I went out to have a look at the people running the Dublin City Marathon this morning as they came through Stoneybatter. I think Marathon runners are barking mad but you have to admire the effort they put in. Sadly I managed to miss all the people I know who were taking part.
If you know anything about marathons you have probably heard the story of the original marathon. In 490 BC the Persians had their first go at invading Greece, but were defeated at the battle of Marathon by the people of Athens. After the battle, the Athenians feared that the remaining Persians would sail around the coast to Athens and trick the Athenians into letting them into the city by pretending to have won the battle. To forestall this, Pheidippides ran the 26 miles from the battle site to Athens, informed the citizens that the battle had been won, and then died of exhaustion. In honour of Pheidippides the first modern Olympic games introduced the marathon race, with Spyridon Loues of Greece emulating his forebear by winning the race (he managed not to die of exhaustion).
The only problem with the story of Pheidippides running to Athens to bring word of victory is that it is almost certainly a complete fiction. The only ancient source for it is in the writings of Lucian of Samosata, who wrote some 600 years after the battle. Surviving sources that are much closer to the event do not mention Pheidippides running to Athens; writing around 60 years later Herodotus actually says that the entire Athenian army hurried back to the city, with no runner sent ahead.
Herodotus does however mention Pheidippides, who seems to have actually been a runner. His story is so bizarre that I feel it should be better known. Before the battle of Marathon, he ran from Athens to Sparta (c. 240 kilometres) in two days to seek the aid of the Spartans. The Spartans were unfortunately unable to help because they were enjoying a religious festival (a recurring theme), so Pheidippides had to run back home to tell the Athenians that they were on their own. On arriving back in Athens however, he reported that as he ran over the Tegean mountains he met none other than the god Pan. Pan called Pheidippides by name and then asked why the Athenians did not honour Him, despite the fact that He was friendly towards them, had aided them in the past, and would do so again in the future. The Athenians took heed of Pheidippides' message. After defeating the Persians, they erected a shrine to Pan and honoured Him each year with an annual ceremony.
I have seen this shrine myself, so Herodotus's story must be true.
This is the film about those guys that did all those great prog record covers in the 1970s. It is fairly straightforward formally, with an interview with surviving Hipgnosis guy Aubrey "Po" Powell intercut with older footage of the late Storm Thorgerson and contributions from other people (some more relevant than others), all combined with images of the record covers they designed and music from those records. There is no interview footage with Peter Christopherson, who joined Hipgnosis in the mid-1970s, which might be just as well. The trailer had suggested that the film was going to be a lot of boring talking heads droning on about record covers, but that proved to be misleading. Instead the film combined the interview footage with music and images to make for an appealing gestalt. If you were broadly familiar with the Hipgnosis story then perhaps the film would not tell you too much, but listening to Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd blasting out on a big cinema's sound system while watching the album covers roll over the screen makes for an enjoyable way to spend time.
One thing I wondered about while watching the film was the presence in it of Noel Gallagher. Hipgnosis did none of his record covers and in any case his band were releasing records long after original Hipgnosis had folded (split up by monetary differences and concerns about how to navigate the changing artistic climate of the 1980s). Every time Gallagher appeared on screen I felt like shouting "What the fuck are you doing here?". It is a well known fact that music documentaries often have irrelevant but well-known figures shoehorned in by the production team on the basis that it will be easier to secure distribution if the film features Bongo yapping away, so initially I was wondering if that was what was going on here. And yet Squaring the Circle features contributions from a Beatle, two members of Led Zeppelin, and all surviving former members of Pink Floyd, as well as Roger Dean and Peter Saville. That's such a high yield line-up that it's hard to see why it would be felt necessary to pad it out with Noel Gallagher. So why was Noel Gallagher in the film?
After the fact I found myself thinking that maybe Gallagher's presence was a bit less irrelevant than I had initially thought. The other people in the film all talk about the creation of album covers, but he was the only person who really talked about how someone buying records engaged with them. I think that was a perspective worth having, even if Gallagher did occasionally find himself approaching "And now I've got to make my own tea" territory.
Another anniversary screening, but this time the anniversary of the concert the film records and not the actual release of the picture. It was made by D. A. Pennebaker and the 1973 concert filmed was the one where Bowie made his "this is the last show we will ever do" announcement from the stage, retiring the Ziggy Stardust persona and breaking up the band, but suggesting to the audience that he was giving up completely.
The story behind the film's shooting is fascinating: originally commissioned to shoot a few of the concert's songs for a short promotional film, Pennebaker was so impressed by the music and Bowie's charisma and decided to shoot the whole thing, with Bowie's management company stumping up the cash. In shooting he faced some severe problems, in particular the low lighting of the stage (he attempted to get round this by focussing on Bowie himself, who was spotlit, and encouraging audience members to take as many flash photos as possible; the finished product still looks very dark). Sound was also a problem, I suspect because the recording of live concerts was still rather in its infancy. Then after the film was shot, Bowie lost interest in it: having retired the Ziggy Stardust persona he wasn't that pushed about revisiting the final Ziggy concert, so he did not devote himself to the musical post-production the film needed, with the result that it languished unmixed and uncompleted for years. I think some of the footage appeared on television but it was only in 1979 that a completed version showed up at a festival and only in the early 1980s that it received a limited theatrical release, at which point it must have seemed like a relic of a forgotten past.
And the film itself is AMAZING. Whatever about the limitations Pennebaker had to contend with, the finished product is a stunning evocation of a peak Bowie concert. The somewhat grainy images feel almost like a deliberate attempt to create some distance from the slicker concert footage of more recent years, while the reaction shots of the overexcited members of the audience give a sense of Bowie's emotional hold over his audience.
There were some odd moments. Later in the concert the band were joined by Nigel Tufnell Jeff Beck on guitar. You get the sense that Bowie and the Spiders are all "Fuck me, it's Jeff Beck!", while the audience are more "Who's this old guy?"
Watching it in the cinema felt as close to actually being there as can be imagined. It was fun sensing the distinction between gig and film screening dissolving for people in the cinema. After the first song or two people were starting to applaud between songs, while the end of "Ziggy Stardust" saw salutes for Mick Ronson and his soloing. I know some people are all "but why would you clap at a film? the people in it can't hear you", but I think they miss the point that seeing films in the cinema is a collective experience.
And yet it is a sad film. This is the concert where Bowie announced that he was breaking up the band (causing dismay to members of the original audience, who thought that he himself was giving up). It is quite poignant watching this amazing performance when you know that these musicians would never play together again. Mick Ronson and Bowie in particular seem to have a telepathic link and it feels like it is against the natural order of things for them to have gone their separate ways.
