I reviewed this album in State in March 2013 and it was not quite the end of The Strokes as I thought it might be. They have had a grand total of one album since. The piece disappeared from the internet with the rest of State in 2018 but like everything else I wrote for State, it’s on Gmail. I only thought of it because I published something about Will Oldham’s ‘I Am A Cinematographer‘ and his entire filmic approach to writing this week. Chatting online afterwards with a musician, film-maker, photographer and Oldham devotee called Alec Bowman-Clarke, I remembered what Will had said in this book about the constant pressing need as an artist to change collaborative partners all the time. If not: dead shark. I quoted him here in 2013 when that sounded just so true. Finally I remember that someone commented on this review on the State website and said—nice piece but terrible closing line. The line I used for the headline here. Oh well. I liked it. As Will might say.
The Strokes: Comedown Machine (RCA).
What do The Strokes think they still have to give, a decade down the road? Why are they still here? It’s not a facetious question; I’m curious. A broader question: what can we expect, or what do we ask, from bands that stick together for so long? There’s no more than a handful that have done so without turning into faintly embarrassing pasticheurs of their early selves. R.E.M. managed it, barely; The Beasties, boisterously; Radiohead, onerously; and Bankrupt will tell how Phoenix are doing. There’s no longevity formula, but these are partnerships that grew and evolved and inspired affection as well as infatuation.
The Strokes, too arch and unengaged, too perfectly formed to be vulnerable enough to be loveable, were different. You didn’t expect emotional engagement from them; they never did stray accidentally into the transcendent. An insistent bass, a jagged twisting guitar line, a scowling vocal and enough energy to power the Aviva for a year and a half: that’s all you’d ask. Ultimately, with The Strokes, it always came down to something as intangible, as unmeasurable, as irresistibility.
After the debacle of Angles—an album as jaded as a sloth on benzodiazepines after a week of nights—Comedown Machine kicks off almost irresistibly. In ‘Tap Out’, a Gallic 80s guitar line underpins a double-tracked, octaves-apart Casablancas vocal, and head-nodding is non-negotiable. Then, ‘All The Time’ bursts in urgently, demanding attention like an out-take from Is This It, let down only by some tediously disastrous lyrics: “You never ask why / You never ask why / You’re living a lie / Baby you’re flying too high”. You don’t want to be too precious, and it’s not like anyone ever asked the question “Julian Casablancas, tell us how to live”, but there are limits. Great tune, though.
Unfortunately, ‘One Way Trigger’ follows, presaging a problem that lies at the heart of Comedown Machine. With a garish, fibrillating, borderline ugly synth riff and stretched falsetto, ‘One Way Trigger’ sounds so forced as to make for uncomfortable listening. I have caught myself wincing when it comes on [Dec 2022 note: still wincing – NC]. It’s the sound a band makes when it doesn’t know what to sound like any more.
The problem is that The Strokes in 2013 don’t have enough unified personality or artistic awareness to keep it going. They either sound like their old selves, but less so (‘All The Time’, ’50/50′, ‘Happy Endings’) or they try too hard to be different, with awkward results (‘Partners In Crime’, ‘One Way Trigger’, ‘Call It Fate, Call It Karma’). ‘Welcome To Japan’ has its moments, but is unattractively pleased with itself, repeating too many times a couplet Casablancas clearly expects to be quotable: “I didn’t really know this / What kind of asshole drives a Lotus”. The line is fine: but shouldn’t every couplet be quotable, when you’re playing at this level?
Magnifying the personality problem, Comedown Machine‘s most successful songs are those on which The Strokes sound literally like a different band. ‘Tap Out’ and ‘Slow Animals’ are both patently purloined from Phoenix, tapping into Laurent Brancowitz’s percussive melodic nous, while ’80s Comedown Machine’, which channels Grandaddy, is moving, amidst repetitive arpeggios, in its rank resignation. ‘Chances’, which I can’t hear without thinking of The Killers, doesn’t work quite as well.
In a book-length interview called Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Will Oldham speaks about bands that stay together a long time in a way that struck me as wise. He said “If you’re always playing music with somebody and spending all your time with them, then they’re not going to surprise you, they’re not going to teach you anything, and you’re not going to teach them anything”. I read that book the week I got this album, and I thought: ten years in, these guys need a really, really good reason to stay together. Playing Comedown Machine, I thought: this patchy, wan set of songs is not that reason.
‘Welcome to Japan’ is all very well, but it could be Sayonara to The Strokes.
I came across Palace Brothers early on, in my life and theirs, in October 1993 when I was nineteen and ‘Ohio River Boat Song’ and There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You were Will Oldham’s calling cards. Soon, Oldham’s calling cards would be Palace Music’s ‘New Partner’, from Viva Last Blues, which Glen Hansard covered, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s ‘I See A Darkness’, which Johnny Cash covered on American III: Solitary Man, the same album where Cash recorded Nick Cave’s ‘The Mercy Seat’ and U2’s ‘One’.
Of course Will Oldham wouldn’t have been too over-awed by this. He was not into awe. A vivid memory of seeing Will Oldham live is when he was lying asleep on the stage he was sharing with Nick Cave at Liss Ard in West Cork. It was 1999 and Cave’s current release was still the reveredThe Boatman’s Call. Cave said he didn’t believe in an interventionist God but then many thought on foot of ‘Into My Arms’ and ‘(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For’ that Cave was himself a god. Sleeping Will seemed not to think so. In fairness, by 1999 Oldham had released ‘I See A Darkness’, the song that Johnny Cash would cover, so he and Nick Cave were songwriting peers. Nick didn’t mind. He’d been in The Birthday Party. He’d been there.
In October 1993 there was a Melody Maker review of There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You and I was riveted to Melody Maker at the time. I don’t remember the review well but I remember finding the language of the album title attractive and mysterious. There is no-one“what” will take care of you. Not “who”. So I popped in to a Palace show that happened to be on that night, 24/10/93, in the Baggot Inn. It was a Sunday. Happy days living in the suburbs of Dublin, a bus and short walk from all kinds of spontaneous excitement.
This turned into one of the most transformative musical moments of my life. There are just a few moments when you have years of retrospect to draw on that seem like important branches in your musical tree. Like side one of American Music Club’s Everclear and Pixies’ Doolittle, side two of R.E.M.’s Green and AMC’s California, then much later IBM 1401 by Jóhann Jóhannsson. Where you realise: oh this can be done. In this case it was the scope of what a songwriter can sing about, how broken a voice can be, and how much you do or don’t have to trust the veracity of the voice you are listening to. Truth comes in different guises.
In Autumn 1993, arriving at the Baggot, I had never seen a picture of Will and his appearance shocked me. He stood on stage so thin and frail, almost invisible if he turned to the side. He was wearing jeans that had a belt and still slipped down his legs. His voice was not like one I had heard. It was hoarse and rickety and vulnerable with a tone both harsh and help-seeking. I think a lot of people in The Baggot were encountering Will for the first time. I remember surprise and sympathy—an “Awwwww!”—that rippled across the room when he sang, in ‘I Had A Good Mother And Father’, “I just thank God he’s able / For to give me so many good friends”.
The band around him was surging like The Bad Seeds. When he sang ‘Ohio River Boat Song’, his wavering vocal was at the centre but the surrounding sine wave of sound carried you up and down as a roaring river would. I didn’t at the time recognise David Pajo, the lead guitar player, who was directing that swelling sound, and who was in Slint, the cover photo of whose Spiderland it turned out Will Oldham had taken. I would get to know him when I met Will and David the following day at a free lunchtime gig in the UCD bar. I bought them pints. In 1993 I was in medical school, based on Earlsfort Terrace rather than Belfield where the bar is, but I was choosing gigs over lectures as I always would.
