Nothing to say here. Just that this was a fantastic record and unexpectedly so. In 1994, I’d been in San Francisco making a pilgrimage to AMC sites and ignoring RHP sites like Grace Cathedral Park. Didn’t care, but this record nearly ten years later tranformed my relationship with Kozelek. Seventeen years ago, my wife’s near-twin sister Colette and her wonderful husband Alan got married, in Nerja, Spain. A memorable wedding for all kinds of reasons, not least that the song they opened their wedding dance with was ‘Gentle Moon’ off Ghosts. You never hear a song quite the same way, do you?
Sun Kil Moon: Ghosts of The Great Highway (2003).
Mark Kozelek has never made it easy on his audience, and he’s not about to start now. In the days of Red House Painters, the difficulty lay in remaining conscious through double albums of dirge. They went on for weeks!
Ghosts Of The Great Highway, however, is taxing in a good way.
With Sun Kil Moon, the great leap forward is in the change of lyrical focus. I was glad recently to hear a rabid Red House Painters fan say what I was already thinking about these songs: “He’s not only singing about himself”. In fact, Ghosts Of The Great Highway fulfils the promise made by its title and its cover, a faded ochre photo of a five-year-old girl wearing angel wings.
Both strongly evoke the Dust Bowl and you can detect the spirit of Steinbeck, of empathy, admiration and sorrow for the things people do to keep going, in songs like ‘Carry Me Ohio’, or the trilogy-of-sorts of ‘Salvador Sanchez’, ‘Duk Koo Kim’ and ‘Pancho Villa’.
All three (like, indeed, the almost titular Sung-kil Moon) were boxers who fought their way out of the slums only to barely survive into adulthood. A South Korean, Duk Koo Kim died in the ring at 23 and here, amidst a vast noise redolent of Crazy Horse or Toiling Midgets, Kozelek (a huge boxing fan) pays tribute and then wonders what it says when such youth and strength and grace exists only to be pounded into nothing: “You never know what day could pick you baby/Out of the air, out of nowhere”.
It might seem hard to take a positive from this, but in the string-steeped ‘Last Tide’, Kozelek asks a question that suggests arrival at a hard-won conclusion and sums up this generous, rich record. “Will you be here with me my love / When the warm sun turns to ash / And the last tides disappear?”
To put it another way: love is stronger than death.
Just wanted to post this alongside the accompanying live review. Fabulous album all these years later.
Lead Us Not Into Temptation, David Byrne’s soundtrack to Young Adam, was sublime, one of the best records of last year. Take a recent immersion in film scores and a well-known wildly wandering muse, and it’s no surprise that Grown Backwards has all the eclecticism of a soundtrack album, from vibrant chamber pop to protest songs and forwards to full-on arias. It’s like it was made by five different people.
It opens exquisitely. ‘Glass, Concrete and Stone’, a meditation on dislocation in the voice of a recently arrived, effectively indentured, immigrant, leads into ‘The Man Who Loved Beer’. Written for Lambchop’s How I Quit Smoking by (music) Kurt Wagner and (lyrics) a remarkably prescient unknown Egyptian, c.1990 B.C., the words could easily describe the Bush-Cheney junta: “To whom can I speak today?/The wrong which roams the earth/There can be no end to it/It is just unstoppable/And the violent man has come down on everyone”.
‘Empire’ makes a more unambiguous assault: “In democratic fever for national defence/Young artists and writers/Please heed the call/What’s good for business is good for us all”.
However, singling out the leftie hand-wringing misrepresents Grown Backwards. Mostly, the likes of ‘Tiny Apocalypse’, ‘Glad’ and ‘She Only Sleeps (With Me)’ are melodically limber skips through the intricacies of modern city life, generous and curious but detached enough to note the absurdities, step back and have a laugh. (‘Civilisation’, say, peers perplexed at the mating rituals we put ourselves through: “Just be yourself, well that’s what they say/But I barely knew who I was yesterday”.)
Maybe most memorable are the aforementioned excerpts from 19th century Romantic opera: Bizet’s aria, ‘Au Fond Du Temple Saint’, sung with Rufus Wainright, and Verdi’s ‘Un De Felice, Eterea’. Full marks for brass neck, and they hit the notes and pull them off. The latter ends the album on a note of understated serenity, Byrne in magnificent, mournful, moving voice.
Eclecticism often means dilettantism, and can camouflage the lack of anything at all to say. But a musician who can go all over the shop stylistically and yet stay centred, lucid and unmistakably himself is really on to something. The sense of adventure is invigorating, and Grown Backwards a triple espresso of an album.
This is a short review of a David Byrne show in the Olympia that I went to with my wife and we both really loved. Grown Backwards is the only solo album of his I have spent proper time with. That formal excellence aversion I mention below: I think that never went away. Right now, October 2022, my kids are finding their way into Talking Heads because Stranger Things included ‘Psycho Killer’ on its Season 4 soundtrack. So their dad has been accidentally playing their Best Of really loud while they are within earshot. The older son does this gorgeous loping dance to ‘And She Was’. A little gazelle, this guy.
BECAUSE I was ten at the time and busy grooving to Wham!, it didn’t occur to me when ‘Road To Nowhere’ was a hit for Talking Heads that the shrieks that close out the song might be borne of the terror and despair that comes with seeing a crazed fundamentalist Christian president getting a second term that could see the Book of Revelations realised. Twenty years later, it does now.
“The Republican Party asked me to write a campaign song for them,” said David Byrne by way of introduction. “I hope they like it”. Then his lone acoustic guitar thudded out that urgent bass line, he began to sing and with glee everyone joined in, last of all his magnificent band, and the roof lifted off the place; and maybe because Reagan was in again by the time this song first surfaced, and Bush is not, ‘Road To Nowhere’ closes now not with mournful keening but with elating, fangs-bared, howls of defiance.
Anger is an energy in excelsis.
It was a telling moment because, though it’s a given that any time spent with Byrne will be culturally adventurous and even intellectually stretching, it’s not always clear that emotion will be involved. Talking Heads never did it for me, and the restless genre-hopping that has characterised Byrne’s solo career has often smacked of the pursuit of cold formal excellence – the wonderful Grown Backwards excepted.
But old songs got new heart here. Byrne’s illuminating foreword to ‘And She Was’ brought an extra insight into its celebration of a young woman’s spiritual awakening in an industrial estate. (It turns out the line “And she could hear the highway breathing” is Terence McKenna in under ten syllables.)
Then, oldest of all, though it’s new to Byrne, the taut, tender Tosca strings swelled behind him on Verdi’s ‘Un De Felice, Eterea’. He knows he’s no tenor and he can’t quite technically hack it. But he persists, night after night, because he understands two things. The artist in him knows your reach should always exceed your grasp, and the pop singer knows the most affecting trick he has is to let his voice crack as he tries for a high note he’ll never hit. Simple things.
It was titled Swede Dreams in HP, and still is on the HP site, because when I interviewed Stephen Malkmus his impending debut solo album was going to be called Swedish Reggae. So I, or someone, popped that headline onto the piece. By the time the piece came out, not long later, the album title had changed and it was eponymous—Scandinavia nowhere to be seen. Still, Swede Dreams the headline remained. I occasionally wondered: did anyone reading the piece ever wonder why? Who knows?