For technical reasons the cinema was unable to bring us all the introductory crap that was meant to precede the film, which was nice.
images:
Arrival (The New European: "The night Ziggy Stardust died")
Backstage (Variety: "Why David Bowie Killed Ziggy Stardust, 50 Years Ago Today")
There is a bit of a vogue these days for 50th anniversary screenings of films, but it's never enough for them to just show the fucking film: they also force you to sit through the kind of bonus feature material that on a DVD you'd probably choose to ignore or maybe watch once some rainy afternoon while bored. So in this case an anniversary screening of The Wicker Man was preceded by a recording of a concert in which some musicians (all of whom were born after the film came out) played songs that appear in it, together with a series of interviews, including with Britt Ekland, two of director Robin Hardy's sons, a film critic, etc. It was in fact not uninteresting, with Britt Ekland in particular giving good celebrity bantz, but I don't think I would describe any of the bonus material as essential.
The film itself… well obviously it is amazing; it's not for nothing that I never turn down a chance to see it. And there's always an element of version bingo when you see The Wicker Man, with different versions varying in length and featuring unique scenes.
This I think was the final cut version, which giving Howie two nights on the island. This is good as it means we are treated to "Gently Johnny", probably the film's best song. But it also meant that there was a pointless mainland scene at the start, in which we see Howie doing some religious stuff in a church (especially pointless as the same scene appears in flashback later). It still left me pondering one of the great unanswered questions of The Wicker Man: to what Christian denomination does Howie belong? His in-your-face god bothering comes across as stereotypically Presbyterian, but the mainland church scene looks a bit high church. Could Howie be an Anglican or even (shudder) a Papist? I suspect the filmmakers were not being too careful in their representation of Scottish Christianity.
One other thing struck me about the film, which maybe occurs to me every time I see it and is then forgotten afterwards: even in the two day version of the film, there is something a bit odd about the timescale. Think about what we are shown of Howie's actions. At the start of the film Howie lands on the island. After an initial conversation with the harbourmaster and a bunch of old lads, he goes and briefly interviews Rowan Morrison's mother about her daughter. And then it is dark, so he goes to the pub for his dinner and to bed down for the night. But it's summer in the Hebrides: it wouldn't be getting dark that early. What does Howie do between meeting Rowan's mother and going to the pub?
images:
The Wicker Man (Warped Perspective: "The Willing Fool: the Spectacle of the Wicker Man by Robert J. E. Simpson")
Islanders (Movie Nation: "Classic Film Review: They should’ve known better than to try and Nic Cage a Classic — The Wicker Man (1973))
Music Town was a series of concerts taking place around a weekend in various venues within The Complex (a new-ish venue just off Jervis Street). It was billed a festival, but each event was ticketed separately, making it easy to cherry pick the concerts that most appealed to your taste.
The first event I saw a concert on the Thursday evening saw a collection of acts that would not have been out of place at the greatly missed Hunter's Moon festival. First up was Aoife Wolf, who was probably the person on the bill I was most interested in seeing, as her recorded work suggests she is an artist of great promise. Unfortunately for me, her set started at 7.00 pm and I arrived at 7.20, which meant I missed most of her short set. I did at least catch her doing a song written on a haunted piano and an impressive cover of Sinéad O'Connor's "Mandinka". Check her out on Bandcamp.
Next there was Natalia Beylis and Eimear Reidy. Reidy played cello while Beylis played keyboards and electronic stuff. This was an amazingly immersive piece of work that I would have happily listened to all evening. From chatting to other attendees I sensed that this collaboration had a strong impact on everyone who heard it, even those who were unfamiliar with the previous work of each musician. "Oh my God, that was amazing, what was it?" was a typical reaction. Their album Whose Woods These Are is worth the time it would take you to investigate it.
Then came Adrian Crowley, playing on his own but with some pre-prepared accompaniment. He is an odd figure: a fixture on the Irish music scene but someone who has neither become very successful nor slunk away into the margins as an embittered eccentric muttering about how the business failed him. Instead he just keeps going on, playing to his fans and popping up at events like this. To some extent I find the idea of Adrian Crowley more interesting than the music he makes, but it's not as though I have ever properly investigated it. His stage demeanour is intriguing, an odd but appealing blend of nervousness and confidence. He has an extensive back catalogue.
And finally Anna Mieke. She sings songs and plays guitar and she had other musicians playing with her. For me she suffered from being so late on the bill at a point where I was a bit *tired*, but I think her work might replay further investigation. Her guitar playing in particular is very impressive. She is also on Bandcamp.
I should note that I was somewhat star struck during the above concert as I think I was sitting across an aisle from Cormorant Tree Oh, hardly a household name but an artist of singular talent who would have fitted well onto the night's bill.
I sat out Music Town on Friday, but did go to another concert on the Saturday. This turned out to be a mistake as instead of the Hunter's Moon adjacent stuff of the Thursday this was all entry level music for young people. The draw for me was I Dreamed I Dream being on the bill, as I found them entertaining when I saw them supporting the Wormholes in the National Concert Hall. They are an all woman punk-influenced band from Cork with terrifying hair and an appealing art-rock ethos. I quite enjoyed their set but after they finished I felt increasingly out of place and left for the comfort of my pipe and slippers.
On the last night of the festival I saw Crash Ensemble performing Philip Glass's Glassworks. This is a six movement piece from 1982 written by Glass to push his music to a wider audience. The individual movements are fairly self-contained and the piece is album length (originally the cassette release was mixed specifically for Walkman listeners). The opening piano piece sounded familiar without feeling like it was doing the Philip Glass fast-slow thing, and was then echoed by the closer. The middle sections were doing the fast-slow thing, combined with non-verbal vocals and the like. The instruments used by the small ensemble involved both traditional instruments and synthesisers; I would love to know how the scoring worked for the latter.
Maybe now when you know Koyaanisqatsi backwards this all feels almost cosily familiar in style terms, but you can see how Glassworks would have blown people's minds back in 1982. Even with the familiarity Glass's music enjoys now this still packed a punch, making this a candidate for live performance of the year.
So that was it for Music Town. I felt I only scratched the surface with the festival, as there were other evening concerts I missed, as well as ones happening in the afternoon. There was also a whole jazz strand that I completely failed to engage with, for all that I wuv jazz. I'm not sure Music Town entirely gelled as a festival, feeling more like a series of disparate gigs with not much of an overlapping theme. I would be curious as to how much overlap there was between the audiences of the separate concerts; my impression is not much. That might perhaps be addressed in future Music Town festivals by the introduction of all-in ticketing, though that might lead to its own complications.
Ken Russell's film adaptation of the Who's rock opera appeared recently in the Light House for one night only, perhaps as a tribute to the recently deceased Tina Turner. It feels like the kind of film everyone in the world has seen before, but if I managed to reach my advanced years without previously seeing it then maybe this is also true of other people. The plot is fairly nonsensical: childhood trauma gives the eponymous Tommy hysterical deafness and dumbness, but then it turns out that he is very good at pinball and he somehow becomes a messianic figure for the young people (and seems to appear in an advertisement for jeans). The music is great though, the Who's power pop sounds leaving me wondering why there isn't more of their tunes in my life. It is also very impressive visually, with the various striking images and surreal presentation generating a desire for the IFI to present a season of Ken Russell works (hopefully also featuring Your Honour, I Object, the BBC Arena documentary about his legal difficulties with Bob Guccione of Penthouse, one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen on television).