‘I Am A Cinematographer’ is the song that ends Palace Brothers’ second album Days In The Wake. This came out, then called Palace Brothers, in August 1994, less than a year after There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You and in the same year as a cluster of summer EPs containing the songs ‘Gulf Shores’ ,’Trudy Dies’, ‘Stable Will’, and ‘Mountain’. Within another year, he would release Viva Last Blues. Oldham was prodigious.
‘I Am A Cinematographer’ sets out Oldham’s stall as a writer of huge breadth and depth painting on a canvas as wide as the oxbowing Ohio River that flows through his home town of Louisville. Oldham documents his departure from Louisville in this song but he refuses to allow the songs to be only about himself in real life. He refuses to be like Morrissey who was only interested in songs that were about himself (“Hang the DJ / Because the music that they constantly play / It says nothing to me about my life”).
Oldham demonstrated early in his Palace career that he was interested in the stories of others more than in his own. He wrote unafraid fiction. The songs were about whatever was in front of his eyes or in the recesses of his mind, acted by protagonists like in plays. This was big news for me in 1994 because I assumed singers were telling their own stories and wanting us to like them. But that is limiting and you need to have people taking chances and sounding like dangerous or uncouth people in their songs. I didn’t know this about Oldham on There Is No-One and it just dawned on me over time.
Oldham’s songs have always been narrated by himself and by reliable and unreliable narrators like Gogol stories. As have many but not all Smog songs. I don’t think there is an Oldham equivalent of Smog’s tender 1999 diary entry ‘Teenage Spaceship’, for instance. ‘Mountain’, released in summer 1994, just before Days in the Wake, has its lead character fuck a mountain (“And I’d do it with a woman in the valley”).
On Viva Last Blues‘ brave but barbaric ‘Tonight’s Decision (And Hereafter)’, the narrator says “I have heard death cry, I have heard him falter / I have heard him lie and escape unscathed / When he comes for me I will fuck him, oh / I will waste him in my own way”. 1996’s ‘Disorder’ has a protagonist say about “Lisa or Laura/ (I know not her real name)”, that he sees in her “a reason to live / Which was past just a symbol of woman and luck / That I will never be lacking for something to fuck”. I remember reviewing this and expressing astonishment at the use of the word something. These characters are not Will Oldham being kind. They are whomever the cinematographer from Days In The Wake points the camera at. So there is this enormous liberation in this very early declaration of how Palace intends to proceed.
Oldham opens the concluding song on Days In The Wake with “I am a cinematographer”, and continues that he “walked away from New York City / And I walked away from everything that’s good”. He walked away from California too. He left these places where things might be comfortable because he wanted to see what he could find out there, like a 50s beat poet refusing to yawn or say a commonplace thing, and to convey this to people who would listen to his stories of rage and failure as well as tender love. There is third-person pain and copious sin here as there is in other oeuvres so Oldham creates a new body of work while attending to old ones. In 1988 Nick Cave died deservedly in a mercy seat. In 1968 Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. As Palace and beyond, Will Oldham’s words witness and recount all sorts of brutal inhuman inexcusable things. Yet on Days In The Wake he also sings, pleadingly, gingerly, in a persuasive first person: “I send my love to you / I send my hands to you / I send my clothes to you / I send my nose to you / I send my trees to you / I send my pleas to you / Won’t you send some back to me?” Cinematographers contain multitudes.
Throughout six weeks in October and November, I was commuting with my wife Sharon from our home to Beaumont Hospital for treatment with radiotherapy delivered by some of the most expert, kindest, most apologetic radiotherapists one can imagine. They were apologetic because of the four radiotherapy machines in use in St Luke’s in Beaumont, one kept breaking down daily. The radiotherapists were front of house when calling in someone like me who had been waiting an hour or two longer than expected.
I explained that as a 25-year clinician with overbooked clinics my entire career, 70% of my St James’s and Inchicore outpatient appointments begin with me saying I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. I said listen: for one thing the music here in the waiting room is good as it is RTÉ Gold. I heard Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’ the day after I went to see him in the 3 Arena and I wanted to tell the whole waiting room. When the staff said sorry, I said apology accepted but I thought no more apologies more suitable. I won’t name the staff but I will always remember them and I did name them in the thank you card I dropped in on November 17th, when I finished radiotherapy. That was seven days after I saw Pavement in Vicar St for the first time since they broke up in the 1990s. I wore a Pavement t-shirt to therapy the final day for protection.
I am a scientist, as Guided By Voices would have it, or at least some sort of scientist. I did medicine and I moved to clinical research with clinical practice and I published papers using data that required statistical analysis. I am medically trained, with an MB BCh BAO that had its Silver Jubilee in April, and I understood the science of the radiotherapy offered by Beaumont. I am not sure how much I would rely on myself to deliver a baby based on a 1997 Bachelor of the Art of Obstetrics, being a 1974 breech baby myself, but the degree letters are legal after my name. “Is there a doctor on the plane?” is a question one does not love hearing decades out of acute medicine and surgery but I once tweezed an earplug out of an external auditory canal on a plane back from Lanzarote and I have never received such an adoring look from another man.
So ‘Gold Soundz’ became the title of this series of essays at the show in Vicar St and unexpectedly came up for its own essay really soon. Last week I shuffled and was taken aback by the track the shuffle chose. There are more than five hundred songs on the Goosebumps list. I have been twice surprised now by the closeness between me and a song that comes up quickly and randomly, but then, maybe, don’t define a playlist by its somatic impact—its bypassing of the brain to hit home.
‘Gold Soundz’ has tracked me through my adult life like other Pavement songs, mostly on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain if I am honest. I know that hardcore Pavement fans reach for Wowee Zowee or Slanted and Enchanted and I’m like that with bands or artists I feel particularly possessive of, like American Music Club, whose Engine is unsurpassed, contrary to popular opinion. Increasingly, I’ve come to consider that Crooked Rain is perfect and it is partly perfect because of the apparent imperfections and inconsistencies. Albums need bumps and diversions and digressions. If one starts an album pristinely and continues it that way then it fades as you go on. Songs for Drella needs the bitter rage of ‘I Believe’ and the confusing mess of ‘A Dream’ to allow the listener to adjust and prepare for the tearduct target archery of ‘Hello It’s Me’.
So on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain we have perfect openers and so much variation in dynamics. We have the abstract pause of ‘Newark Wilder’, the clamour of ‘Unfair’, and the Fall caterwauling of ‘Hit The Plane Down’, so we are not just hearing perfect slacker pop. Then off we go again: the bewitching wishing of ‘Fillmore Jive’. I carried a bleep in multiple hospitals from summer 1997 to winter 2002, between being a urology surgical intern in Louth to a post-Membership psychiatry trainee in Tallaght. In 1999, in Portiuncula in Ballinasloe, I was a medical SHO and while on call I was the most senior immediately available doctor to look after you if you came from east Galway or Athlone with cardiac collapse. This was crazy. I could not sleep. What if someone arrives in from Loughrea and I fail? To my bleep, and career choice, and to hospital switch, so many times I pleaded, in Stephen Malkmus’ voice: “I need to sleep / Why won’t you let me sleep?” This was an era of 120 hour weeks and 60 hour calls. ‘Fillmore Jive’ could not help.
