[record review] Bob Dylan "Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue" (1975)

My friend Mad King Ken has long recommended this record. It is one of that bootleg series of Dylan live albums. The other one of those I have is the so called Albert Hall concert in 1966, where some twunt shouts "Judas!" at Dylan for the folkcrime of playing with electric instruments. From nearly 10 years later, Live 75 sees Dylan unproblematically embracing a big electric sound and band format without any obvious sign of disgruntlement from the audience. If there are still folk purists out there who reckon Dylan should be sticking to acoustic instruments they have given up going to his live shows.

And while the audience are less hostile, Dylan himself seems less confrontational. On the 1966 record, Dylan is playing at the audience on the electric tracks, giving them amped up music whether the fuckers want it or not. On this one he seems almost like a showman. These recordings sound like they come from shows that would have been actively fun to have attended. A lot of that must come from the army of extra musicians playing on this (including T-Bone Burnett and Joan Baez and many others), giving the record the feel almost of a live jam party (dude).

But there is still an edge to this collection, the spectral presence of the protest singer of yore. One of the most striking tracks on this for me is 'Hurricane', a song about a man languishing in jail for a crime he did not commit. But instead of being a mournful solo acoustic dirge, the song zips along with en effortless verve and the kind of instrumentation that would have people dancing in the aisles at concerts.The way the lyrics manage to advance the (true) story without falling into ponderous plodding is to me one of the greatest illustrations of Dylan's famous poetic skills.

image source (Dave's Music Database)

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[record review] Alasdair Roberts & Friends "Too Long In This Condition" (2010)

This is another folkie record... what is happening to me, readers? On this one we have song performed by the popular Scottish singer and guitarist Alasdair Roberts. These songs are mostly trad. arrs arranged by Roberts. None of the songs are new Roberts compositions, though there is one by his dad.

Several things make this record. There is Roberts's vocal delivery and his guitar playing. There is also his ability with storytelling tunes. The overall production and the well judged interventions by his collaborators are also important. What I find so attractive about the tunes is the jaunty rolling character of the arrangements. Having tried singing one of his tunes at the Unthanks weekend I know that he favours rhythms other than the straight four-four beat, so his songs roll rather than plod along. This means that even when performing a grim tune like 'Long Lankin' (about child murder and then the harsh retribution for that terrible crime) it still manages to come across as an upbeat toe-tapper.

I also find that there is a cumulative effect to Alasdair Roberts' music. The first song or two by him I heard did not impress me that much, but once I had heard a few I was programmed into his aesthetic. I went back anew to the first song of his I heard ('You Muses Assist', from the brilliant Rough Trade compilation Psych Folk 10) and found myself far more receptive to its charms. But for all that wariness of approaching Roberts on a single song basis, I now present a performance of 'Long Lankin'.


image source

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[record review] A Hawk and a Hacksaw "Délivrance" (2009)

This is another one of those gypsy-Balkan-folkie records by the popular man and woman band from the USA. Although there is just the two of them they manage to create a big sound, though on record they may use session musicians or overdubs. This is an entertaining record to listen to, but none of the individual tracks really leap out at me like ones do from Darkness At Noon, the other one of their records I have. I do not know if this is because it is not as good or because A Hawk And A Hacksaw are one of those bands where you get the idea on the first record.

Darkness at Noon

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[record review] Two records by Anne Briggs

Anne Briggs A Collection
Anne Briggs The Time Has Come (1971)

So Anne Briggs - she is this English folkie. These are records my beloved received as payment for services rendered. The first is the one I have listened to the most. It contains a load of songs recorded from the early 1960s to 1971. The second is an actual studio album. As far as I can see, there is no overlap between the two, making me wonder if there is some funny record company contract stuff going on here. As A Collection is the one I have listened to the most, so I will largely just talk about it.

The first run of songs on the compilation album are all sung unaccompanied by Ms Briggs. These are not really to my taste. Her voice is not unappealing, but I am not really a big fan of solo unaccompanied singing, as to me the results are a bit thin. So even though in this case she is singing classic songs like 'She Moves Through The Fair' there is a certain meh quality to it all (for me).

