‘Krautrock’ mainstay talks candidly to John Doran about the future of Harmonia, the death of Klaus Dinger and why Neu! ground to a halt.
The sheer weight of nomenclature that German experimental music from the late 60s to the late 70s has attracted should serve as some kind of signifier to how diverse and influential it was – and still is. Whether you wish to refer to it as Krautrock or Cosmiche or whether you want to refer to the beats as motorik or apache, few other points on the space time continuum have seen such a surge forward in the way that popular music is made, whether you are talking about the electro pop of Kraftwerk, the ethno-jazz rock of Can, the acid rock of Amon Duul II etc.
One of the central figures among all this action was Michael Rother who was born just months after the end of World War II. He was recruited into the ranks of an early touring incarnation of Kraftwerk but he chose to split away with radical drummer Klaus Dinger to form the tempestuous but highly influential Neu! While seeking musicians with whom he could tour his music live in 1973 he met Rodelius and Moebius of Cluster and ended up forming the proto-electronica group, Harmonia. After a hiatus of over thirty years, the third album proper by the group (Harmonia Live 1974) was released, causing a ripple of excitement through the experimental music community; this in turn led the group to reform. Just weeks after a triumphant set as part of the Ether Festival on the South Bank, London and just hours before a headline slot at the Camber Sands ATP, Rother took time out to talk to us.
Carnage at All Tomorrow’s Parties: Tim Harrington in Les Savy Fav action hero battle to the death with our John Doran! Mighty men with beards in desperate conflict! Trailer here:
Flight of the Conchords Flight of the Conchords
Sub Pop
By Jacqui Steele
Spend an evening at a comedy club and you’ll likely be cursed at some point with comic songs, performed by an eyebrow-waggling berk who thinks his barren material can be rescued by rudimentary strumming. Thanks to hundreds of crap comic songwriters across the decades, many people are now allergic to the whole genre. Even the few performers with both the tunes and the wordplay – Eric Idle, Tom Lehrer, Victoria Wood – were best in small doses. But with their self-titled LP, Flight of the Conchords have made a rare thing: a comedy album that’s still fun on the second, third and 44th listen.
As this is the LP of the HBO series of the Radio 2 series of the live show, it’s all tried and tested material. If you’re new to New Zealand duo Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, you’re getting in on the top floor with their greatest hits. For records like this to work, the jokes have to be strong enough to support the music if it flags, which it mustn’t ever do, and vice versa. Flight of the Conchords pass both tests.
Appreciating the technical skill of accurate parodists is a singular, nerdy pleasure, and those who seek it are in heaven here. The Conchords favour rap, ragga and R’n’B because they’re the best counterpoint to their comic personae: chaste man-children who keep including mundane phrases (“overheads… transaction fee… sort out the recycling”) in their smooth love anthems. For a couple of weedy white guys their falsetto soul is spookily convincing, but they can do anything with startling authenticity. ‘The Prince of Parties’ is a stylish aping of shagadelic late-60s sitar minstrels. Ignore the lyrics about flutes and underpants, and ‘Inner City Pressure’ could be real early Pet Shop Boys. ‘Think About It’ nails the chicka-chicka guitars and histrionic social message of right-on 70s Motown.
Affectionate fanboy details are everywhere – ‘The Most Beautiful Girl (in the Room)’ displays an intimate knowledge of Prince backing vocals – but these aren’t just facsimiles. The Conchords rise above their influences to sound like themselves. It helps that, even on an album as eclectic and lovingly produced as this, they’ve kept the duelling acoustic guitars of their live act. Moreover, also intact is their cuddly, celebratory, unique comic world.
Comedy songs are cringeworthy when they’re too on-the-nose. The ’chords barely brush the face. Whether it’s ‘Think About It’s obsession with cutlery, ‘Mutha’uckas’ with its hip-hop dissing of a fruit seller (“He’s gonna wake up in a smoothie”), or ‘Bowie’ and its fixation on David Bowie’s nipples (“Do you use your pointy nipples as telescopic antennae to transmit data back to Earth? / I bet you do, you freaky old bastard you”), every song is littered with glorious idiosyncrasies. Lesser men, too embarrassed by simple silliness to immortalise it on a proper record, would have redrafted these songs to lose the rough edges, killing their charm in the process. Not the Conchords. They even get away with stupid things like the old forgot-the-words gag (What’s wrong with the world today? / N-duh nuh-duh nay n-nay”).
Flight of the Conchords are joyously uncool, hiding their musical chops behind boyish giggles and warm self-deprecation. An ever-widening grin is the only response.
When rock writer and extreme music fan Tommy Udo fell out of a six storey window last Autumn, people thought he would die for sure. Fate, it turned out, had something much more strange in store for him. This is the first part of his coma diaries.
Falling out of a window and breaking nearly every bone in your body and going into a coma and having a near death experience is the new rock’n'roll.
OK, is it fuck the new rock’n'roll. I know because I’ve done both: rock’n'rolling and lying in a bed with tubes coming out of every orifice while I drool away oblivious to the world, drifting in and out of consciousness, lost in vivid Morphine-induced nightmares and let me tell you, there’s no fucking contest. It was interesting being lost in a drugged up fantasy world of my own creation, yes, but all in all I’d rather have been at a Bill Haley show.