This was another interview, like Kristin Hersh’s posted last night, conducted on my parents’ phone in Ballinteer. I remember that it was the last in a long day of phoners for Stephen. He opened by telling me this. He was tired and bored like Bruce. But he was interested and interesting when he got going about Irish music including folk music. Thankfully, I appear to have done some research before ringing him. Still, it was literally today October 14th 2022 that I learned a related lyric from ‘Folk Jam’, off Pavement’s 1999 Terror Twilight: “Irish folk tales scare the shit out of me, yeah”. Go Planxty.
Having broken up Pavement, STEPHEN MALKMUS has had plenty of time to devote to making his eponymous solo album and indulging his obsession with all things Irish from U2 to Thin Lizzy to Planxty. NIALL CRUMLISH cocks an ear and raises an eyebrow.
There are many sides to the inscrutable Stephen Malkmus. You may, like me, know him best for Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement’s definitive sunny Californian college rock record. You probably remember Pavement winning over a generation with Malkmus’ melancholic, half-together tunes: think ‘Range Life’, the pedal-steel-powered pop at Smashing Pumpkins that got them booted off Lollapalooza; the wild whoop of ‘Cut Your Hair’; or ‘Gold Soundz’, their sepia-tinged single that rivals even The Divine Comedy’s Promenade as the sound to evoke the vintage summer of 1994.
More recently we know him for his role as a ruiner of Britpop. Malkmus has long been an unreconstructed Anglophile, and Graham Coxon returned the compliment by commandeering Pavement’s angular guitar noise for 13, waving goodbye to the annoying cockney Blur and pulling the rug out from under an army of idiot imitators. (Leaving idiot Oasis to pull the rug out from under themselves.)
Soon, then, you’ll know him as the man behind Stephen Malkmus, an eponymous solo debut that rediscovers the pleasure in a good simple sad melody that Pavement misplaced circa Wowee Zowee. What you won’t know, unless you’ve scouted the Internet for interesting new things to ask a sick-sounding Stephen Malkmus at the end of a long day of interviews, is that his Anglophilia actually stretches just across the Irish Sea.
To Prosperous, to be precise.
I found a list of your favourite records, Stephen, with Planxty by Planxty on it.
“Oh yeah, I just sit around, playing the folk tunes,” he enthuses, seemingly relieved not to be going straight into another Pavement post-mortem. “Sometimes you realise that it’s not that you’re becoming a dad yourself, but the old-time music rings true to you. Traditional music is awesome, and Planxty put a little contemporary twist on it in the Seventies. I’ve always been a little bit of a sucker for Irish bands, whether it was Thin Lizzy or U2, you know. Even some Cranberries I can stand: probably most Irish people can’t.”
There’s a set of acceptable post-punk influences, I suggest, and Christy isn’t among them.
“Yeah, and I admit that there’s some contrary bone in my body that would make me say Planxty’s better than Blur or something, and I can prove a hundred reasons why. But I guess in the end I truly would rather listen to Planxty in my house in the morning than, you know, Pulp. For me it does more. It just makes me feel good.”
Malkmus develops the point to invent the Christy Vs Ziggy wars.
“It’s music that’s complex but entertaining and there s a real fire behind it. I just have a little suspicion of this music that aims towards the commercial mainstream of any sort, you know. I don’t have a problem with well-produced albums or songs, but when it gets into that sort of David Bowie-style cult of personality, I don’t know, I’m not as into it normally. I don’t like to play those kinds of records in my house. That’s just me. I can still appreciate Bowie or Roxy Music up to a point, but, you know, around the fire you’ll have Planxty playing.”
You made an admission earlier that a lot of people in your position wouldn’t. You like U2.
“Oh, yeah. Well, I’m American for one thing. You could hate them, maybe, back in the ‘New Year’s Day’ era, but generally you liked them. I went to see them, I was at the right age, and I still think they have a good attitude about what they’re doing. They’re a band we definitely looked up to, in a certain way. Of course, Bono goes a little overboard and the bass player looks a little Eurotrashy sometimes. He’s probably a cool guy.
Malkmus, in contrast to Bono, was always regarded as a bit ironic, a bit clever-clever.
“I never really felt that was an issue,” he coughs in demurral. “I didn’t mind that people would think I was being clever or something. That’s how I entertain myself, but, that being said, maybe after a while the mainstream hopes of this kind of music had been sort of swallowed up; some of the fun was taken out of being in a band after Nirvana. Everything got really boring really fast.”
Externally there certainly is a sense that, from Wowee Zowee on, we watched Pavement gradually wind down. The split last year surprised no-one.
“Yeah. It was ten years. I thought it was great. I don’t look back and think it was a nightmare or anything, or, like (hushed), Thank God it’s over! But yeah, I think it was running its course. Now, for some reason, I’m trying to get back in there. I do feel sort of invigorated. I’m by myself now, but it’s with a little more levity. I was always trying my best to write good songs and keep it interesting, fighting to make good albums: I think, though, this one has a more free, happy feeling.”
Any Americans with a bit of warmth and colour in their music I immediately have to compare to Grandaddy and The Flaming Lips. Malkmus considers this.
“Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right, but I’m not always in that area. I consider them the high-voice clique. All the bands that somewhere between their balls and their throat something happened, so they sing like (wounded squirrel noise ensues). Other than that, as far as the songwriting or the people, I feel a kinship with them.”
Jonny Greenwood played on 1999’s Terror Twilight. What’s Malkmus’ take on Kid A?
“I like it,” he affirms. “Song by song I don’t like every song, but there’s a lot of great stuff on there. For some reason the time is right. You know, we need a little bit of weirdness. The media’s very open to something weird right now because everything else is so straight. I don’t know if people actually like it, but they’re going along, you know. Tripped out by it.”
One evening in February 1994, I sat on the floor of the hall of my family home, shushing my parents and brothers while I awaited a call from Kristin Hersh in Chicago. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening. I was new to interviewing. I was nearly a year in Hot Press by then but they don’t just unleash you. I’d met a fine young band called Swampshack, who supported A House in the SFX and evolved into Turn. I’d phoned Craig Walker of Power of Dreams, whose Immigrants, Emigrants and Me was a huge album in adolescence. I’d asked The Voodoo Queens whether you could have one song bemoaning supermodels and another veneratingKeanuReeves. That was about it.
Now Kristin was calling and I would hear the voice that I had been hearing non-stop for weeks as I’d absorbed her astonishing Hips and Makers. In my December 1994 review of the year, I would write that in the April Olympia show flagged here, she was “as entrancing as several very proficient hypnotists. Hips and Makers, too, is as gorgeous and graceful a record as there is. ‘Close your eyes’, she sings, and you do, with dreamy contentment.”
Having read this interview today for the first time in decades, I wasn’t sure whether to post it. The wafflings of one’s nineteen-year-old self are something you don’t necessarily want people, including possibly the interviewee, to see. I’m not keen on my obvious misunderstanding of the difference and overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.But when I re-read the piece, I remembered that this is where Kristin said a few things that I never forgot that were important to my musical development. They’re down below in her voice but essentially there were three.
