Manafonistas

In a Spike Milligan story about (if I remember correctly) a short break in Paris, the narrator, describes waking up in his 3rd floor hotel bedroom, opening the doors and stepping out onto the balcony, and then (as he writes) … „I remembered – I didn’t have one!“ Well something similar happened to me today. I excitedly drove to the post office to pick up a package from Kudos Records, from whom I’d ordered the Purity Supreme ep „Always Already“ – Purity Supreme being a collaboration between Leslie Winer and Christophe Van Huffel. I slit it open with an eager finger (that I had to hand (so to speak)) and remembered that wonderful feeling I had years ago whenever I bought a new record – that wonderful, but slightly unfamiliar feeling … unfamiliar because it’s years since I’ve been in the habit of buying records – the reason being: I don’t have a record player! (something I should have remembered when reading Michael’s recent Blog post about his turntable!)
 

There is a fine line between devotion, enthusiasm, love, single-mindedness, passion and obsession and this line is in a constant state of flux – until it makes that fateful shift – usually with conviction (and often irrevocably) – and encircles the subject in a single hypostasised category „cell“ where there is no disguising the emotion or state any longer and little chance of recourse or redemption. Yuka Honda captures this initial nascent, throbbing, latent state in „I Dream About You“ from her 2009 album Eucademix. The song is sung by Miho Hattori (I believe) from the perspective of a female subject to the female object of her burgeoning desire – the refrain „I dream about you“ is incanted over a monotonous electronic backdrop – occasionally interspersed with more elaborated semi-spoken narrative and snatches of dialogue from a European movie of indeterminate identity or content – save that it is suitably „moody“ and ominous. The ambiguity of the line „I dream about you“, that is alluded to in the song’s opening reference to the „little moment between twilight and night“ – is perfectly framed by the music, by the singer´s tone and by the paucity of detail. When we are focused – however healthily or unhealthily on an object of adoration – words are usually superfluous – and when we hear the line repeated again and again, each iteration is inflected with a different hue – Love? Sexual desire? Anodyne admiration? Tender affection? Venal obsession? Any interpretation could be possible. The narrator reveals how she meets the object of her passion three weeks earlier, when „She gave me a sweet smile – the kind I call sublime“. This word is most apposite as, Mona Lisa-like, it embodies the ambiguity and latent quality that exists at the heart of all change. Limus – „oblique“ and Limen – „threshold“ – words that it may derive from, signal that line which initially can crossed from moment to moment until something will happen that drives us to cross it without hope of return. Was the smile genuine? Was it a come-on? Was it a guarded, resigned defence put up instinctively in reaction to an encounter felt to be sinister? The great thing is we will never know. The song will remain forever in this unfinalisable state.

It’s a wonderful thing to get drunk on music – and particularly the music of Scott Walker. Since first hearing ‚Such a Small Love‘, when buying the Julian Cope compilation many years ago at the height of post punk (it’s funny how each epic period that we lived through seemed eternal at the time, but with retrospect lasted perhaps a few months!) I have loved almost everything I have heard of his (with the possible exception of ‚Stretch/We had it all‘) and find his most recent work to have surpassed even his earlier seminal solo work (recently re-released and remastered) in terms of its scope, artistic ambition – its  humour and literary playfulness/inventiveness. But despite Tilt/the Drift and Bish Bosch being just about as fine as it can get, I still love his earlier work and can’t believe that until today I had never actually heard ‚the big Hurt‘! So to sit in front of a roaring computer, listening to a wonderful ’new‘ Scott Walker song (well, he didn’t actually write it) that has already been freely available for years is akin to … well, is akin to finding a Scott Walker that you didn’t know about, when you perhaps could have done so simply by buying the album! The song has the typical ‚big‘ orchestration of that period and, again typically, has a prominent violin presence … but unlike, say, the sinister sustained string effect on ‚it’s Raining Today‘, here, the violin has a ludic/lunatic/Rabelasian quality – jumping around wildly all over the place – as if mocking the counterpart MOR orchestration that forms the backdrop to much of the rest of the song. It’s almost as though the violin part is channeling Scott’s psychic disquiet as he wears, but at the same time seeks to shake off, the mantle of conformity to the mainstream, which he had donned as a teenager and worn ever since with elan, sophistication  and youthful Schnodderigkeit. Interestingly, the violin part isn’t consistently wild and untrammeled, but (playing its part to perfection) intermittently bows to conformity and sounds at times almost as though it would feel at home in the ‚Stingray‘ outro (not in itself a bad thing!). And just when the strings have had enough of being ‚out there‘, the unrest spreads elsewhere to the trumpet … it seems that something has to give: the truth will out … But what holds all of this together and prevents it from fracturing completely, is the voice, which glides effortlessly from stanza to stanza (I think the word is more appropriate here than ‚verse‘) in what is perhaps the finest example of ‚gliding‘ that I can recall in a song, as it rises and descends through the pitches like a cool, ray-banned surfer … expressing on the surface, loss – of love and time, but also pointing towards some kind of recovery and growth; both in terms of the narrative of the song, but also an artistic and spiritual growth. If this is hurting, then who needs joy!

