tUnE-yArDs @ The Haunt, Brighton 21.06.11

Photography: Daniel Arthur

"I think songs should be hot and sweaty, like I am now."

So says Merrill Garbus, midway through the best gig I’ve seen this year. Yes! Songs should be hot and sweaty. Songs should stamp and dance like she is doing. They should breathe fevered and damp on your neck, pulse tangible waves through the air, ruffle your hair with whomps of sound and life. You've got to feel them. Merrill’s absolutely right. Maybe this is key to the tUnE-yArDs puzzle: a band that had me hooked from the first video I saw of them but somehow failed to bottle the genie on record. The songs needed to be hot and sweaty and alive, not plasticinated by some Gunther von Hagens of a record producer.

So here's the video that won me over: it's filmed at an in-store gig; Merrill is cheery and peculiarly ordinary, as unflash as any toast-of-the-town musician I have ever seen. She’s wearing an awful patterned T-shirt with elephants on it and no make-up. I like her. She looks like the girl who prices up the soya milk in the health food shop. This is important. You wouldn’t catch the indie pop girly-girls with their dresses and tresses being so genuinely, unselfconsciously, gloriously plain. It makes her remarkable. Perhaps Merrill Garbus is the anti-Zooey Deschanel? I fucking hope so.

And there’s the way she scrunches up her nose and opens her big mouth wide as all get out, wide enough to swallow idiotic pop whole, The Vaccines and the Vampires and all the silly-shoed boys and hair-clipped girls, and shouts out loud. She knits her brows like a sulky toddler. Or a witch doctor. She whoops and twitters and hollers. At one point she stands and shakes her outstretched hands and growls, actually growls, for about a minute. Whoa. That got me.

As well as the look of the band, there’s the noise of it: two stand-up drummers; a battered ukulele; a jittery guitar; a pedal board. It sounds like nothing else. Which isn’t strictly true, of course: influences can be unpicked if they have to be, and zeitgeist-trailing fellow-travellers identified. I could say that she’s nicked the same percussive African guitar that Vampire Weekend have purloined; that she uses the abrasive close vocal harmonics and jagged rhythms deployed by Dirty Projectors; that I’ve seen exactly that sort of rackety bottles’n’cans percussion and awkwardness worn by Micachu and her Shapes and that Braids do a similar live-looping, multi-pedal-based, in-the-moment song construction thing. There are of course the cultural appropriations that so irk some commentators, not just the jit guits, but the polyphonic, polyrhythmic yelps and yodels of the forest-dwellers of Central Africa. But let’s go with the uniqueness.

Bloody hell, if I had overheard someone describing that band I’d have been salivating, given my long-term crush on shonky, DIY, defiantly unrock’n’roll female-fronted outfits (Pram, UT, fr’instance): I so want tUnE-yArDs to be spectacular. I so want them to ignite me.

There’re plenty of other tUnE-yArDs performances out there on video to give me hope: Merrill plays mix-and-match with band members and instruments – percussionists, brass sections, sometimes just her and her uke. There’s an obvious spark at play when she is conjuring up the music from the moment that doesn’t seem to catch on record. I loved – and agreed with – Brigitte Adair’s ace review of w h o k  i l l : there’s certainly something both irritating and profoundly disappointing in the experience of listening to recorded tUnE-yArDs. Which is a shame, because Merrill Garbus has talked about the album as being shaped by playing live; being an explicit attempt to capture all that she learnt from touring her debut. If that was her intention, it has failed, although perhaps it was always a doomed endeavour, given the irreconcilable difference in nature between live and recorded versions of songs.

Usually the experience of seeing a band live is augmented by a more-or-less detailed knowledge of the music you’re hearing. You need to know what the song sounds like. Otherwise you’re missing a trick: you’re missing hearing the ghost of the recorded version buzz round your sweaty, excited, possibly drunk self with all its associations and memories. It’s a thrill-boost. A head-charged internal enhancement of your listening pleasure, Bose headphones for the soul. You know that song so well. You’ve listened to it dozens of times over in your bedroom, danced to it in the kitchen, you know every chord change and counter-melody: it’s yours. You fucking OWN it. Never mind that live the sound is dirty, that the PA is a dog, that they haven’t brought the cellist, the cheap bastards, that the bassist fluffs the chorus; it doesn’t matter because you can hear the song as it has already been laid down, you can hear the potential as tangibly as you can feel the bodies of the crowd around you. If you watch an unknown band playing unknown songs through shitty speakers, the music is really going to have its work cut out to catch your ear.

Coincidentally, and unfortunately for the band in question, tUnE-yArDs’ support, Thousands, were a perfect example of the flipside of this phenomenon. Two Americans with acoustic guitars, battling against the curiously cone-shaped venue which funnelled and amplified the sound of hipster chatter right onto the stage and into their faces, so that their delicate pickings were competing with several hundred ha-ha-ing haircuts. So they sounded like nothing. Like two blokes strumming. As dull as mud. Whereas, so I later discovered, on record they are all about the minutiae. Their songs breathe when studio-born, much more rarified beasts than the busked nonentities my ears heard that night. Their recording process is meticulous: they record outside, in specific rural locations, every gentle burr of the strings, every catch of the breath part of the poetry. It’s beautiful, through lush stereo speakers and in still air. It’s utter shite on a stupidly-placed stage in front of a distracted, bored, partisan crowd on a hot night in Brighton.