I should mention one slightly odd song choice here, the song 'Let No Man Steal Your Thyme', a tune lyrically very similar to a song called 'A Bunch of Thyme' that was a big hit for strange country and Irish act Foster & Allen in the early 1980s (they appeared on Top of the Pops dressed more or less as leprechauns; see for yourself on YouTube). This song warns women to be careful of their thyme, as there are apparently lots of men out there who are keen to steal thyme from young ladies. Maybe things were different in the past, but I do not think thyme was ever that much in demand, so there might be some kind of metaphor business going on here.

The one song I do really like here though is one called 'Willie O Winsbury'. It is not the first song on the record with instrumental accompaniment, but it still leaps out at me more than anything gone before. The song tells the story of a king who returns from imprisonment abroad to discover that his daughter Janet is up the duff thanks to the attentions of one Willie O Winsbury. The King has this rogue brought in bound with the intention of having him hanged for his impudence, but on seeing him he is blown over by Willie O Winsbury's handsome features. The King blesses the marriage of his daughter and this mysterious character and they all seem to then live happily ever after. I am not sure what is so appealing about the song. Partly it might just be that it ends on a surprisingly positive not for a folk tune, for all that there is an air of dramatic tension all the way through it. But it is also a great tune and one that suits Briggs' voice. Her own playing on the bouzouki is also part of what makes this song so attractive, so much so that for me it is a pity she did not play that instrument on the a cappella tracks.

Even if you have never heard Anne Briggs singing this song you have probably heard the tune. An instrumental version played by a brass band features in The Wicker Man, during the procession.

I like 'Willie O Winsbury so much that it alone justifies these two Anne Briggs records.

Before moving along, I should mention two non-musical things about Anne Briggs, though they do bring me dangerously close to the Van Morrison School of Music Journalism. The first of these is that from old photographs of Anne Briggs it is clear that back in the day she was stunningly beautiful. I know it is wrong to judge artists on the basis of their looks, but with Anne Briggs her sultry looks are so striking that it would be almost surreal to ignore them. The other fact-tastic fact about her is that back in the day she was famously a bit of a hellraiser; in a notoriously boozy scene she was known for a terrifying level of alcohol consumption, for being drunk all the time and a tendency to engage in bizarre behaviour (jumping off a cliff into the Atlantic to swim with dolphins being the one people most talk about). I think I read somewhere that Richard Thompson cannot recall ever meeting her when she was not in a drunken stupor. It has been suggested that it was a shared fondness for terrifying levels of alcohol consumption that may have facilitated her relationship with the allegedly "difficult" Irish performer Johnny Moynihan (that and a shared interest in bouzoukis and Moynihan being a bit of a roffler).
[meta: I am now worried that Anne Briggs will google herself, find this, and leave an irate comment saying "Do you mind, I was never more than a social drinker! Those stories are just the idle tittle tattle of jealous liars!"]

I saw some relatively recent footage of Anne Briggs on YouTube, I think a clip from a Folk Britannia documentary. It was interesting what good shape she was in for her age, both physically and mentally. Unlike John Martyn and others she seems to have managed to not let alcohol destroy her body and mind. I don't know if she has given up alcohol completely or merely cut back to a more modest level of intake, but it is nice to see that there is more than one way these kind of stories can end.


image source (Tumblr)

Foster and Allen

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[record review] The Knife "Shaking the Habitual" (2013)

I am a member of Frank's APA, an amateur press association for people who like music. I sometimes worry that my APA colleagues and I are maybe a bit too isolated in our own musical tastes, that we enjoy yapping away about our own stuff but do not really engage with what other people like. As a way of countering that, I decided that I would start buying an album every two months that had been written about in the APA and made to sound interesting. And I started with this record. I got the two CD version, which seems to differ from the more expensive one disc edition by the inclusion of a long track at the end of disc one. That long track is mostly silent and barely musical. If the two disc version was more expensive I would feel a bit ripped off. But it is not, so hey.

I am one of those people who has a theoretical fondness for the Knife but before acquiring this record had heard next to nothing by them. I have heard the Fever Ray record by Mrs The Knife, but I accept that that is a bit different. For one thing it seems a bit more dance-floor oriented, apart from the quiet ambient tracks.