Although I knew Jonathon Richman and the Modern Lovers though Roadrunner, Ice Cream Man and Egyptian Reggae, which I heard around the time of the first punk explosion, for some reason I never really listened to him very closely until about three or four days ago, which is quite a long time to allow such a great treasure to escape from your life … I can’t even remember the chain of aleatoric thoughts that lead me to him again, but I find myself becoming ever more captivated by his enchanting music. What I find so great about him is that unlike a band like Coldplay and countless others who need to express BIG emotions and big sounds, which ultimately end up feeling limited and constrained  because of the scale of their ambition, Jonathon Richman’s music is small and homespun in its sound and in its lyrical interest and yet manages to seem limitless in the possibilities it suggests of its possible meaning and its spiritual yearning. Whether he is writing about being a mosquito or about honey bees or parachute jumpers, whether about the joys of driving along a New England freeway or dancing in a lesbian bar; however small or parochial the nature of his concerns, the expansive nature of the joy that the lyrics give rise to in the listener and the vibrancy and ebullience of the music are such that any one of his songs could charge you with sufficient energy to single-handed build a pyramid, fight a Roman legion (assuming there was one in the vicinity of the pyramid) and still have room to counter the next wave of misery that is an inherent part of the human condition, but which he manages to somehow dissipate through his songwriting.

Although there are so many of his songs that are great, I particularly love ‚Twilight in Boston‚ because it expresses the joy of the mundane – of the prosaic, with precisely the deftness of touch that avoids slipping into the mawkish (of course, this is subjective). It happens to refer to Boston, but this could be an experience that anyone could have, anywhere in the world – at any time. It’s sung with that gleeful sense that enjoyment comes from the here and now, from the smallness of things, which at the same time are connected to something greater. So as I listen to it, I can celebrate the wonderful reaction of Jurgen Klopp to Subotic’s goal line clearance, walking past Tonbridge castle in the late afternoon sunshine and at any of these times, feel connected to an Egyptian slave who is in love with Cleopatra (my interpretation of Abdul and Cleopatra)!

(Dedicated to the inspiring BVB team)

We Manafonistas are united in our love of music and football. We tend to write about music more than football, but there are times when you just have to get the old quill out and, as a committed scrivener, (or perhaps one who should be committed!) vent your spleen. To summarise the story as succinctly as possible; Southampton, the team I support, were in administration after years of mismanagement and in-fighting (having been known historically to be a well run ‚family‘ club fighting at its own weight or possibly slightly overachieving (it’s subjective)). Then, on the brink of ceasing to exist as an entity, we were rescued by the Swiss Businessman, Markus Liebherr (who sadly died only a year or so later) and his friend and business associate Nicola Cortese. Saints were then in League 1 and, after in their first season under the new owners almost gaining immediate promotion despite a 10 point deduction, at the start of the next season, with the team near the foot of the table, the then manager – Alan Pardew, was sacked and replaced by Nigel Adkins – a relative unknown, but who had achieved success with Scunthorpe in the lower leagues. This sacking seemed harsh to some, but nothing compared to what we have just experienced.

Under his leadership we experienced two consecutive promotions playing bright, attractive football and bringing players from our excellent academy into the first team. Now of course, we mustn’t forget that a huge amount of the credit for this success is due to the vision (and financial backing – or access to it via the Liebherr family) of Nicola Cortese, for whom, we must remember, we must be grateful for having the insight and courage to notice and employ Nigel Adkins in the first place. However, it needed a great manager to realise Cortese’s vision of getting Saints into the Premier League, which Adkins did within two seasons (rather than 5, which was the original plan). He did so with intelligence, decency, humility, humour, unrelenting positivity, generosity, magnanimity and a sense of wanting to bring together the community (of fans, players, staff) in pursuit of a common goal or purpose – success for the football club. His catch phrase – often repeated, was ‚together as one‘. In fact, from the position of misery experienced in my own work setting, I looked on with envy at the joy that must have been experienced by the players and staff who worked under such a man.