‘Gold Soundz’ was on this list because of my early connection to the song and album and because of how much I related to the lyrics way back when. In 1994, turning twenty, I felt like the lead character in this song felt about himself: “So drunk in the August sun / And you’re the kind of girl I like / Because you’re empty, and I’m empty / And you can never quarantine the past”. Maybe their finest verse and the source of the title of their Best Of, but in summer 1994 I was in America and feeling empty too. As one would hear in American Music Club, Palace Brothers, Kristin Hersh, Blood on The Tracks, and The Magnetic Fields’ ‘Born on a Train’, which no-one in Europe yet knew. The Divine Comedy’s Promenade and A House’s Wide Eyed and Ignorant were off-setting this loneliness although A House’s ‘The Comedy Is Over’ was wincingly truth-telling: “On the days I made you laugh / I thought I was halfways there / Now it seems that halfways is nowhere.” Ouch.
I was using music that resonated and I was using, as I always have and still do, sound as a source of emotional fullness. It helped to know that one could feel empty and not be alone in this. Smog, over the years, were particularly helpful here. In 1994 and 1995, Bill Callahan’s songs on Julius Caesar and Wild Love were about nothing but frozen isolation and by 1997’s Red Apple Falls they had warmed so much, in ‘The Morning Paper’ and ‘To Be Of Use’, that you knew change could come. In ‘Gold Soundz’, you had this loneliness but you also had shrugging optimistic lightness. You had Stephen Malkmus rhyming remember with December. Hey—he is a fun ragged poet! He does not care too much what people think. Once I heard him sing “So drunk in the October sun” live and I always enjoy when singers play with songs. Playfulness brings joy. I was a soupçon of disappointed when Malkmus decided not to sing “So drunk in the November sun” three weeks ago.
I didn’t know if I could go to Pavement on November 10th. I was over a month on radiotherapy and by then you are feeling things. The side effects were fine but they would preclude one from going to a show and standing for two hours. Any shows I’ve been to since becoming unwell in August have been seated—Christian Löffler and Grandbrothers, Julia Jacklin, Bob Dylan, and Pavement. Pavement was planned months ago, long before any of this, and I thought I was not too pushed about seeing them. But at half one on the morning of the show, Foggy Notions’ Leagues O’Toole direct messaged me to say there would be a seated ticket for me waiting in the box office and I realised I was delighted and craving this music.
I did not know whether I would buy a Pavement t-shirt. Since Beaumont began, I wore a t-shirt every day usually under an Autumn sweater (thank you Yo La Tengo). Each shirt was a band or singer. Radiation was not being directed at my chest or abdomen and so I wore t-shirts as if they were armour or the musicians were talismen. This meant I would only wear a t-shirt of someone who I thought had the resolve and robustness to keep me still and safe so the treatment would help not harm. Sharon bought me two Iggy pop t-shirts on these grounds, one of which reads “I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.” I told my old friend and boss, author of 250 scientific papers, about this and he said: If Iggy Pop doesn’t protect you, who will?
Additionally, I wore shirts from A Lazarus Soul, Julia Jacklin, Nick Drake, Bob Dylan, Guided By Voices, Rival Consoles, The Wormholes, and A House. Technically the last one there was AHOUSEISDEAD but that is about rebirth not death so no problem. I did not wear my B.C. Camplight shirt bought in 2020 because as much as I love him and Shortly After Takeoff, he has a song called ‘Cemetery Lifestyle’ and his t-shirt depicting ‘Born To Cruise’ has a skeleton driving a van. So this seemed like asking for trouble. My Pixies t-shirt from the 1991 Point Depot show I saw the day I finished the Leaving Cert did not get an airing either. I thought the radiotherapy staff might wonder if I was OK if they saw 1991 on my long-faded clothes.
I didn’t think I would want a Pavement t-shirt because I had this memory of them as Stockton slackers: lazy and likely stoned and not too concerned: “I could really give a fuck”. I thought harm would not be magically prevented by their presence. Then I saw the show and they were as fierce and fiery as lava. Bob Nastanovich bobbed and roared his lungs to within an inch of their and our lives. Spiral Stairs sprang, strummed and smiled. When I came home I opined that the exchange of love, energy, and joy between the band and audience was unparalleled and I maintain that. Stephen Malkmus stood mostly smiling to the side of the stage rather than act as an oligarch and the whole band swept us away. As the show came to an end I realised I needed to hold on to this energy in the remaining days of treatments. I ran down during the penultimate song of the encore and picked up a t-shirt that I knew would help to keep me well. I wore it the next day. The therapists smiled and understood. They know you can never quarantine the past.
‘Apology Accepted’, the final song on The Go-Betweens’ fourth album, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, has one of my favourite opening couplets. The late Grant McLennan opens ‘Apology Accepted’ with “I used to say dumb things / I guess I still do”. This couplet is one I recall every time I say something dumb, which is every day.
I think a lot about how song lyrics are often there to teach us—to remind us to do better and sometimes signpost how. Arguably ethically demanding, but in a good way. I’ve found this couplet to be slightly opposite, unless teaching oneself to go easier on oneself counts. I find these as self-compassionate a couple of lines as you will find in a song, outside of The Walker Brothers’ ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’. Maybe not: McLennan beats himself up in the rest of the song, and the further I got into this essay, the more I twigged he was maybe right to do so. But there is no law against being selective in what you take from texts.
I was going to be alliterative and authoritative in the opening paragraph and say that ‘Apology Accepted’ is the final and finest song on Liberty Belle, but I don’t know that it is. There are no songs better than it anywhere but this is a genius album. I clicked with Liberty Belle in 1995, nine years after its release. I had encountered The Go-Betweens first in Hot Press and then in the RDS on 24th June 1989, when I was fifteen and they supported R.E.M. It was their final tour as a full band, supporting their final album 16 Lovers Lane before a couple of kinda reformations in the 1990s and 2000s. When I say kinda, Forster and McLennan reunited and called themselves The Go-Betweens. Lindy Morrison did not get back in. I suggest read the book about Lindy Morrison called My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend by Tracey Thorn and decide whether the two lads alone were the band. (They weren’t.)
The Go-Betweens broke up just after I saw them and I was kept busy with bands that were still going. So my attention was not drawn to Liberty Belle until a magisterial revisiting of the album by Melody Maker journalist Andrew Mueller. Andrew wrote about Liberty Belle in a booklet called Unknown Pleasures: Great Lost Albums Rediscovered that accompanied the March 4th, 1995 issue of MM. I still have that booklet on my bedroom bookshelf. It’s a bit of a sacred text. It is where I learned properly about Dexys’ Don’t Stand Me Down too, from Chris Roberts in that case. I think I might have have mentioned that album before.
If this song is not unambiguously the finest Go-Betweens song, why choose it? I didn’t choose it, just to be clear. Chance chose it. It meets criteria for this essay in that it is on a Tidal playlist of songs that give me goosebumps or, at least, spine tingles. This column was almost called Shivers Up My Spine after the A House I Want Too Much song but then I went to Pavement in Vicar St. My wife Sharon chose this song by shuffling Goosebumps last Friday and seeing what played first. Shuffle played ‘Apology Accepted’ and I thought: Oh God. How do I write about that? There are oceans in it. The hundreds of times I’ve heard it, the incessant singing along. The friendships and relationships it’s woven into. The vast number of my mistakes that it has soundtracked.