OK, I will come clean, I have not really listened to this record enough to say anything detailed about it. I like it, certainly, but I think it needs closer listening over time to tease out its secrets. I am interested by the slight nods towards Whitey's idea of what music from the Global Southern sounds like. The record certainly has a looseness that I would not normally expect from electronic music.

Although there are tracks called 'Oryx' and 'Crake', there do not seem to be any songs that just laboriously recount the plot of Margaret Atwood SF novels.

Fever Ray

Shaking the Panda

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[Live] New Music Dublin

Wow, someone has managed to get the funding together for another modern composition festival in the National Concert Hall, truly the Celtic Tiger is back. But they are still not selling any kind of season ticket to this so going to more than a coupe of events is unaffordably expensive if like me you are attempting to live within your means. Thus I made it to just three events this year. The handy combination of my bad memory and time constraints means that I will not say too much about them.

The first event was a concert in the John Field room by the Arditti Quartet. These are the string quartet of Mr Arditti and they play the modern composition. I have no memory of the composers of the pieces they played on this occasion, but I do remember quite a few of them being of the scratchy scrapey variety. As a person of forward thinking tastes this was right up my alley, but when one movement of one piece suddenly went all melodic (I think representing snowfall or rainfall or something) I found myself thinking that maybe melody is a bit underrated in the world of modern composition, which made me wonder if I was turning into Geir Hongro (Mr Hongro is this fellow I remember from the I Love Music message-board, who used to post about how melody is the only important thing in music and that music without melody is not worth listening to, always advancing this extreme opinion in a very polite and courteous manner regardless of the critical brickbats that would be thrown his way).

Then on Friday I went to a concert by the Crash Ensemble who were playing in what used to be the Engineering Library of UCD in Earlsfort Terrace and has now been annexed to the National Concert Hall. I was amused by the idea that the musicians were sitting where once bound volumes of the International Journal of Sludge Disposal once were shelved. The pieces played were by Michael Gordon and Gyorgy Ligeti and were enjoyable. I think maybe the chamber concerto of Ligeti was the most enjoyable piece as it made the fullest use of the ensemble.

After that in a mysterious room (but not the old Medical Library as claimed by the programme) we were treated to a "performance" of Karlheinz Stockhausen's 'Oktphonie'. I put performance in scare-quotes because this was one of those electro-acoustic events where it is all pre-recorded and you could basically be sitting at home listening to it if you had good enough sound system. This was played in room with four speakers (not 8, unless there was an extra four I failed to notice) and the music did proper quadrophonic stuff, moving around the corners and all that. As this was on quite late and I had had a little drink I did get a bit puppy tired and nearly nodded off once or twice, which was most enjoyable.

One final interesting thing about the Friday concerts was that I recognised a lot of faces I am used to seeing at the kind of avant-garde musical events I associate with the Skinny Wolves-Joinery-Hunters Moon axis. I tend not to see that kind of people at events associated with the Crash Ensemble, Ergodos or Kaleidoscope. Could it be that the musical barriers are breaking down and the separate worlds of weirdo music are merging into one unstoppable force?

image source (Wikipedia)

New Music Dublin website (check out all the things I did not go to)

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[film] "The Swimmer" [1968]

This was the only non-music film I saw in the recent Dublin film festival. It is an old film (from 1968) that I had never seen before but which had somehow come up in conversation a couple of weeks before the festival programme came out. The basic premise of the film is simple enough. Burt Lancaster plays a man who arrives out of the blue in the enormous back garden of some friends. He is wearing only swimming trunks and he takes a dip in their pool to call off. He chats to his friends, who offer him a lift home, but he then decides that instead he will swim home through all the swimming pools in the gardens on the way. As he heads off on this strange journey, he at first meets more old friends (all of whom seem to be resting after parties to which he was not invited) who are invariably pleased to see him.