What happened was this: I was lying on the concrete shortly after falling from a great height with my arms and legs at funny angles and blood gushing out of my broken nose. There were people standing around asking questions like: “Is he still alive?” and saying things like “They say we have to keep him talking.” I thought: am I still alive? Aw fuck… it hurts. And I can’t breathe. I could see the tunnel of light unfolding and pulsing in front of me. I felt like I was standing up beside my dying body. Was that God I saw there? He looked every inch the cunt I’d read about in the Old Testament. Can dying really be as clichéd as this? I wondered. Will I end up in some hideous Doris Stokes afterlife? I told myself: Stay away from the light…
The last record I remember listening to was by As I Lay Dying: fact.
The paramedic shone a torch in my eyes and asked me what day it was. How the fuck would I know that? I work freelance for fuck’s sake. “Thursday,” I grunted. “Are you Scottish?” he asked. “Er… I suppose so,” I think I replied. “I’m from Glenrothes,” he said. “Oh. Right,” I said. “In Fife,” he said. “That’s nice,” I think I replied. Then he said: “We’re going to give you something called ketamine to knock you out.” He started to explain what ketamine was. I managed to grumble: “I know what bloody ketamine is.” I felt a sharp prick on my neck and then a great black wind roared and blew all the fragments of my conscious mind away. It was nothingness. It was nice.
From here on in things – time, space, identity - get very confused.
You know those novels and movies and TV shows where somebody is in a coma, lost in their own mind and characters presumably of their own creation help them back to consciousness: Life On Mars for example, or my favourite Open Your Eyes (remade badly as Vanilla Sky)? Well it wasn’t quite like that. For one thing I was pretty much already aware that I was in hospital and that I was badly fucked up. For another, I could hear people talking to me: family, friends, nurses, doctors. It was like hearing them through a haze of static. They were telling me what had happened and that it was going to be alright. I knew that was a lie, though, because it’s exactly what I would have told somebody who was lying there in a coma. Buck up, fellah, everything is going to be A-OK. You’re alive… sort of. You’re still with us…in a manner of speaking.
But much of the time I was somewhere else. Camden Town in January 1943 for example.
For those of us who came of musical age at the turn of the 1990s, the whole Grunge phenomenon was a somewhat traumatic experience. That fissure between the teeming underground and the mainstream that Nirvana opened closed almost instantly, contracting tighter than even before. In their desperation to snag the ‘next Nirvana’, the labels threw wads of green at every scuzz-haired pedal abuser in every rehearsal room in America. Too soon, though, it became clear that only the ‘Grunge’ groups with the most ‘suburban metal’ sound could truly crossover, that the weird and gnarly and oddball and profound would somehow get clogged in metaphoric sewer grates designed to keep the weird and gnarly and oddball and profound out of shopping malls, and off the radio and MTV.
The triumph of impersonal stadium rock, in the form of groups like Stone Temple Pilots, spelled out to the underground that the mainstream wasn’t a place where they could flourish. Like in Hollywood, it was the grand and simple gesture, writ large and clear enough that a blind deaf quadriplegic could grok your inference, that set cash registers ringing; that sold tickets at the cow-town enormodomes that peopled America. This indie rock stuff, the message seemed to be, could only ever be a niche concern, a hobbyist’s passion; that the idea of bands like Jesus Lizard and Tad and Madder Rose existing as successful major label acts was absurd, that they deserved the often spirit-crushing ignominy of being dumped (twice, in Tad’s particularly sorrowful case).
In the years that followed, the underground seemed to retreat to the fringes, the indie-rockers wary of the avaricious Majors (and thatMaximum Rock’n’Roll cover ), and – like Black Flag and the hardcore generation before them – forging a network of tiny labels and sympathetic venues, carving out their own private left-of-the-dial America in rickety splitter vans they rode across the country. Lofty dreams of Nirvana-style stardom seemed forever beyond their reach and, given how that story ended up, were hardly appetising in the first place. Instead, this retreat could be best described by that mainstay of indie-rock interview hell: “We make the music we want to make, and if anybody else likes it, that’s a bonus”.
So what the hell does any of this have to do with Death Cab For Cutie?
You find us in the college town of Bellingham, Washington, 1997, where a young band named for an obscure Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band song from the Beatles’ maligned Magical Mystery Tour movie, have just formed. In the years that will follow, they will record a number of quietly acclaimed albums for local indie label Barsuk, and find themselves on the same touring circuit as kindred spirits like Built To Spill, Modest Mouse and The Dismemberment Plan, groups of similarly earnest but earthbound ambitions. The radiowaves and MTV mostly ignore them, and the noises they make barely resonate over here, except with us sadsack scribes who ever cock an ear across the Atlantic. But someone else is listening, and talking about them, and a buzz is building.