It doesn’t bode well for tUnE-yArDs. And this is the gig where I get to test my theory that the alchemy happens live. Huh.

I needn't have worried. It's perfect. The sound is clear and gorgeous, the performance miraculous. Blah blah blah. The thing is, with live music there’s nothing that can be done to convey the experience truly. Words fail me. Us. They leave gaps and create elisions, they trick and mislead. Shit. It’s not like writing about a song on the internet and embedding an MP3 so the reader can check that your whooping about its awesomeness isn’t just some hype-induced craziness. This is a doubly-mediated experience. And it’s not as if videos can really do it either, despite where we came in. Watching a video of a performance on a small screen is a qualitatively different experience to being in the venue, with all the roar and the stink and the friction.

I’ll try. Because it really does make a difference to what I heard that I was perched on the edge of the stage, my back against the speaker. That I could see the sweat dripping down the saxophonists’ faces, smearing the black streak painted across their cheeks. That I could feel the thump of the bass in my belly. That my legs got pins and needles but that I didn’t care; I didn’t want it to end. That the sensation of being a mere metre away from where two saxes were playing notes a microtone apart could be felt in my knees. Does it help that I found out that that sound is the ringing clink of a beer bottle being struck by a drumstick or that one is the particular clatter that a baking tray makes when thwacked by a joyous brass player? Does it increase my appreciation of the songs to twig that the reason Garbus doesn’t wear shoes on stage is because she uses a stripy-socked foot to twiddle a delay pedal and adjust the length of the loop (whilst simultaneously singing and playing the drums and the ukele)?

 Yes. It does.

She is an accomplished, electric, performer. She stands out front like a tribal queen, an arc of drums and pedals arrayed before her, and builds her songs afresh each time. She writes and constructs her music in front of us, starting with a rhythm clicked out on the rim of her drum which is looped and repeated and manipulated and added to, vocalisations used as percussive rather than melodic elements, parps of brass and skipping lines of guitar looped and woven into the mesh in their turn, until there is an utterly thrilling web of noise pulsating on the stage. It’s a pretty remarkable thing to witness. It gets the place bouncing; at one point Merrill and her band and the whole crowd hop up and down in sheer synchronised delight like Masai warriors. She makes the crowd sing out a simple repeated phrase; she builds us into it all as if we were another instrument. She works the communal thrum until every being in the place is buzzed-up with shared joy. No time for irritation, no space for getting tired of the yodelly schtick: it's all about the heartbeat.

Cleverness is definitely a turn-on. Lack of botheredness about seeming cool is too. Being a savvy female musician, who clearly knows exactly what she is doing, who is deeply, geekily, competent and in control of the sound she is making, a conductor of and for magic: that totally rocks. Merrill Garbus shares this, and a kind of particular weird ordinariness, with Kristin Hersh (and, incidentally, with the pedal-head women in Braids, who look like wide-eyed junior English teachers and play like goddesses); unglitzy to the bone but deeply extraordinary – because this isn’t how pop stars are meant to be. They shouldn’t look or act or sing like this. They shouldn’t be this untrammelled, this peculiar! Where’s the rock? Where’s the roll?  - and thus are quite the most intense performers imaginable.

So tUnE-yArDs do the bizness. I win. Maybe one day they will come close to the impossible goal of pinning down a moment in recorded form but for now THESE are the ur-version of the songs. THESE are their platonic ideal. No need for foreknowledge when the music comes to life in your gut, no need for ghosts when things are this alive. This is moment-by-moment ineffable specificity: there’ll never be this again. This is unique. This is now. This is here. This is mine.

And next time I listen to w h o k i l l, I'll also be hearing the whoops of that night, the memory of her socks and her audience and her grin boosting the digital signal and turning up the colours to full saturation.

(Originally posted on Collapse Board)

How I Stopped Worrying And Learnt To Love the Cardiacs

A REVIEW OF WILLIAM D DRAKE - THE RISING OF THE LIGHT (ONOMATOPOEIA)

A fair chunk of music that has been produced this year could be classified as music for people who don’t like music. A fair chunk of all pop music ever has been. You know the type. When I was a student everyone had to own Bob Marley’s Legend and Born In The USA. That was how it was. Produce the cassettes and you get to wear your keffiyeh down the uni bar. Not that some of it isn’t good – draw your own Venn diagrams here – but the music that gets sold at petrol stations has a particular flavour to it. I mean, if you’ve only bought a couple of albums in the last six months and you’ve picked from Fleet Foxes, Adele, Lady Gaga or Eddie Vedder and his faux-rustic, common man, back to basics ukefuckingleles, you’re consuming music in a very different way to someone who devours it for breakfast, lunch and tea, whose pulse beats faster at the thought of the filthy shouty racket that the best new band in town will make tonight and who can actually literally feel their mouth watering when they read enticing reviews of new releases (please tell me that’s not just me).

