened fifths never resolved.
Icebergs, bullets, dustbowls and Casey Jones merge into one final divine
apocalypse. It is the product of a mind which has turned indeterminate.
This is profoundly disturbing listening, the Dorian mode impaled upon
John Henry's spear.
The symmetry of the album then resolves with "Everything Is Free"
which returns to the "do what I want" ethos of "Dear Someone." The song
is apparently about Napster - "gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn't
pay - I can get a tip job, gas up the car, try to make a little change
down at the bar; or I can get a straight job - I've done it before/Never
mind working hard, it's who I'm working for." It's a means, not a
purpose. It's defiant. It says fuck you far more fervently than Eminem
taking the piss out of Steve Berman (not to deny the worth of the
latter).
"Every day I wake up humming a song, but I don't need to run around,
I just stay home and sing a little love song, my love and myself/If
there's something that you wanna hear, you can sing it yourself - no
one's gotta listen to the words in my head." A degree of
distance/separation from commerce/the listener/the world which is almost
on a par with that of AMM. What is there in MY uselessness, she asks,
to cause YOU distress?
And finally to the closer, the unparalleled, unbeatable 14-minute
masterpiece "I Dream A Highway" which sums up everything that's come
before, attempts to explain it and moves music forward. Barely using
three chords, but with every conceivable harmonic, acoustic and temporal
variation there could ever be. Once again the protagonist is on the
move through place and time. The mental highway is delineated by "a
winding ribbon with a band of gold" and a "silver vision" which
variously comes and rests, blesses and convalesces her soul.
It starts at the Grand Old Opry - "John (Henry, presumably)'s
kicking out the footlights/The Grand Old Opry's got a brand new
band/Lord let me die here with a hammer in my hand." In other words, she
is here to demolish and destroy the citadel of conservatism. Referring
back to Presley, she then plans to "move down into Memphis and thank the
hatchet man who forked my tongue/I'll lie in wait until the wagons
come" only to find that the "getaway kid" has sent her "an empty wagon
full of rattling bones" (from the April 14th concert? From the
dustbowl?). Then the revelation itself - "Which lover are you, Jack of
Diamonds?/Now you be Emmylou and I'll be Gram." But this itself is a red
herring. The confession ensues. "I don't know who I am."
And then it hits you. Underline it, Gillian.
"I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight/Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on/In the blue display of the cool cathode ray."
And you realise that this astonishing piece of music is beyond even a
reverie, not the reverie of the dying Charles Foster Kane trying to
make a personal sense of his life, but the imagined, implanted reverie
we recognise from Blade Runner. It is the American equivalent of
Tricky's "Aftermath." A replicant trying to learn and assimilate an
alien cultural vocabulary. Bowie's imagined Sinatra gabble at the end of
"Low." An alien trying to find its mother, its womb.
Explicitly referred to in the next stanza: "Sunday morning at the
diner/Hollywood trembles on the verge of tears/I watch the waitress for a
thousand years/Saw a wheel inside a wheel/Heard a call within a call."
The cops shooting roses at ET instead of bullets. And, like ET, it
awakens from the apparent dead: "Step into the light, poor Lazarus.
Don't lie alone behind the window shade. Let me see the mark death made"
as the song itself continues to wind down in speed almost
imperceptibly, now down to funereal tempo winding the call around the
circular spin of its own wheel.
There is no resolution. In the final verse Welch proclaims "what
will sustain us through the winter? Where did last year's lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow." And the chords continue to occur
less frequently. The space becomes more vast. The piece ends (if it can
be said to end) with a few basic notes, deliciously hovering on the
brink of non-existence (cf. Morton Feldman's Coptic Light, the closing minutes of John Stevens and Evan Parker's The Longest Night Vol 2). It fades, but like the end of Escalator Over The Hill, could theoretically continue forever.
And time resolves upon itself. When I started the preparatory notes
for this piece in October 2001, I was still in Oxford and in grief.
Perhaps it has required six months for me to bring a piece to a
successful conclusion. I now feel differently about many things than I
did then, and new light has availed itself upon my threshold.