She taught me about the physicality of acoustic music and the visceral connection that there can be between the musician’s instruments and the listener’s gut and heart. That drama and melodrama in music were and are different and critically important to distinguish between. And to be careful about twinning mental illness with art, or, as Kristin said, twinning madness and creativity, in a way that music writers and all kinds of psychiatric and cultural commentators had done and continue to do, mostly in error if well-intentioned.
Addendum: the headline of this piece in HP was Hersh Words. I wanted the above. Finally.
IT’S A chilly yet picturesque snowy February afternoon in Chicago, Illinois, and Kristin Hersh is, to very nearly cop a phrase from Nirvana, bored and cold. “I thought Chicago people would be used to it,” she sighs. “I thought it snowed all the time here, but no-one’s going to work and all my promo stuff got cancelled (laughs). It’s beautiful, I wanna be out in it, but they’re all hiding. So I gotta stay here and talk to you.”
Thank you Kristin, I’m touched. Actually, I am—if not touched, then more than a tad awestruck and quite, quite unable to eat—because, as you can imagine, it’s not every Friday evening (GMT) that the brains and heart behind some of America’s most singular rock music ever, and she who in creating the essential album of early 1994 (faint praise indeed) has possibly perfected the art of transferring words and music of paralysing beauty onto little round shiny things, rings you in your own home to shoot the breeze for half an hour. Even if she’d rather be pegging snowballs at buses.
Hips and Makers is an acoustic, organic epic, and it is Kristin Hersh’s first solo album. (For the benefit of Mr R.V. Winkle of Sleepy Hollow, who just rang in to ask, she has spent the last decade as the linchpin of Throwing Muses, the Boston band whose records, from Throwing Muses in 1986 to Red Heaven in 1992, have all, in their time, led many among us to believe that we had just taken up residence in Superlative City, Arizona, and whose next album has already been recorded in Daniel Lanois’ New Orleans studio, home to Dylan’s Oh Mercy among others, for release in early ‘95).
Throwing Muses have always been Kristin’s baby alone; even when her half-sister Tanya Donelly was guitarist, she only had one or two songs per album. Now that Tanya has loped off to give it some welly with Belly, the word ‘autocracy’ is possibly understating the case. Kristin Hersh is Throwing Muses. So the obvious opener is: why isn’t Hips and Makers a Muses album?
Kristin laughs, a little mysteriously. “It’s the acoustic sound itself, the sound of the guitar, the cello, the piano, no percussion. I like all of the dimensions that acoustic sounds have, that you can hear the pieces of the instrument because of the muscles playing them and the air the sound needs to travel; you can hear the shape of the room—I recorded in a stable, so it had natural reverb—and those kinds of sounds, I think, invite these intimate kind of songs.”
Consequently, the temporary break with the band is the result of a search for musical, rather than lyrical freedom. “I came to respect the sound,” she affirms. “I thought acoustic music was real wimpy, that it was for people who couldn’t play guitars, who just had, like, poetry and politics. I didn’t think I would ever find myself doing anything more than token acoustic songs on Muses records.
“But as soon as I came to really respect the physicality of the instruments, all these songs just happened, and I didn’t control what they sounded like, I just let them come, pretty much out of the guitar itself. There was no real thought process,” she insists, “I just never really found myself hearing a rhythm section on Hips and Makers material.”
While this is all well, good and perfectly reasonable, it sometimes seems that the themes of the songs are such that only an album recorded alone could ever have done them real, uncompromising justice. So, it could be said that Hips and Makers is the Anti-’Side Project’. While most extracurricular activities by members of acclaimed bands with long, illustrious track records are an excuse to get rat-arsed in a studio with some celeb chums and foist the fruits off on a gormlessly trusting public without lowering the tone of the all-hallowed back catalogue (see: Hindu Love Gods), this album seems to have been done solo because only Kristin has any kind of access to the obsessive, volatile, deeply loving side of herself that is brought out so forcefully on it.
The track that perhaps most arrestingly backs this up is ‘The Letter’, written ten years ago, when she was approaching her late teens and was what you might call a wreck. Many teenagers are miserable and a fair whack of them write narcissistic, self-pitying Smiths pastiches about how time-consuming the Leaving Cert is or how rarely it happens that beautiful people they’ve never had the guts to talk to swear solemn oaths to be theirs eternally, but ‘The Letter’ is different. It’s not difficult to see why she couldn’t give it a home till now. It’s real. It hurts. It’s fucking hard going.
“It is,” Kristin concurs. “I almost didn’t put it on the record for that reason, because I thought all the other songs were so . . . so sweet and positive and mystifying to me. That song is not actually written very well; it’s honest, that’s where its charm lies. And it’s also very beautiful, and very scary as well! (“Gather me up because I’m lost / Or I’m back where I started from / Crawling on the floor, rolling on the ground / I’m gonna cry / You look for me / Love Kristin, PS keep them coming.”)
“At the time,” she continues, “I had been told that I was schizophrenic, and I was on heavy duty drugs, and I’m living in an apartment called ‘The Doghouse’. It was a letter to someone, I’m sure, but I don’t remember who. It was reality to me, it wasn’t a metaphor at all. I never would have done that song again except for the song ‘Hips and Makers’ which says that you’re supposed to take the ride, you know, over the course of a lifetime or an album or a thought. You’re supposed to go everywhere and you only see how high the highs are because you know how low the lows are.”
Her reputation as some kind of wild-eyed prophetess of doom has been garnered by the writing of songs such as this. That and the publicity photos, which almost invariably show her gliding to victory in a do-or-die battle to out-frozen-stare the camera lens, and the common knowledge that she suffers with bipolar disorder, a disease resembling schizophrenia, which, while it takes her to emotional extremes that most other people can’t imagine and most definitely can’t sing about, hasn’t, she says, helped her creatively: “I don’t like the idea that madness and creativity are connected, because my experience with it is that it’s a sickness, that it’s ugly, it’s humiliating and it’s not where your body’s supposed to be. I don’t write well when I’m losing it, I write well when I’m clean and healthy enough not to be self-involved.”
It’s a misconception that can easily be cleared up by even the most cursory listen to ‘Beestung’, ‘Hips and Makers’ or the gentle, jaunty coda to ‘A Loon’, with its swoonful sentiments, “Never thought I’d see that silly grin / Never thought I’d see that fool again / Never thought I’d love that lunatic”, sung like someone on a top secret divine mission to charm the birds, or quite possibly the wood, from the trees.
And it’s not an image she’s entirely happy with: “I have a lot of respect for those dark places, but I don’t like to be identified with them because I’m not limited to them, and there’s a lot of melodrama in music today that colours the real drama in a bad way. But it would be hypocritical of me to say what I say in Hips and Makers and then only show the perky pictures.”
Kristin Hersh songs are, their composer readily agrees, more intense than yer average ditty: “But they’re not negative,” she stresses, drawing a distinction between seriousness and mournfulness that rarely, if ever, occurs to most songwriters or critics. “Everything that you feel is hot, and hard! (laughs) Whether it feels good or not, it’s still the truth and it comes from feeling, which is a good thing. I don’t think any of these feelings are negative; to be spitting angry at somebody, it’s telling them that they have the power to draw all of your force out of you! And to be serious, and serious about something like love, which deserves gravity—it’s not sad, certainly, it’s not even that serious, it’s just being real with it.”