It is actually amazing to think that there was a time when this kind of surreal nonsense could find its way into the cinema. But there were other aspects of the film that marked it out as a film of the past. In particular, having Tommy's kiddie fiddler Uncle Ernie being played for laughs by Keith Moon fell heavily into "you wouldn't be able to do that now" territory.
After seeing the film I listened intensively to Who's Next, the only one of the band's albums I have. It's great, obviously, but I was struck in particular by the drumming. It is strange how Moon was such a complete fuck up of a human being and yet capable of such incredible playing. To some extent you could say the same about Pete Townshend, someone with pretensions towards being a serious artistic figure who at the same time engaged in the puerile trashing of hotel rooms (without getting into his various later "research interests"). In general though I am really struck by what a tight band the four of them were, to the extent that I am now contemplating buying Live at Leeds (on vinyl, so that I don't get all the extra crap).
I also found myself thinking of the film of The Wall. I have never seen that, but I am familiar with the record and remember watching the televised concert Roger Waters did in the Berlin to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall (he is very literal). I'm going to be hardline here: the music of The Wall is mostly terrible, with all the good stuff on the first side of the first vinyl disc. But as with Tommy, I could imagine the film working as spectacle even while Waters' endless moaning about the travails of the rock star life might result in me shouting "well jack it in and get a proper fucking job then".
images:
Wrangler mania (Guardian: "Tommy review – Ken Russell's mad rock opera is a fascinating time capsule")
As you may know, The Young'Uns are a trio of singers and musicians from the north east of England. Their background is in folk music, the name being given to them by the old lags when they were starting out in the folk clubs. While I associate them primarily with sea shanties and unaccompanied tunes featuring close vocal harmonies, a considerable chunk of their oeuvre is made up of original songs, with these taking up most of the night's setlist. These ones are typically accompanied by members of band playing piano or guitar and are much less driven by vocal harmonies. I used to grumble at the preponderance of the original tunes in the Young'Uns' sets and recordings, but I have come to really appreciate them and like the contrast they present to the shanties.
The original Young'Uns tunes are often about real people, recounting poignant or uplifting stories about their battles against adversity or their efforts to make the world a better place. So you have songs about a woman who leaves little notes on a bridge encouraging would-be suicides not to jump, a man who makes meals for refugees stuck outside Calais, a young guy who was flying to meet his girlfriend in New York when his plane was brought down by the Lockerbie bombing, a Derry man blinded by a rubber bullet who went on to meet and befriend the soldier who took his sight, a British trauma surgeon who found himself saving the life of an ISIS fighter in Aleppo while other ISIS fighters stood around with guns, oblivious to the kidnappable Westerner in front of them. And so on. Described coldly these subjects sound like they could produce songs of sickening sentimentality, but they somehow work and prove to be genuinely moving, with even the most jaded cynics in the audience feeling the occasional tear in their eye (their song "Lyra" wa the one that did for me).
The other odd thing about the Young'Uns is that they are rofflers, or in particular David Eagle (who also plays piano) is. I think we needed that as the songs on their own could be pretty heavy, but it was a strange type of laughter you would get when a song about suicide was followed by Eagle cracking a joke about having played a bum note. They also used switches to shanties or uplifting vocal tunes as palate cleansers.
So all in all an enjoyable concert. And not just for me: also in the audience was Irish trad deity Christy Moore, although I completely failed to clock him and it was my beloved who mentioned that he had been in front of me in the merch queue. I think he was left to enjoy the concert in peace, which was nice.
Sick of Myself is another one of those Norwegian films about a woman whose problematic behaviour is masked by her sizzling nature. But although you can imagine the characters from this film appearing at parties with their counterparts in The Worst Person In The World, this feels like a very different film. Sick of Myself sees Kristine Kujath Thorp playing Signe, half of a terrible couple (their awful nature is established in the opening scene, where they order a €1,000 bottle of wine in a restaurant and then run off with it without paying). She works in a coffee shop while her partner Thomas makes terrible art from stolen furniture; for inexplicable reasons, Thomas' bullshit art starts becoming popular. Resentful of the attention he is receiving, Signe starts pretending to be ill, progressing from trying to get dogs to bite her to faking a nut allergy and then to buying dark web medications with horrendous side effects. It's funny, but in a deeply uncomfortable way.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor [sic] among Thieves is OK and has some entertaining bits but is not as good as some people said it was. No cleric, no credibility.
Directed by Sinéad O'Shea, Pray for Our Sinners is a fascinating documentary about the social control exercised by the Catholic Church in Ireland in past decades, focussing on Navan, the filmmaker's home town. But the emphasis here is on resistance to that social control, which makes it a bit less miserable than other works looking at the same subject. Part of the film deals with unmarried mothers being forced to give up babies for adoption (and work by a couple of local doctors to protect these women and assist them in holding onto their offspring), but another major focus is extreme corporal punishment in church-controlled schools, where again the doctors were in the vanguard of resistance (triggered initially by a child's parent coming to the doctor's for a note asking the school to only beat him on his left arm as his right arm was too injured). One of my films of the year, but might not travel that well outside Ireland.
Barber crept into the IFI and then swiftly disappeared, which is unfortunate as I think it deserved a better reception. It's an attempt at making an Irish neo-noir, with Aiden Gillen playing the eponymous private detective hired to look into the disappearance of a young college student from a well-off but troubled family. It had proper murky-levels-of-intrigue stuff but what I thought was an impressive twist on noir conventions was Barber being a former cop who had been quietly hustled out of the Guards after his superiors discovered his being in a same sex relationship. Sadly the film then did not have the courage of its convictions, because after dealing well with some awkward semi-closeted gay stuff, it then has him cop off with the noir cliché shady lady character played by popular singer Camille O'Sullivan, leading to this clunky bit of dialogue:
SHADY LADY: I thought you were, you know…
BARBER: Actually I'm bisexual.
O'Sullivan and Gillen being in a real-life relationship led to a certain lol-factor here; O'Sullivan meanwhile was not so much playing herself as her stage persona.
I nevertheless considered the film to be worth my time for the mystery stuff and the amusing Dublin locations. The performances are pretty strong too, and not just in the lead roles.
I signed up for a series of events being organised by the Reception event organisers, which they were calling the Reception Weekend (with events taking place on Friday and Saturday but not the Sunday; perhaps the Reception people are strict sabbatarians). But I also went to a Georgian polyphonic singing event called The Song and the Hand, because my beloved was taking part in it. So I was setting myself up for an action packed two days.