I can but say that anyone wishing to listen to "Original Pirate
Material" should first hear this. The parallels are remarkable; the same
leitmotifs obsessively returned to, the same template of hopelessness
and conventionality endlessly subverted (for "Casey Jones" read "shit in
a tray"); no real ending. An individual decelerating in rebellion
against the increased acceleration of the rest of humanity.
Or there are the sky, and rebirth:
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
THE AGE OF THE AERIAL
"Give me, instead of beauty’s bust,
A tender heart, a loyal mind,
Which with temptation I could trust,
Yet never linked with error find.
One in whose gentle bosom I
Could pour my secret heart of woes,
Like the care-burthened honey-fly
That hides his murmurs in the rose."
(George Darley, "It Is Not Beauty I Demand")
The wind is inescapable, unavoidable. It is the same wind which could either fuel or blow out the fire on Wuthering Heights. But this time it isn’t just about coming back. It’s about summoning others to come back; in other words, life. Why Elvis? Why Rosebud – and by Rosebud, is that Hearst or should it be Orson?
"Why does a multi-millionaire
Fill up his home with priceless junk?"
"The interiors were cramped. The garden was littered with thrown-away Macanudo cigar butts – this is a terrible image, a blindness to nature…His bathtub was full of old books. His closet had maybe thirty identical black silk shirts."
(David Thomson on the living conditions of the last days of Orson Welles, Rosebud: The Story Of Orson Welles)
She is of course summoning herself back, after twelve very busy years, but not simply her own self. She’s been listening extensively to the works of Massive Attack, whose once-removed imprints are all over both halves of Aerial; on "King Of The Mountain" the not-quite-splendid isolation is articulated by the slowly ascending triple string chords as well as the Ryuichi Sakamoto synth pattern in limbo. She’s impersonating Elvis (there’s a chuckle buried deeply, which will eventually emerge from its chrysalis) as well as trying to will him back to life, to deny that he died
(and here’s the section where I’m afraid you’ll need to go back to Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) and remind yourself of what she said about Elvis. Did he die the day he died?)
to return that 40-year-absent smile to his face ("Looking like a happy man?"). Meanwhile the wind whistles, its chill palpable, and it’s evident that the same spirit breathes here as breathed on "Dead Souls" – Kate Bush is summoning the souls of the dead, trying to understand why or how they died. In the multitracked "blow southerly" chorus it is as if she’s caught in the act of exhuming them, dragging their bodies back onto the ground. And then every individual will live again, proud and triumphant atop their mountain – and they can never make their way down again ("The wind it blows the door closed").
A Sea Of Honey is a study about how life can expect to be lived once that door has been blown shut, and we choose never to open it again. Far from being a prelude, or a softener, to disc two, it defines everything at which the songs of disc two laugh, or ridicule, or negate. In other words, the simple and complex joys of A Sky Of Honey would not carry nearly as much emotional impact were we not aware of the tragedies slowly being dissected on disc one. A Sea Of Honey is the tunnel through which we are obliged to swim if we are ever to emerge into the light of blissful blue.
Grieving penetrates virtually everything on A Sea Of Honey – and where there is grief, there is often associated compassion for others who decide to shut themselves away from the world, for whatever reason, never more so than on what everyone else has mistakenly thought to be the album’s comic relief, the song "Pi" which is actually a heartbreaking plea to rejoin humanity, to realise that a world comprised of lists and numbers, of doomed rationalisation of random biological occurrences, is not a substitute for interacting with other people. "Oh he love, he love, he love/He does love his numbers/And they run, they run, they run him/In a great big circle/In a circle of infinity" – a circle from which he does not seem to wish to escape. Thus does Bush sing him a tender lullaby to try to prise him away from this dead world, a lullaby comprised of the number Pi extended to however many decimal points are needed, as though any were wanted. Gradually her singing of the numbers drifts out of tempo, after an initial sustenato of the number "3" to make it sound like "free." Her 5s are like cuddles, her 8s and 9s see her in a virtual flood of tears, her 4s are subtly sensual, and she freezes in dread as she rolls the fatal number "zero" around her tongue like a barbiturate she doesn’t want to swallow. The verse musically offers Hugh Hopper/Matching Mole chord changes, but the numbers are accompanied by rueful electronica which, not for the last time on Aerial, indicate some familiarity with the work of Boards of Canada (compare, for example, with "Olson" from Music Has The Right To Children, which latter’s number count stops making sense, eerily, at 36).