It begins on the internet, newly available to a wide swathe of the world, where listservs and message-boards and nascent blogs chatter about these groups as they wend slowly and scruffily across America. And then, one by one, each had their stroke of outrageous fortune that helped them miraculously ascend to stardom, be it Modest Mouse sound-tracking a TV advert, The Shins enjoying Natalie Portman’s effusive praise in Garden State, or, indeed, Death Cab For Cutie being announced as the fave-rave band of The OC’s geeky heart-throb Seth Cohen. Ah, Seth. All the girls want to be with him, and all the boys want to be him. And, the show’s spinoff sound-track ‘mixtapes’ suggested, you could seem that little bit more like sensitive, angsty Seth if you listened to Death Cab. They were perfectly suited to his tastes, after all, their chiming indie-rock subtly orchestrated to emotive crescendos, bespectacled frontman Ben Gibbard’s achingly composed lyrics perfect for scrawling on the cover of a notepad.
And so it was that Death Cab For Cutie snuck into the mainstream, towards a platinum-level of success that’s seen some cynical corners of the press take potshots at them for certain Middle Of The Road tendencies, a certain absence of rock n’roll essence. True, Ben Gibbard is not Iggy Pop, and his band are not the Stooges, and the idea of addled losers like me forking out cash for an exhaustive 7CD box set of the Complete Narrow Stairs Sessions is unlikely to be realised. They are a band of nearly no mystique, of no real public image; if they exist at all, it is in their songs. Indeed, their subtle qualities might be obscured by the extraneous noise of rock legend; better for fans to come across these songs accidentally, on a mixtape or on a messageboard or on The OC, at their own speed, and to just luxuriate in them for a while.
Gibbard, after all, is a man who pens lyrics like they were extracted from novellas of great intrigue and insight, a story teller who writes without flash, but with feeling and a sharp eye for detail. The deftness of their melodies – played out with a drama that fits their peaks and sighs perfectly, but stops well short of clumsy bombast – rewards those with patience, those who appreciate that fireworks aren’t the only way to light up the sky.
Narrow Stairs is Death Cab’s second album since The Big Time came a-knocking, an album they trailed with an eight minute single of a Krautrock countenance, announcing a more experimental approach, something they feel their recent success has earned them. In truth, it sounds very much like most other Death Cab albums, albeit grander in stature, and rougher at the edges (a result of the group ditching their laptops and recording live in the studio); Gibbard himself declares it “no Metal Machine Music.”
But this constancy isn’t noted as a negative. Instead, it’s in admiration of how fresh the Death Cab blueprint sounds, how much new material they glean from similar structures and themes. Swooning melody and epigrammatic wordsmithery infects almost every corner of Narrow Stairs; even on the aforementioned ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’, the pulsating bassline and expertly metered drums that announce a rhythm track with some Can in its cold blood never obscure the Tune: deft but dynamic, soundtracking Gibbard’s vignettes with sensitivity.
‘Your New Twin Sized Bed’ is a case in point, its tight-focus and sympathetic but unforgiving lyrical eye confirming that Gibbard understands why Raymond Carver’s prose is golden. Musically, the literate and articulate guitars, threading cat’s cradles and hitting angular turns, stake out the space Death Cab seek to inhabit, post-breakthrough: the kind of classic and unabashed collegiate anthems REM once stumbled upon with ease, guileless and large.
There’s a passage in Get In The Van: On The Road With Black Flag where Henry Rollins notes that his group’s acrid roar offended the audience’s ‘REM sensibilities’. But in the American High School Playground that is rock’n’roll, groups like Black Flag and, initially at least, REM were outcasts and outsiders together, the geeks and freaks whose loosely shared subculture rarely crossed over upon that of the jocks and cheerleaders in the mainstream, and in this exile much weird and gnarly and oddball and profound art was hatched. And while there’s not much that’s weird or gnarly or oddball about Death Cab For Cutie, there’s a profundity – or, perhaps, simply a yearning or reaching for profundity, a modest but earnest grasp – to their music that suggests they don’t belong in an arena many of us, in our more cynical moments, write off as ever beholden to the Lowest Common Denominator. But they’ve seeped through somehow, under the radar, riding the long tail, part of that gentle revolution, advancing alongside Modest Mouse, and The Shins, and The Flaming Lips, staking out a visible place for this 21st Century of indie-rock.
Death Cab don’t crawl across the country in a knackered van anymore, but you don’t doubt they’re probably the same guys they were when the group were dubbing off their first demo-cassettes. It’s the same with their music; Narrow Stairs builds on many of the same elements that have concerned the Death Cab catalogue for years. But build it does, ever-refining and growing ever slightly bolder in its reach. They sound less concerned with vaulting the walls of their niche, of compromising or changing what they do, as making a loud enough noise – and making it as honestly, and as passionately as possible – that people will come search them out.
It’s a scheme that certainly seems to be working so far.
Freedom is in the eye of the beholder. To their advocates, Animal Collective have explored some of the most ecstatic regions of contemporary rock, from the lofty, romantic heights of Mercury Rev to the angular, fractured forms of post-rock. They are one of the few current bands whose sound is utterly distinctive and wholly theirs – orgasmic vocals like air escaping from a balloon, guitars strummed so fast they become an impressionistic blur – as if they’ve wrapped their whole subjective world around them, warping space in their own image.