The Reception Weekend was taking place in the Depot venue at the Complex in Smithfield, a converted warehouse. The Friday evening Reception event saw me arriving down a bit late, unsure as to whether the advertised time was when the doors were going to open or when the concert was going to start. Thus it was that I missed Cora Venus Lunny, the one artist on the Reception Weekend's bill I had definitely heard of previously. But I did catch Phil Maguire, who came onstage with a piece of electronic equipment that was all wires and knobs with no obvious keyboard. His music was of the long tone variety, hardcore in its unchanging nature, with slight changes in tone accomplished by minor turns to the knobs. I loved it and it made for a great and uncompromising start to the weekend.
Maguire was followed by Pat Thomas, whom I understand to be somewhat well known. The piano was his thing, but not in a plinky plonky way. Rather, he was very improvvy about he approached it, not just playing the keys but also leaning over it and manually attacking the strings to make strange musical noises that way. The polished underside of the piano's lid made for a highly reflective surface, which made Thomas' explorations of the piano's interior quite visually striking. For his second piece he largely limited himself to playing the keys, but there was no retreat into conventionality here either, with the playing deliberately slipping into sounds that would sound a bit "off" to anyone expecting Moonlight Sonata.
The next day I made my way back to the Complex for the Reception Weekend's afternoon session, which was introduced by Kate Butler. First up was Rob Casey/, whose set saw him play piano while also doing electronic stuff. The electronics were of the tonal variety, but what I really remember about this gig was that half way through I started noticing this weird whooshing sound that I thought was part of the set but then realised was the sound of it bucketing down with rain outside (the Complex isn't great for soundproofing).
The next act was Julia Reidy, whose thing was playing playing guitar but running it through loads of funny electronics. At times this reminded me a bit of Flying Saucer Attack (good) but to me the different parts of her set felt a bit disjointed. In retrospect Reidy's set may have jarred for me because the frequent transitions made it the antithesis of the very minimal music that the other performers were presenting.
I would have liked to stay for Judith Hamann, the last performer scheduled for this slot, but I had to leave to make my way over to the D-Light Studios, another converted warehouse space, for The Song and the Hand. This was just round the corner from the Five Lamps, which was appropriate as the concert was taking place as part of the Five Lamps Arts Festival, which takes place in the north east inner city. The venue is also very close to the Dracula House on Buckingham Street and the derelict mansion Aldborough House. The Georgian singing was taking place in a corner of the warehouse's first floor, the rest of which was taken up by a craft market. The singers arranged themselves in a circle on the floor, with people sitting around them on cushions and chairs. While they sang their songs they either knitted or unwound thread, with audience members having been encouraged to also bring their own knitting along. The songs I understand to have all been work songs, but women's work songs rather than the kind of songs sung by people working out in the fields (or did women work in the fields in Georgia in the days of yore that preceded mechanised agriculture?).
If you've heard Georgian polyphony before then the general sound of the tunes would not particularly surprise you, but it was great hearing it again and seeing it enrapture people. The attendees seemed to enjoy the event. On the last tune the audience were invited to join in, with visiting group member Bernard Burns doing a great job of teaching the tune to the audience on the hoof.
I then had time to trudge home in the rain to grab some food and feed our hungry cat before heading out to the Complex again for the last session of the Reception Weekend. The first act tonight was electronic performer Sharon Phelan, who was (amazingly) the first laptop musician at the event. Her music was also rather droney, but it also swirled and pulsated in an endearing manner.
Phelan was followed by Mohammed Reza Mortazavi and Mark Fell playing together. On this occasion Mortazavi played percussion instruments (judging from the online programme notes, there were tombak and daf, the former a fairly large handheld drum and the latter somewhat akin to the Irish bodhrán) while Fell hid behind the largest set of electronic equipment at the weekend. This was an odd set. At times it felt like the least weird music of the whole Reception Weekend, with Fell's electronics sliding in the direction of four to the floor dance music (all the more bizarre given that this was an all-seated gig). Mortazavi playing was very impressive, shifting at times from what struck me as being a bit non-standard for the instruments (like I would know) to the more straightforwardly virtuosic. On the daf he was almost channelling John Bonham, with his playing in the latter part of the set getting very locked in with Fell's dancetastic sounds. I tapped my toe.
Like a lot of early rock 'n' rollers, Little Richard's life and career is not something I know about in detail. Before going in to see this my thumbnail summary was Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom and sexual ambiguity. The film is pretty good, in that it certainly tracks through the contours of his strange life in a way that left me considerably more informed, but it had certain annoying features. First of all was the presence of all the ponderous talking heads telling us all how important Little Richard was. I was half expecting Bongo to show up but we were at least spared that, but in general I do not appreciate people appearing in a documentary telling me what I am meant to think about the subject.
The other thing that annoyed me was the continuous claims by people in the film that Little Richard's career had been sabotaged by the rock establishment who had then gone on to write him out of history. That kind of semi-conspiratorial thinking seems to be a staple with discussions of cult figures. It generally doesn't add up, and it particularly does not in this case. As the film's use of archive footage makes clear, Richard seems to have spent most of his life appearing on TV chat shows, which is pretty good going for someone written out of history. And as to his career being sabotaged by the rock establishment, firstly it was a general feature of the early rock 'n' rollers that they didn't really remain relevant that long, not because of a conspiracy but because music moved on and they didn't. But in Little Richard's case, if anyone sabotaged his career that person was Little Richard, whose problematic religious beliefs kept causing him to give up making music (because it meant he thought rock 'n' roll was the music of the Devil).
The Little Richard story is still a fascinating one. I just wish there was a better film about it: one with less annoying talking heads and more analysis of his own conflicted relationship to his sexuality.
image source:
Little Richard, Little Richard (Guardian: "Little Richard: I Am Everything review – irresistible tribute to a rock’n’roll genius")
As you know, Dean Wareham was the singer and guitarist in American indie three-piece Galaxie 500. Galaxie 500 split up after three albums. They were never massively successful commercially but they inspired a fierce devotion among their fans, something that has only grown over time. I think it is probably the case that Wareham enjoyed greater success with Luna, the band he formed after Galaxie 500, but the songs from Galaxie 500 remain the ones that inspire intense devotion, so it is not too surprising that he embarks on tours like this where he plays loads of songs from the band to ecstatic audiences.
Support was provided by Cian Nugent. It turned out this was not some random pairing, as Wareham and Nugent had encountered each other previously in the United States. I am not fully assimilated into the ways of Mr Nugent, for all that I am a great admirer of the first Aoife Nessa Frances album, which he produced. So I enjoyed his set (him playing guitar and singing a bit) while feeling I need to engage more with his music. I'm sorry that union commitments prevented me from attending the launch of his album some weeks after the concert.
And so to Dean Wareham himself. He was not playing solo but was joined on bass by Britta Phillips (Wareham's long-standing musical and life partner, and also former voice of the title character in 1980s cartoon Jem and the Holograms) and two others on drums and other guitar. He started off with a couple of more recent songs from the Dean & Britta album Quarantine Tapes, which seemed very likeable. And then he unleashed "Blue Thunder", the opener to Galaxie 500's On Fire. After that it was all Galaxie 500 songs (or songs Galaxie 500 covered, which means we also got "Ceremony" and "Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste"). And it wasn't just the songs that Dean Wareham sings on record: room was also found for two tracks originally sung by Galaxie 500's bassist Naomi Yang, "Another Day" and a cover of Yoko Ono's "Listen, the Snow Is Falling". Britta Phillips sang these.