Both "How To Be Invisible" and "Joanni" could represent Bush turning into herself, to denounce her own wilful absence from the world, if indeed she can be said to have ever been away from it. The former is a strangely loping torch song in which Bush examines the consequences of thinking "inside out," the slow decay which will occur once you have decided to remain "under a veil you must never lift/Pages you must never turn" and subsist in a microscopic world of yourself ("Eye of Braille/Hem of anorak/Stem of wallflower/Hair of doormat")
"The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning."
(Sylvia Plath, "Ariel")
"Is that an autumn leaf falling/Or is that you, walking home?" The sudden sob at the word "mirror" in the line "You jump into the mirror" and the whistling ("The wind is whistling," remember) which bookends the song. But those two lines again – "Under a veil you must never lift/Pages you must never turn/In the labyrinth"…
…of militant Islam?
The lyrics to the song "Joanni" are accompanied by a photograph of Bush, the lower half of her face seemingly obscured by a veil and her hands clutched together in prayer. She may well be laughing, or trying to laugh, underneath that veil. The song itself, with more sinisterly ascending strings, returns to Massive Attack territory, or at least on the same planet surface at right angles to the narrator of "Antistar." With its description of a girl who ostensibly is Joan of Arc ("All the cannons are firing/And the swords are clashing?…/And she looks so beautiful in her armour/…blows a kiss to God/And she never wears a ring on her finger") but reminds Bush of someone else ("Who is that girl? Do I know her face?"). Herself? Or…given the apocalypse of the first verse ("And the flags stop flying/And the silence comes over/Thousands of soldiers")…a suicide bomber? The progenitor of Eno’s "Bonebomb" ("I waited for peace…and here is my piece")? In these two songs there is definitely the touch of the muezzin wall present (even, at times, bearing a bizarre but entirely logical resemblance to John Lydon’s voice).
And then there are the two flattening songs with Bush alone, voice and piano, which almost made me wish that the whole of A Sea Of Honey had been recorded solo, which cut into an exceptionally deep core of pain. First, "Mrs. Bartolozzi" – a song about a housewife watching the clothes of herself and her family spin around in her washing machine, and the fantasies which that engenders in her mind, primarily sexual in nature. What is perhaps most remarkable about this song and its reluctant twin "A Coral Room" is how unhurried it sounds – one marvels at the increasingly rarefied qualities of slow patience which Bush applies to her writing and performance. Note the many pauses in "Mrs. Bartolozzi" – it’s as if she’s thinking over what she’s just sung and hasn’t quite decided where to take the song next, which road to travel down (or which river to swim down). This was a quality very common in thoughtful avant-garde British singer-songwriters between 1969-78 (see John and Beverley Martyn’s Road To Ruin and Simon Finn’s Pass The Distance for two extreme approaches to this tabula rasa) – the tradition of Roy Harper, indeed the same tradition within which those formerly lost souls Bill Fay and Vashti Bunyan worked. Remember that Kate Bush was virtually the last British singer-songwriter to come out, or come into, that tradition before it was supplanted, or superseded; thus when listening to Bill Fay’s Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow we can see exactly where Bush got the ball and how far she subsequently ran with it, virtually single-handed for the next 15 years. And what about Vashti Bunyan, whose second album, a mere 35 years after her first, finds her sounding 35 years younger than she did on Just Another Diamond Day (again, the patient compassion of a Bunyan song like "Turning Backs" is the other, necessary end of the tender Bush spine)? There’s something quietly significant about all these artists coming back from the cold in 2005.