That said, there are five Liberty Belle songs on the Goosebumps playlist. Robert Forster’s ‘Spring Rain’ opens Liberty Belle and ‘Spring Rain’ is the song I had to bring on tape when I picked up a secondhand red Opel Corsa on 24th June 1999. This was ten years to the day since the RDS show and that timing was honestly not on purpose. However, it was my first car, and I needed ‘Spring Rain’ on the stereo so I could leave the Deansgrange dealership while “Driving my first car / My elbows in the breeze”. I’ll always be grateful to Forster for saving me thousands of euros due to his disdain for motoring. “These people are excited by their cars”, he critiqued, contagiously, teaching me not to care what I drove except when electric cars came along. “I want surprises / Just like spring rain”, he continued, and I agreed. Spring rain is less surprising in Ballinteer than in Brisbane, but still.
The question for any Gold Soundz song is: why does a song give goosebumps? Can you ever really know? You can try to know. Why is ‘Apology Accepted’ on such a list? Should it be?
Well, it’s a raw, intimate, precarious song. A man who has a penchant for carousing alongside melancholy sings abrasively and abradedly about pain, shame, and failure. Early in the song, without laying out the relationship between the singer and the person being sung to, he sings, “More used to naked men / You said leave the light on / Don’t be frightened / I don’t know how long / I can wait to see / If my apology’s accepted”. As listener you are left wondering: who is “You”? We don’t know. We don’t find out what he did. We assume he said something thick and irritable. We all do that then grimace and wish we hadn’t. That’s right, isn’t it? (Wrote the essayist anxiously.)
McLennan continues, “Too proud to hang my head / In shame beside your bed / But sometimes you want something / So bad, you’ll grab anything / You said that’s ridiculous / There’s only one thing that precious / I don’t know how long / I can wait to see / If my apology’s accepted”. While revisiting ‘Apology Accepted’ since the weekend, I’ve also been going through a Sign O’ The Times phase and all I think of is how opposite this song is to Prince’s ‘Slow Love’. The protagonist in ‘Apology Accepted’ would love to be the lead in Prince’s song: “The man in the moon is smiling / For he knows what I’m dreaming of / Tonight is the night for making slow love”. McLennan’s character kicked off the night with that in mind, then fucked it up, somehow, failing sexually with a woman much more experienced than him. He then flailed at her, hurt her, and wants forgiveness. Is that it?
The song concludes with an ambiguous verse. I must say I have noticed this now, during the November Tuesday morning hours of this essay, more than before. McLennan sings with high expressed emotion, with Lindy Morrison’s drumbeat steadying him and guest vocalist Tracey Thorn empathically harmonising, “Time and time again / Your soft eyes close in trust above me / Such a simple question, I pretended I was sleeping / I didn’t know anything but you I’m keeping / I don’t know how long I can wait to see / If my apology’s accepted”.
We don’t know the simple question. We don’t need to know. We know that he can’t answer the question. We know that he wants his apology to be accepted yet he can’t quite act as a wise person probably would. Like, roll over. Turn around. Turn the light on. Talk. Know that shame is permanent if you act like it doesn’t exist.
I like that I don’t know the details of what happened and that you don’t need to know the details having heard ‘Apology Accepted’ hundreds of times for it to continue to give you goosebumps. The goosebumps have changed a little in texture. Today the song feels darker, more isolated. As a listener I now place less emphasis on the appropriateness of reconcilation and I have less interest in the protagonist being forgiven. I’m separating out the dumb things said from the frustrating avoidance through pretending to be asleep. There is conflict here and it needs courageous resolution not just passive attenuation with pretence and the passage of time. The protagonist does feel pain but he did it to himself (oh god there’s Radiohead now). He is shocked by his own behaviour. He is desperate for readmission to the relationship but there is no sign that he can do what he needs to do. It’s up to her. He is angry, wrongly. I have to say that thinking about this right now, hundreds of listens later, I picture his lover looking at him, turned away, faking sleep, and going: he’s wide awake. He won’t talk. I’m sick of this. I’m leaving.
So here’s my drum-roll take, thirty-six years on: the apology is not accepted.
This is as much of a surprise to me as Spring Brisbane rain was to Robert Forster. I always took the title of this song as a statement, interchangeable with ‘Apology Is Accepted’. Well—no. If it was, Grant McLennan would have called the song that. It does not say that anywhere in the words. Neither the arrangement nor McLennan’s vocal delivery say it either. The song is a cliff-hanger. The final couplet is “I gotta know / Is my apology accepted?” Today, at least, it seemed like the answer is no. The protagonist has to know that his apology, whatever exactly that was, was accepted, because he demands, righteously, that it is. He made a mess of things and he needs to be told that he behaved OK, but he didn’t. He has sexual and emotional needs and he can’t meet them and neither can his lover. He gotta know about the apology for ego reasons, not for mutual relationship reasons. Not so that his tender, sombre lover can work on repairing their relationship through helping him to change, to man up in ways that are vulnerable and mature. That final couplet is not as forgiving as I have always found the opening couplet.
In November 1991, I read a review for A House’s I Am The Greatest that was written by Lorraine Freeney for Hot Press. I had been reading her for a year or so. I had just started college and I didn’t know Lorraine but I loved her writing and highly valued her opinion. I started in Hot Press too in 1993. We have been close friends since then and I still do both of those. Lorraine gave I Am The Greatest a double six on the HotPress dice and she wrote that ‘When I First Saw You’, track seven, the song that segues into ‘I Am Afraid’, had a haunting quality with “sustained, ominous baroque chords crowned with gut-wrenching vocals”. That sentence stuck the album on my Santy list. I played the album, those two songs more than most, to death. I have played. Not past tense.
One thing that intrigues me is how songs evolve and grow with you. Well, they don’t all have to. You partner a song and then you can move and grow together or you can go your own ways.
Some songs are critical to life decisions at one point and then they are released just to be great sounds again. That was Dexys’ Midnight Runners’ ‘This Is What She’s Like’, from Don’t Stand Me Down, for me. Kevin Rowland assured me indubitably, through whooping, when I had not met and then when I had met the woman I needed to spend my life with. I broke up with someone great in 2000 when I first heard ‘This Is What She’s Like’, because the ecstatic adoration in the song just did not resonate with our relationship. I did not want to waste the time of the person I was with. I played ‘This Is What She’s Like’ when I met Sharon in summer 2001 and it said Bingo. I no longer needed the song as a guide. Long ago I put it out to pasture, no more workhorse blues, but I still stroke its nose every so often and say Christ, thanks Kevin.
At the start of my relationship with I Am The Greatest, I paid less attention to ‘I Am Afraid’ than I did to ‘When I First Saw You’, because paying attention to ‘When I First Saw You’ was not volitional. When the song finished, it didn’t. There was post-vocal reverb but that was not all. On ending, ‘When I First Saw You’ grabbed me and shook me by the lapels of the James Dean red jacket I was trying to look cool in. It mussed my quiff.
I was seventeen then eighteen in 1991-92. I arrived blinking and hoping to college from a lonely few years in a boys’ school. In UCD, I was frequently, incompetently, in love. I understood when Dave Couse sang “I was in awe of you / I needed to have you / God you’re beautiful, you really are / God I need you now, I need you now”, but I had no clue how you would go about meeting those needs. Not for ten more years.
I play this song now and I am still blown away by it in a way that is as literal as it is figurative. I am not synaesthetic but Dave Couse’s vocal sounds as a force nine gale would feel. I have to breathe deeply to assume the impact safely. The song clears my sinuses. Couse’s voice pierces through my heart space to my spine and I shiver. Some of this must be bad memories. I don’t miss that early longing. But it’s gratitude too. Thank you for letting me know I am not alone. Thank you for keeping me going.
‘I Am Afraid’ stood out on I Am The Greatest for me in 1991 because, well, for one thing, I could play it on the acoustic. I could strum with confidence and I could fumble along to Fergal Bunbury’s limber, empathetic lead line. Also, I heard the words. While I didn’t need these words as much back then as I needed ‘When I First Saw You’, we have stuck together. No retirement for them.