The show's reception was pretty rapturous, with cries of "Dean-o!" from the crowd by the end. That said, it did not reach the levels of near ecstatic devotion that I witnessed last time Wareham was playing Galaxie 500 stuff here, at which concert people were being shushed if they applauded too loudly.
The concert itself and the listening I've been doing since has had me thinking about what exactly was so great about Galaxie 500. When you listen to them the two most striking things are Wareham's guitar lines (alternatively delicate and soaring) and his angsty strangulated vocals. The bassplaying by Naomi Yang (basic but effective) and the drumming by Damon Krukowski (non-standard, jazz-influenced) also impress, but it is Wareham's contributions that stand out. And Kramer's production, obviously, which makes great use of the music's sparseness. And the songs, with their evocation of alienation and isolation, something that will always appeal to sensitive indie kids, and maybe that is where the group X factor comes in. The original songs are all credited to Galaxie 500 rather than to individuals, and there might be some alchemy to them working together here that made the band more than the sum of its parts (I don't think any of its members reached those heights in their post break-up careers). I found myself curious as to how the songwriting actually worked in practice: did Wareham produced the lyrics and melodies on his own, to which the others added rhythm stuff, or were they more of a group effort? From looking at Pitchfork's oral history of the band, it seems like they all contributed elements, with it not being the case that Wareham came up with all the guitar lines. The lyrics seem to have been his though.
More advanced readers will have twigged that this is a documentary about the popular Robert Fripp led band. I am not really that familiar with the music of King Crimson or indeed with their history, so I was watching this to get a sense of what they are about. Directed by Toby Amies, this follows them on tour in 2021. It kind of follows the Spinal Tap rockumentary model, interspersing live footage with interviews. While the film seems to have been made with the permission of King Crimson (i.e. with the permission of Robert Fripp), it does feature some interviews with former members of the band, some of whom are a bit barbed in their comments about the band's interpersonal dynamics and Fripp's dislike of band members who want their artistic ideas treated with respect).
The main thing I took away from this film is that Fripp is as mad as a bag of ferrets. He seems to combine being a bit interpersonally difficult with an extremely obsessive approach to musicianship. It is mentioned at one point that he insists on practising his guitar for six hours every day and feels that his performance suffers if he doesn't put the full block of time in. And then we see him giving out to the filmmaker and threatening to cancel the whole film because all the interviews he has to do are cutting into his practice time and impinging on his ability to perform. He also seems to have spent the history of King Crimson feuding with all the band's other members and is only somewhat happy now that he has recruited a line-up of (brilliant) musicians who are happy not to push back against his every demand. But it was still noticeable that Fripp was far more on edge throughout the film than any of his players (and that includes drummer Bill Rieflin (formerly of the Revolting Cocks), who spends the film being eaten up by colonic cancer, remarking at one point that he is in constant pain from his terminal condition). I was kind of thinking of Fripp as the prog Mark E. Smith, but my sense is that in The Fall MES was pretty chill but everyone else was on edge all the time.
Oddly, you get that sense of "Everyone's replaceable in King Crimson" more with the film's director than with the musicians. The current line-up of musicians know their place and are happy to go along with it, but the director seems to be always a Fripp meltdown away from the project being cancelled. There is one bit where one of the musicians is being interviewed and he says something like "I was years into the band before I stopped feeling like I was still auditioning for my part". Amies comments that he still feels like he is auditioning himself, to which the musician replies "Well you are".
The film is also surprisingly funny for a documentary about a prog rock band led by a deranged obsessive who takes himself very seriously. At one point Amies is talking to Jakko Jakszyk, vocalist and guitarist in the touring band. He was saying how before he had joined King Crimson he had been playing in 21st Century Schizoid Man, a group formed by former members of the band. He recounts how one day he took a call from Robert Fripp. "He asked me how things were going, and I had to say that they weren't great. And he said to me, 'the thing you have to remember is those guys from the early years of King Crimson are all cunts, and the biggest cunt of all is -' ", and then the film cuts to a separate interview with a former member of the band.
There was also a funny (to me) bit where someone is saying to Jakszyk that, as the only single man in the touring band, he'll be able to go out there and get a load of action for himself from the King Crimson fans, and I thought, "only if you have a fetish for chubby middle-aged men".
The music is pretty good too and did leave me wishing I had seen this tour. The big selling point for me was the band having three drummers. More drummers the better. Now I just need to actually listen to some recorded King Crimson. The tour in the film is reportedly their last ever, so I'll probably never see them live, although one of the musicians commented that Fripp is always saying that he will never tour again and then finding that he has to tour to fund an extension to his house, so one never knows.
One final thing: one thing that really endeared me to this film was that the director comes across very well in it. He never appears on screen (apart from at the very end and then only briefly) but we hear his voice as he talks to the subjects, and he has an appealingly hesitant attitude, the opposite of the in your face arrogance of the guy who made the Ginger Baker film. I may investigate further works by him.
image source:
At home with Robert Fripp (Guardian: "In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 review – a rollicking workplace comedy")
The National Stadium is where they hold big boxing matches in Dublin. I am not known for my fondness for pugilism, but I have actually been to a boxing tournament there. However, when I was there on the most recent St. Patrick's Day it was not to watch the Hartnoll brothers batter each other but to see them play techno music together. And it was first time seeing them play in an absolute age. The spur was an "are you going?" message from one of my 1990s Orbital mailing list buds, with whom I reconnected during the pandemic, without whom I would probably not even have heard of the concert and would have spent the evening at home with my pipe and slippers.
The concert was not sold out (speculation abounded that the young people had been lured away by something called Bicep in the Point) but it still felt pretty full, with the crowd profile feeling like it was a mix of some young people and an older crew who remember Orbital from the 1990s and were out for their one big ravey gig of the year while also wondering if they still knew anyone who could source them some disco biscuits. And it was a lot of fun, with the moment the brothers bounded onstage in their funny glasses reminding me of how enjoyable their sets can be.
I was impressed by how they mixed a lot of newer tunes into their set instead of turning into a rave nostalgia heritage act playing a set of 1990s classics. It is great seeing long-running bands who aren't afraid to play the new stuff, provided of course that it is any good. In Orbital's case the newer songs seemed pretty strong and were not the product of some radical new direction. It was still the old tunes that excited the biggest response (though there was a lot of singing along to the one from the new album featuring yer man from the Sleaford Mods).
After the concert I made my way home, wondering if I had made a mistake not sourcing a ticket for the aftershow party (at which one of the Hartnolls was joined on the decks by his son (probably a grown adult, given that like us the Hartnolls have also been getting older, though I would like to think the son is some 6 year old from a recent temporary liaison)). Maybe I would have been too *tired* to really enjoy it but it is after all better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done.