As the journey goes on, people become less pleased to see him, with the first inkling of this being a nudist couple who worry that he is going to try and palm money off him, implying that he is in some financial difficulties. We get an increasing sense that all is not right in the world of the Burt Lancaster character - are his wife and daughters really waiting eagerly for his return? Why is he so evasive when his wife is mentioned? Has something gone very wrong with his financial affairs? And his behaviour seems increasingly odd the more you see of it (beyond deciding to swim home through neighbour's swimming pools). He meets the daughter of a friend who when younger used to babysit his now grown-up daughters. He talks to her about coming over to babysit them again, which she takes as a joke but it starts looking like he is a bit confused. He persuades her to come with him, but his behaviour to her becomes increasingly inappropriate. She runs away, but he swims on, meeting people who are increasingly hostile to him. It would not be a spoiler to reveal that things do not end well for him.

So by now you get the idea of what we have here - a film about a crisis of masculinity in middle class middle aged white America, the sense that something has gone wrong with the lives of the parents of the baby boomers. The sexual politics are fascinating, both in terms of the swimmer's relationships with the women he meets on the way (especially the friend's daughter and another character, an actress with whom he had had an affair that ended badly) and with his wife and daughters at home. And race gets thrown into the mix too, when he meets the black servant of one house he visits, he mixes him up for the servant they used to have and talks about how wonderfully musical he had been, whereupon the actual servant says something like "I bet he had a great sense of rhythm?"

I have seen Burt Lancaster in relatively few films, but in this he is perfect, conveying the kind of ambiguous confidence that the role requires. He projects this awesome virility but also the sense that it is a mask hiding some terrible failure.

So this is a film I recommend whole-heartedly to people who like films.


image source (Wikipedia)

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[film]"Bad Brains: a Band in DC" (2012)

And this was the last of the Allison and Tiffany Anders programmed music documentaries in the 2014 Jameson International Dublin Film Festival. It tells the story of the well known DC hardcore band. They emerged in the late 1970s and had two notable features separate to their music. First of all, they were African American, which made them extremely unusual in the white-tastic world of punk. Secondly, they were weird. Now, lots of musicians are weird, but Bad Brains' weirdness, in their early days, came from an espousal of Positive Mental Attitude, a kind of cargo cult psychological approach they had acquired from a self-help book with the title Think And Grow Rich. Part of this Positive Mental Attitude thing was an avoidance of alcohol and drøgs, which means that Bad Brains arguably brought straight edge into the world (this is not necessarily a good thing, and I should know, for right now I am enjoying a relaxing time with some fine Yamazaki whisky).

There is some very grainy early footage of Bad Brains playing live, and this gives the sense that the band really had something. They come across as really intense, playing very heavy punk music with the winning feature being their extremely driven frontman. But I think they might be one of these bands who rather outstayed their welcome. Several things went wrong for them and I do not think they really ever recovered from them. For one thing, the music seems to have nose-dived in quality after their period of initial promise. Part of their slide into shite was an embrace of the kind of turgid metal that eventually gave us second division grunge bands. The other musical wrong turn was their embrace of reggae after seeing Bob Marley play live. I may be wrong, but I fear that no non-Jamaican act has ever improved their musical output by going reggae. Bad Brains efforts in this area do not suggest to me that they were bringing anything particularly new to the reggae table, in contrast to the rather exciting sounds of their early punk music. The other thing that went wrong for them was that their lead singer developed pretty serious mental health issues and became rather erratic in his live performances (and not in a good way).

Overall this was an interesting documentary about a band who were important in a scene I am ultimately not that bothered about. While the human story was engaging enough, the music was definitely the least interesting of the music films shown in the film festival. What also made it a disappointing experience was that the two Anders were not present at the screening, which was a shame as it would have been nice to have them close off their strand of the festival.

I should also mention that I was sorry I did not make it to Deconstructing Dad, another of the films in the music documentary sub-festival. This one was made by Stan Warnow about his father Raymond Scott, who apparently made all kinds of bizarre music for films and TV.


Bad Pandas

The Anders' JDIFF music programme

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[film] "Family Band: the Cowsills Story" (2011)

This is another of the music documentaries Allison and Tiffany Anders programmed in the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. It tells the story of the Cowsills, a band I only know of because one of my correspondents wrote a fascinating piece about them for that august publication Frank's APA. In case this is all new to you, the Cowsills were a band of brothers, their little daughter and their mother who had a couple of hits in the late 1960s. Their music has a sunshine pop quality to it, characterised by lots of vocal harmonies and stuff like that. They laid down the template for the Partridge Family. I am unclear as to what extent they played their own instruments or if any of the band wrote their songs. My sense is that their moment of fame was relatively short in the United States and they never troubled the charts over here.