But back to "Mrs. Bartolozzi." Wade in the Woolf waves of sensuality as Bush does so effortlessly here, gently transforming banal domesticity into a David Cox seascape. When she sings "Oh and the waves are coming in/Oh and the waves are coming out" with the piano ebbing and flowing in watery counterpoint, you can tell she really feels the movements which matter. "Oh and you’re standing right beside me/Little fish swim between my legs" would have been about a thousandth as astonishing if that couplet had appeared on the new album by Madonna, Bush’s senior by two weeks. Because we hear it so infrequently it penetrates far more deeply than the corporate wink which we pretend not to worship in 2005 mainstream pop (though that of course isn’t to say that the more intelligent pop operatives – the Sugababes, Girls Aloud, why the same intelligent pop operatives we had three years ago – aren’t sneakily and sexily dismantling those memes and know full well that they are doing so; contrast with Rachel Stevens, who torpedoed one of the year’s best pop albums basically by acting like a Young Conservative who had volunteered to work in Spearmint Rhino for a week for an ITV documentary).
However, the sea and the fish are – for now – merely a daydream. And it’s a daydream parenthesised by a nearly unspeakable pain. "I think I see you standing outside/But it’s just your shirt"…and if we look at the accompanying photograph in the CD booklet, it depicts a washing line in which there is a terrible red in the centre, as unavoidable as the red coat in Schindler’s List, bloodied…and then Bush virtually breaks down. "And it looks so ALIVE!" she screams, whimpers, "Nice and white." This is someone who might not be coming back ("And all your shirts and jeans and things"). The childhood memory of a nursery rhyme which intrudes towards the end of the song, and the mystifyingly terrifying first few lines of the song: "I remember it was that Wednesday/Oh when it rained and rained/They traipsed mud all over the house/It took hours and hours to scrub it out." And the song’s progenitor is obsessed with getting everything clean – note how the words shiny, clean and white keep reoccurring throughout – that you wonder: what horror is she trying to erase? Who were "they"? The Gestapo? Come to take her husband and children away? Was Mrs. Bartolozzi...interfered with?
Finally there is the option of drowning in A Sea Of Honey’s closing song "A Coral Room," a song which continues to leave me speechless as, with its visions of ruined houses, of past lives ("And the planes came crashing down"), the memories we clutched to our breasts, held against our hearts, now in disrepair, a broken home for spiders, it quietly sums up what for me has been the overriding trend of 2005’s important music – the feeling that, especially after both 7/7 and Hurricane Katrina, it’s after the end of the world (if Bush doesn’t mind my citing Sun Ra, which I’m sure she wouldn’t) and we’re engaged in a salvage operation. Think of the Shortwave Set’s reclaiming of battered 1974 MoR, their refusal to let their source material rot; of Eno’s generously gracious hymns of solace to a dying world (notwithstanding the deadly punchline of the final track on Another Day On Earth); Saint Etienne’s sadly wise realisation that all those Subbuteo catalogues and Gibb Brothers 45s ultimately count for nothing in the face of destruction (can anyone listen to "Side Streets" now and not shiver at the thought of 7/7? "I’ll probably get it tomorrow/’Til then…"); Antony’s mutation from boy to guhl; Rufus and Martha trying to redefine the pods from which they emerged; King Britt bringing Sister Gertrude Morgan back; the Arcade Fire bringing EVERYTHING back; Bill Fay being brought back – somehow it is all summed up in "A Coral Room," especially in that deathly pause between Bush’s first "What do you feel?" and her calmly tearful "My mother. And her little brown jug" (again a childhood nursery rhyme echoes in the collective memory, sung here by one Michael Wood, who may or may not be the television historian). When Bush sings "See it fall" it sounds as though she has plunged 30,000 feet into the abyss. Her tiny cry of "Oh little spider" also reminds us of Cat Power’s reading of "Crawling King Snake." At last, she turns to you, to me, to us, and her voice soars with choked emotion as she demands "Put your hand over the side of the boat. What do you feel?"