For all that, and whatever their most ardent fans say, Animal Collective undeniably revisit the same old terrain again and again. Often, their aesthetic palette seems to extend little further than the Beach Boys on E, their happy-clappy melodies looping the loop as if reaching the plateaux of an MDMA rush. Their tracks pack in so many chord changes they are almost too fast to see, and this perpetual motion means they rarely take on the hard contours required to lodge themselves in the memory banks. While Animal Collective’s music is undoubtedly freeform, it can become an undifferentiated, impressionistic blur. As the lyrics of ‘Cobwebs’, from this new EP, put it, “it’s a sticky case/the more I move, the less I’m free”.
If their music resembles the early stages of a drug rush, where a kaleidoscope of ideas reverberate in the mind only to be forgotten moments later, it’s not surprising that over the course of a whole album their work is only fleetingly successful. Last year’s Strawberry Jam was a fractured and fitful affair, and 2005’s Feels oscillated between frothy excitement and intense languor with little in between. But their EPs contain some of their best work, capturing the band’s unique state of wide-eyed, emotional innocence in its freshest, starkest state. The Prospect Hummer EP with revered English folk singer Vashti Bunyan was some of their most evocative work, its whispered vocals and strummed guitars rolling in on the balmy summer breeze. Water Curses is another brief but intensely seductive EP, and if the songs here are as turbulent as a jacuzzi, it serves all the better to capture their warm, nurturing emotional currents.
‘Water Curses’ itself is the kind of hyperactive sing-song we’ve heard from them many times before, but an almost rave-y fairground synth in the middle eight hints at the textural depth to come. ‘Street Flash’ is a drip-drop strummed lament that in its middle section drifts into a truly otherworldly interlude of swimming pool reverb with vocals bubbling to the surface. The rhythm of ‘Cobwebs’ is somewhere between Tricky and Aphex Twin, with chunky metallic plonks and squelchy electronic blips, while the guitars are rendered as grainy whitewashes of noise and frothing tides. It’s one of the few Animal Collective tracks to successfully synthesise their bewilderingly diverse musical influences into something wholly new. ‘Seal Eyeing’ is a piano based ballad with an elastic sense of time, the chords and vocals rocking to and fro while subaqueous collisions suggest a boat gently brushing against its moorings in the night.
Water Curses, like previous EPs, is nothing but a collection of stolen moments. But such is the level of vivid detail, the 18 minutes here seem paradoxically longer than many of the group’s more protracted albums. Their work is as fleeting as daydreams, capturing a world of flux, confusion and ephemeral delights. Their peculiar kind of freedom is psychological, intimate and subjective, and it’s only within the informal, sketchy outlines of an EP that one can truly experience it.
About this time last year, Britain enjoyed a few days of glorious sunshine before the Atlantic spent the summer firing endless storms at Gloucestershire. With this in mind, the past weekend of sun and warmth saw hostelries empty as the people of the nation turned their skin to pork crackling with a zeal that suggests they thought it might be their last chance of a roasting in 2008
But with the resolutely upbeat Antipodeans Cut Copy providing an appropriately sun-dappled soundtrack to summer with second album In Ghost Colours, it’d be impertinent of the clouds to make an appearance over the coming months. A superb step forward from their debut Bright Like Neon Love, the sophomore effort takes a bewildering range of sounds (post Daft Punk belters, hints of MBV exuberant noise, er, Suede’s ‘She’s In Fashion’) and melds them into something entirely beguiling, and utterly their own.
In our exlusive podcast, Cut Copy talk to John Doran about their isolation from the rest of the world, why they’re the Minor Threat of dance music, working with Tim Goldsworthy of DFA, and why it’s time for an ELO revival.
Waking up to a breakfast of lightly grilled kippers and a cask of my own stored and refortified urine, I read with interest that Sir Cliff Richard may well have been denied victory in the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest by General Franco, whose henchmen ensured that the Spanish entry, “La La La” by the chanteuse Massiel, reached the top spot by systematically bribing foreign jurors in exchange for votes. In the end, Cliff’s “Congratulations” lost by a single point.
Aw, there’s a f***ing shame! British Song with all the f***ing artistic merit of a f***ing eight year old girl’s turd loses out thanks to Fascist corruption! Tell you f***ing what, Cliff, it’s a f***ing pity South Africa isn’t part of f***ing Europe, what with all the f***ing fans you picked up there when you defied a ban and toured the f***ing place during the f***ing apartheid era like the clueless Christian c*** you are! You’d have f***ing walked the contest! If Franco fixed this, it was the best thing the old f***er ever did, second to f***ing dying! I could pretty much forgive him his f***ing conduct in the f***ing Spanish Civil War if by whatever f***ing means necessary he knocked you off your f***ing perch of pop pillockry! “Cliff”! Go f***ing throw yourself off one, you prune-faced pile of sun-dried f***ing arserag! Seriously, in all f***ing seriousness, you’re f***ing 67, die!