On ‘I Am Afraid’, Dave Couse, who is ten years older than me, sang explicitly about his fears and he declared that he was not brave. Well, technically, he said, “It’s not that I’m not brave / It’s just that I’m not brave enough for you”. If at seventeen you hear singing about twenty-something interpersonal problems, you might reasonably be pining for personal problems that attenuate your isolation, and you might disagree that they are to be feared. Couse sang “I am afraid to drink too much, because of what I might do”, so my GABA, my amygdala and I conferred and replied together: We are afraid not to drink too much, because of what we might not do. This remained true for—ten years maybe. Who’s counting?
‘I Am Afraid’ opened with “I am afraid of the dark”, and I was not. I liked dim light because that way you could shun and be shunned while walking around Ballinteer or town, without making a big deal of it. Headphones and the Discman that Blonde on Blonde inhabited helped. My stomach churned if I had to bump into someone I was uncomfortable in meeting. I was, as such, afraid of the day, as the second half of the first line said. Couse did this a lot. Not afraid of this? How about its opposite? Ha! Gotcha.
I don’t recall now being then perturbed by many of the next listed fears: “I am afraid to be unloved, I am afraid to be forsaken / I am afraid of doing wrong and to be never be forgiven / I am afraid that you will find I’m not the man you think I am / I am afraid to be on my own and of the unknown”. I was afraid to be on my own but I was used to it. I was not afraid that people would find I’m not the man I think I am because I was not a man. Who was I? No clue.
In ‘I Am Afraid’ an unmissable moment was when the music stopped and Dave Couse, a cappella, revealed “Ever since I was a small child / I cannot sleep at night / Without the light on”. I mostly mentally skipped this one. Even my ten-year-old brother slept in the dark. Then Couse stood on stage including at A House’s final show in 1997 and stretched out his arms like on Calvary, disarming himself while crying this out, and I didn’t properly appreciate even that act until recently. I am not brave enough for two, he said, but I am brave enough to be beamed at by bright lights before you to tell you that I suffer and lack courage so that I can help you sense, admit, and remedy your own fear and pain.
There are fears in ‘I Am Afraid’ that emerge as the song and seasons draws in, that don’t shrink. My core fear for years is “I am afraid that you will find I’m not the man you think I am”. One has to get to know yourself to validate this fear, which matures like vintage wine. Live through Sinatra’s ‘It Was A Very Good Year’ and arriving in UCD is the first verse while draining vintage wine is verse four, in the autumn of one’s years. As wine matures, taste improves but dregs pile up and crappy characteristics become visible. At seventeen, it’s hard to parse out flaws. At forty-eight, it’s easier.
‘I Am Afraid’ concludes with a verse in which Couse examines and elicits fear of two opposing things: “I am afraid of growing old / I am afraid to die, but it’s something I must do”. ‘I am Afraid’ can momentarily trick me into thinking that I am still afraid of growing old but I am not. I am afraid to die. I heard John Lennon last weekend singing “I can hardly wait to see you come of age” to his son Seán on 1980’s ‘Beautiful Boy’. John died at the end of that year, when Seán was five. Seán has always had Yoko Ono and he seems fine. Still, I have two such boys and a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful girl. I can hardly wait to see them come of age. I dreaded old age and now I crave it.
In Vicar St in December 2019, at the second AHOUSEISDEAD show, Eva Couse, daughter of Dave and star of his 2003 album Genes, sang ‘I Am Afraid’ as Dave accompanied on vocals and Gretsch, Fergal Bunbury played that graceful and resilient guitar line, and Eva’s friend and Fergal’s daughter Mairéad Bunbury drummed. They had done this together in June at the NCH too. I was there in June.
There are moments when Eva has to stop what she is doing because the crowd is singing to her and to her family and there is a moment towards the end where she elevates the pitch of her vocal by an octave because she is in front of her Dad, declaring on his, her, and all our behalves, “I am afraid to die / But it’s something I must do”. It is an act. And I know she and her family have experienced losses that were predicted and painted in song by Dave Couse and Fergal Bunbury and are rightly, always, to be feared. Then she and her dad and Fergal and Mairéad all hug each other as they close the song and you watch and you think, this, here, this is peak human life.
I first became aware of Low in 2000 when I heard Dinosaur Act. It was a bit late, I know, but I guess I was busy. I loved its stately, funereal tempo, the fuzzed up, almost glitchy, guitar, the extreme dynamics, the burning intensity and the soaring harmonies and I’ve listened to and loved them ever since.
Sometimes, with me, it’s an extra, random thing that makes me love a band. It could be a picture, some tiny detail in a recording or something I’ve heard about the artist.
With Low, it was a story I heard about when they were starting out, playing smaller venues, and if the crowd weren’t giving them their full attention they turned DOWN! Imagine. To a neanderthal guitar-thrasher like me this is REVOLUTIONARY. It never made me turn down but what a glorious and fuck-you idea.
Which reminded me of one of the reasons I love the Minutemen. Their double album masterpiece, Double Nickels on the Dime, was named as a reaction to a Sammy Hagar single called ‘I Can’t Drive 55’. It was the Minutemen saying: “Is that ALL you’ve got Sammy? That is your rebellion?” and the cover features D Boon driving a Volkswagen at exactly 55 miles per hour (Double Nickel) on Interstate 10 (the Dime) with a manic glint in his eye. We can drive at the speed limit but listen to this music! The interesting, cool person will not be wearing red leather trousers or playing a guitar cranked up to 11.
I read somewhere yesterday that someone had written to Low asking them to play ‘Murderer’ at a show he was attending. When they played it, he messaged them the next day saying he felt it was played for him and they replied that it was: “We read our requests”.
They also read minds.
I only saw Low twice. The first time was on the altar in Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin, lit by candles and a burning inner light. I had also hoped that they would play ‘Murderer’ and they did. The second time was at Vicar Street last April and for this one I hoped they would play ‘Sunflower’ and you know what? They did. Sweet Sweet Sweet Sweet Sunflowers. A beautiful evening, mostly showcasing HEY WHAT, their latest and now sadly last album. Probably their best.
In September, I was in hospital for the treatment of a condition that made itself evident to me only in late August. I am long out of hospital. I am having the best care and treatment anyone could have. I am recovering. Low’s ‘2-Step’, in particular the part sung by Mimi Parker, who I just learned died last night, November 5th, was critical to my recovery and to my knowing that I would recover. Her singing signalled to me that a potential devastating consequence of a new-onset illness, a consequence for which I was trying to but could not conceivably brace myself, was not going to happen. I am not a crier but in my single room, when she sang, I wept.
It’s hard to describe exactly what my core symptom was that required hospital admission, but it was musical. Of course it was.
Let me try.
What I experienced was something that you could call musical déjà vu. Déjà entendu? My B in Leaving Cert French is unsure. I found myself on three occasions in six days thinking that I was remembering a song that was just out of reach, but I was not. I would realise five minutes later that what I had glimpsed as a tune or a lyric was not one at all. This was odd and it taught me something that I hadn’t been consciously aware of, which is that my musical memory constantly reaches out to adhere itself to a song relevant to what’s happening.
It’s not just a memory function, either. It uses a lot of my cognitive power because it is at my core. My sense is that songs have been so important to me since I gave up religion in 1987 (the year of The Joshua Tree and just before Green) and that it is music that I worship. Music provides my commandments. Just—ten thousand commandments. What was unusual about these symptoms was that my mind was reaching out to adhere itself to a song that wasn’t a song. This is why I call it musical déjà vu. You know how you are sure that you’ve done this thing before, until minutes later you are sure that you have not. Same, but for songs.