The centrepiece, the lynchpin, of this entire sequence of music is of course "Bertie," Bush’s ode to her son, arranged and performed by members of my favourite group the Dufay Collective as a 15th-century estampie realigned by John Dowland. Note how she cannot allow her larynx to let go of the downward cascade of the word "sweet" in "Sweet dreams" and the words-are-really-no-good-for-this-kind-of-thing inarticulate genius couplet of "You bring me so much joy/And then you bring me/More joy," worthy of Marvin Gaye purely because of how she sings it. But the medieval roundelay is minor key throughout, and sometimes she sounds as if she’s weeping. Has her displacement of time meant that she has seen forward to Bertie’s death, or her own?
"How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet."
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves, whose prelude should perhaps not be read until you’ve heard the album, as it pretty well gives away the entire plot)
Suddenly…there is colour. A beneficent lightness. A child’s voice. "Mummy? Daddy? The day is full of birds. Sounds like they’re saying words."
"A. Sky. Of. Honey." Or, if you twist your ear to 45 degrees, "Don’t. Go. Oh. Bertie."
Even as the sun and the piano and the birds of "Prologue" rise upwards and ever upwards, Bush is already foreseeing transience and non-existence. "Every time you leave us/So Summer will be gone/So you’ll never grow old to us," even as the piano magically unfolds in ascending scales and arpeggios, and the bass, drums and orchestra make discreet entries, even as Bush has to switch to Italian to express what English can’t quite ("Like the light in Italy/Lost its way across the sea"). Just as in "A Coral Room" the patterns of the melody echo the thoughts of Bush’s voice; they come after her words, as opposed to merely erecting a framework for them. Bush’s melodies will go exactly the way Bush wants them to, and at the speed which she decides – slow and patient.
"Some dark accents coming in from that side…"
Now it is nightfall, and the childish joys of that "lovely afternoon" become distinctly carnal and not a little pagan. "Sunset" is an exquisite scribble of Euro-Tropicana which wouldn’t have been out of place on the stunning Nine Horses album (Snow Borne Sorrow, or David Sylvian Was Right All Along). Bush sings wondrously of colours ("The most beautiful iridescent blue") but again worries about the horror of non-existence – that pause which comes after the first delivery of "Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust – Then climb into bed and turn to dust," and which amplifies its pain in the lines "Keep us close to your heart/So if the skies turn dark/We may live on in/Comets and stars." It’s an ECM samba for the end of the world (and distinctly ECM, as Eberhard Weber and Peter Erskine are the rhythm section on this track). However, after the last "climb into bed and turn to dust," Bush turns her back defiantly on mortality and ups the tempo to a Balearic house rave-up. "The day writes the words right across the sky/They go all the way up to the top of the night." Running up that hill again…to encounter a brief and astonishing episode ("Aerial Tal") where Bush suddenly gives us some vocal free improvisation in duet with the blackbirds, which obviously makes me think that, apart from Virginia Astley and maybe Messaien, she’s also heard the Evan Parker With Birds album, but even this is but a mere prelude to…
"We went up to the top of the highest hill. And stopped. Still."
And – again, like stout Cortez from whose notion of the Pacific I can never seem to tear myself away – Bush discovers…the eternal (or Joy Division’s "The Eternal")? "Something In Between" is the first of Aerial’s supreme one-two punch which gives me…just what I always wanted? Deep oceans of synthesisers, whale guitars and subaquiline bass suddenly but gently veer into view as Bush sings of being not quite this and not quite that. "Somewhere in between/The waxing and the waning wave/Somewhere in between/What the song and silence say…/Sleep and waking up…/Breathing out and breathing in…" Between man and woman, between jouissance and ennui, between life and death, between boy and guhl…
"Oh I’m scared of the middle place, between life and nowhere"
(Antony, "Hope There’s Someone")
But Kate Bush isn’t scared; she’s simply awed – that trembling sopranino sustenato of a note to which she clings throughout "Oh how we have longed for something that would make us feel so…" Words are really no good for this kind of thing, but the thing is, the twirls and curlicues of the arrangement set beside her voice, the echoes of a generation ago when I did feel so…but I’m thinking of a marriage between the Cocteau Twins’ "Ribbed And Veined" and Boards of Canada’s "Peacock Tail" and Björk’s "All Is Full Of Love" and, most deeply of all, Billy MacKenzie’s "At The Edge Of The World" because something here makes me hear that Kate Bush has become the new lead singer of the Associates and unless you’re a 1982 child like me you won’t know how that makes me feel, though you could make a decent guess and perhaps realise that Kate Bush becoming the new lead singer of the Associates is for me an infinitely more infinite prospect than Madonna becoming the new lead singer of Zoot Woman. And those gentle backing vocals, provided by Gary Brooker, the voice of Procol Harum, the co-author of "A Salty Dog," promising us that we can never really truly die, capped by the tender double meaning and let-me-die-now-poignant punchline which I won’t spoil for you, suffice to point out that it transposes the spirit of the closing two minutes of ELO’s "Mr Blue Sky" into the closing two minutes of George Crumb’s "Makrokosmos III," and unless you’re a 1978 child like me who waited 27 years for the two to come together…well, guess with a kiss.