It seems that Scarlett Johansson, star of Lost In Translation, has made an album of covers of Tom Waits songs, featuring contributions from David Bowie. It was produced by David Sitek of TV On The Radio.
Oh my f***ing Christc*** - Scarlett. Has it f***ing occurred to you that there’s a f***ing downside to getting to a f***ing point in your life when any proposition that floats through your f***ing minimally appointed head and finds its way out of your mouth is greeted with, “Oh yes, of course, Ms Johansson, you can do anything you want!” Including this f***ing piece of shit? You can no more f***ing sing that a f***ing goat can toss the f***ing caber! The only redeeming thing you can f***ing say about this album is that it’s not as bad as that pile of “ooh, aren’t slitty-eyed people strange?” shite Lost In Translation! And Tom f***ing Waits? I’d rather listen to a f***ing dosser vomiting! In fact, I suspect I f***ing am listening to a f***ing dosser vomiting! As for David Bowie, well, you f***ing knew that desperate old twat would have got his f***ing yellowing, vampiric f***ing fangs involved in a f***ing project like this! “Ah. Yes. TV On The Radio. Marvellous. Yes, I’m very up to date with the modern scene. Bright new labels like 4AD. Young music. Young blood. The blood of the young. Blood! Blood! Must have blood! Come hither, my young ones . . .”. Chateau owning c***!
Finally, The Kaiser Chiefs have let it be known that in order to keep it real, their next album is to be produced by hip-hop/rock producer Mark Ronson, nephew of tycoon Gerald Ronson and brother of Samantha, Lindsey Lohan’s “party pal”.
F*** me, Leeds, eh? Rickets. Peter Sutcliffe. The f***ing Kaiser Chiefs. You know, if we wanted to see if our f***ing nuclear bombs were still f***ing working after all these f***ing years in storage, I can think of f***ing worse ideas! Trouble is, like the obdurate f***ing cockroaches they are, the f***ing Kaiser Chiefs would probably survive the f***ing blast, scuttling around like pointless little f***s, predicting f***ing riots! What the f*** do you still exist for, you rancid f***ing streaks of f***ing cockrot? You know, when even Boris Johnson – Boris, flabby faced f*** Johnson – slags you off for being too f***ing tame, the game’s f***ing up! It just f***ing reminds you of the old wives’ f***ing adage that you can’t shove shit back up the arse of f***ing mediocrity! As for f***ing Mark Ronson, you overprivileged, undertalented twatpiece – P Diddy? Robbie Williams? Christina Aguilera? The f***ing Kaiser Chiefs? Is there anyone you f***ing wouldn’t work with, on f***ing principle? Is there f***! If General Franco were discovered to be f***ing alive and well and living in f***ing Bolivia, you’d be right on the phone to him offering to give his f***ing new album of Patriotic Military Marching Songs a radical, edgy, hip-hop sheen, wouldn’t you, you little c***?
Upon his stage-managed release from prison this week, Pete Doherty told the assembled microphone-waving morons of the press that “gangsters and Radio 4″ made for the worst part of his stay at her Majesty’s pleasure (and ours, come to think of it) in Wormwood Scrubs. A typically daft comment from Doherty, who, one imagines, was the kind of youth who’d fall asleep to the monotonous tones of the shipping forecast.
Yet of late, Radio 4 has bizarrely started to realign itself for a more populist, younger listenership, albeit one defined by those thrusting producers who left Oxbridge and were able to use daddy’s money to fund months of unpaid work experience with all the other Nicholases and Emilys.
Now it must be admitted that some good has come of this yoof drive: next week, for example, Asher D will be the deserving and interesting subject of John Humphrys’ On The Ropes, which ought introduce the former So Solid Crew rapper to a new audience and, more generally, give the residents of Godalming and Grantham direct insight into an inner-city world they usually encounter only through skewed tabloid reports.
However, Radio 4’s new music-specific output is altogether more hit-and-miss. Recently the station has served up a panel discussion on the merits of Pulp’s ‘Common People’; Mark E Smith on Front Row; Jon Ronson and Robbie Williams on the hunt for UFOs; and Simon Armitage raising his right arm to give the bloated corpse of Ian Curtis a weary flogging. All of these felt entirely out of place, far better suited to 6music or Radios 2 or 3, while Paul Morley’s recent programme about John Cooper Clarke (a great opportunity) was marred by the former’s wearily familiar reminisces on punk and Manchester. At least on the radio you can’t see his jowls.
Similarly, a recent special 50th anniversary edition of Sue McGregor’s The Reunion was broadcast from the BFI theatre, the audience laughing uproariously every time one of the cast members, or director Bruce Robinson, hammed a line from his film Withnail & I. It was hard to see the point of the programme – it failed to examine the film as a piece of classic cult cinema and an excoriation of the failed ’60s dream, instead relying heavily on the student cliché of it being one long audiovisual drinking game. To any listener unfamiliar with the film, it would have made little or no sense.