Everyone I’ve met who likes Cardiacs has LOVED music. Every single one. There is no such thing as a casual Cardiacs fan. They have the hunger on them. Music isn’t an optional extra, it’s the centre, the hub, the pivot around which everything else wheels. They get the shivers, they get the buzz. They don’t get Death Cab For Cutie from beside the till at BP before a long journey home to see the folks.

I’ve got to confess I’ve had my problems with Cardiacs in the past. Sometimes I’ve found their wackiness so teeth-gratingly irksome I’ve wanted to gnaw my feet off rather than listen to a minute more. It was so bloody wearisome, all that snickersnackery bouncing around. I wanted to put it under a blanket and sit on it. It had the same effect on me as Camel. Or Yes. Made me snarl. But recently I got roundly (and deservedly) berated on Facebook for dismissing a documentary on prog rock that someone had posted a link to. Pfft, not watching that, I smirked; it’s all codpieces and public school boys being pleased with themselves. Twattery that prizes ‘technical proficiency’, that chill passion-killer, above gawky inventiveness. Boy music. Clever-clever fancy footwork that does not ring my bell, no way, no how.

Which, behind the facetiousness, betrays a common-enough repulsion for anything that doesn’t conform to a class-conscious, post-punk directness; to an authenticity (whatever the fuck that means) which pays homage at the altar of down’n’dirty rock’n’roll by spurning silly time-signatures and mock-classical tomfoolery. Punk gobbed on music in 1977, so the story goes, and washed the streets clean of the degenerate, self-satisfied dross that the likes of ELP and Rush were wanking out over the album charts; freed us all to scorn the stomach-turning excesses of prog in favour of DIY attitude; got virtuosity stomped on by rough & ready’s size 12 DMs. Grrrwk: take that, velvet waistcoats! Sppplaf: take that, unnecessarily fiddly flute solo!

Well, the story is distorted rubbish. I was wrong about prog. Yes, it can easily be caricatured as indulgent wankery, but, as a savvy friend of mine said, it is actually as much about an attempt to find beauty as anything else. And that’s a quest worth following to the end of the line (even if it does involve whole symphony orchestras and unnerving facial hair). There’s nothing inherently pompous about being difficult; nothing gobworthy about ambition.

Cardiacs isn’t exactly prog, anyway. It’s been called pronk – a hybrid punk/prog beastie, combining prog’s proficiency with punk’s spikiness - which is going to have to do as a defining something, but there’s an anti-Cardiacs vibe at play in the press that is tied up with the anti-progism that’s been so evident in (un)critical thinking about music for the last few decades.

Nor is it boy music, not by any definition of the term that you care to make up on the spot. The audience for the Cardiacs-associated bands I saw last weekend was as gender-mixed (and enthusiastically engaged) a crowd as I have seen at a gig for years. Women musicians and fans abound in the Cardiacosphere. And a Cardiacs song which employs tricksy time-signatures that flick the rug out from under you just as you’re finding your feet in its patterns is going about the business of bending, breaking and re-making the rules in a contrary multi-coloured glory, not about proving how clever it is, as the most boyish of boy music seems intent on doing.

That story is wrong about punk rock, too; there was a good thick strand of fun and silliness to punk and its aftermath (think of Captain Sensible, if you must, but also of X-Ray Spex who were quite capable of being daft as well as furious) but somehow the Great Punk Creed that obliterated the cred of prog has managed to create a situation today where joyless fucks like Kings of Leon get lauded for their grittiness and the pogoing loons have been forgotten. How did worthiness win out over moshing? History is a peculiar business.

Of course Cardiacs’ music is clever. Of course it is fiddly. It is jagged. Silly. Playful. Roaringly scritchy. Stop-start-stop-go-go-GO widdliness to end all widdliness. It is, oh god, fun. It is jaunty. Jaunty. For fuck’s sake. A word that should make one and all wash their ears out with Pussy Galore. No leather kecks here. Nor cool, neither, not a drop of it. But what there is, is joy. And snatched beauty, so much better than the complacent here-it-is-on-a-plate kind. And songs that skitter hither and thither in wild abandon to make untidy girls in stompy boots and flowery dresses shake their hair on the dancefloor and laugh like maniacs. What the fuck was ever wrong with joy in pop music? When I stopped worrying about the whimsy and started feeling the noise, it all made sense. I got the scritchiness bug.

So to this: if you’ve never heard (of) Cardiacs and their tentacular side projects you have the chance to experience the record I am nominally reviewing here something like afresh. Virgin ears if not a virgin cultural perspective. William D Drake was a key member of Cardiacs for, oh, decades, and he has made a record this year with his new band which is as unlike Cults or Adele or Odd Future as is a giraffe. It’s not young, it’s not radical, it’s not provocative, it’s not innovative, it’s not ever going to be top of any pops, it’s never boring and it’s the very opposite of inoffensive (which isn’t, obviously, the same as being offensive) and it’s certainly not hip. In fact, you can be pretty sure that this is music is as unhip as anything you’ve ever encountered so far in your musical listening career.