This was a kind of weird supergroup affair at which an odd collection of musicians got together in Whelan's to play the songs from Iggy Pop's 1977 album Lust for Life and some other tunes of the era. It was originally meant to feature Tony Fox Sales, who had played bass and some guitar on the album, but he had to drop out. This meant that none of the musicians present had any direct connection to the album, though some of them did play with Iggy Pop on other occasions. But who were they? Well let me list them:
Kevin Armstrong, guitar: he played with Iggy Pop and David Bowie in the 1980s and onwards, but is most famous to me for co-writing Morrissey's "Piccadilly Palare"
Clem Burke, drums: formerly of Blondie and The Ramones, he is regarded as one of the great drummers of the new wave era
Luis Correia, guitar: a previously unknown quantity for me, he is based in London and has played with various people
Glen Matlock, bass: holy fuck, it's Glen fucking Matlock, bassplayer with the Sex Pistols, the man who wrote "Pretty Vacant"; he has also played with and written at least one song for Iggy Pop
Katie Puckrik, lead vocals: a bit of a leftfield choice, as Ms Puckrik is best known to people of my generation not for her singing but for presenting The Word in the 1990s. Back then she was also something of a doppelgänger of my sister, while more recently she has flown the flag for yacht rock to a worrying extent
Florence Sabeva, keyboards: another figure of mystery, she is another London based musician who has played with various people as well as recording her own music and composing soundtracks.
So what was it like? Well, what do you think it was like? It was a load of solid musicians fronted by a surprisingly impressive American lady banging through some top tunes. For all that Iggy Pop's Lust for Life was billed as the gig's focus, to me it felt like it really went into overdrive in the second part of the set, when they were playing various other punk tunes as well as some older Stooges classics. That put me in mind of a fundamental problem with the whole Don't Look Back thing of bands playing their classic albums, separate to the whole debate around whether there is a kind of artistic bankruptcy to playing songs in album order: basically, on albums, the big songs tend to be towards the beginning, so that the record makes an initial impact on listeners, but at a gig you want to put them further back so that the set builds up to them (careful readers may notice that I am contradicting what I said about the performance of Faust IV I attended at Le Guess Who in 2021). Opening with the song "Lust for Life" when the audience are yet to warm up is a waste of a tune and not something you would do if you were not playing the songs in album order. I also had the embarrassing problem of realising that I do not actually know Lust for Life that well (it is years since I listened to it) and was continuously afraid that I would be burned at the stake as an unbeliever.
One of my great grumbles these days is that crowds aren't as up for it as they were in the late 1980s and early 1990s when people moshed to everything (not always in a good way), so I was a bit disappointed by the Lust for Life attendees. OK so yes they did show their appreciation between songs, but there was a definite "standing there with their arms folded having a great time" energy when the band were blasting through the punk classics. I accept that many of the audience were a bit on the old side, but that makes it even worse: they should be able to remember the way things were in the old days, and if they are out for their one gig of the year they should be going hog wild. I could not face being stuck at the back behind these people indefinitely, and when the opening chords of "I Wanna Be Your Dog" rang out I took my chance to charge to the front; I was irked that more people did not follow me.
Some actual moshing kicked off by the gig's end, with a storming version of "Pretty Vacant" making for a great highlight to the evening, for all that the band were somewhat inexplicably joined for this by B. P. Fallon (who did not seem to do anything bar stand there while Matlock looked after the vocals). Crowd reaction suggested we seem to have reached a point in human history where Fallon is now regarded as cool. I suppose if you wait long enough anything is possible.
And then the gig ended and I went home. It was a hot sweaty concert and it took me weeks to shake off the cold I picked up.
Krzysztof Kieślowski's film may well be a triumph of cinematography, sound design and art direction over plot: it looks and sounds amazing but arguably not that much happens in it. Music features a lot as there is a composer in it; one striking scene shows the compositional process taking place, the music we are hearing changing as decisions are made on how to arrange the piece.
As you know, the film is in some way meant to draw on the idea of Liberty that underpins the blue in the French flag. What exactly the main character Julie (memorably played by Juliette Binoche) is breaking free from is ambiguous. At the start of the film her husband and daughter die in a car crash (sorry for spoiling a film released thirty years ago) so is she being freed from the constraints of family life? Or is the film about her being freed from the shackles of grief? Either way I found her husband a mysterious offscreen presence whose point in life is hard to determine. He is a famous and highly successful composer but anyone with half a brain twigs almost immediately that it is actually Julie who was writing his music (this is so obvious to anyone with half a brain that it can't be considered a spoiler). Quite why she was letting him take the credit is never addressed. And he also turns out to be getting it on with a lawyer on the side. I really struggled to see why Julie had stuck with this guy (admittedly she only found about the extracurricular shagging after his death). I was also struck by how when Julie asks another guy whether he loves her and/or fancies a shag, she addresses him as "vous".
Rye Lane (2023)
When I walked into the cinema auditorium for an afternoon screening of Raine Allen-Miller's film there was only one other person there, a woman, which felt like the meet cute opening to a rom com. Then other people came in and ruined everything. Rye Lane meanwhile is that rare thing: a rom com that is both funny and kind of cute, like a Richard Curtis film that isn't shit and doesn't exist in a parallel universe in which non-white people have been purged from London. There is a lot of music, including a great moment that had me thinking about possibly exploring the work of whatever Terence Trent D'Arby is calling himself these days. I also liked the arse-themed art show that brings up the rear of the film.
If you are being in any way reflective when making a film in a genre you have to think about how you will engage with the conventions of the genre, particularly ones that people have started to consider problematic. Do you just follow the conventions, in an "I don't make the rules" way? Do you ignore them, albeit running the risk thereby of effectively making a film that falls outside the genre you were aiming for? Or do you attempt to subvert the genre? In Rye Lane this is most noticeable in the way the film engages with the manic pixie dream girl stock character (the free spirited perky woman who for no obvious reason decides to spice up the life of a deadbeat male protagonist). Rye Lane sees Yas (Vivian Oparah) barge into the life of Dom (David Jonsson) after she encounters him crying in a bathroom over a recent bad break-up. The film seems to follow the MPDG line, with Yas bringing Dom out of himself as they race around having a fun and exciting time. But I think there is enough of a switcheroo in the storyline that stops Yas being just a prop to Dom's story. I do wonder though whether we are seeing a new genre convention emerge, the subverted manic pixie dream girl.
I know Boards of Canada are very famous but their music largely passed me by and I am almost completely unaware of what it sounds like. This concert was meant to be jazz trumpeter's tribute to their famous album Music Has A Right To Have Children, but not the kind of tribute where he slavishly reproduces the tunes. He also had some gamelan players in his line-up, which was what pushed me over the line up into picking up a ticket for this National Concert Hall event.