After a brief rant about the pernicious affect Hollywood has on the British film industry, Robinson remarked, “They should get me on Question Time” – and the audience guffawed. Like so much of Radio 4’s output, the youth programmes fall into the trap of fusty in-jokes and self-referential titters.
Radio 4 ought to stick to what it’s good at – hard-hitting news, the shipping forecast, A Book at Bedtime, Just a Minute, the Today programme (itself weakened, post-Hutton and budget cuts), In Our Time, Week in Westminster, Farming Today, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, Unreliable Evidence, Sandy Toksvig vehicles, The Archers. I’ve been a listener for two decades precisely because Radio 4 doesn’t trouble itself with music and popular culture; it provides a respite and an education, a reminder that there is a world outside vinyl-mining, gigs and pub pontifications. If it were to change too far the other direction, I might well find myself in that most unusual of places: in accord with Pete Doherty.
While being a rock star in the wake of the 60s meant you wore expensive free flowing clothes and strutted around the stage with eyes bulging in libidinous frenzy, Jonanthan Richman, with his cropped haired and clad in straight legged jeans and white t-shirt, was the archetypal suburban boy who moved to the city. He stood gawkily, voicing his concern that he might never find a girlfriend who wasn’t just some “coked up triumph in the bar”.
By the time Richman brought his band to the UK in 1977, the first wave of punk had already been and gone, leaving behind it a sea of posturing blanks eager for someone to play something pissed-off sounding to them. Yet Richman and his band did not comply. Instead, they played child-like acoustic songs with titles like ‘The Wheels On The Bus’, and ‘Hey Little Insect’. The band played so quietly that a chorus of “shhh” would be directed at a noisy member of the crowd. Punk this was not. “I can’t connect the concert with the chill world outside AT ALL,” Jon Savage wrote in a Sounds magazine review of a show at the Hammersmith Odeon, “beyond fearing that Richman’s courageous, innocent positivism is SO fragile”.
I often wonder whether Richman’s shift into writing songs that express unquestioning positivity represents some kind of postmodern sickness, the world that he has created out of the modern American myths about ice cream men and bank-tellers examples of a kind of hyperreal world of Jonathan’s creation, where he can exist safely and peacefully and shut out the world.
But then perhaps he just stopped being pissed off. Should he have repeated the angst trick if he didn’t mean it? Novelist and editor of literary journal n+1 Keith Gessen recently wrote in the Guardian that Richman had a choice between moving back to Boston to live, or going to New York to die a dignified nihilist death like members of the Ramones did, suggesting he should have done the latter to preserve some sort of artistic punk credibility. It is this kind of bullshit that makes me think Richman was perhaps right to pursue the career that he has, if only to save us from another Jimi/Jim/Sid/Ian/Kurt staring out, shiny and confused on a W.H. Smith magazine shelf.
He’s touring now, returning to West London this Friday (May 9), playing Shepherds Bush Empire. Don’t expect much angst, but lots of sincerity and feeling. It may make the cynic curl their toes at times, but let’s take a stroll through the frighteningly happy world of Jonathan Richman.
1. Velvet Underground
“If the Velvet Underground had a protégé,” said Sterling Morrison, “it would be Jonathan”. Few musicians owe as much to a group as Richman does to the Velvets, and even fewer admit as much. At 15 he swapped a Fugs album for the group’s Warhol-produced debut and it had such an effect on him that he immediately picked up guitar. “They made an atmosphere, and I knew then that I could make one too”, he said. He saw them 80 times, wrote about them in Boston zines, supported some of their shows, and slept on manager Steve Sesnick’s couch when he moved to New York aged 18. Highlight: ‘Sister Ray’ – Richman’s fave and the basis for ‘Roadrunner’
2. The Modern Lovers - The Modern Lovers
Richman returned to Boston in 1970 after failing to make it as a musician in NY. (The biggest crowd he pulled was for an impromptu performance on the roof of the Hotel Albert in New York: The audience standing on the pavement below thought he was a suicidal man about to jump.) He quickly pulled together some musicians, including future Talking Head Jerry Harrison on organ, and formed The Modern Lovers, releasing an eponymous album in 1976. For all the Velvets inspired fuzz and drone, it is an record of feeling, whether that be disdain as in the anti-hippy lament ‘I’m Straight’ or the jealous ‘Pablo Picasso’, or the real romantic yearning of ‘Girlfriend’, the latter’s soulful beauty providing a link to much of Richman’s later work. Yet it’s also that describes the conflict between his early life in Natick in suburbs of Boston and his ambition to make it in New York. The notorious ‘Roadrunner’ suggested flight from this past, but soon ‘Old World’ suggests that Richman belonged to the ‘burbs. Highlight: ‘I’m Straight’
3. Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