In ‘Your Ghost’, the first single taken from Hips and Makers, Kristin rings a dead friend so as to ‘let (his/her) house ring’, then slides down the telephone wire until she reaches his/her number and they have some form of spectral rendezvous; it’s fairly oblique and, ooh, seventeen shades of wonderful. It’s the one Michael Stipe sings on. So, with the sole purpose of transforming my esteemed colleague Lorraine Freeney from her normal state as a generally mild-mannered (and of course immensely talented) staff writer to her alter ego, the most insanely jealous (but still talented) person in the whole universe, I asked Kristin to reveal a little about her good friend Mike, the man who will one day (oh yes!) father the next generation of startlingly attractive Freeneys, tee hee hee, evil cackle. (you’re gonna regret this—L.F.)
So, Kristin, was he fun to work with? “Yeah,” comes the inevitable prelude to the genuinely affectionate masterclass in gushing that follows. “He’s great. He’s an angel. He’s just… Good. Capital G. He’s the rock star that we need, I think. He’s real open to everything. I’m not, I hate everything (laughs). But Michael is really trusting and he loves all these different artistic mediums, he’s a little modern Renaissance rock star! He’s actually doing a movie right now. He’s all over the place, he’s real busy and he knows everybody. It makes me tired to think about it!”
Admiring and all as she is of Mr Fucking Perfect (as I like to call him), she doesn’t aspire to his level of success, at least not for its own sake. As she quite sensibly explains, “I’m happy the way I am, definitely, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me really. I want people to listen to good music instead of bad music. If it’s other people’s good music then that’s fine with me too, but there just isn’t very much good music around. So I am driven to sell this stuff, because it’s good. So far, I’m not very good at being famous so it doesn’t, you know, ring true with me. I don’t understand that drive. But I do want to sell this record, so if that’s what I have to do…”
One of the many remarkable things about Hips and Makers is that it is selling, having reached No.7 in Britain in its week of release, to the delight of both Kristin and 4AD: “Yeah, it’s doing well. I didn’t know if anyone would ever listen to it. I thought it was too little for that. It’s like distilled crystal or something.”
Even the bar-dwellers in the Olympia will be silenced when she plays her first Irish concert on April 2nd. (Tanya Donelly, of course, lit up Sunstroke for forty-five minutes or so last June.) It’s purely acoustic, featuring only Kristin and her cellist friend, Martin McCarrick (not Jane Scarpantoni, the REM collaborator who handled string section duties on the album). Although she has done acoustic showcases in New York, London and Los Angeles and has performed many a live set for many a hopeless DJ on many a piddling American local radio station, this is the first full tour without the comforting crutch of a rhythm section and some easily accessible swathes of bloody loud guitar.
The set will chill, it will move, it will split the audience fifty-fifty into gleeful grinners and stock-still sobbers. We will enjoy the experience, Kristin Hersh won’t. “It’s hard,” she says. “I’m shy, I’m not a performer. I still have to take my contacts out so that I don’t see anyone!” The thought of a thousand pairs of eyes and ears transfixed upon her and her slightest uttering doesn’t do anything for the obviously undernourished Hersh ego. It’s a job, a chore, she says: “I’m resigned to it, actually. If I thought about it anymore it might bug me so DON’T TALK ABOUT IT ANYMORE!” she laughs.
Suitably chastened, I ask whether, after Belly’s cleaning up in the outdoor arena last summer, Féile or any other festival is likely to be graced by her presence this coming silly season: “I’m thinking not,” she replies. “It’s not really a festival set! But the band might, we’ll see.”
And at first that makes perfect sense. Festivals are for the anthems of loud, uncouth youth, not the fragile hymns of Kristin Hersh. But dig, if you will, this picture; Sunday night, the Final Féile, the headliners are off to bed, all is quiet. Except, that is, for a quiet, shy woman nearing thirty and her considerably younger acoustic guitar, a single bright white spotlight, and the delicately pealing songs of innocence and experience that make up Hips and Makers leaking out of the speakers to send The Kids off to sleep in a slightly more serene stoned stupor. I, for one, would pay to see that.
For now, though, we’ll have to settle for the album and the show in the Olympia, which I can confidently predict will not be forgotten. I, for one, am counting the hours.
The Holy Bible is the sacred text of the Manic Street Preachers. I have hardly ever listened to it all the way through. Not too thrilled with this: people really love it. It was just a little too pain-filled, even for me, and at the time I was pretty much proud of how much pain was in the music I loved. 48-year old me goes: Sheesh. Still, I did listen a few times before this show. Then, I really liked Everything Must Go (there’s a 10/12 HP review somewhere). At 20, I found this Holy Bible gig hard to wrap my head around. Moshing to ‘4st 7lb’ just didn’t seem right. I doubt that would be different now. One explanatory note: “the bleakest in Western Europe” was a reference to a phrase that my Geography teacher, Mr Harrington, in a school I’d left in 1991, had used all the time. Anything extreme was the somethingest in Western Europe. One thing I enjoyed in HP was getting a reference no-one could possibly understand under the noses of a few thousand people.Confusing is not always a bad thing.
MANIC STREET PREACHERS/SCHTUM (Tivoli, Dublin)
SCHTUM AREN’T schite. Not an opinion schared by the côterie of frighteningly eloquent, Scrumpy-sodden Manics supporters who spent all of Christian McNeill and Co.’s set suggesting that they should—and I quote—“Fuck off”, but, dammit, it’s the truth.
Schtum, in fact, are anything but. Tonight, McNeill’s paintstripping holler is such that even the mixing desk guy has to dodge the phlegm, while their clanging, corrosive electric guitars make your ears bulge and the walls bleed. ‘Corrupt Cop’, for example, sounds like a pneumatic drill operator whistling while he works in your arch-enemy’s bedroom at 5 am. That is, it sounds pretty fucking great.
Later, and Richey looks good, by his sallow, sunken standards—he even smiles twice, which is encouraging. Seán hides and hits things hard, so no change there. Nicky absent-mindedly fails to wish aloud for the death of even one popular cultural icon, he’s so wrapped up in his punky bouncing to and fro. James “Dean” Bradfield roars away, invariably through gritted teeth, except for a sweet solo take on ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head’. And we, the mob, jump around.
Everything in its place… sort of.
They’re confusing, are Manics gigs. They used to be such fun, just one big cartoon punkfest, but since the release of The Holy Bible—War! Death! Pestilence! Locusts!—their set list has become the bleakest in Western Europe. So when they grind through ‘Of Walking Abortion’, which states that humanity is vile and worthless, or ‘4 st 7 lb’, Richey’s semi-autobiographical document of the decline and death of a person with anorexia, or ‘Yes’, or ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, or any of their myriad defeated anthems, and the response is even more gleeful moshing, it rankles, y’know?
Maybe there’s a difference between angry, cathartic mindless moshing and celebratory mindless moshing, but, to quote J Mascis, I don’t think so. Maybe, then, if it’s true that a poet’s worst failure is to succeed through being misunderstood, then Richey James (a fine poet) is going to be sitting some repeats. Perhaps, just maybe, we’d look silly standing attentively, stroking our chins and discussing Nietzsche. Or maybe I’m taking rock music too seriously, again, and should get a grip. Hardly!