And then, incredibly, there is "Nocturn," the song of the year, maybe of the century, possibly of the millennium, not that I anticipate personally living long enough to ratify either of the two latter options. The "sweet dreams" refrain returns, and out of tempo Bush oscillates as wildly but as gently as Julie Tippetts at the beginning of side three of Keith Tippett’s Frames.
"Everyone is sleeping. We go driving into the moonlight"…
"Could you see the guy who was driving?"
(Kate Bush, "King Of The Mountain")
…and then the most delicate and most gorgeous bass and percussion line you’ve ever heard eases its way in like the first tentative wave as Kate sings as tenderly as she has ever sung, quiet and wondering. "Could be in a dream/Our clothes are on the beach," and you can’t quite believe what’s happening here, now it’s Judee Sill singing Propaganda’s "Dream Within A Dream" and did you think you’d live long enough to witness that? The song gently ascends with that slow patience, not hurrying to reach ecstasy, and yes…"No one, no one is here" (even though everyone is) and…OH MY FUCKING GOD…"We stand in the Atlantic/We become PANORAMIC" and it soars above all of us, climbing higher and unbelievably higher, as if trying to drag Varese and Meek down from their clouds, "The stars are caught in our hair/The stars are on our fingers/A veil of diamond dust," and then you notice that Joe Boyd is thanked in the sleeve credits and fuck me if Kate Bush, who NEVER stopped believing in the Incredible String Band, is trying to make 1967 live again as the eight-year-old Kate Bush imagined she remembered it. The washing machine now long gone – "The sea’s around our legs/In milky, silky water" – they sink into ecstasy ("We dive deeper and deeper") until the unreal sun comes up and a sudden dawn chorus howls in rage against the dying night ("Look at the light, all the time it’s a-changing (Bob Dylan!!)/Look at the light, climbing up the Aerial") because it’s fuck me yes yes yes a thousand times yes Oxford London Toronto YES
AND ALL OF THE DREAMERS ARE WAKING
She’s up, and she can’t come down. Finally, "Aerial," the song itself – and it’s Frankie’s "Relax" in 6/8, a thumping sex beat as Bush finally cuts the strings of restraint and screams as only she can except up until this moment on Aerial she hasn’t actually done so but she screams "I’ve gotta be up on the roof! Up, up on the roof! In the sun!" and then the scream turns into a laugh and she turns into a bird
and then the guitarist, Danny MacIntosh, who is actually Bertie’s daddy, who has so far kept a similarly reticent profile, suddenly erupts with Hendrix lava, interacting with, fucking, Bush’s cackles ("Come on let’s all join in!") and she keeps laughing, is it at us, or with us, and it’s frightening, or it’s liberating, and then suddenly there’s nothing except the dawn chorus of the blackbirds and the now distant echoes of laughter because they are now ghosts and they are happy and life continues anyway.
"The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside."
(Woolf, The Waves, from the Prelude)
Or, like me, you might prefer the following option:
"And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one."
(John Donne, "The Good-Morrow")
For L.G., who should have heard Aerial,
And for L.F., who thankfully can.