The original Modern Lovers disbanded in 1974 as Richman turned away from the loud fuzz-laden proto-punk that made their name: “I believe that any group that hurts the ears of infants – and this is no joke – sucks”, he reasoned. He assembled another, quieter band who would work together as Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. They adopted a kind of 1950s doo-wop style, and played gigs for children at schools and hospitals, resulting in songs like’ Abominable Snowman in the Market’, and ‘Here Come the Martian Martians’. The motif of childhood, mixed with the romance of the modern USA already evident on the debut (’Rockin Shopping Centre’ and ‘New England’) has served as his blueprint pretty much ever since. Highlight: ‘Lonely Financial Zone’
4. Modern Lovers - Rock n’Roll with the Modern Lovers
After aborting early sessions that took place in a toilet, Richman set about complimenting his fifties acoustic style with influences from outside America. There are some prominent instrumentals. Opening track ‘The Sweeping Wind (Kwa Ti Feng)’, is influenced by Chinese folk, while Richman’s biggest hit ‘Egyptian Reggae’ is exactly that. The kids are still kept happy though, with ‘Ice Cream Man’ and ‘Wheels on the Bus’. Highlight: ‘Fly Into The Mystery’
5. Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - Rockin and Romance
Richman’s writing goes anatomic on this 1986 album, with no subject matter too banal for him to tackle. In ‘Chewing Gum Wrapper’. (Check this video explaining how he came up with the song). Somehow he manages to craft a strangely moving song out of seeing a crumpled up chewing gum wrapper on the floor of a street. ‘My Jeans’, feels one step too far though, featuring choice lyrics like “Well my jeans they are a frayin’/And don’t talk Levi’s/Because I’ve tried/My hips they had no room to play in/And my little bum felt all trapped inside”. Highlight: ‘Chewing Gum Wrapper’
6. Sesame Street
It had to happen, and when Sesame Street started to feature Richman’s songs it made perfect sense. Angry? Depressed? Just watch this clip and I reckon you’ll either smile or go look for a rope.
7. There’s Something About Mary OST
To some, Richman will be best remembered as the man in the tree at the beginning of the 1998 Farrelly Brother’s bullpap comedy There’s Something About Mary. After he popped up in their earlier film Kingpin the brothers, who are big fans, asked Richman to score the movie as well as appear in it. Not a union to win the cynics over, but it did bring him to a wider audience. Highlight: ‘There’s Something About Mary’
8. David Bowie - ‘Pablo Picasso’
While the Sex Pistols famously covered ‘Roadrunner’ before they had any songs, surely the most bizarre Richman cover has to go to David Bowie’s 2003 rendition of the debut album track ‘Pablo Picasso’. The Thin White Duke manages to make the track sound like a jam session between U2, Bruce Willis and Devo. The weirdness is multiplied by the fan-made video in which Bowie appears as an abstract painting of a kind of evil alien, floating through a labarynthine landscape and pictures of Andy Warhol. His old bunk mate Iggy had a go some years earlier. Suffice to say it is a simpler affair.
9. Jonathan Richman - Not so Much to be Loved as to Love
Released in 2004, his latest studio album won’t have surprised many of his fans, containing the familiar mix of eulogies to heroes (’Vincent Van Gogh’, ‘Salvador Dali’), and sunny acoustic instrumentals (’Sunday Afternoon’). Richman must be the only man alive who can sing the line “In an alley somewhere smelling of grease and piss/I was delighted that the world would wanna smell like this”, as he does in ‘The World Was Showing It’s Hand’, without a hint of irony. Highlight: ‘My Baby Love Love Loves Me’
10. The Modern Ovens
So what of Richman’s 21st century legacy? You can point to Adam Green for the same kind of plain-talkin’-troubadour-croon, but he’s too ironic. Vampire Weekend write catchy, dweeby pop but they’re just too damn cocksure. Perhaps its the Modern Ovens, the affectionately titled covers band from Brighton made up of members of British Sea Power, Tenderfoot and Actress Hands, who carry the torch the most convincingly. Last New Years Eve the band played a tribute to Jonathan, dressing up as ice cream men and encouraging games of pass the parcel. The party band for the twee generation is here.
“Metal is focking alive and well, and doing better than it has for many years,” declared Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich recently, conveniently omitting the fact that he personally pronounced heavy metal dead and buried 12 years ago. With that in mind, it’s ironic to note that the most anticipated metal release of 2008 is undoubtedly Metallica’s as yet-untitled new album, being recorded with Rick Rubin as we speak and on its way to you in the autumn. Most of us know in advance that it won’t be much cop: the band have talked at length about the ‘power groove’ element in many of the songs (like the world needed another Pantera, right?) and the two songs previewed on tour last year were horrendously tedious. Still, a spark of hope nestles within a large proportion of Metallica’s fanbase: let’s hope Lars doesn’t stamp it out.
Ulrich’s statement about metal being alive and well is right, though. This is a golden age for heavy music and all its myriad subgenres – and it’s commercially viable, too. Although there’s a huge underground movement of extreme metal (see m’learned colleague Tommy Udo’s forthcoming In Extremis column on this very site for more on this), the kids are paying wads of money for the big-selling metal brands that you see on MTV and the Kerrang! channels, too. There’s gold in them there riffs, and the industry knows it, spending obscenely large sums of money on the promotion of several planet-shafting albums this year. Oh, and the Reading/Leeds festivals sold out all of their 200,000 tickets in 24 hours a couple of weeks ago – proof, if any were needed, that metal is thriving, depressed economy or not.