It is easy to think of examples now that I know this happens. My cousin the other day asked that if I saw a woman we both know, I would say hello. Bob Dylan’s ‘If You Say Her Say Hello’, from Blood on the Tracks, arrived unbidden and unfortunately for my kids got stuck on Tidal in the kitchen with me hollering along. When I wrote “to my knowing” in the first paragraph, my mind started singing ‘The Not Knowing’, which closes the first Tindersticks album. In Naas this afternoon it bucketed down as we left the bookshop. At the time, I silently sang the riff to The Beatles’ ‘Rain’, but now, having mentioned Blood on the Tracks, I have to hear ‘Buckets of Rain’. I was reading through this piece with my wife Sharon when she used the term “anchor” to describe the role that a song has for me and not un-telepathically we both conjured Björk and we laughed.
So this seems all like good fun and sure, yes it is. But there’s more to it and there are so many songs that are deeply meaningful in a way that is hard to describe. There are songs that I have attached myself to, or they have attached themselves to me, or both.
Only after I first experienced this symptom did I notice how often I have written about songs teaching me how to live. In fact, dating my music-based decisions to 1987 is dating them too late. I wanted to be a priest when I was ten in 1984 but at eleven, under the influence of Live Aid, I decided to become a doctor. I titled a piece last year about The Weather Station Guiding Lightsand I wrote in a 2020 piece about BC Camplight the following: I still use songs like BC Camplight’s to remind me to try to be a better human and to continue to teach me how to do it. It’s crazy that I still rely on songs like this. I’m not far off fifty years old. I meet a lot of people and I’ve had a lot of experiences. I still need reminders?
I met my friend Dr Killian O’Rourke in hospital a couple of days after admission and we talked through this. We looked at simple things like ‘Open House’ from Songs for Drella. Killian and I wrote a paper together once and because I was first author we joked that I was Lou Reed and he was John Cale. I’m nothing like Andy Warhol—I don’t like Brillo that much, for instance—but I long since latched on to this ‘Open House’ lyric or it latched on to me: “It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me / Give people little presents so they remember me”. Anyone who’s had me bring or send something since 1990 owes The Velvets.
Then Killian and I talked about bitterness. I am incapable of bitterness. Now, I am an inordinately lucky person. Bitterness would be mostly comical. Still, at the time we were having this conversation I’d been landed in hospital with a near future of deep uncertainty and potential calamity. People including me were worried. But I couldn’t locate any bitterness. This is for two musical reasons. One is Mark Eitzel’s ‘Bitterness’, from The Invisible Man, and one is Prefab Sprout’s ‘Life of Surprises’, from Protest Songs.
In ‘Bitterness’, Eitzel sings “Bitterness poisons the soul”, and that’s it. In the context of American Music Club’s oeuvre and Eitzel’s solo output, this statement carries huge weight. The first song I ever heard by Mark Eitzel was ‘Why Won’t You Stay’, which opens 1991’s Everclear, a tender exhaling account of finding a friend who died by suicide, which is something I did ten years later. My friend owned vinyl Low albums that I inherited, including Secret Name, which I still have and which hosts ‘2-Step’. Eitzel’s songs are full of trauma and and he has never been sheltered. If he rules out bitterness as a response to life events, then that needs to be taken very seriously.
In ‘Life of Surprises’, Paddy McAloon and Wendy Smith sing some of the most important words I’ve ever heard, that embedded and embroidered themselves into me in a way that incalculably improved my life. This was a long time ago—’Life of Surprises’ is on a mixtape that I made for Sharon just after we met in 2001. There was one daunting morning in hospital that I woke early, humming “Just say that you were happy, as happy would allow / And tell yourself that that will have to do for now”. There is then the core couplet that matches Eitzel’s lyric: “Never say you’re bitter, Jack / Bitter makes the worst things come back”.
The reason it was necessary for me to write this down and talk it through with Killian, asking him to write it down too, was that I feared I was about to lose this musical anchoring. I wanted in a week or two’s time, if things had changed, to have written down a relationship with songs that I would work to reattain.
During the conversation with Killian, I logically concluded that songs like ‘Bitterness’ and ‘Life Of Surprises’ are musical lassos that spread out from me without me knowing I’m throwing them, that wrap themselves around touchstones or longstones, and ground and steady me when I need them to, which is always. I feared that due to illness or treatment my musical centre would be disconnected from my autobiographical centre, so those lassos would not work. All the grounding and guidance I’ve acquired over the guts of forty years of listening to songs by so many brilliant and beautiful and wise people would be gone. That I would not be able to distinguish between lyrics that meant something and lyrics that were nothing. I don’t know how possible is it to empathise fully with this but I imagine many music lovers can. Imagine all the lessons, the emotional range and stability learned from songs, evaporating. How lost can one person be?
So I avoided meaningful music for a few days after admission.
Then, a week later, there was a point when I had to see what had happened. Symptoms were better, treatment was in place, and I have a playlist called Goosebumps on Tidal that aims to include all of the most emotionally significant songs in my life. I started the playlist in July after my Mum died and it keeps growing, to just over four hundred songs now. I thought: well, the only way to know if songs still mean as much as they did in July is to put on this playlist. If I get no goosebumps, then things have changed. I stuck on headphones and as casually as I could—as casually as the rabbit in your headlights off Unkle’s Psyence Fiction—I hit the shuffle button. Randomness felt important.
My phone played six songs. It did not take six songs to know I was alright. It took one.
The songs came on in this order: ‘2-Step’ by Low, ‘This Woman’s Work’ by Kate Bush, ‘Quiet Heart’ by The Go-Betweens, ‘Like a Song’ by U2, ‘The Waltz’ by Dexys Midnight Runners, and Aphex Twin’s ‘aisatsana’. All these meant something but it It was Mimi Parker’s singing on ‘2-Step’ that told me I was OK and that my mind and heart were intact.
It’s hard to convey what an enormous gift this was from Mimi Parker to me.
In a way, in fact, it was my anticipation of her singing when Alan Sparhawk started singing that did it. Alan opens ‘2-Step’ in his also beautiful voice and his contribution here is foundational. It’s like he is the first to get his chisel to the marble, but Mimi makes the Pietà. So as the song came on, I heard, for the two hundredth time, Alan sing “And the light, it burns your skin / In a language you don’t understand / It’s not that hard / It is not that hard”. My eyes began to burn. I was moved. I was intensely moved. And I thought: wait, this is not the peak. It felt like a peak. But it was base camp.
Mimi joins Alan soon and then she takes the lead vocal such that the song’s summit is when she sings “2-Step / Around the room / Kneel down on white / 2-step around the room / Kneel down on white”. Her voice, its solidity and its intensity and its quivering, is just so enriching. Listening to Alan opening the song, I felt my heart already full, like my lassos reminded me Morrissey’s was in 1994, and I thought: wait—if Mimi’s singing moves me more than Alan’s does, and it always has, and if my heart is already overflowing, then, how does that work? Where does this emotion go?
The answer was, that is when weeping begins, and it soon did. It was not as gentle as that of George’s guitar and it lasted five songs, to the end of ‘The Waltz’, which is itself eight minutes long. ‘The Waltz’ is one that ties me to Sharon, having been second choice after ‘City Sickness’ for opening song at our wedding disco, so it was completely weep-worthy.