At first the team struggled – conceding goals by the hatful – despite scoring quite freely and often taking the lead against our opponents (all of them, somewhat aleatorically, from the top half of the table), but then losing. We we ensconced (given our history, that is the ‚mot juste‘) in the bottom three and Nigel was favourite for the sack… and then we gradually began to find our feet… winning 4-1 against Aston Villa at home; getting our first away win at QPR – 3-1 and drawing games when we might previously have lost. Throughout this period, the fans were resolute in their support of their Manager. Even when he was odds-on favourite for the sack, such as immediately after a depressing 2-0 away defeat to West Brom there were constant chants of ‚there‘ only one Nigel Adkins!‘

In recent weeks we have only lost 2 matches out of 12 and in his last game in charge came from 2-0 down to draw against the European champions, Chelsea, at Stamford Bridge – to sit in 15th place – and some three points away from the bottom three. Then, on Friday, the dream ended and he was sacked.

The response has been enlightening: a poll in the local newspaper showed that 6% of respondents were in favour of his dismissal and 94% against! A website that was set up to show fans‘ appreciation of his contribution to our club has so far attracted over 600 (extremely eloquent) posts – testifying to the human qualities he possesses. Perhaps the most heart-warming story to emerge is the message he left for the players (presumably at the training ground) which, when some might have felt resentment, anger and bitterness, reflects the kind of person he is and why so many feel so sad about his dismissal:
 
 
 

What is the price of success? If Southampton are European Champion’s league winners in three years time, will it have been worth it? I would have to say ‚No.‘ The fact of the matter is that the joy of supporting a football club is the joy of being part of a community – and I would say that most people would wish to be part of a community that values the highest ideals  which most would (probably) value  – just look at Chelsea supporters‘ disgust at the treatment of Roberto di Matteo, who more than any manager at Chelsea, deserved to be allowed to continue in his job, having gained what his owner coveted above all else.

I will, of course, continue to support the team (it would be ridiculous not to, given that Akins‘ appointment also involved a premature (?) sacking) – and will support the new manager – he will probably be very good. I won’t even be overly critical of Nicola Cortese – only in the constructive sense of pointing out that success is an amalgam of disparate factors, and that one of the factors that has greater weighting than any other is the intangible, ubiquitous, essential quality (often elusive) of spirit (call it what you will) that we look for in music, in sport, in creativity and in every aspect of life. We all know what it is – but might struggle to give it a name. In time, this will all be chalked up as one relatively minor chapter in the history of a relatively minor club in the greater scheme of things, but for now, it does feel as though oer vaulting ambition (to reference the Scottish Play – and no allusion intended to another former Saint’s manager’s new charges) has kicked Mr Generosity of  Spirit in the proverbials!

But that’s football!

 
Here is where I had my coffee today – at the Royal Naval College at Maritime Greenwich … it looks Palatial, but the coffee is only £1.50 (and served in plastic, not bone china)!
 
 

About 14 months or so ago I was bitten by Tiny Vipers – the guise or persona adopted by the great singer-songwriter, who should be better known, Jesy Fortino. After hearing her for the first time – after one of her songs was posted on the Fleet Foxes‘ Facebook page – I think (I’m glad they’re called ‚pages‘ and not ‚folios‘!) I listened to whatever of her music I could find online and bought as much as I could. Her music is hypnotic, entrancing and captivating. What I find fascinating about it is that I can’t for the life of me remember what any of the tracks are called – and I haven’t really pored over her lyrics – and yet none of that matters, because each song is entirely distinctive and memorable, and despite that distinctiveness, each one addresses some universal quality, which every individual note, chord, bar and verse of every song (I’m not sure if there are choruses as such) – and most of all all every note – draws me inexorably towards – as did the Seirenes Odysseus. Of course, the difference between Odysseus and myself (apart from the fact that Odysseus didn’t support Southampton or have a driving licence) is that when her music is playing, I have no desire to stuff my ears with Bees‘ wax. On the contrary, if I had any Bees‘ wax, I would be tempted to turn it into another Tiny Vipers‘ record, as too much time has elapsed since the last one.