But first the support act. These were local outfit the Glasshouse Ensemble and they were performing the music of the Aphex Twin. Their core seemed to be a small string section, but they also had a drummer and someone doing stuff with electronics. They were reproducing tunes by the Aphex Twin, which for me made the presence of the synther problematic: creating a simulacrum of electronic music on acoustic analogue instruments (plus drums) is impressive, but if you are also using electronics I am not going to be quite so impressed. Still, it never felt like the synth was doing the main work here, with the concert coming across pretty much like it was an arrangement of the Twin's work for strings. Most of the tunes seemed to be from the Selected Ambient Works albums but I think they also threw in one or two from Drukqs. The drummer put in great service reproducing the beats from the records, to the extent that I had to keep reminding myself that they had not just sampled the Twin's programmed drumming. And they finished with "Windowlicker", impressively realised on the strings.
As noted above, Byron Wallen's Gayen Gamelan Ensemble included some gamelan musicians, playing on the National Concert Hall's own set. His gamelan group was relatively small, however, and they did not play prominently on all of the tracks (and they skipped a few entirely). It was also quite striking that Wallen himself abandoned his trumpet and took to playing one of the gamelan instruments on the pieces that were the most gamelan-heavy. The gamelan stuff was the highlight of this for me, both the Javan piece and the couple of new compositions. What I liked about the new compositions was the way they served up what I most like about gamelan (lots of people playing at once in unison), when it often happens that when I see people playing new western pieces on gamelan they go all experimental and just have one or two guys dicking around instead of playing to the instruments' strengths.
Wallen himself comes across as an amiable gent, which is half the battle, and I also enjoyed his jazz parpings. I must get a copy of Music Has A Right To Have Children now, and indeed explore Byron Wallen's own work.
This performance took place as one of the Sunday at noon concerts in the Hugh Lane Gallery, but arguably it was more in the character of a theatrical event than a concert. It did feature music, composed and performed by pianist Andrew Synnott, but the event was more focused on Gavin Kostick's delivery of his adapted episodes from Homer's Odyssey, with the piano (mostly) coming in during breaks in Kostick's delivery, at which point it provided an accompaniment to the dancing of Megan Kennedy.
We were treated to three episodes from the Odyssey. First we have Odysseus and the last of his ships arriving on an island. He sends some of his crew to explore the interior, but only one of the party returns, to report that a sorceress has transformed the others into pigs. This of course is the beginning of the memorable encounter with Circe. Then we had a later episode in which Odysseus and his ship first sails past first the Sirens and then attempts to navigate the straits of the twin monsters Scylla and Charybdis. Finally we have a disguised Odysseus back in Ithaka, preparing to deal with the dissolute suitors who are trying to get his wife to marry one of them, eating her out of house and home while she demurs.
To my embarrassment, I have never actually read the Odyssey, either in translation or in the original archaic Greek. My Odyssey is still Barbara Leonie Picard's The Odyssey of Homer, which I read in primary school (despite my teacher warning that I would find the names too hard, which I took as a challenge). What struck me from Kostick's version was that it is not the events but the telling that is important: it's not that Scylla eats six of Odysseus's sailors as his ship goes past, but that as they are pulled away to their doom their eyes and arms desperately reach out to Odysseus in the pathetic hope that he will save them, reported by Odysseus to be "the most pitiable sight I ever saw out there on the waves of the sea" (I'm hoping that a full read of the Odyssey would explain why Odysseus had to sail past Scylla and her neighbour Charybdis, and not avoid them by retracing his steps and then returning home by his original route).
I mentioned that the music mostly accompanied Megan Kennedy's dancing. That felt like its own thing, separate to the storytelling, but still impressive in its own right. But I did like the moment when the piano joined in with the narration, with notes coming in just as Odysseus is approaching the Sirens, Synnott's playing suggesting their song heard by the bound Odysseus while his sailors row on with blocked ears.
I'm curious as to where this will go. Some years ago Kostick memorised all of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and then delivered it as a monologue in a theatrical event (the book is supposedly a story recounted after dinner so it kind of makes sense). But the Odyssey must be longer than that, particularly if you add in episodes of music and dance, surely much too long for a single performance? Or perhaps that is just me being a lightweight and we will soon discover that there is an audience out there for a 12 hour poetry-theatre-music-dance event adapted from Homer's classic.
You wait years for a black and white film focusing on an area in Dublin and then two come along at once. They are actually very different films, but I am still going to lump them together here.
Directed by Luke McManus, North Circular is a documentary about the North Circular Road, a winding route that runs from Phoenix Park almost all the way to the Five Lamps junction on Amiens Street. The film expands its remit to look at Phoenix Park itself at one end and Sheriff Street on the other, with the latter basically a continuation of the road towards Dublin's docks. Interesting locations near but not on the road feature, with one notable scene taking place in the UN veterans' place at the end of my road; sadly neither Billy Edwards nor the Patriotic Chonker put in an unscheduled appearance. There are also some nice musical sequences in the Cobblestone pub. The tone is pretty heart of the rowl and there is an amusing bit near the beginning where former residents of the now demolished Devaney Gardens flats reminisce about the great community spirit of the place ("At Halloween the chisellers used to burn out cars on the green, it was great crack almighty" etc.). At the other end there are some great sequences with Gemma Dunleavy, local pop star in the making; I was particularly struck with the live sequence that showed her being accompanied by actual harps while doing her R&B/garage/grime influenced stuff.
If I had a criticism of North Circular, it is the extent of its heart of the rowl focus. The film acknowledges that many people live along or near the North Circular who have moved there from elsewhere: other parts of Dublin, other parts of Ireland, even other countries. Some of these people are shown on screen but we almost never hear their voices, which seemed to mark the long meandering street out as a domain where only the true inner city Dub can really feel at home: a local street for local people. But that does not stop the film being a fascinating journey through Dublin's north inner city.
Alan Gilsenan's Ghosts of Baggotonia is a good bit more impressionistic. It begins for some reason with footage of allied bomber planes from the Second World War but then moves on to its true focus, the area around Baggot Street. In the post-war period became a bohemian milieu in which various struggling writers eked out a living from flats and bedsits; some of them are still well known writers, in Ireland at least (I'm thinking in particular of Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh), others less so. The film also uses a collection of street photographs by Neville Johnson to evoke the era (though his photography ranges far beyond the Baggotonia enclave). And it is worth noting that some of the writers covered (e.g. Flann O'Brien) did not actually live near Baggot Street: Baggotonia was a state of mind rather than a place. The film presents an allusive portrait of the time, using archival footage, drone photography and voiceover to hint at an era that seems almost unimaginably ancient for all that it hovers at the edge of living memory. I recommend the film to anyone interested in that cohort of writers or in bohemian life generally.
images:
North Circular still (The Journal: "Lockdown took me on a journey to film life along Dublin's North Circular Road")
Andrew Legge's alternate history science fiction film LOLA can still be seen in the IFI and Light House. The IFI is also showing three of Legge's short films as part of their Archive at Lunchtime strand: The Unusual Inventions of Henry Cavendish (2005), The Girl with the Mechanical Maiden (2013), and The Chronoscope (2009). They are free to see (just pick up a ticket from the box office) and are being screened in two programmes on Monday, Wednesday, and (possibly) Friday this week. They're worth seeing on the big screen and would appeal to anyone who liked LOLA as the aesthetic is quite similar (altered archive footage and newly shot material features). For someone curious about LOLA they would also serve as useful tasters.