Which is no bad thing. So let it go.

There’s an obvious connection in The Rising Of The Light to a distinctively English strand of Sixties pop, to songs such as ‘See Emily Play’ or The Village Green Preservation Society; here are those jocular organs, that mock-pomposity and wry delight in an aesthetic that is now doubly-archaic (the support band at Drake’s recent gig, Crayola Lectern, which includes ex-Cardiacs man Jon Poole among its members, played the Cardiacs’ only cover, that of The Kinks’s ‘Suzannah’s Still Alive’; they also played Robert Wyatt’s sublime ‘Sea Song’, so do, as they say, the math).

Don’t expect very much in the way of yer actual straightforward songs; not a lot of beginnings, middles and ends here. These are unfurling carpet rides of pieces, littered with snatches of hornpipes and jigs, which make sudden switch-backs from tremendous thumping keyboard tunes to howlingly naff fairground skirls, which in turn are interrupted by choral interludes belted out in absurdly over-blown but glorious trembling harmonies. There’s no casual conforming to expectations of what makes a song, which is all to the good, if you can haul yourself over the perkiness stumbling block and stop hoping for the easy comfort of a returning chorus.

‘Wholly Holey’ skips and hops from the beginning in a roil of oompahpahs. It’s quite ridiculous, really. And, look, there’s the falsetto and harmonies nicked from Queen’s A Night At The Opera, all lawns and lemonade, as English as raised eyebrows and politely furrowed brows. The elegiac ‘In An Ideal World’ has a melody-line to bring spring to frozen earth, wound through waves of rippling piano by a hurdy-gurdy (well, yes, of course).

My taste leaning more towards the stately than the jolly, I found myself skipping ‘Zeigler’ (which makes an interlaced pattern of too-pretty reels and chunks of wilfully awkward discordant piano) third time round. But Drake writes tunes and lines to make you ache, most delightfully in ‘Me Fish Bring’, which is quite, quite lovely. It’s a pastoral sentiment bomb, deploying clarinets and honey-sweet melodies and images of wafting smoke and lambs grazing in fields to thump the hell out of cynical old (or young) hearts. Oof.

For all the layers of reference, all the self-conscious playing with musics past and paster still and the grandiose, tongues-both-in-and-out-of-cheek choral tub-thumping, the album roots itself nicely with Drake’s voice and lyrics: he’s got a perfectly decent but down-to-earth voice and sings of cups of tea and jacket potatoes and the nicknames lovers give each other. Homeliness in the midst of bombast. How very - again - English.

This is music that has utterly abandoned the urge to now-ness. If you don’t find that refreshing and admirable, then do feel free to go hang with Tyler and his hipster nemeses. I don’t know much about Captain Beefheart or the Penguin Café Orchestra, some of the more obvious benchmarks I probably should be leaning on here. I’m not all that up on the post-punk that informed Cardiacs’ jagged freneticism either. I stood in the queue for Drake’s gig yesterday and all around me clever beautiful women were talking to be-T-shirted men about King Crimson and Brian Eno. Seriously. I felt a bit dim. If you absolutely must have a contemporary comparison, think of Sufjan Steven's utterly remarkable 'You Are The Blood', which has a similarily contrary attitude to genre and structure, pulls wholly disparate threads together yet does gorgeous so well. Course it doesn't sound anything like this.

So never mind the context: this is a simple plea for you to pin your ears back and listen. An appeal on behalf of the Cardiacs party to put aside prejudices and engage with what these musicians are trying to do, to make. That’s what it’s all for, isn’t it, this wordy stuff? To coax you into sharing the thrill. And now I get it. I GET IT. This music here is about beauty and joy and delight. It cares not for fashion or convention or status. It’s for people who eat their music whole.

You’d hate it.

Postscript: Beautiful, grinning, gentle, kaleidoscopically-talented, furiously energetic, fucking all-round lovely man and Cardiacs leader Tim Smith had a severe stroke in 2008 from which he is still recovering. In all likelihood, there will be no more Cardiacs. He is very much loved; there was a tribute album made last year to which the likes of Ultrasound, Katherine Blake, The Magic Numbers etc. contributed cover versions of his songs, the proceeds going directly to his care. If you want to check out his songwriting, there's a place to start.

(First published on Collapse Board)

Paradoxical Undressing - Kristin Hersh

Six-year-old Kristin Hersh, in the way of small children told not to touch something because it’s not a toy, imbued the guitar belonging to her university professor dad (whom everyone called Dude) with mysterious and magical powers. She used to creep up and gaze at it longingly, imagining the thrilling sounds it would make when played.

Eventually Dude teaches her tiny hands to make E/G/A around the guitar’s huge neck but little Kristin is bitterly disappointed: the chords are boring.

