This was something of a touchstone for me – and it’s sobering to think it’s nearly 15 years old. I’d had a passing interest in Chapterhouse as they seemed from the vantage point of small-town Lancashire the most interesting of those Thames Valley scene bands [purely because of the drum sample on Pearl. An astonishingly lax judgement in retrospect, but I was young and the Great Indie Dance War was on - this is about the same time as I thought the most interesting thing about My Bloody Valentine was the Weatherall remix of Soon. Oh, to be so young, dumb and full of cum again! But honestly, if you didn't follow THIS path, the alternative seemed to be Ned's Atomic Dustbin.]
Anyway, the second Chapterhouse album, Blood Music, was bobbins [1993 was the year I vowed never ever to buy another record made by white men with guitars - a resolution that probably lasted all of two weeks and has been repeated, to the same degree of success, on average once every seven months since then] but the copy I bought, from Action Records in Preston I believe, came with the Global Communication remix of the album. I forget the chronology of their releases round time, but the same year I also bought the Reload album A Collection of Short Stories on Infonet and a Reload remix of a Slowdive track, so Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton were floating around my bedroom quite a lot but I didn’t know any of their more techno stuff (Link, E621) – until my kid brother turned it up!
The Global Communication ‘retranslation’ of Blood Music into Pentamerous Metamorphosis, however, was music of choice for the stretch from 3am to 5am after a night out and I’ve had it filed away in my head with other stuff that fitted the bill at the time – Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms was out the following year, and The Orb’s Wau! Mr Modo stuff like the cover of Hotel California [which I've just looked up, was released under the cringe-inducing pseudonym Jam On The Mutha] and Blue Pearl’s Naked In The Rain were already a couple of years old. [The originals of both were a bit rubbish, but the 12s came with the ubiquitous 'ambient' remixes. As did Zoe's hit Sunshine On A Rainy Day].
This is the one that holds up most over the years though. Split into five distinct, but flowing, sections, it’s far from just ‘ambient’. Alpha Phase starts off all drifty and Orb-like, but halfway through picks up with a cool acid drum line, Beta Phase is cinematic and slow-burning, and may have been what I was thinking of when I tried to relate it to New Zealand drone guitarist Peter Wright [in retrospect not a comparison that holds up, but something in the style still connects], Gamma Phase was my favourite at the time, probably because it related more to stuff like Future Sound of London, but listening now it’s possibly the most dated of the sections. Delta Phase is dark and picks up more of the guitar from Chapterhouse [I mean, I'm assuming they're actually using SOME samples of the album in here and not just going off on their own - to be honest, I can't be arsed going back to Blood Music to check]. Epsilon Phase sounds the best in 2007 and, strangely, while dissing the Chapterhouse album, THIS is the only time Global Communication take voice sounds from it – and it works. The middle four minutes with the vocals lifted over drifting bits of, what sound like, treated feedback is gorgeous. It’s noticeable that the lyrics they’ve taken – ‘reaching to the light, changing all the time’ – are disembodied from whatever context they had on whatever Chapterhouse track they came from and are just used as a slogan. The kind of thing we had got very used to with acid and techno over the previous four years/next five years, but which was still a novelty in ‘indie’ [although obviously quite detached from 'indie' by the time they'd been filtered through this context - the Global Communication album wasn't even included as part of a 2CD box. It came in a separate card sleeve packed, if I remember right, in plastic with the original album. It's a really insubstantial little thing. Which makes it even stranger that they seem to be going for £100-plus on Amazon. Dunno how many copies of the Chapterhouse album you can get for that.]
I think that point about taking the vocal out of context and just using it as a signifier is why I really liked this and why I was losing patience with the guitar scene of the time – it was just so much cleverer, and at the same time had more feeling than the source material. Not that there was ‘two culture’ thing going on – there were connections between. Infonet was a Creation subsidiary, and there are stylistic, as well as record company reasons, why the earliest releases by Global Communication and Reload were rehashes of Thames Valley shoegaze types. And that leads to some interesting connections these days – Ulrich Schnauss, The Remote Viewer, Lali Puna, a lot of the stuff on Static Caravan or City Centre Offices.
This is Epsilon Phase to enjoy.
Global Communication – Epsilon Phase
Very very much enjoying Flying Over by Keijo – who is Finnish “free folk godfather” Keijo Virtanen. [I'm making sure that description's in quotes so nobody thinks I'm pretending to know anything more about this guy than I've read on two websites and a piece in The Wire a couple of months ago.]
One of the things that has disappointed me about a lot of the new folk underground stuff is that there’s a lot of ‘talking the talk’ about free jazz influences, and not that much ‘walking the walk.’ I think the only things I’ve heard before this that have joined those dots for me have been some of JOMF’s more clattering free-form pieces, but even then it’s more a sense of taking the spirit of someone like Pharoah Sanders rather than following in any blues-jazz continuum [obviously, why the hell should they. I'm not suggesting this stuff has to be rooted in that particular past, just that I've always thought it would be interesting.]
This is my favourite track from Flying Over …
I think the take on blues can be compared to some of Albert Ayler’s blues recordings, though obviously acoustic guitar is going to take you in a very different direction to alto sax!