Happily, the end comes with the arrogant racket of ‘Motown Junk’ and ‘You Love Us’, so we can stomp on each other’s heads with impunity. And we can leave, and look forward to gigs with fewer thrills and fewer moral dilemmas. Bjorn Again are never around when you need ’em.
I was asked in 2004 by Hotpress to review R.E.M.’s new album. It felt like a lot to be asked to do, mostly if not entirely in a good way. Those lead reviews of albums by superstars felt like a big deal, an opinion that might have attentionpaid to it—erk. I had done lead reviews on The Manics and and the Boos and The Stone Roses’ Second Coming, but this was the greatest band of my whole generation, Green being the album of my life to date. They were still huge and full of integrity and dignity. I remember picking up the CD in the International Bar and going OK: I guess I get to hear this first. I wrote a 9/10 Around the Sun review that was more favourable than essentially anyone else wrote. It got 5.2/10 in Pitchfork. I was a little embarrassed. Shit—did I over-rate them because I was so glad to be asked? Because I worshipped Buck, Mills, and Stipe so much? Well, yes and no. I just read over the review for the first time in eighteen years. I see where I was coming from. The record was downcast. It did not have a ‘These Days’or ‘Get Up’on it. Therewas no justificationfor the visceral infectious optimism of those Pageant and Green songs. Around The Sun was deflated with no soaring stadium choruses. Those choruses had not kept Republicans out. GWB was about to get back in because he started a war.The songs were crafted, subtle, bristling, even openly defeated—fornow. My 9/10 was high but not daftly wrong. Pitchfork score? 7.84.
R.E.M. Around The Sun (Warner Bros).
On the day in November 1988 that REM released Green, George H.W. Bush was elected to office. It wasn’t supposed to work out like that. Michael Stipe liked to call him The Bush Fucker—pithy!—and that magnificent record was made in the hope that it would mark the quick death of the rotten Reagan years and the birth of something bright and fresh and new. “Get up! Get up!” they exhorted, and exulted.
Sixteen years on, we’re back where we started—minus, perhaps, the hope.
George Dubya concludes a first term that makes you pine for his deadbeat dad, and after giving the Republicans a reprieve for the ’90s—‘Ignoreland’ aside—REM had to say something. What Around The Sun says is you can’t keep your good side out indefinitely. It’s their most directly politically engaged work and their saddest, a lament for what America has lost.
The politics are of course personal: in the immobilisingly gorgeous single ‘Leaving New York’, Stipe grieves for 9/11. “It’s easier to leave than to be left behind / I told you / Forever / I love you / Forever / I love you,” he sings in a love song that can’t escape the times. Similarly, in ‘High Speed Train’, as uneasy backing vocals echo underneath him, Stipe declares: “I’d jump on a high speed train / I’ll never look back again / I’ll go anywhere for you”. And where would he go? “To Berlin, Kyoto or Marseille”. He didn’t pick those names out of a hat, Mr President.
Soon after ‘Leaving New York’ REM move from the obvious tragedy of that day to the capital made from it by the Bush/Cheney cabal. ‘The Outsiders’, ‘I Wanted To Be Wrong’ and ‘Boy In The Well’ all speak to the despoiling of first Iraq, then America, brought about by phoney wars. Again and again, the image is of dislocation, of living in a homeland that’s been stolen: “Everyone is humming a song that I don’t understand”.
‘Final Straw’, the centrepiece, restates this point and takes it further. It’s an open letter, brilliant and with balls of steel, to the neocons (‘Masters Of War’ anyone?). Stipe swallows hard and speaks the language of love and forgiveness through clenched teeth: “I raise my voice up higher/And I look you in the eye/ I offer love with one condition/With conviction, tell me why/Tell me why/Tell me why/Look me in the eye/Tell me why”. He won’t get an answer; but you feel that Stipe wouldn’t make such promises if all hope was lost.
Around The Sun is an album largely about language. There’s so much that needs to be literally stated that the music takes a back seat almost ‘til the very end. Then, after the reaffirmation of resolve that is the title track (“Hold on world cos I’m not jumping off”) some backward guitar plays, then goes quiet, then softly begins again, and for a minute accompanies Stipe as he hums wordlessly to himself, like someone just forgot to turn the tape off.
So Around The Sun, this confrontational, statesmanlike album, ends on a childlike note; a note of hope and quiet redemption. Sometimes desperate times call for delicate measures.
This was an email interview conducted for State, primarily with Pat Barrett and Joe Chester, also with nice contributions from trumpeter Donagh Molloy, as Hedge Schools released the wonderful At The End of a Winding Day, the second of their third albums. I interviewed Pat again in 2018, for Psychiatry & Songs not State this time, as Hedge Schools released their third and, it turned out, final album. That 2018 interview was important for me. I was not writing all that much, a bit worn out, when Pat reached out to meet up for an interview because he’d liked this 2015 piece. I was chuffed and glad that he did and it certainly encouraged my writing and energised this site. One 2015 comment from Joe about Pat has never left me and is one of the loveliest things I’ve ever heard one musician say about another: “when Pat sings, a state of grace descends”. Seven years later: Wow.
In an interview with State in 2009, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh invoked a musical image that I’ve never quite forgotten: that of the “really juicy peach”.
Caoimhín was describing how a moment of music, if sung by the right voice or played the right way, can carry an abundance of emotional information: a “concentrated meaning within a certain note or a certain phrase”. He said that a sean-nós singer might “start maybe with their mouth one shape, and this is within even a single note, and it might last one second or less, and they might go through seven shades of the one vowel within that, and it might be imperceptible, but it just gives this beautiful richness. It’s like a really juicy peach; when you bite into it there’s all these things going on, and tastes, and smells, rather than just being a plastic peach that you look at.”
I’ve always loved this description, and thoughts of this beautiful richness, this really juicy peachiness, came back to me when I heard The Hedge Schools’ At The End of a Winding Day.
The Hedge Schools’ second album comprises nine sparely arranged songs performed primarily by Pat Barrett and Joe Chester, who used to be in Ten Speed Racer together, with acutely judged contributions by Donagh Molloy on trumpet and Kevin Murphy on cello. (It’s “120%” a band record, says Barrett.) Joe Chester says that the arrangements were inspired by Japanese minimalist painting and while I don’t know those works there is a Mark Rothko feel from these songs: simplicity and depth, starkness and warmth at the same time.
For optimum emotion in music, you don’t need huge arrangements, or histrionics. You don’t have to be The Flaming Lips, or Brian Wilson, or Beethoven (not that there’s anything wrong with that kind of thing). Played or sung perfectly, a single note is a symphony.
State: How did The Hedge Schools come about? I know this is your second album, and I know about the Ten Speed Racer connection, but I don’t know much else.
Pat Barrett: When Ten Speed Racer disbanded we were all writing, and we all had batches of tunes ready. Joe was out of the blocks first with his solo debut Murder of Crows, and during the Ten Speed Racer days his production skills and recording skills were always something we used.
I decided in 2007 to sit and record tunes, written over a number of years, and these were what became the first Hedge Schools record, Never Leave Anywhere. Joe was always going to be my go-to guy to get the first album moving. I think the main difference with the first record and the new one is the collaborative input from Joe was massive on this record, 50/50 splits.