“But Bob Dylan plays these chords. And Neil Young.”

“Mm-hm.” I looked at my hands, willing them to play better. “They’re probably nice guys.” Handing the guitar back to Dude, I stare at it, perplexed. Why doesn’t it sound as cool as it looks?

I complained that the chords didn’t sound magenta enough. “ … You know?”

“No”, answered Dude, bewildered.

“Well, red, I mean. I’ve heard red before. A million times. That chord was red. And boring.”

“E major’s red?” he asked. “E never sounded particularly red to me. You mean it’s a primary color?”

“Yeah. We didn’t even play green.”

“What chord is green?”

I shook my head and glared impatiently at Dude. “Mix a blue chord with a yellow one. Duh-uh. It’s stronger and prettier that way. Like those fish.” The fish I meant were African cichlids, who change color when they lose too many fights. They get their asses kicked enough times and grow pale, while the winning fish develop bright colourful scales and beautiful patterns … “If you play too many wimpy chords, you’re just asking for wimpy scales.”

“Are you calling Bob Dylan a loser?”

“No, just a pale fish.”

Dude looked at me sideways. “Are you calling my scales wimpy?” I shrugged and he handed me the guitar. “It’s yours,” he said. “Play colors”.

*

And so she did. The songs Kristin Hersh wrote with her band Throwing Muses are kinaesthetic wonders, flashing bright with fire and fury. Her autobiography, Paradoxical Undressing (Rat Girl in America), covers the frenetic year in which the 19-year-old Hersh is hospitalised with manic depression (“They don’t call it that anymore”), signs to British label 4AD, gets pregnant and along the way writes some of the most extraordinarily affecting, astonishing and inventive pop songs that have ever been recorded.

It does make me wonder how people who’ve never heard Throwing Muses experience this book. (Fuck knows what they imagine the band sounds like but I’d love to hear the music a forensically-minded reader might make, reconstructing Throwing Muses solely from what Hersh has written. It'd be awesome.) But if you do know their self-titled first album from 1986, the Chains Changed EP (1987), second album House Tornado (1988) or the In A Doghouse cassette of demos from 1985 (released on CD in 1998), then you can be sure of a hundred little epiphanies and the mental clicks of puzzle pieces fitting together. The narrative colours-in the recollection of familiar songs, and imagery that might have struck one as purely cerebral is revealed as having its feet set in concrete reality; not altogether an expected situation, given that Hersh has always been so clear that her songs drop from the ether, in a process not so much of being written as transcribed.

So the lyrics of ‘Fish’ (from In A Doghouse; also on the 4AD Lonely Is An Eyesore compilation (1987) : "I have a fish nailed/To a cross/On my apartment wall/It sings to me with glassy eyes/And quotes from Kafka") are revealed to be about an actual scaly crucifix on the wall of the squat the teenage Kristin sometimes sleeps in, rather than hallucinogenic word play. (The story about 'Hate My Way' is far too good to quote now: you’ll just have to find it for yourself.) This demystification manages to be simultaneously delightful, satisfying and alarming, not least because the hallucinations, when they do appear, are all too real: Jesus Christ, she slept alone in a haunted apartment under a fishy, donut-headed Fish Jesus? Oh, little homeless Kristin...

Alongside the pleasurable ‘Oh!’s of recognition you get when spotting the genesis of well-loved songs, Hersh has left snatches of lyrics scattered throughout the text, which widen the book out into an extra, noisier dimension, so that cached songs burst out from memory-banks at appropriate moments, a self-generated soundtrack. It’s lovely. Startling. Discomforting. So, after describing the dressing-up wigs that the band, all sleepy and snuggled up against each other in the front seat of Kristin’s unheated car, take to wearing on the way back from late-night gigs (both to keep their heads warm and to provoke non-boring conversation), she drops a lyric from ‘Carnival Wig’ (from Red Heaven, 1992), into the mix and suddenly there it is, a riot of crashing percussion broken up with that sinuous, heartbreaking guitar line. The disconnect between the image of tired kids in their funny wigs and the triggered memory of the song itself is positively unnerving: her voice all jagged on the urgent one-note central line ("That looks like a carnival wig/And two shiners") then sliding into raw sexual desperation: "It looks like your left hand/Don’t love me. Don’t love me." The kookiness wiped out in an instant.

The sound in one’s head that accompanies the reading of the book, along with the startlingly vivid images that Hersh employs (New song is done. It’s burgundy and ochre with a sort of Day-Glo turquoise bridge – another tattoo on this pathetic little body) and regular vignettes of life from her hippy childhood (Allen Ginsberg wrote me a poem … it wasn’t a very good poem) foster an entirely appropriate sense of overload, given her own of experience of the world as a constant assault of sensation, colour, sound, emotion.