Digitalis Recordings, who’ve released Flying Over, have a good mail order deal on at the moment [they'll ship seven sale CDs to the UK for $50, which is incredibly friendly of them!]. You can also download for free a whole album of stuff [released simply as 'Keijo'] on the wonderful Finnish label Lal Lal Lal. I particularly like the first track, Wide Clouds, which heads into Fennesz territory.
Nice juxtaposition on BBC Four last night. Andrew Marr did an hour on Thatcherism as part of his History of Modern Britain series. Followed by Bryan Ferry live in the BBC Sessions promoting his album of Dylan stuff. Both obviously repeats, but both made better by being up against each other.
Marr’s take on those years of turmoil was spot on – he got the mood of the New Right perfectly, explained the hatred from those in the ‘wrong’ parts of Divided Britain very well and had some interesting takes on the importance of background and class. The central ten minutes about the miners’ strike was brilliantly done – in particular his observation that the background and beliefs of the families of the vast majority of miners were far closer to central tenets of early Thatcherism (family, self-reliance, respect for tradition, spending no more than you earn) than were the beliefs of the yuppies (ostentatious spending, breaking the rules about what *you* were and weren’t allowed to do) who were her biggest cheerleaders in the battle with Scargill.
And yes, while this kind of comparison can eventually lead you down a path where you’re forming unholy alliances between the New Right and the left [cf Blair's "forces of conservatism" bumpf] there is definitely a historical truth there. In retrospect it’s baffling just how much the Thatcherites had lost their moral purpose and, well, ‘sense’, by this point [but they were always lucky in their enemies]. The kind of austere non-conformist religious background Maggie was grounded in had clear parallels in mining communities, especially in the north east, and while you can intellectually read their reasons for wanting to smash the apparatus of ‘A Big State’ [nationalised industry, the unions] the fact that it became an almost personal battle against the “kind of people” the yuppies would characterise the mining families as [whining, dependent on the state, set in their ways, lazy {!!!!}] was a tragedy.
Surely the Thatcher of ’79 would have seen that the very people whose communities were going to be wrecked were the living embodiment of the kind of England she must have been planning at the time. The miners’ strike, I think even more than the poll tax, ripped this country apart [Marr said it was 'medieval' - the idea of people using, literally, bits of the street as weapons] – it was all very well being a tentative supporter of the New Right for “liberal” reasons [a tendency Cameron is doing his best to revive] but when it came down to it this was when you were forced to pick sides. It exposed the lie of the ‘values’ of Thatcherism and gave the spivs and wideboys the green light to take charge. I still think Thatcher believed in those values though (somewhere in her soul). I can’t see how you can be dragged along to Methodist chapel FOUR times EVERY Sunday and not *get* that community thing. I think it left her confused – Marr seems to suggest borderline mentally ill by the end – and I think that’s because she thought she’d escaped the limitations that come with being a provincial grocer’s daughter, and that she wanted everybody else to escape ["everyone wants to be middle class. Of course they do. What's wrong with that?" - T. Blair] but when she saw what we did with the freedom that comes from escaping she was horrified.
Which brings us to Bryan. Now there’s the embodiment of escape.
[By the way, the only bit Marr got wrong was when he suggested that the rise of the new romantics and the fall of punk was in someway a reflection/product of the 1979 election. He used some line about "they still wanted a riot - but only a riot of partying" {or something like that} ... I don't think it was like that. The music accompanying that bit was The Human League. Now surely they were a band who dressed up and went synthetic in spite of the old-left assumptions of "What You Are Allowed to do In Sheffield" AND in spite of Thatcherism. Not because of Thatcherism. Perhaps I'm giving them too much of a popist reasoning in hindsight.]
Anyway. Bryan. You don’t get to escape from being a son of working class Sunderland much more than marrying Jerry Hall and supporting the Countryside Alliance! And here he is, someone who had defiantly refused to let his music be tied to anything as dull as “politics” or “issues” and gazes at his beautiful visage in the sheen of popism, doing a whole album of Dylan.
Watch the BBC Session. When he sings “the lonesome sparrow sings there are no kings inside the gates of Eden” – hmmmm. HE may refuse to ground his work in politics, but hey, there’s no kings inside the gates of Eden, so I’ll do what I want. That’s politics you’re singing about there Bryan – and you’re doing it brilliantly because that line chimes perfectly with your background and what you’ve become. And the line in Hard Rain about “black is the colour and none is the number” banged up against his multi-racial band and his fetishisation of beautiful women [including beautiful black women]. THIS is what it means to get away from the petty gossip and ingrained attitudes of your life – the art school route out. And as the Thatcher experience proves, that escape can really mess with your mind if you don’t watch it, so if any old leftie comes knocking wanting to know why you “like the Nazis” you’d have every right to give them short shrift.
But he didn’t. He apologised for “any offence”.
[That's how intellectually bankrupt we are as a nation now. Saying someone's architecture is "beautiful" means you have to be asked whether or not you think trying to murder all Jews is a good idea. Honestly, I'd make Roth's 'The Human Stain' compulsory reading for all British teenagers.]
This is genius …
… although the line about potatoes is quite clearly the most ludicrous thing ever in English pop.
ACTUALLY: Just remembered he didn’t marry Jerry Hall. That would have been way too ‘Correct County Durham’.