A half hour of weeping is deeply unfamiliar to me but it was not distressing. These were tears of relief and joy, then quiet calm. ‘aisatsana’ in effect held my hand and led me out of this emotional turbulence so I could rest. I stopped the phone at that point.
I don’t quite know how to end this from here.
I am so terribly sorry to hear that Mimi Parker has passed away, just months after I saw her play live the only time I ever did, in April in Dublin. I wish I had sent this message to her while she was alive. I hope that Alan Sparhawk gets to read it when he is ready. Sharon and I wish him our most heartfelt condolences and I hope that my gratitude to him and his wife is obvious and well-explained. Low have taught, contained, sustained, nourished and elevated me for my entire post-adolescent life. They will continue to do this forever as will so much more music and I know this because of Mimi’s voice as experienced in hospital in September 2022.
The words of Circuit Des Yeux’s song ‘Walking Toward Winter’ that are printed on the sleeve of their 2021 album, -io, are not quite the words that the band’s leader Haley Fohr sings. This is what moves me most about this song, and the bar is high. Other affecting elements of ‘Walking Toward Winter’ are the synthesizer, percussion, bass and strings arrangement, Fohr’s supple singing, the song’s printed lyrics, and its title. Did I miss anything?
‘Walking Toward Winter’ is a song that I don’t want to over-explain with a backstory, as if it has one literal narrative meaning. No song does because every song is a dialogue between singer and listener. There are a few interviews with Haley Fohr from the time -io came out that discuss losses that she had experienced that drove the creation of songs like ‘Walking Toward Winter’, ‘Stranger’, and ‘Neutron Star’. I avoided reading them because I don’t want my connection to a song to be influenced outside the bubble of the song itself.
Title-wise, walking towards winter is a courageous but dubious act. December, which some have wished out loud would be assassinated, doesn’t need us to move towards it. It will show, right on time, after November. I don’t know about you, but this dimming, hushing period of the year is not one I relish. When crocuses, elder, and birdsong return in Spring, I often think back to the quicksand it’s been since Halloween and wonder: how the hell did I get through that? But it’s not like you have a choice, unless you choose to walk toward the cold, leafless and lifeless. You can only do that when winter is a metaphor, although the song seems to be hitting me hard again as our days literally darken. November Rain? November pain more like.
In ‘Walking Toward Winter’, Fohr sings about someone to whom she is close. She opens with “i’ve got my favourite thing / right beside me / and i am not afraid”. She does not specify what that “thing” is, but it may be her friend or a memento or memory of that friend. Fohr notes that while she is not afraid, she is not invulnerable: “i don’t want to go through all the seasonal hardening / cause you know there’s an avalanche that lives inside of me / and it’s ready to flow”. Fohr sings with rich texture but with immaculate containment, managing the avalanche, unlike, say, in ‘Stranger’, in which her singing is more volcanic than even the most dynamic form of frozen.
Who Fohr means by “you” is deliberately not clear. This “you” can be her friend or the listener or both. But later in the song she sings in the second person to someone whose hand she holds, who is in the song not outside it: “i’m breaking as your finger fit into mine… trying not to face / the storm that’s arrived”. She is “frozen just by the idea of taking a step / the fear of falling through, of finally settling in”. In a song about winter, you wonder where this step must be taken. In my mind, Fohr and her friend are at the edge of a lake they must cross, covered in ice that may crack, although “settling in” suggests an exhausting suffocating snowdrift like the quicksand above. The published song lyric concludes “walking toward winter hand in hand with you / our voices meet in the dark / first close, then closer, then your words become mine / and i’m walking toward winter with you”.
Again, I don’t want to imply that there is any definitive narrative meaning, but what I hear in Fohr’s aching melody and vocal tone as well as in her words and the song’s taut, resonant arrangement, is that the person whose hand Fohr was holding is gone by the end of their walk. They are at the edge of the ice together and then she is alone. Their voices find each other, then her friend’s voice dissipates and disappears. Still, though her friend leaves, she keeps going: “I’m walking toward winter with you”.
Although ‘Walking Toward Winter’ is a desperately sad song, there are a couple of things that I have observed about the song that provide me with solace.
One is a completely subjective, oddball, and refutable observation, which is that Fohr’s lyric writing in lower case, including “i”, is reminiscent of that of the great poet Lucille Clifton. Clifton wrote The Death of Fred Clifton about the death of her husband in 1984, and she wrote it in his voice, with the timing of the poem bridging his passing from this life to—wherever. The full text is:
and I saw with the most amazing clarity so that I had not eyes but sight, and, rising and turning, through my skin, there was all around not the shapes of things but oh, at last, the things themselves
Oh, at last! I mean—Lucille makes this dying thing sound pretty attractive.
Another is there are what feel like meaningful, song-reframing disparities between the printed lyrics and the sung lyrics. For example, she added a “that” to, and removed an “of”, from the line “cause you know there’s an avalanche that lives inside of me”, which became “cause you know that there’s an avalanche that lives inside me”. The lyrical differences are not huge but I think they mean two separate things.
Firstly, the fact that what is printed is not what was sung tells me that ‘Walking Toward Winter’ was vibrantly alive as Fohr recorded it, which means that the love declared in the song also was.
Secondly, the song ends with three words that are not on the lyric sheet at all. The final words, after “i’m walking toward winter with you” are “I love you”, or, sotto voce as they are, “(I love you)”. That they are not included on the lyric sheet means to me that the words were added as recording was happening by a person who just could not, despite her capacity to curtail emotional avalanche, curb her cascading love for her lost friend. Why is this important? Maybe it’s not. The subject of the song is gone and the singer is grieving. But it feels important.
These words are not as they are on the sleeve because Haley Fohr changed them in the moment, unable not to. For a song about approaching and encountering death, ‘Walking Toward Winter’ is so alive, so pulsing, so present, that it almost undoes death. Walk towards winter all you like but winter is not the end. Seasonal hardening must segue into seasonal softening. Dylan said “Death is not the end” and Haley Fohr’s incandescent whisper says that here. Crocuses know when to show and they always will. As Mark Hollis already told us.
And yet I’ll gaze The colour of spring Immerse in that one moment Left in love with everything
The Voodoo Queens were definitely one of the first bands I interviewed for Hot Press. I met them in the Rock Garden, Autumn 1993. I remember I interviewed them at the same time or maybe just slightly before someone writing for a local Riot Grrrl fanzine and I thought her questions were better. She knew a lot more. She kindly sent me a mixtape afterwards with Huggy Bear and Chia Pet and a bunch of fine bands on it. This interview went fine except I had one exasperatingly smart-arse question, which was, if liking supermodels is silly behaviour (per ‘Supermodel-Superficial’), then why have you got a song glorifying Keanu Reeves (‘Kenuwee Head’)? Eh? They must have that this thrown at them by so many irritating boys. They were gracious about it. Also, I watched Bram Stoker’s Dracula two nights ago, which stars Keanu and which was in cinemas around when they would have been writing that song. Jesus, he looked great. I take their point.
THEY LOVE CHOCOLATE, HATE SUPERMODELS AND THINK THE BEST WAY TO COMBAT RACISM AND SEXISM IS TO JUST GET UP ON STAGE AND PLAY. NIALL CRUMLISH DISCOVERS THE PURE POP DELIGHTS OF THE VOODOO QUEENS.
OF THE many dodgy decisions, creative and otherwise, that Something Happens have made in the years since their remarkable ‘Skippy’ cover condemned the youth of Ireland to two years of obligatory paisley shirt wearing (yes, I’m bitter), three in particular stand out, for their sheer cavalier disregard for commercial success and personal safety.