She’s an innocent abroad, candid to a fault, observing the world and its peculiarities with wide-open eyes: sometimes sitting out, sometimes indulging people’s demands of her to go along with rituals she barely gets the point of, sometimes consciously (though not contrarily) sticking to her own eccentric ways in order to survive. So she won’t wear her contact lenses when they play gigs, despite being nagged to do so, and she won’t wear a coat in winter:

Dave and I always believed that coats were for wimps who couldn’t handle seasons: “coat slaves”. Gee, people, get a grip! Seasons happen! And that vision was for wussies: people who couldn’t hack the rough-hewn, fuzzy life we lived – slaves to their glasses – when we could play entire shows without seeing anything. It was the only thing we were smug about, really, our ability to live blind and cold.

At least until Dave (Narcizo, the drummer) finally caves in himself and then drags her off shopping to a thrift store and buys her a small, blue, woollen overcoat: Dave unzips his coat to show me how it works. “See? We can still wear our T-shirts, but if we wear out T-shirts underneath coats, winter won’t hurt!”

She and Dave also puzzle over other people beyond their Musey bubble, like “the aliens” in their shared house, and grill them about the ‘normal’ music they play, incredulous that there are people in the world who put their feet up on the table while they play guitar, don’t get hot or feel electricity when they make music, who strum strings to relax: they might as well be sitting there doodling. While passages like these occasionally teeter on the verge of disingenuousness, overall the impression is of genuine teenage insularity rather than retrospective faux-cutseyness.

Her innocence, curiosity and wit are surely not only what makes her writing so appealing, so fresh, but also the reason why Kristin Hersh has a reputation as one of the very nicest musicians to work with. She’s both interesting and interested. Not that common a trait in the biz. And it’s obvious how very fond the band are of each other, not just Kristin and Tanya Donelly (‘Tea’, her step-sister with whom she started the band at the age of 14), but also Leslie Langston, the dreadlocked hippy chick Californian bassist and Dave, the afore-mentioned snare-prodigy. They are entangled in the joy and awe of playing together, rehearsing in the attic of a giant Victorian house that belongs to Dave’s parents (who sit in comfy chairs at the bottom of the stairs and listen to the band practise), playing gigs several times a week, and eventually all moving in together, away from the ocean and the small-town comforts of Rhode Island, to a shared apartment in Boston.

When I first started reading about Throwing Muses back in 1988 I was concerned, as was my earnest wont back then, that Hersh’s frankness about the unusual way she ‘wrote’ her songs would have her pegged as just another crazy woman, reducing the extraordinarily muscular inventiveness of her music to mere kookiness; such an easy, diminishing, write-off for the boy journos. What I wanted was to celebrate the unconventional accomplishment of her music, to group her talent in a girl’s gang of underappreciated musicianship, with the likes of Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell. You can’t very well do that with music if its author refuses to credit herself with its creation.

If you haven’t already come across Hersh talking about the way her music comes to her, then the passages in which she describes the process will be enlightening. She calls herself “a lightning rod for songs”: not a songwriter, not an inventor, but some kind of psychic secretary uncomfortably possessed by music which is an entirely separate entity to herself. She writes of being haunted by songs, battered and tormented and bullied until she can get them down and safe. It’s not craft, it’s alchemy. The story of this strange phenomenon begins when she is knocked off her bike by a car and badly hurt. She hears her first song recovering in hospital:

Soon, the song began organizing itself into discernable parts that sounded less like “machines”. Instruments played melodies rather than disembodied tones in the bed of ocean waves: bass, guitar, piano, cello. Punctuated clanging became drums and percussion. I guessed that my brain was making sense of something, turning this sonic haunting into vocabulary with which I was familiar.

… every few weeks, song noise will begin again, and when its parts have arranged themselves, I’ll copy them down and teach them to the band, making them hear what I hear. As soon as I give the song a body in the real world, it stops playing and I breathe a sigh of relief, in precious silence …

… It’s not me. A song lives across time as an overarching impression of sensory input, seeing it all happening at once, racing through stories like a fearless kid on a bicycle, narrating his own skin.

(How good is that phrase, “racing through stories like a fearless kid on a bicycle, narrating his own skin”?)

One of the great things about reading Paradoxical Undressing is that I can finally lay my qualms about the ineffability of that process aside, daft as they were anyway. The skill is there all right. They were an immensely clever lot, those Muses kids, and worked phenomenally hard to get their music right; they deserve every bit of credit they get:

Leslie never misses a beat. Never. Dave never misses a beat either; he smashes delicately, the deep sound of his kit punctuated by the metallic knocking of cowbells, mixing bowls, hubcaps and busted tambourines. It’s beautiful. But Dave never messes up because he can’t be distracted. He’s just as nearsighted as I am and lost in his own world back there behind the drum kit. If he looks up, it’s like a mole digging his way up from the underground, squinting in the sunlight.

They rehearse and play and rehearse and play, Kristin’s years of classical guitar training and child-genius Dave’s precocious talent aiding the songs’ troublesome journey from insistent disembodied furies to definite pieces of music, although even then Hersh is self-deprecating about her part in it and the otherness of the song’s own voice:

I can start a song just sorta, you know, singing along, and then, before I know it, inflatable words fill my rib cage, move into my mouth. I gag on them and they fly out, say whatever they want, yell and scream themselves.