Two of the three films are actually available to view on YouTube (though I still recommend seeing them in the cinema if at all possible). The Unusual Inventions of Henry Cavendish is a steampunk adventure set in 1895, in which the eponymous inventor seeks to win the heart of a beautiful heiress with his fantastic inventions while battling against a caddish rival. There is a cat.
The Chronoscope meanwhile is effectively proto-LOLA, only with a device that allows people to view the past rather than the future. Like LOLA, it features a lady inventor in the 1930s and is also presented as a documentary.
Meet Me In The Bathroom is documentary based on the book by Lizzy Goldman, which in turn took its title from a song by The Strokes. It is documentary about the New York scene of the early 21st century, focussed on the Strokes themselves and on other bands of that era: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, The Moldy Peaches, etc. When I first saw posters for the film my initial thought was that those bands were not actually good enough to justify a documentary about their scene. Then I though back to how exciting it was when the existence of the New York scene was announced to the world, because scenes are exciting in a way that individual bands are not. Also, having been told all my life that New York is an amazingly cool place, the prospect of there being actually cool music emerging from it was something that was easy to lap up. With the passage of time, my sense was that most of these bands had rather underdelivered, which raised the prospect that a film about them would be a bit of a trudge, leading to more discerning viewers being irritated by an endless parade of mediocre music juxtaposed against a commentary about how great the whole thing was. Nevertheless, I decided to take one for the team and booked myself in to see the film.
And it's actually very enjoyable. It does not necessarily shake me out of my belief that most of these acts were quite good rather than truly great, but it does communicate a sense of how exciting it must have been when the bands all burst onto the scene together. Formally it combines a lot of archival footage of the artists with recordings (possibly for interviews made for the book) of people talking about the scene. It is a very time-bound artefact, looking at a scene that emerged in the period when mobile video technology had become sufficiently cheap that it was possible for there to be loads of footage of the bands playing live and goofing around offstage, but from before the rise of people not paying for music precluded the emergence of such a scene.
The Strokes are the film's main focus, which is fair enough: they were the first of the bands to break big, and they also broke very big indeed, going almost overnight from playing toilet venues in New York to being superstars in the UK. It's easy to see why they were so successful, with catchy tunes and good lucks being a perennially winning combo. I'm still undecided as to how actually good they were, but they are definitely at least quite good, and the film has certainly made me interested in listening to their first album again.
One thing the film definitely did was confirm me in my view that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the most essential band to emerge from that scene. A lot of that is down to Karen O, but not everything. She is a very charismatic frontwoman, but there is an energy to how Nick Zinner's guitars and Brian Chase's drums play off her yelps that adds to more the sum of its parts. It's also striking that in a scene defined by its good lookers (e.g. The Strokes and Interpol), Karen O is surprisingly plain-looking (controversial), probably not even being the best looker in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (doubly controversial); yet for all, that throw her onstage and she transforms into a super-charismatic rock goddess. The film was also interesting on the pressure heaped on Karen O as the most visible woman in a pretty blokey scene.
My view on the other key band of that scene was also reinforced. The Moldy Peaches may have been a bunch of underachieving wasters who never followed up on their early success (quirky artistic success, not commercial success) but I still feel they had something, and hearing their tunes in the cinema alongside the others did not make me feel that I was wrong. Their underachievement is in some ways kind of surprising. There is a bit in the film where Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches is talking about supporting The Strokes on their first tour of the UK, where the latter were living the rock star dream as they discovered that on our side of the Atlantic they had become superstars. Dawson mentions being a bit older than The Strokes and saying to them, "Dudes, do you maybe not want to get completely wasted all the time so that you will be able to remember all this?" (to which The Strokes collectively responded, "SHUT UP KIMYA AND GIMME THE DRØGS! WHERE ARE THE SEXY GIRLS?").
Beyond that we're into first wave also-ran territory: Interpol (good looking, not obviously essential in the music department), Liars (tuneless), TV On The Radio (not sure I've ever heard anything by them), etc. Then the second wave, which is essentially James Murphy & Tim Goldsworthy's DFA Records and the acts associated with it. For the purposes of the film that was basically The Rapture (who were on DFA for a bit but then left because some kind of mysterious prickology was delaying the release of their album) and Murphy's own LCD Soundsystem, a band summoned into existence by the success of the "Losing My Edge" single. Obviously, you know the tune; in fact it is about you (and not because you are one of the kids who is coming up from behind). The situating of the tune in the film was interesting, as it came up in the context of how the rise of Napster and file-sharing was suddenly making everything available to everyone, killing off the cachet that came from having hunted down obscure old records. The film also mentioned how file sharing strangled bands' incomes, playing a large part in the decline of band-based music, which may well mean that the early 2000s New York scene is the last of its kind.
images:
The Strokes (Pitchfork: "Vintage Photos of the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, James Murphy, and More From Meet Me in the Bathroom")
If you know anything about marathons you have probably heard the story of the original marathon. In 490 BC the Persians had their first go at invading Greece, but were defeated at the battle of Marathon by the people of Athens. After the battle, the Athenians feared that the remaining Persians would sail around the coast to Athens and trick the Athenians into letting them into the city by pretending to have won the battle. To forestall this, Pheidippides ran the 26 miles from the battle site to Athens, informed the citizens that the battle had been won, and then died of exhaustion. In honour of Pheidippides the first modern Olympic games introduced the marathon race, with Spyridon Loues of Greece emulating his forebear by winning the race (he managed not to die of exhaustion).
The only problem with the story of Pheidippides running to Athens to bring word of victory is that it is almost certainly a complete fiction. The only ancient source for it is in the writings of Lucian of Samosata, who wrote some 600 years after the battle. Surviving sources that are much closer to the event do not mention Pheidippides running to Athens; writing around 60 years later Herodotus actually says that the entire Athenian army hurried back to the city, with no runner sent ahead.
Herodotus does however mention Pheidippides, who seems to have actually been a runner. His story is so bizarre that I feel it should be better known. Before the battle of Marathon, he ran from Athens to Sparta (c. 240 kilometres) in two days to seek the aid of the Spartans. The Spartans were unfortunately unable to help because they were enjoying a religious festival (a recurring theme), so Pheidippides had to run back home to tell the Athenians that they were on their own. On arriving back in Athens however, he reported that as he ran over the Tegean mountains he met none other than the god Pan. Pan called Pheidippides by name and then asked why the Athenians did not honour Him, despite the fact that He was friendly towards them, had aided them in the past, and would do so again in the future. The Athenians took heed of Pheidippides' message. After defeating the Persians, they erected a shrine to Pan and honoured Him each year with an annual ceremony.
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