Yesterday I was watching a BBC documentary in the ‘Imagine’ series, about Simon and Garfunkel’s recording of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water ‘. (It turns out that one arranger– not being particularly concerned with the lyrics of the track of the same name that he’d been working on, believed that it was called ‘Pitcher of Water’!) Although I’ve always liked Simon and Garfunkel, I have never owned a record, CD, mp3 or even cassette of their music or even borrowed any of it. There was something about their music that I was attracted to and yet at the same time something that stopped me from wanting to be close to it, which is a shame, because when I was watching the documentary one song really stood out for me – ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ and this made me think that I might have missed out on a few years of listening to it and other gems! For one thing, the title of the song itself is wonderful; I’ve no idea what it truly meant to Paul Simon, who wrote the song – and even though I could quite easily arrive at a plausible interpretation for myself, I don’t really want to do so, because at the moment it still holds all that beautiful potential that comes when something has an infinite number of possible meanings – and it’s that latent possibility that is so attractive in the title of any song that we love when we first meet it (less so in those we don’t) as well as in the lyrics – and which is gradually lost with familiarity. In fact, the general processes involved in encountering a song or a piece of music and then loving it and subsequently growing tired of it are, I suspect, what made me hesitant about owing any S&G music in the first place; whilst at the same time explaining why this song called to me more strongly than others in the programme – and why I will probably have to watch that love dwindle in time.

The song was written by Simon about his friend Art (or ‘Artie’) going away to film Catch 22 in Mexico (Garfunkel is referred to in the song as ‘Tom’ – his stage name in the early act that he and Simon had early in their career). The opening line ‘Tom, get your plane right on time’ is sung with the tenderness of someone who cares deeply about their friend (despite the fact that it’s possible to infer from even a cursory knowledge of S&G’s relationship that this moment must have involved a complex mixture of resentment, scorn and anger as well as amity) and shows an almost paternal concern – despite their being the same age: “I know, your part’ll go fine”.

This opening was what hooked me – at some subliminal level, because I wasn’t listening with any great attention to the lyrics at first – but clearly I could pick up on the tenderness. Next comes the base line (apparently an 8-string base played by session musician Joe Osborne) – I didn’t know any of this information at a conscious level when I was being hooked – just that the song (or the opening bars, at least) involved (A) tenderness and (B) a fat, loping bass line. But then, as I learned more about the song, which I had already made a sub- or semi-conscious decision to love, it turned out that I must be more sensitive to something about music than I thought as it turns out (from interviews with the producer – and other collaborator-musicians)that playing on this track were members of the Wrecking Crew (such as Hal Blaine) – I’m a big Beach Boys / Brian Wilson fan – AND that it involved significant use of echo chambers (I’m a big Lee Hazlewood fan).

The fact is though that there are competing forces at play which on the one hand liberate, by offering infinite potential and infinite possibilities, and on the other, which seek to constrain, hypostasize, limit and make staid that same potential. Just as something new and dynamic – or ‘different’ (any form of music, art or architecture, for example) will at first offer something incredibly alluring and as a result attract imitators, with this usually culminating in the creation of a ‘genre’, so there will inevitably follow process whereby the same genre will be the progenitor of further imitators – initially affectionate ones, who will then tip the balance away from overwhelming approval and invite parody and eventually ridicule. This, ultimately, will lead to the originators of the genre (as well as those who follow in their wake) and the genre itself being viewed with derision or contempt.

When this song was written, it arose from an initial thought of tenderness and of caring for a friend – a beautiful moment, untrammelled by limitation; but this moment contained within it the seeds of its own demise: it became a collaboration involving numerous musicians, requiring time and incurring expense, eventually culminating in its becoming a product or cultural artefact, which in turn attracted my attention and that of countless others. This process that subsequently followed the moment of creation was a necessary one – just as it is necessary to frame a work of art or to put flowers into a vase (or pitcher!) of water, but, paradoxically, the same processes that allow such initial moments of creativity to exist as art are precisely what chain them Gulliver – like in the bondage of Lilluputian-limitation.