And bleech, that voice – it’s wretched. My speaking voice is low, husky and quiet. The song’s voice is loud, strangled and wailing: thin and screechy. A squashed bug might sing like this.

Going away is my only talent.

I wouldn’t say so. Not least because she is such a fine writer of narrative, which surely she can rightfully claim as all her own work, as much as any writer can. It’s such an engaging story, this year in song of hers. She’s a baby-faced urchin in old woman’s clothes, running from place to place, hardly sleeping, swimming to burn off energy (I’ve never tried to make it through a whole day without swimming. Water temporarily washes off song tattoos, so I made it my drug), sleeping in abandoned apartments and in her unreliable car and on the beach. She goes to classes at the university where her father teaches (she enrolled at 15) and where she meets her friend, a very elderly Betty Hutton (in her time a great Hollywood movie star, although Kristin, in her naïveté, doesn’t know whether to treat Betty’s stories of tête-a-têtes with Judy Garland as yet more fantastic eccentricity). I love the idea of Betty and her priest, Father McGuire, coming along faithfully to every Throwing Muses show, standing at the back behind the junkies and the painters and the punks, smiling fondly and giving Kristin advice about the big time show business career Betty feels sure is round the corner.

And so it is, in a way. Hot-shot A&R men wine and dine them, the teenagers revelling in all the free food but puzzled by the attention, because they truly don’t understand why anyone else would like the noise they make. And they won’t sign to any one of those labels because they know they’re not cool and they don’t want to play the game.

But when Kristin’s bi-polar disorder kicks in hard and she starts to come apart, the reading gets more painful. The narrative falls into little fractured bits: more snippets of lyrics, less coherence, horrifying descriptions of Kristin’s tortured thoughts and hallucinations, disintegration. It’s disjointed and almost unbearably sad to read:

Music’s making me do things, live stories so I can write them into songs. It pushes my brain and my days around. A parasite that kills its host, it doesn’t give shit about what happens to a little rat girl as long as it gets some song bodies out of it. It’s a hungry ghost, desperate for physicality.

I remember well the strange little person she appeared to me in 1988, a couple of years after this book is set and a couple of years older than I. She was wearing an A-line khaki skirt and a neat blouse and I remember thinking “Why on earth would you wear that to a gig?” Especially in a dirty, glassy, glitter-balled punk rock club in Birmingham, on tour with inkie-darlings and fellow Bostonians, Pixies. Inexplicably, she looked like the me I was trying so hard not to be: dark blonde hair cut in a wavy bob; round, childish face; sensible outfits … but transmogrified when she played into something mesmerising. A she-wolf. A snake. She was like no one I’d ever seen before, playing music that seemed beamed from an alternate universe, tethered to recognisable shapes of pop and rock by only the most tenuous of lines.

“Well, geez, look at me,” I said, pointing at the screen. “I really don’t blink.” We watch. “Golly, that’s creepy.” I knew I stared into space when I played; Betty never stopped giving me shit about that. She should have been giving me shit about the thing I do with my head. It swivels from side to side in a figure-eight pattern while I play. What the fuck? “I think of it as an infinity symbol,” said Dave kindly.

Tremendous, she was. Those songs snagged at me, painful and demanding, Kristin’s squashed bug voice the perfect vocalisation of all the jumble of emotions my teenage self was experiencing, the switchback ride they took - roaring through cowpunk frenzy via dischord and ecstasy to sweetness and charm - an apt representation of where my head was at, where haywire teenage heads tend to be at. And those words that I could barely grasp at understanding but which made total sense to me, all blood and rage and impotence and self-loathing, here they are again, sewn through the story of a real girl

So I have to acknowledge that the sadness that lurched in my gut when reading my way through that bit of the story is much about the strange little person I was in 1988 as the extraordinary/ordinary girl I was watching on stage. The feelings that Throwing Muses provoked in me then came roaring back at me full-throttle with the account of Kristin’s breakdown and I ended up reading through tear-bleared eyes, surely a measure of just what a remarkably eloquent writer (ahem, conduit) Hersh is, both of songs and of stories. Because of the way that so many of her songs rage and fume, gurgle with ugly (self)hatred then liquefy into beauty and tenderness, hold themselves on achingly lovely melodies, then turn on a penny and then come crashing back into chaos and mania, even those of us who didn’t have hotwires to genius in our heads, who haven’t lived the awful/amazing/brave life that Kristin did as a teenager, even bog-standard youth, can hear those things and say, yes, that is what it feels like to be young and confused. Nothing ever spoke to me of being a nineteen year-old-girl, torn between being good and being furious, between romance and horror, between sensible shoes and razor blades, quite like Kristin Hersh’s remarkable, terrifying, goddamn gorgeous rollercoaster voice.