This film was directed by Louise Palanker and is narrated by one of the surviving Cowsill brothers (Barry? Brian? Bill? Boris? Bohemond? There are so many of them and I struggled to get a fixed sense of which was which, though it turns out the narrator was Bob Cowsill). There is a lot of fascinating archive footage and interviews now with the surviving members of the band. And the film looks behind the sunny exterior at the darkness lurking within the Cowsills. That darkness emanated from their father, Bud Cowsill, who seems to have been a thuggish bully. As well as running the family band with a rod of iron, being quite handy with his fists whenever anyone stepped out of line, he reportedly was also sexually abusive to his daughter Susan. His management of the Cowsills seems to have been a bit erratic; his bullish personality opened doors for him, but his ability to piss people meant that these doors tended to quickly close, which may explain the band's short period of success. And he made the bizarre decision to sack the most musically creative of his sons from the band. At the time the story was that whichever one of them he sacked had been caught smoking a joint, but the film argues that it was actually because he stood up to his dad (which in this case means he refused a beating).

Bud Cowsill is no longer alive and so cannot answer these accusations on camera. Barbara Cowsill, mother of the others, also died some time ago, so Bud is only dealt with by interviews with his children and his sister and Barbara's sisters. The picture painted of him is not a pleasant one but it is one-sided, even if confirmed by so many different voices.


What I was struck by, though, was the contrast between the adult Cowsills accounts of their miserable past and the archive footage of them playing on TV shows. In the old footage they look so carefree, so effortlessly happy that it is hard to imagine the tenterhooks they lived on at home. I thought maybe that was something the film could have explored more. Was their scary dad explicitly telling them to go out there and look happy or they would get it at home? Or were they able to escape their father's reign of terror when they were performing? They do seem to have genuinely liked playing music, so the latter is perhaps more likely.

The film brings the story up to something approximating to the present day. Things went better for some of the Cowsills than others, with some of them battling substance abuse issues and that kind of thing. Many of them seemed to have retained some kind of engagement with music, and there is an interesting sequence where they are invited to sing the national anthem before a baseball game in Fenway Park. They decided initially that all of them would sing it, even Dick Cowsill, who years previously had been blocked from joining the band by their father (Bud claimed Dick failed a drumming audition but it seems more that the father just hated him). This leads to an awkward scene where the siblings are practicing in a hotel room, and Dick just cannot do the harmonies as he does not have the singing experience, leading to some terrible inter-sibling sulkiness. In the end he show up at Fenway and mimes and the whole thing goes off very well (what a great national anthem America has, tears even came to the eye of freedom-hating me). The only downside to that incident was one of the more freewheelin' Cowsills passing out in the Red Sox hall of fame after having a bit too much of the hospitality.

The film rolls on, presenting the sad deaths of two of the more wayward siblings and showing the others as they continue on in music (to at least some extent) and with life generally. For all the sadness that these people went through the film ends up being quite uplifting in its portrayal of people who really do seem to love music and love that they are continuing to make it, even if they know that their fame was a fleeting period in the past and one that will not return.

Links:

MusicFilmWeb interview with Louise Palanker and Bob Cowsill (image source)

The Anders' JDIFF music programme

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[Film] "Lawrence of Belgravia" (2011)

This is another one of the music documentaries from the Allison and Tiffany Anders music section of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. It tells the story of Lawrence, frontman of the iconic 1980s indie band Felt and then in the 1990s of Denim. More recently he has led Go-Kart Mozart. If you are old like me or have read books about indie music of yore you will know that Lawrence was long famous as a somewhat eccentric character. In the 1980s he was known for the extremely OCD rules governing his home, which went so far as not allowing his flatmate's friends to use the toilet there (as the flatmate's friends included Bobby Gillespie this was perhaps not such a crazy idea). This film does not go over this old ground, eschewing a biographical approach in favour of presenting a portrait of Lawrence as he is now ("now" being the eight years or so the film took to make, something it largely obscures).