Donagh Molloy, who plays trumpet, I’ve known for years, and I’ve known him to be a gent. That matters to me, working with like-minded good souls. Kevin Murphy who played cello is the same, a good soul from the old days who we’ve known for years. They are both great players, who listened, played over spaces, left spaces, just bought into it, gave themselves to it.
The four of us are The Hedge Schools for this record. That’s how it’s worked. There can be the perception that it’s my project. That’s lingered since the first record, because with this we just sent out the record to press: no info, no press release, just the Art. This is a band record. 120%.
The songs on At The End of a Winding Day are songs that are pared down to their essence. These seem like songs you have lived with for a long time. Can you say a little about the process you went through for this album—as writers and as a band?
Pat: It’s such a hard process to define because I think for every writer it’s different. Melodies in terms of voice matter to me, and evoking emotion matters to me. That great Bill Withers quote: “I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel”. With this record it was about home, being warm, about family, about normal life really, no great mystery in terms of theme.
Joe Chester: When Pat approached me a few years ago to say he was ready to record a new Hedge Schools record, the original idea was that it would be primarily an electronic record. Some of Pat’s reference points were those gorgeous early Blue Nile albums, A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats, which were also big favourites of mine. So we were pretty much in concert about that.
We recorded a couple of songs in The Living Room [studio] and they sounded pretty good but, to be honest, to me there was something not right. I felt like we were missing it. Around that time I was in London and went to look at some Japanese minimalist paintings that just blew me away. I don’t know what it was about them—they were just these small monochromatic canvases—it might have been where I was emotionally, but I just found them so extraordinarily moving.
It’s very rare in music that you have these kind of cinematic, Hollywood flashes of inspiration – it’s usually something you arrive at incrementally. But I remember coming back to Dublin in a state of fervour and telling Pat that this record needs to be just like those paintings. Almost nothing there. Get rid of everything. So we pulled out a track we were working on (might have been ‘Winter Coats’) and set about erasing everything but Pat’s vocal, including his guitar track. So all we had left was Pat’s voice, suspended in air. And what a voice it is – when Pat sings a state of grace descends.
Then I put a piano track down, playing as few notes as possible, to preserve as much space for the voice as possible but still communicate the movement of the song. And it was instant – we both fell around the place laughing because, well, we both loved the effect so much really. So then we followed that principle with all the other songs too, finding ways to create these almost completely empty spaces.
On the contributions of Donagh and Kevin—which were mighty—I would say that I met Kevin on Liffey Street and explained what we were at. He had just finished up with the first Seti [the First] record so he didn’t need any explanation from me or Pat; in fact as far as that kind of thing goes, Kevin, along with Thomas Haugh, is king of the castle, lord of the manor. We’re just scrambling around in the mud singing, “Bring out your dead”.
Donagh is a wonderful trumpet player—Pat knew him from Lisa Hannigan’s band. And he came in with his own ideas which, by and large, were absolutely right. Sometimes I talk to producers who are just starting out and the biggest mistake they make is that they’re so determined to be the driving force, to impose their vision on a record that they miss out on all the music that they can’t envisage. For me, I’d have to be completely stupid to have musicians like Donagh and Kevin in the room and not give them the freedom to express their musicality completely.
Pat: On day one of recording Joe pulled out a Roger Eno record on vinyl in the studio, which was just an ambient piece with cello and piano. That sent us down a road. He possesses the tools in terms of production and engineering to take a sound there and we just went with it. There’s a lot of space on the record, loads of really well recorded acoustic guitars; the thought and craft of classic records like Richard and Linda Thompson’s I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight, Nick Drake string arrangements, Arvo Pärt pieces. These were all things we thought about throughout the whole recording process. When Donagh and Kevin came into the process the bones were there but the two of them had the musical understanding to leave spaces where spaces needed to be left, and flesh the bones that needed it. The two of them brought some glorious colours to the palette.
Donagh Molloy: Before going in to record I knew Joe only by reputation as a producer/player, and I wasn’t necessarily doing much trumpeting aside from the band I had been playing with full-time. Pat had given me pretty much free rein on the tunes (aside from direction like “familiarise yourself with it, live in it, breathe it” or “keep some melody in the locker”) but having not been able make much time to work on ideas, before I arrived I felt a little intimidated at the prospect of recording for the first time into the ears of both the lads. That lack of preparation ended up being perfect for the session. Joe immediately made me feel as if The Living Room was my own living room. Pat’s reactions to what we were putting down were uplifting and confidence boosting from the outset. I came in with some loose ideas, but between the three of us we naturally worked out what was best for each tune. I remember after we played through the title track a couple of times, Joe mentioned he felt I was trying to take the tune somewhere else with the trumpet, and suggested to stay within the music—perfect direction, he was absolutely right.
Joe, I love what you said about Pat’s singing: “a state of grace descends”. And I love that Pat’s voice—this gorgeous, aching, vibrato voice that he has—doesn’t actually appear until half way through track two on the album; the first song, the title track that Donagh referred to, is an instrumental. I admire the restraint.
Joe: Well when you have a weapon like that in your arsenal you don’t want to go straight to the nuclear option. People could get hurt!
Space in music, which you’ve touched on, has been increasingly important to me as I’ve gotten into Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Jóhann Jóhannson, the Erased Tapes roster, and so on. I think it’s because the more space there is, the more of a dialogue I can have with the song; the more I can bring myself to it.
Joe: Yeah I’m familiar with those records, really like Jóhann Johannson. Brian Brannigan introduced me to Disintegration Loops by William Basinski, which I really love. That was a big inspiration for the A Lazarus Soul record, which was actually made after the Hedge Schools, although it was released first. (I would say that that too is a very spacious record, although it’s wearing slightly more sinister clothes!)
Pat: Space is the king! One of my favourite records of all time is Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, the last record. It’s almost jazz—but the space! And also Paul Buchanan’s solo record Mid Air—the space around his voice on that record, just gorgeous.
Is it difficult or daunting to make a spacious, spare record? It must require a lot of confidence in the material. Like a recipe with only four ingredients; the ingredients better be good.
Joe: Is it difficult? Well all records are difficult, or at least they ought to be. It’s just that the particular requirements of this record demanded that everything else be taken away. That’s not courageous – it’s just good sense. If Pat says “space is king”, well that’s right enough for me.
Donagh: I think my understanding of the importance of space in a song came from working on Lisa Hannigan’s debut album, and in the following few years both performing and recording with her band, I learned so much more about music than the rest of my life before then. I’d rate Lisa with the finest songwriters going internationally, and few understand the importance of the space between the notes you play in music better than she.
Pat, you wrote on the album that you sent me “The art of something should always matter. Always”. Paul Page began his review of your album with a reflection on craft in music; specifically his concern that craftsmanship is being increasingly neglected. Is this a concern that you share?
Pat: God yeah. I think it’s too easy to find things these days: no mystery anymore, no magic. That matters to me. I’ve always been a forager when it comes to tunes; always avoid the obvious. I think the handmade Artwork has sprinkled some magic dust over this project. I wanted the craft of the recording reflected in the sleeve because I think when it came to the recording Joe was meticulous – when it came to what microphones we used, that we used real pianos; he added a beautiful upright piano to the studio setup about two weeks after we started recording and it ended up on everything. The detail into the spaces we left, the spaces we filled, obsessing over mixes and mastering: that’s his craft.