While we’re waiting for Metallica’s new album, there’s tons of other heavy music on its way, both live and on record. Iron Maiden, perhaps the only metal band who can equal Metallica’s pulling power these days, are currently in the middle of a vast world tour, flying from country to country in an airliner piloted by singer Bruce Dickinson and reprising a live set taken from their classic Live After Death album of 1985. Like every metal band in the world these days, Maiden are playing one of their best albums – in this case Somewhere In Time – in its entirety, following in the recent tradition of Slayer whipping through Reign In Blood and Metallica doing Master Of Puppets. (What next – Poison revisiting Look What The Cat Dragged In?) Such is the power of the ageing Maiden brand that a compilation of their earliest and best stuff called Somewhere Back In Time will be issued as a free but time-limited download on 12 May from their website. Their show at Twickenham Stadium on 5 July with pretty boys Avenged Sevenfold is bound to be the metal show of the summer, too. Not bad for a bunch of East End herberts, eh?
Talking of hair-metal (and we have to at some point, fella), Ratt are back, promising a DVD and a best-of album later this summer. Why, I ask you, why? The spandex fanbase is still huge, obviously, even though they’re all grown up and using their credit cards to buy B&Q gardenware rather than chopping out coke. No-one knows this better than the perennially nearly-dead LA quartet Mötley Crüe, whose exhumation in recent years has been nothing short of cynical, I mean astounding. Following up their autobiography, The Dirt, with an album of the same title (out mid-June) and an MTV-backed film based on said tome, the band have just executed two stadium tours and announced a rolling festival, the Crüefest , featuring party chaps Buckcherry and nu-metal no-marks Papa Roach. In line with the now 12-year-old Ozzfest , Slayer’s annual Unholy Alliance tour and the Gigantour founded by Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine, metal festivals seem to be where the money is at these days – so expect plenty of chemical-toilet action this summer.
More credibly, Sammy Hagar (on a Ross and Rachel-style break from Van Halen while that band are touring with original frontman Dave Lee Roth ) is touring in America with the Teutonic evergreens Scorpions later this year. If you’re reading this Stateside, you lucky git, you may also have heard the news of the Metal Masters enormo-tour featuring Judas Priest, Heaven And Hell (the Ronnie James Dio -fronted version of Black Sabbath), Motörhead and Testament. The last of these have a new album out in May called The Formation Of Damnation and, while it’s not a patch on their old stuff, is still a sight better than most of the current neo-thrash wave…
Industrial metallers Ministry are currently executing a farewell world tour with the mighty Meshuggah in support, signalling Al Jourgensen’s desire to lay his band to rest in style. One alternative act departs and another is reborn, however, with the re-re-re-re-reformation of Jane’s Addiction, who played at the recent NME Awards USA ceremony in LA – the first appearance of the classic line-up in 17 years, they say.
Indeed, it’s the era of the classic dinosaur-rockers once more, with even AC/DC limbering up for the release of a new album later this year. The album – the band’s first since Stiff Upper Lip back in 2000 – is being recorded with Brendan O’Brien and reportedly sounds like a combination of happy hardcore and vintage Madchester. (Joke.) Guns N’Roses, meanwhile, are really, really supposed to be releasing the long-awaited (™) Chinese Democracy this year. Yeah, sure they are.
It’s not all about old men, though. The ridiculously young Black Tide, whose frontman Gabriel Garcia is 15, have been the talk of metal cognoscenti in recent months, playing with Bloodsimple on the recent A7X jaunt and delivering a fine Maiden/Megadeth/Mötley hybrid with their recent album, Light From Above. Disturbed have got a new album out on June 3 called ‘Indestructible’ (how modest of them) and are trailering it with a Guitar Hero-style game which you can try out online. While we’re on the subject of the interweb, Nine Inch Nails are letting people create videos for songs from their last album, ‘Ghosts I-IV’, at their Youtube channel. So much fun to be had and so little time for work, eh?
Finally, on the horizon there’s supposed to be a new Slipknot album, Satan help us. They’re playing at Reading/Leeds alongside the reunited Rage Against The Machine, y’know. Stranger things have happened in metal, but not many…
Must-have Metal Albums This Month
Opeth Watershed
Death metal, ambient sounds, acoustic folk and epic ambition successfully collide on this awe-inspiring album. If Opeth are this generation’s Pink Floyd, then this is their ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’.
UFOmammut Idolum
Taking the spaced-out grace of Hawkwind and applying it to uneasy, Sunn0)))-like doom metal, this Italian band create a sound which may not be unique, but which should be much, much more popular.
Meshuggah obZen
There is no arguing with Meshuggah. Buy this album. Sit down. Listen. Be confused. Listen another six times. Finally get it. Have your consciousness raised.
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Over a few pints late last year we were talking about the elephant in the room. It was a giant pachyderm with a picture of Bob Dylan on the end of its trunk, a snap of Hadouken just above its anus and its feet on photocopies of all four Beatles. The elephant, which also had stickers of Kate Nash and Peaches Gandalf on either tusk, was impossible to ignore. Read more...
