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Tag Archives: The Cramps

Queens, feeling it & The Art of Listening

04 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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ABBA, Beyonce, Bizet, Bowie, Brixton Academy, Dave Grohl, Eek A Mouse, Heloise Lettisier, Iggy Pop, John Foxxx, John Paul Jones, Kraftwerk, Landscape, led zeppelin, Les Negresses Vertes, Listening, love, Madge, Michael Jackson, Morcheeba, Patti Smith, Pretty vacant, Puccini, Rocky Horror, Schubert, Sinead OConnor, System Of A Down, The Cramps, Them Crooked Vultures

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I experienced an epiphany last night. A small one.

Yes, bright lights from above were involved. Choral throngs. A shift in the cosmos. But so was a small French chanteuse. 3 musicians. 3 male dancers. Some sparsely choreographed neon tubes. Some Somersby cider. And few thousand people.

Christine & The Queens quietly smashed through the musical panic room I have patently been living inside.

It wasn’t until half way through the gig that I realised that the mesmeric and seductive nature of her and the music was actually relentlessly delicately tap tap tapping against the walls until smash. Revelation. For various reasons, some particular to me and the recent years of my life – others universal and just to do with age, I had forgotten how to listen.

As a man, especially a 50 something white one, that will come as no surprise to many. We are apparently renowned for our inability to listen.

But clichés aside, I have always had the deepest and greatest love for all forms of music. From the velvet of Puccini to the Twin Tenor Aria of Bizet’s the Pearl Fishers, to reggae blues parties ting a ling-a-linging to Eek A Mouse, the rocky horror psychobilly of the Cramps, smash in some black country Led-heavy rock, season with System of A Down,  Move On Up to disco, cross the White Lines of Hip Hop, turn left at ABBA, drink in the pretty vacancy of punk and back into deep folk, all rounded off with some heavy house and a little drum and base. Nenah Cherry’s Red hot and blue Monday. Hoagy Carmichael to the power of the killers.

And I hadn’t even got to Bowie, Pop & Reed, and the art fag beauty of shape shifting artists and icons in bleeding light landscapes. And then there’s the expanses of Ode to joy and Trout Concertos for cello and violin with a little Gregory Parker and Ella Fitzgerald for the sheer hell of it. The colour is endless.

I just love music.  And I can find the delicate cadence of a Gregorian chant in the heart of Face A La Mer by Les Negresses Vertes.

But therein lies the problem. Listening too much becomes Not Listening. It becomes interrogation.

I am also a drummer which means that the musical verticals are cut with the horizontal of particular musicians (always a tricky word to use when talking about drummers). The interrogation is not just genre. It’s now cut by skill set and value judgements. Not only am I interrogating the vibe and output of Crooked Vultures, I am also listening to the relationship between Jones and Grohl in comparative terms – given the seamless fluid and world shaping nature of Jones’s previous relationship with John Bonham.

Listening too much and having too much of a back catalogue in your head and heart in one way is divine and defining. But it is also a tyranny when applied in the wrong way.

As Christine, real name Héloise Letissier, moved through her set, I did what all over music-ed under feeling people do. I started cataloguing every nuance and inspiration. Mining every song for influences and steals. Creating collisions and comparisons, like some dreadful two penny film pitch. In her physicality she had the punk animalism of Iggy Pop fused with Michael Jackson; with a smattering of ‘Madgey ‘Vogue for good measure.

She had the fractured roar and vocal soar and musicality of Sinead.

The musicians that back her were like someone had taken Daft Punk and sent them to a musical un-finishing school run by John Foxxx, Landscape and presided over by Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, two discrete computational Professors from Dusseldorf.

The pulsing and strobing of samples was text book White Lines – and the tip toe keyboard of Tilted was pure Einstein a Go Go rolled in a little sparks with some deep house and Morcheeba for good measure.

Stop. Whoa. And the whole Bitter Pill Alanis moment cannot be ignored. Which bled into a Red Dawn landscape of Peter Gabriel like making.

The elegantly choreographed neon installation dancing above her head – and I am remembering Gary Newman and the Tubeway Army’s bleak black and strip lights.

And then the soaring above all of the others: Patti Smith rushed up into my head.

But as the gig went on the snippets, influences and collisions came thicker and faster, speeding through my head.

Trying to stay focused on each one of these flashes became akin to watching a subway train pull out of the station. At first each window, each carriage and the people inside them are distinct but as the train speeds up they begin to smudge into each other faster and faster, until they are a strobe of light a roar and a feeling: a feeling. Until they just ‘are’.

And that was my epiphany. The Broken Beyonce. The Half Woman. Became my Jean D’Arc.

As the music overflowed it became impossible to keep interrogating. And I started to listen. I slowly remembered what it was like to just listen and feel. Stop thinking stop talking.

I realised that I was trying to control the emotion of the music and her through the deconstruction of it. And the falling away of that felt transcendent.

I don’t mean to put too much on her shoulders. Perhaps I was also overwhelmed by the LOVE in the room. Because it was LOVE. All these people calling her name. It was kind and generous and messy. It wasn’t obsession, or trending or fetishizing. She seemed very very LOVED.

So unusually, even for this whiter shade of male, I found myself listening and being moved once more. And feeling exhilarated by the feeling of that.

I remembered how I feel about music. Not what I think about it.

Merci Heloise.