Tell me about the handmade artwork?
The artwork side if it for me was all my doing. I scoured the internet for an image that spoke to me, that was a rubber stamp. I bought it online, bought all the cardboard sleeves online, had rubber stamps made in a shop on Capel street. The Rubber Stamp Company, run by an old gent called Frank, who again loves his craft of making stamps. Talk all day to you about it. I’ve sat at home and when orders came in I’ve personalised messages going onto each CD that goes out. I’ve always been more of a fan of the letterbox rather than the inbox and it’s a lovely way to receive something. It’s the personal touch. We’ve lost that.
Is music in danger of being under-appreciated, taken for granted? Now that we don’t have to work to find it. (Speaking as someone who spends hours a week on Spotify, but guiltily.)
Pat: I think the craft of it is, the detail of it, the uniqueness of it is something that has become under appreciated. Daytime FM playlists will always exist, that’s the commercial reality, you’d not bother with that fight for a start. But one thing I’ve learned in the last few weeks, since the record came out: the hunter-gatherers, the foragers, those who like a tune to mean something, those who give a shit – they come out at night, on Twitter, on radio, on blogs, they become alive. That’s why craft I think will always matter, because those people will always be there. That’s the magic. We’ve not uploaded the new record to Spotify, and I don’t think we will.
Who is currently working in music that you admire, in terms of artistry and craftsmanship?
Pat: I tend to shop by labels these days. Certain brands of quality have emerged over the past few years: Erased Tapes, Bella Union, 4AD, Sub Pop, Full Time Hobby. They’ve all got great artist rosters. For about 10 years I worked as a music buyer for HMV so I’ve seen many changes down the years, but in recent times the resurgence of independent labels letting Artists make their own records is encouraging. I love ambient piano artists like Otto A Totland, Ólafur Arnalds, Roger Eno, Nils Fraham. Loving the Ryley Walker record from last year also; he’s got that classic 70’s folk songwriting thing going on. I’m a sucker for a decent folk tune.
You’ve been compared to The Blue Nile. Daunting?
Pat: To be honest anyone who knows me knows my love of The Blue Nile. It’s no secret. I would have to say no voice be it male or female has ever emotively moved me more than Paul Buchanan’s. That’s a gift. There is a wonderful emotion in those first two records: a sense of wonder, longing, love lost, pain, joy. I love those albums. I think if we’ve managed with this record to capture even a percentage of the emotion on those records, then it’s a job done.
Lastly, it strikes me listening to your music, as it struck me when listening to Mumblin’ Deaf Ro’s Dictionary Crimes in 2012, that you’re covering topics and emotions that are not covered well in pop music. Family life and the emotions that go with it: a nagging yearning; gratitude; happiness, often tempered by the worry that it’s fleeting. I suppose I’m asking: did you or do you deliberately set out to represent adult life, grown-up life in these songs—do you think as I do that songs that are, as you say, “about home, being warm, about family, about normal life really” are hard to come by, and did you set out to fill that gap?
Joe: Everyone’s different. Those themes are obviously a source of inspiration to Pat, and good on him. I love these songs. I, on the other hand, could never write a song about any of that stuff. I need some kind of monstrous distortion to get me going.
Pat: I suppose I’ve always written about what’s around me every day. The emotions I feel, the ups and the downs. ‘Oceans’, on the record, is a track about missing the bond of brotherhood. For the Ten Speed Racer years, we—myself, Dermot, and John, the 2 brothers—hung around in venues, recording studios, sat in vans travelling up and down the country always with each other. John is married with two kids now and lives in Australia and Dermot the same, married with 3 kids and living in Norway. It’s a bond I really miss. It was never a deliberate thing to write the songs around one theme. It’s just a place I’ve found myself in between the two Hedge Schools records. There’s a gratitude in what I have around me these days, in who I have around me. Some people take that for granted; I don’t.
“Why I would not cross the road to see the band that changed my life” is a piece I wrote for the Irish Independent in 2009. My old friend & HP colleague Nick Kelly, then an Indo columnist, was on holidays and asked me to sub for him. Pixies were touring to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Doolittle and this is about why I wouldn’t go. I love this band and still have the t-shirt I got outside the Point in June 1991. But I couldn’t go. Fergal Bunbury responded to this piece here last month with reference to Death to the the Pixies and AHOUSEISDEAD. In 2015, I posted this as an addendum to another post on Psych & Songs, an irritated attempted evisceration of nostalgia, but given Fergal’s energising and appreciated contribution, I thought I should pop this on a page of its own. I still believe most of this and can’t stand rock’n’roll as taxidermy. By 2015, though, I’d realised I was wrong in mycastigation of Iggy Pop for his Raw Power shows and insurance ads. By the way, Black Francis took inspiration for his nom de guerre from Iggy. James Osterberg is to Charles Thompson as Iggy Pop is to Black Francis. In 2015, repentant, I asked “Where did I get off? Iggy doesn’t owe anyone anything.” Just as true in ’22.
Why I would not cross the road to see the band that changed my life.1st October 2009.
For the last three nights, the legendary Pixies used the Olympia as the launching pad for their keenly awaited Doolittle tour. The tour commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Doolittle, their magnum opus, the album that led music website Pitchfork to acclaim the Pixies as “the most influential alternative rock band of all time”.
At the time of writing, the shows haven’t happened, but rapture will abound. Like a handful of records of its era (Murmur, The Queen is Dead, The Stone Roses), Doolittle has acquired sacred text status. This is the first time it has been played in its entirety on stage. The Olympia is a great venue. Rock fans of a certain age are pretty excited.
And why not? Doolittle was a landmark moment, for rock and for this writer. In any list of key moments in my life, reading the Hot Press review by Graham Linehan that sent me scurrying into town for a scratched vinyl copy of the album in April 1989 is right up there.
At the time I read Graham’s piece I was just feeling my way into pop via REM, U2 and the Beatles. Doolittle completely exploded my concept of what rock music could do: the ideas a writer could address; how a singer could sound; the language that qualified as lyrics; the distance artists could and must go beyond what is considered acceptable. (‘Dead’ is barbarous.)
Right from the urgent opening bass notes of ‘Debaser’, Doolittle was an epiphany. Anyone who has obsessed about music can cite two or three records that were life-changing; I have even been known, after a couple of pints, to trace back to ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ the evolution of my entire adult personality. This is not an entirely comfortable notion.
So why not wait till after the Pixies have actually played to write about the Doolittle tour? Because I didn’t go. I couldn’t go. I love Doolittle too much to watch it being mummified.
It’s not just that the Doolittle tour is such a nakedly commercial venture. (A box set, Minotaur, is being released to coincide with the tour; that is, the Pixies’ discography is being sold to us again, but with shinier packaging and a book. A book! How lovely.)
It’s not just that there is no creative reason for the tour, although Black Francis has mentioned new material. Ever since reforming to support the Chilli Peppers in 2004, they have promised new material, as if they were a going artistic concern. None has arrived, and none will.