Or,
well - there's a Freudianism if ever I accidentally wrote one - we
could consider the thousands of other stories, many of which I am
preserving for their own independent lives, before this book degenerates
further into a greatest blog hits anthology, but then it's all lists,
pointers, guides, torches not truncheons. Time is running out and not
just mine. Running out on us, that is, because time itself never stops
running.
If songs are mostly, if not completely, about having something, or having something and losing it, or having something and losing then regaining it, then this story has to conclude - climax! - with the third option, because that is how my life has worked out.
The surgery:
"I TOLD YOU ONCE, I CAN'T DO THIS AGAIN!"
The recognition that as human beings we are generally smarmy shits every much as we are ardent angels. That musicians and especially the music business hate us. That there's nothing the music business hates as much and as fervently as musicians. They're supposed to make profits and the business profits then shut up and comply to maintain said profits. If they falter by a nanometer they are spat out or spit themselves out.
A Northern British folk song performed by a man who underwent surgery for brain tumours both before and after he performed it. The suit, the cautiously confident spins and footwork. The absolutist loathing of the world that he demonstrates when performing the song on television and this song may well be the key song of all songs because it unites every theme about which this book has spoken.
The hope that there is someone to the hope that there will still be someone; a journey through a hall, if not hell.
If songs are mostly, if not completely, about having something, or having something and losing it, or having something and losing then regaining it, then this story has to conclude - climax! - with the third option, because that is how my life has worked out.
The surgery:
"I TOLD YOU ONCE, I CAN'T DO THIS AGAIN!"
The recognition that as human beings we are generally smarmy shits every much as we are ardent angels. That musicians and especially the music business hate us. That there's nothing the music business hates as much and as fervently as musicians. They're supposed to make profits and the business profits then shut up and comply to maintain said profits. If they falter by a nanometer they are spat out or spit themselves out.
A Northern British folk song performed by a man who underwent surgery for brain tumours both before and after he performed it. The suit, the cautiously confident spins and footwork. The absolutist loathing of the world that he demonstrates when performing the song on television and this song may well be the key song of all songs because it unites every theme about which this book has spoken.
The hope that there is someone to the hope that there will still be someone; a journey through a hall, if not hell.
MY.
SELF.
WILL.
GET.
BACK.
I.
* * * * * *
You still here?
Haven’t gone home yet?
Don’t think that I don’t know that you were waiting for a bigger, more spectacular ending to what has proved to be a rather sentimental and self-fancying volume. But lives aren’t stories and tend to end far more mundanely. You are right to scratch your head and wonder what this book was all for, what it intended to express, which of course was far less than it actually conveyed. This is because you can’t see the inside of my mind and examine how it processes and reconfigures thought. What goes on inside me is infinitely more articulate and determined than what you read from my hands.
Can you remember where home is?
The home that I knew from my younger days, of tobacco, television, Turkish Delight and tape recorders, no longer exists and even if it did it wouldn’t be home as such. I had my chances – was practically handed some of them – and blew them or turned them down almost every time. I could have been a published writer in 1973 but because of my father I didn’t really feel like becoming one. I am superficially one of the most spectacular failures of imposed human ambition of the last half-century.
And yet, when I wriggled free of brutalist expectations and elected to work with and develop my own intrinsic understanding of ambition instead, I find that I was and am, in truth, quite the success, despite the fact that my health and body are now both buggered beyond meaningful repair, despite my millions of unread – some say unreadable – words, I managed to construct an uniquely special life. I can remember nearly nothing of what I learned at school. I remember every atom of what I learned of my own volition. What tedious Tom Peters tollie, christ man you’re writing like any of those interchangeable sports and industry bods who go on Desert Island Discs and bleurgh on about motivation
oh just shove it and say well this man Carlin he lived and he was loved, in some cases more than he was prepared to acknowledge, and he had a fair turn with words and the skills Mrs Ley taught him in Religious Education class at school – which was assertively not religious education – and if you dig through the ashes indicating what might once have been humanity then you might find that he was there and this is what he and therefore humanity was and therefore were capable of accomplishing, Orson got that right and a whole lot else though not absolutely everything what do you expect from humanity, anyway this was me and my cannily messy story well that’s the one.
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