As I’ve mentioned, the forces at play in the world mean that whatever might have existed at the moment of a song’s creation or at the moment that we first chance to hear any given piece of music or to learn about its creator(s), that infinite possibility – whether of unlimited meaning or unlimited interpretation or undying emotional attachment or love, will immediately begin to undergo a process of attrition or erosion through familiarity – through association with a particular genre, through being linked to a chain of history and knowledge, to categorisation and analysis – everything about the song and the artists who brought it into the world will be known, fixed, and limited or limiting – exactly as was the case with the creators of ‘TOLBINY’ and their creations. That is precisely the reason why for years I didn’t avail myself of the opportunity to possess any music by Simon and Garfunkel, despite my enjoying it, any time that I heard it.

It was my loss. However, what is great, and what should not be forgotten, is that these processes are dynamic and ongoing and so, just as stasis and limitation are the inevitable consequence once we begin to like a piece of music or artist, so the converse is true – that there will always be the opportunity for the limiting chains to be severed and for love and infinite potential to be released – as I can testify with my new-found love of Simon and Garfunkel, which I can now scream about unapologetically, like a gambolling Gulliver – hopefully besocked rather than behobnailed-booted!

1. Bish Bosch – Scott Walker
2. 1966 – Karen Dalton
3. Sun – Cat Power
4. A House Safe For Tigers – Lee Hazlewood
5. This is PiL – Public Image Ltd
6. Love this Great Divide – David Byrne & St Vincent
7. The LHI Years – Nudes, Singles and Backsides – Lee Hazlewood
8. That’s Why God Made the Radio – The Beach Boys
9. Foreign Body – Mirroring
10. Live and Rare VOL 2 – Subway Sect
11. Ca Se Traverse et C’est Beau – Juliette Greco
12. Kurtag / Ligeti: Music For Violin – Kim Kashkashkian

There are numerous breath-taking moments on ‘Bish Bosch’ – in fact, rather like in a Kurosawa movie, where every frame is full of energy and dynamism – even where nothing appears ostensibly to be ‘happening’, in each track on the album almost every moment is replete with suggested meaning or, almost as strongly, the absence of it. For me, there are two particularly stunning moments. The first of these can be found on SDSS14+13B (Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter) after 16:33’. In his latter day work, Walker’s voice has consciously been used in such a way as to remove ‘emotion’ or ‘character’ from it – to become as neutral a medium as possible for the lyrics. On ‘Tilt’ and ‘the Drift’ in particular this approach has been adhered to quite rigorously. On BB, in contrast, something very interesting has happened: whilst some tracks reveal the same ‘neutrality’ – at least at various moments, there is now running through the album a fascinating loosening of the shackles, which sees Walker’s voice at times a mature mirror of his work on the four 70s solo works; whilst at others it screams, double (or multi?-tracked) with rage and, at the moment referred to above – the significance of which I can’t really fathom, the timbre of the voice is such that you could almost be hearing the teenage Scotty Engel  singing the words ‘don’t forget to blink, least your eyeballs dry up’. When I heard this, I wondered whether it was an out-take from an early recording session, where the 14-year old nascent songwriter had made his first public attempt to make public his singular writing style – only to find that the precocious ‘and dangle on your cheeks like Caesar’s shrivelled Coglione’ wasn’t something that the people at Orbit were ready for! The other incredible moment comes in the same ‘song’ – seconds after the Voice (I refer to it as though it were a character in its own right) has assumed the familiar persona of the Crooner, which so many would like Scott Walker to revert to being, for a few bars, which I italicise purposely, because it then transmutes – quite literally into ‘Ba-s’ – first one ‘Ba’, then a string of them, before finally becoming a cacophony of multi-layered ‘Ba-s’. It is a stunning chain of events. I believe that ‘Barbarian’ was a term given by the ancient Greeks to anyone who did not speak their language and for whom such repellent speech sounded uncultured and actually unworthy of being named a language – just ‘BA’ – ‘BA-BA-BA’. It is as though, on this one track, Walker – far from becoming a parody of himself, as one reviewer has suggested, has on the contrary playfully sucked into a black hole / brown dwarf (they’re pretty much the same thing for me) all of the various permutations of which his voice is capable, together with all of the words he has used – conventional or abstruse from his Walker Brother days, through the first period of solo work to more recent work and allowed all of it to transmute into its essence: vibrations – ‘BA-BA-BA’. Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet Psychologist, once wrote that “a thought can be compared to a cloud shedding a shower of words” and in highlighting in this track the purity of consciousness over the relative grossness of words Walker has probably got a little closer to spiritual truth to which all great works of art aspire.