I’m thinking, as you may have guessed, of the decision to drop the “!”, the decision to go grunge for Bedlam-A-Go-Go and the unfeasibly foolhardy decision to share a bill with the Voodoo Queens at last month’s UCD Fresher’s Ball. After all, if your most recent single was a moving tribute to Cindy Crawford, who it would be fair to say you didn’t love for her soul, would you, voluntarily, go within five hundred miles of the band who have made ‘Supermodel-Superficial’ one of the anthems of the Nineties thus far, without a restraining order tucked safely into the back pocket of your Levi’s? Ray Harman did, and look what happened to him. Hang-gliding off Bray Head? A likely story.
Well, it’s a theory, but it doesn’t wash. Having met and having not been very intimidated by Anjali out of the Voodoo Queens, I must sadly report that she’s unlikely to take a sledgehammer to Ray Harman’s shins for fancying an agent of Satan. Even Cindy herself is safe.
“We don’t hate (the supermodels), we wouldn’t waste our energy hating them. We just dislike the fact that they’re a tool in this society that other women are supposed to look up to, which is a very negative thing for other women, because we’re absolutely sick of that image being rammed down our throats, saying ‘This is the ideal woman’. Plus, whatever a woman does is based on her looks, and they’re perpetuating that by not doing anything else; they’re just models, they look beautiful, and they’re so famous, because they look so beautiful.”
Ella, their American guitarist, chips in. “And because of the pressure it puts on young girls, because all of us (in the band) have had weight problems, or thought we did, when medically none of us have ever been overweight. We just thought we were because all our lives we’ve been bombarded by images of skinny women. And it’s such a waste of energy for a woman to spend her whole life worrying about her weight when there’s plenty of better things to do.”
The Voodoo Queens have just released a CD containing both of their first two singles, ‘Supermodel-Superficial’ and the ode to Keanu Reeves, ‘Kenuwee Head’. Any meekly-delivered questions regarding the existence of maybe a teensy-weensy double standard (is Keanu or is he not the male Christy Turlington, only thicker?) are yawned at, witheringly, by Anjali: “I’m sorry, but you haven’t seen the obvious humour in that song,” (I have, by the way, I was just asking, it’s my job!… N.C.) “There have been a few men who have said ‘I don’t like that song ’cos you haven’t written it about me’ and they can’t handle it! They can’t handle the fact that the guy turns me on and, yeah, he’s a completely horny guy! But most guys do see the humour in it and they’re at the front going ‘Keanu, Keanu!’ It’s really funny!”
And there is a slight table-turning element to ‘Kenuwee Head’ which should convince even those who take ditties about bimbos (or is it bimboes?) too seriously that the Voodoo Queens have every right to drool in public.
“For centuries, women have always been a pin-up. When have we ever had a page three guy? Yeah, we have page seven guys, but that’s not very old, and they’re not even completely naked!” Truly, the injustice to end all injustices. Rupert Murdoch, you have been told; more flesh please, we’re women.
In a music scene dominated by white males, any Asian, all-female band that emerges can be expected to use its position of influence to make a few points. If you could file both ‘Supermodel-Superficial’ and ‘Kenuwee Head’ neatly away in the file marked “Female Empowerment Anthems,” then, the question must be asked: You’re 80% Asian, explicit racism is on the up, are the anti-Nazi anthems on the way?
“The point is that I am Asian, I was brought up with racism, and it’s not me suddenly deciding hey, let’s be really political, because I’ve been taunted at school, I’ve been physically abused by racist people, and it’s something that’s really important to me,” says Anjali. “Racism has been ingrained in society anyway, but it’s just getting worse now, and there are scapegoats like Asian people in Tower Hamlets. That is a really dangerous thing and people need to be made aware of it in whatever form; music, media, everywhere.
“I write about things that I get affected by, like the supermodel thing, and I’m writing a song about being the subject of racist taunts at the moment. I want to write about something because it affects me, not because everyone else is writing about it.
“We didn’t start out, I think, making statements that were that political,” continues Ella, “because, for example, we’re friends with Blaggers ITA, and they make such an issue of their politics all the time I think they cut people off, and they preach to the converted. Whereas if a band is covering a lot of topics and making good music, and then they make a statement about it, then they’re going to reach more people, people that wouldn’t listen to a purely political band.”
Recent threats (i.e. after this interview) by Nazis to the owner of a venue which the band were supposed to play, threatening his niece if the gig went ahead, are indicative of the harm that the likes of Voodoo Queens and Apache Indian and Fun-Da-Mental are doing to the racist movement in Britain. If music can aid the demise of sexism and racism, play on. They deserve your support, so to paraphrase Anjali, on Keanu, make them more than a picture on your fridge door.
This is a short review I did of two fantastic bands in The Attic in Dublin, where I went as much as I could. I used the opening paragraph of this piece as an introduction in sleeve notes for You Never See The Stars When It Rains, the 2021 Wormhole anthology pictured below. I have regretted for some time (25 years?) the daft bit about breaking guitars. I own YNSTSWIR on vinyl, as in the picture below, and might have to pop it on as soon as I finish this paragraph. Niall McCormack, the singer with Jubilee, who later became Jubilee Allstars, was a hugely talented art director in Hot Press at the time. He’s still a hugely talented visual artist. I interviewed him as Jubilee lead, around the same time as this show, on our break from a Hot Press production Sunday. I grilled him over two pints in the Bankers, the pub next door to the Trinity St HP office. I still have a couple of early 7 inch singles of theirs. I will pop them on after Wormhole.
WORMHOLE/JUBILEE (The Attic, Dublin)
NOW IS as exciting a time to be a rock’n’roll fan in Dublin as I can remember. No longer do you have to wish that you’d been aware of the existence of the Underground a decade ago; everywhere you look, these days, there’s another crowd of lo-fi misfits getting it together to borrow or steal distortion pedals and to promise as fantastic a few months as that legendary summer of ‘85.
Jubilee are Wormhole’s favourite Irish group. They remind me too of some of my favourite groups; their quietly self-hating and magnificent ‘Better Than I Know Myself’ has both the should-you-be-telling-us-this vibe and the feeling that they’re only just holding it together that I associate with Sebadoh and, not wishing to crush their shoulders with such a hefty comparison at this early stage, the mighty Palace Brothers. They have a long way to go, but they’ll get there.
Wormhole may be there already. They stride on, not a scar between them, which doubtless explains the lack of digging by chicks that I’d imagine fuels their very loud pop music. Theirs is, like many groups, a wall of noise, on top of which they stick and under which they hide many things of beauty.
Dave, with his driven drumming and vocal asides that range from honey-sweet harmonies to piercing, shrill howls, is massively rock’n’roll, while Graham supplies the melancholia with his Corgan-resembling strums and sometimes gravelly, tired vocals (He also recalls Mark E. Smith, but we’ll let that pass.) He knows feedback, too, though, and he even attempts to trash his guitar but then remembers how little he can afford to – the only downer of the evening. Don’t start something you can’t finish, would-be rock’n’roll anarchists: it makes your chaos look calculated, and that’s never good.
Hooks, the stuff of which pop dreams are made, are everywhere in Wormhole’s music. The “Ah-roo do do do doo-doo” of ‘12AM’, the ominous groove of ‘Leave The Blanket In’, every riff, every bassline. Their lust for life and music is inspiring, so that even their closing fifteen-minute wankout leaves you standing on the edge of your seat, if you got there early enough to have one (the Attic was crammed).
They alone are a reason why Puppy Love Bomb’s once-accurate slogan has to be binned. In 1995, Dublin’s still alive.