In fact, the Doolittle tour is part of a wider and disturbing trend in rock, particularly in independent music, which has long-laughable pretensions to being adventurous.
The last few years have seen ever more bands reforming to play shows at which they perform single classic albums years after the event. As the Pixies are doing with Doolittle, so Echo & the Bunnymen did with Ocean Rain, and even Iggy and the Stooges with Raw Power.
At the last true Stooges show in 1974, recorded on Metallic KO, Iggy roared abuse at bikers while beer bottles smashed against the amps either side of him; he ended the night in hospital. Now, he sells insurance while playing ‘Gimme Danger’, dissonance unnoticed or ignored.
There’s more to my antipathy to these reformations than disappointment with former renegades pandering to the phoney nostalgia of a now-moneyed audience that, tired of the present and wary of the future, wants to pay to relive a mythical past–though there is that.
There is the principle that bands should know when to break up. Bands should be Fawlty Towers, not Friends. They should then stay broken up. Other than ABBA and The Smiths, it’s hard to think of a band of consequence that refuses on principle to reform. That Agnetha Fältskog could have more artistic integrity than Iggy Pop would once have been shocking.
There is the stifling notion that albums should be commemorated. They are just songs, and unless they live and breathe in the present, they’re nothing. Pixies, the Bunnymen and Iggy Pop are making museum pieces of their music. It is rock’n’roll as taxidermy.
And with the best will in the world, the Doolittle shows can only provide a faint, sad echo of the Pixies at their peak; high-class karaoke, but karaoke all the same. Pixies Rock Band.
Doolittle can’t be revived in this way–how could it? It was a moment.
It was a glorious confluence when four people in one room channelled something mysterious. It was like flames descending on the heads of the apostles on Pentecost Sunday, or lightning hitting the DeLorean in Back to the Future. It would only happen once.
The Pixies couldn’t tell you how they did it; Black Francis was often asked. It happened, and the moment passed, and it was gone. You can’t ask the Pixies, twenty years on, to reproduce the unearthly unwilled wonder of Doolittle. You may as well ask them to speak in tongues.
In 1994, I did my J1 summer on the East Coast, between Cape Cod and Annapolis. I had started for HotPress in springof 1993 and my first piece was a review of American Music Club’s Mercury. I had everything by them by then. They were the band I’d gotten deepest into, and maybe still are. In September, I persuaded two friends, Brian and Paul, to acccompany me on a Greyhound trip across America so that I could buy the new AMC album, called San Francisco, in San Francisco, their home city. It made sense to me, as pilgrimages can. (I told Kristin Hersh about this recently and she said “That doesn’t make ANY sense, but it’s still wicked cool”, which I accepted.) I first asked a record megastore store assistant who had no idea who I was asking for (“you’re looking for American music?” ). But we tracked it down in a Rollercoaster-type emporium. I taped it in a house acrosss the Golden Gate Bridge, and I winged my review on a three-day, non-stop, cumulatively pungent journey back to Baltimore. I think the cross-continent trips—Baltimore to New Orleans, Memphis, Beale St, Sun Studios, Graceland and the Grand Canyon, on to San Franciscoandback—may deserve their own post but as of now I just found this on the HP archive and hadn’t read it in nearly thirty years. I’m surprised by some of it like the multiple opening question marks and the references to Mark Eitzel getting “laid”. I’m not thrilled about a reference to vicarious suicidal depression. I guess I was twenty and had *not a breeze*.Still. My 48-year old self, although head-shaking disdainfully at this jabbering, agrees that AMC had made, was continuing to make, “the most heartbreakingly gorgeous pop the world will ever know” and that the masterpiece and centrepiece was ‘What Holds The World Together’, which it still is. In September 94, a fine new writer in HP, Nick Kelly, had already reviewed the album before I got back and dumped my hand-written stained scrawl on the editorial desk. HP showed him my piece and said, Nick, you’re entitled to publish yours as we commissonedyou—but what do you think? With kindness that I would later learn is his core characteristic, Nick said: use Niall’s. He gets Eitzel more than I do and he seems to really care. I was so grateful. Closest of friends every since. He read Yes at my wedding.
AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB: “San Francisco” (Virgin)
Nobody me there’d be days like these. Jacko and Lisa-Marie? OJ?? Waco, Switzerland??? A good-humoured record from American Music Club???? Strange days indeed.
San Francisco is AMC’s day in the sun. And the sun has got his hat on. It is the most joyful record so far to spring from their ten-year mission to create the most heartbreakingly gorgeous pop the world will ever know, so, don’t search too strenuously for stereotypical sorrow. If it’s not gaping at you, it’s not there.
San Francisco is different, almost revolutionary, simply because the love songs here are written by a Mark Eitzel who is at long last loved (or, if you prefer, at long last laid), unlike all his other records, which were, it seems to me, written by someone who loved desperately, constantly and always, always unrequitedly.
‘Fearless’ sets the tone. The finest redemption song since Marley’s, it starts with Mark wheezing (in a distinctly un-fearless manner). “Lost again, am I lost again?” and ends with his coming to the happy conclusion that he is, in fact, “Saved again…”, at which point everyone who worried for his mental health circa Mercury clinks cocktail glasses in congratulations, and cheesy grins abound.
Me, Eitzel, Nick Kelly, and the late George Byrne. Post-gig, Whelan’s, 1997. Pic by Lorraine Freeney.
Real giddiness doesn’t set in, though, until ‘Can You Help Me?’ Here Eitzel sounds positively carefree as he informs a lover that “my old friend rigor mortis starts to breathe in my face,” but that if the lover in question helps him (i.e. lays him), which it sounds like she will, then “… We’ll turn our backs on what the world has in store/And we’ll twist the light so that it always shines down on us/And wait together for the touch of something more.”
It’s the sound of a human being being rejuvenated, and it is quite enrapturing, as is the playful ‘How Many Six Packs Does It Take To Screw In A Light’, and the masterpiece and centrepiece ‘What Holds The World Together’, which I won’t even attempt to describe, except to say that when its gently fluttering intro arrives, two butterflies tie knots in my stomach.
Clearly, all this unprecedented good cheer makes San Francisco nigh-on impossible to mope successfully to, but that’s OK. Mark Eitzel has publicly flayed himself often enough already, and if we ever need some vicarious suicidal depression (not that that’s something you actually need, in the strictest sense of the word, too often), we’ll always have California (buy it, please).
Sadness and some bitter narcissism does raise up its weary head, though, in what turn out to be the least accomplished songs of this bunch. The guitar atmospherics of ‘The Revolving Door’ (“ … I’m stuck in it, my love …”) remind me too much of The Police’s chillingly awful 1986 Big Music version of ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ to allow me to enjoy properly one of Eitzel’s most yearning vocals. Also, ‘I’ll Be Gone’ (one of a piffling two songs about death on the album, versus Mercury’s thirteen) is a little bombastic. Damning or what?
These two failings take away considerably from San Francisco, as they are maybe the only two AMC songs since the debut The Restless Stranger that you could conceivably want to ever skip over. Which, I suppose, makes this their least accomplished record since the debut, or before. Needless to say, the ten triumphs make it album of the year, or so near as to make sweet sod all difference. Nothing compares.