There’s so much else here to relish besides: the off-beat small-hours trans-Atlantic phone conversations between Kristin and 4AD's Ivo Watts-Russell; the wonderfully astute descriptions of the recording process (rats running round the night-time studio when they record their demos; the agonising multiple attempts to re-capture the manic verve of their live performance when recording their debut for 4AD); the snort-inducing interviews with well-meaning but dim journalists who ask endless variations of the ‘why did you decide to be girls?’ question (“Why didn’t you hire a woman to play the drums?” she asks me accusingly. I’m at a loss. “Because Dave’s not a woman,” I answer. “I didn’t hire him anyway; he doesn’t get paid.” “I’m a volunteer!” Dave chirps happily) and of course, the sweetly-written course of Kristin’s pregnancy, culminating in the birth of her first son, marking the beginning of her career as working musician and mother, someone who puts her babies to sleep then walks on stage to scream and holler; who is articulate and charming on TV interviews while being infinitely patient with the sleepy toddler on her lap. She’s amazing.

But really you just need to read the book. And if it doesn’t make you run back to ‘Call Me’ and ‘Soul Soldier’ and ‘Rabbits Dying’ and ‘Vicky’s Box’ (yes, there’s a Vicky. She has a box. A wooden box.) and ‘Delicate Cutters’ (oh, my god, ‘Delicate Cutters’!) just as fast as your ears can take you, then nothing else will.

I made the other Muses hear what I heard. Now we can make everyone else hear it.

(First published on Collapse Board)

Who Gives a Fuck?

I read this article today. It’s good. It points out the fact that, never mind the bloody cuts, the irreparable damage that the privatisation of higher education will do to the country’s brain, the disgraceful dismantling of the NHS, the hideously inequitable taxation priorities of the current government, never mind all those awful attacks on the infrastructure of our community, there is longstanding, deep-rooted poverty in this country that hardly anyone is challenging. Or being righteously furious about. And I don't mean the rearranging-of-the-deckchairs type campaigning that would have us call for a slightly fairer unfair system by making the super-rich dig a little deeper when they chuck us their loose change: I mean snarling, offensive, powerful action against what should be an intolerable situation.

None of the three main parties have much to distinguish between themselves politically on this issue, mind you, so this isn’t a case of let’s all hate the Tories. Though do be my guest if you fancy it. The ridiculous referendum that no-one except the conniving little traitor Clegg asked for is a cynically-manipulated distraction and the outcome will not make an iota of difference to the long-term unemployed, who will continue to be ignored, belittled, demonised, blamed for their own situation.

No-one, for that matter, ever asked us to vote in a referendum on really important matters, like whether or not we should allow babies and toddlers to be bombed in the name of peace-keeping. This is only the second national referendum in the UK ever: you'd think it would have been worth the wait. 'Course, you can see why they wouldn’t bother: the quasi referendum that was the huge national outcry against the war in Iraq a decade ago was very successfully blanked by the government and the media, but it served as a useful lesson in the toothlessness of popular opinion for both politicians and public alike.

What the Independent article also points out is that the acceptance of poverty as a fact of life is evidence of a cultural and moral sea change in this country:

“Now a new credo, rooted in social apartheid that starts in schools, struts by the nation's slumdog neighbourhoods – elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair.

Yet pity was always one of the fundamental virtues of British life. It travelled easily, crossing class borders without a passport, informing every level of the nation's cultural life. In 1966 Jeremy Sandford's BBC film Cathy Come Home created an uproar about the homeless and made the charity Shelter into a major player which no politician dared ignore. In 1982 Alan Bleasdale's Boys From the Black Stuff reduced my generation of TV critics to tears of rage.”

Whatever you might think of the virtues of pity as an emotion to stir the political will - it certainly wouldn't be my first pick of the feelings chorus line - at least there's a picture of a country with a coherent moral sense; the abandoned and the destitute provoke compassion, but more importantly, demands for change. So where are the playwrights, filmmakers, songwriters who would challenge the current state of affairs? There are scrums of privately-educated bands who blithely brush away questions about their privilege with “class doesn’t matter anymore” and who, in their beards-and-jumpers-and-hurdiegurdies nostalgia, have quite supressed the dissident impulse of their socialist, republican, hippy-era progenitors. Tears of rage, uproar, outrage: these would be totally appropriate responses to the situation at this precise moment in history (I liked the fact that the author of the radgeek blog referred to above confessed to taking a while to write out his thoughts on the unfussed-over murder of Gadhafi's grandchildren because he was so distressed about it. Appropriate, see?): it would be good to see the music that would, could, do that, because it sure as hell isn't being made by the mumbly men with their humble guitars that so abound in 2011.


I have just been educated in Crass lore, which included listening to this startling and furious song for the first time (I know, I’m slow):

Quite apart from having the balls to be properly offensive (offensive these days seems to mean making some wildly un-PC snarky crack about paedophiles or rape in order to cock a snook at the po-faced feminists: woo, clevah), the song is explicit and angry and heart-breaking. It stirs feelings. It points fingers. It is UPSETTING. Crass make me feel like the ignorant, posh, privileged, complacent, white dabbler that I am.


And so they fucking should.