Everything is connected & a brief journey through two kings, blue eyes, 1970s posters and Alice Cooper

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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1970s Posters, Blondie, Crystal Gale, Elizabeth Taylor, Elrond, Everything Is Connected, Gandalf, Gimley, Gladiator, Hamlet, Legolas, Living In The Now, lord of the Rings, Lothlorien, Manhatten Transfer, Mick Ronson, Mirkwood, Mustique, Nostalgia, Peter O Toole, Portofino, Richard Burton, Sartoria, Shakespeare, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir John Gielgud, Social Memory, St Tropez, Strider, The Cramps, The Medusa Touch, The Senses, The Shire, Theodren, Viggo Mortgensen, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf

Screen Shot 2015-07-15 at 11.26.07  BurtonL1402_468x624imgres-1$_12imgres

TWO KINGS

let’s start our journey of connection at the film Lord Of The Rings: The Return of the King – and lets take ourselves to the final reckoning at the Black Gate – and Aragorn’s rousing speech in the final battle scene.

It teeters on battle speech perfect. And that’s amongst some stiff opposition:
Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
A sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!

Theoden’s rousing speech is about as good as they get (leaving aside every transcendent quote from Gladiator you care to mention.)

But Aragorn’s speech goes to a different level. And it is due to something beyond mere content. Something rings (sorry) more deeply here: something is different: his voice: the gruffness of before – the hoarse whisper of Strider, the ranger’s voice, has taken on a more measured passion – a more kingly tenor.

Suddenly there is a new stature present: that of a King in waiting. It seems as if Aragorn in his speech finally rises through his oratory to the challenge set by Elrond: to “Put aside the Ranger. Become who you were born to be.”

But this kingly voice sounds faintly familiar. Whose voice echoes down through the celluloid corridors to sound out through the lips of Viggo Mortgensen?

And then it struck me.

Richard Burton: Hamlet. 1964. Produced and directed for the stage and screen by the immutable Sir John Gielgud.

And What a piece of work is a man…

Glorious.

Viggo’s voice, whether by prescription or accident sounds out the spirit of Burton’s Hamlet through the mouth of a different King.

Strangely, another more abstracted, wholly subjective and subtle connection exists for me – through Gandalf or should I say Sir Ian McKellen: whom has always reminded me of Gielgud.

GOING FOR A BURTON

On the matter of Richard Burton, when asked recently whom I thought, beyond Bond et al,was the yet to be discovered Look in gentlemen’s sartoria – for me, it is Richard Burton.

Apart from the fact that, he already achieves 11 out of 10 on a blokey rating just for marrying one of if not the most beautiful women of the age (shallow is the new deep), Burton also found himself a famous sporter of fashion signature pieces like the toweling polo shirt – three button, splayed collar, sun burnt colours – which he sported in American Bars from Portofino to St Tropez to Mustique.

But look further and his look expands into multiple sartorial shards from the broken glass of 50’s 60’s and 70’s fashion. The ‘almost Elvis’ suit and collar combos off set by slicked back hair and powder-white sideburns firing across rippled sun drenched skin. The smokey southern deconstructed suits of a very twisted George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. To the beat generation black of Hamlet and the stripped back Medusa Touch.

So Burton is The Man for me when it comes to the next British Look.

BROWN EYES BLUE

It’s amazing how a still from a movie can invoke a memory that rockets you back to a moment in time with such a breathtaking ferocity and such clarity.

While looking at stills of Richard Burton in the film The Medusa Touch, I was reminded of the depth and what I can only refer to a the particular ‘blue’-ness of his eyes – not bright crystal like O’Toole’s – more a deep mined blue with graphite shades and green eddies.

Regardless, the song that rushed to the back of my mind while looking at the stills was Crystal Gale’s Don’t it make your Brown Eyes blue. Now disregarding the fact that I had a massive crush on her for a while (though nothing will EVER outshine the tenure of my teenage crush on Debbie Harry – currently still burning brightly), and playful word recognition and threads aside (Blue Eyes – Brown Eyes) it was the ‘time’ that played up into my head – that moment of being in the world through which that song floated. The clothes I wore. The music I loved. The posters on my cork tiled patch of wall. All those discomforts of self: the intensity of passions and uncertainties. The smell of cut grass on school playing fields. The face of a girl that I liked but couldn’t even fathom how to look at let alone try and speak to. Dislocated parents. Dislocated body (nothing my body did bore any relation to what went on in my head – it was a law unto itself). A time made as viscerally present as it is past. All through a song and a film still.

1970s POSTERS

Speaking of posters from the 1970s – one of the posters that hung for years on my wall was a Lord Of The Rings poster Illustrated by J Caulty.

The poster’s central characters are, I believe, Gandalf and Frodo Baggins. Around its periphery we see Aragorn, Gimley, Legolas and Gollum amongst others, interlaced with twisting pathways, and realms like the distant Lothlorien, and the Shire – all topped with a curling embellishment on which hung a golden crown.

Around the poster ran a border embellished with men, elves, dwarves, riders and assorted others. But dead centre at the bottom of this border lay the magic: a small iris that looked into a mysterious land: as if we are peering out from the dark innards of the great Mirkwood to the lush lands beyond.

And I remember looking deeply, almost trance like into this aperture and wondering what world existed beyond there. (Preferably one more seductive than the one in which my highly conflicted teenage self lived currently.)

And I remember thinking that the character I thought to be Aragorn (but it is actually probably a darker character from the stories) midway up the right hand side of the poster looks like a mash up of Alice Cooper, Mick Ronson, Manhatten Transfer and a Cramps flyer – which just about summed up my musical confusion through the mid to late 70s – a troubled collision of heavy rock & pomp metal, disco, punk, greaser rock and psychobilly.

Confused perhaps. But Lord Of The Rings nonetheless.

Which brings me back to the return of the king: a virtuous circle of being.

So heres to a goes around comes around world where everything is connected – past present and future through sight smell taste touch and sound wound into a cat’s cradle string that we merely reform and reshape depending on the memory doorways we enter through, and to whichever passing thought kicks the embers from the back of our mind into sparks at the front.

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