This was a film I had been looking forward to seeing for ages and I was excited that it was finally coming to Dublin. But five minutes or so into the film I was starting to think it was perhaps one of the most depressing things ever committed to celluloid. Lawrence is still making music but he is someone whose moment has very much passed. If there was ever a real possibility that he was going to hit the big time, that possibility is now gone. That would not necessarily be a problem, as many people plug away in relative obscurity, following their music and happy enough to make music for whoever ends up liking it. But Lawrence still comes across as a driven character feeling that his day is yet to come, that any day now he will see himself on a revived Top of the Pops and find himself being driven around in a limo while screaming fans run down the street after him. That this is not going to happen seemed at first to mark him out as some kind of delusional saddo.

The other disturbing thing about the film initially is shock at what a wreck Lawrence has become. He has notably aged far worse than other contemporaries of his who show up in the film. When he was younger he was a rather stylish character. While now he is still someone who takes a certain interest in his appearance, his look is now one of a crazy eccentric rather than anyone who is ever going to grace the pages of The Chap. And his living conditions seemed to have declined somewhat. I doubt he was ever inhabiting penthouses, but the first flat we see him in looks extremely dingy. I suspected that Bobby Gillespie would have no problem using the toilet there.

The reason for Lawrence's decline is touched on obliquely rather than directly stated. Basically, as well as suffering from mental health issues, he has for many years now been in thrall to heroin and methadone. It seems that he fell into a dark place after the record company dropped Denim in 1997 or thereabouts. He has been living in relative poverty since then, though he is lucky that he is in the UK and can get access to council accommodation and be prescribed opiates rather than become a homeless junkie (though obviously it would be wrong to think that the UK is some kind of utopia where people with drøg addictions are looked after; there are plenty of homeless junkies in that country).

Once that penny drops the film becomes a lot less depressing. For one thing, I found myself becoming habituated to Lawrence's droll sense of humour. I particularly liked when he mentioned some people he had fallen in with, saying that he met them while he was living in Pete Astor's loft (too cumbersome to explain if you do not get it straight off). But I think more generally I started finding Lawrence almost inspirational. He has his vision of pop stardom and he keeps working to achieve it. Maybe he is delusional and has no realistic chance of achieving his goal, but he keeps at it, not letting poverty or opiate addiction stop his pursuit of his muse. I think anyone who has engaged in largely pointless artistic endeavour will see something of themselves in Lawrence's refusal to give up.

Paul Kelly, the film's director was there for questions and answers after film. He proved to be an engaging and likeable character. He said that Lawrence would have come along to the film's screening except that travelling outside the UK would have required him to take off his hat, something he never does in public (I think for reasons of baldness, another terrible cross he has to bear).


Links:

London Film Festival 2011 Diary: Day 11 (Death image source)

Foxtrot Echo Lima Tango (old Lawrence image source)

Chapter one of a recent example of my own largely pointless artistic endeavours

The Anders' JDIFF music programme

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[Film] "The Wrecking Crew" (2008)

I saw a number of films in the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Most of them were music documentaries, brought to the festival by guest curators Allison Anders and Tiffany Anders, a mother and daughter team from Los Angeles who combine film-making chops and music appreciation (and indeed music-making - Tiffany Anders has released an album produced by P.J. Harvey). This was the first film they presented to us, a documentary by Denny Tedesco about the Los Angeles session musicians who played on every record released in the 1960s. It featured interviews with some of these people as well as with some of the people who fronted their records (Cher, Brian Wilson, Nancy Sinatra, Jimmy Webb, among others). Glen Campbell manages to straddle both camps, as he worked for a long time as a session musician in Los Angeles before eventually releasing his own records, on which many of the other session musicians played. Tedesco's father, was the late Tommy Tedesco, another session guitarist, and he appears in archive footage and some interviews filmed before he died.

I was a bit worried before this film started that something would go wrong with it. I am not sure what exactly I feared, but maybe the experience of the Muscle Shoals film had me thinking that the film would be over-poncey or that it would feature too much in the way of irrelevant talking head stuff from gobshites who would have had little or nothing to do with the music under discussion. But it all works. The music does a lot of the talking (they managed to get rights to lots and lots of it, thanks I think to some kind of Kickstarter campaign that raised a lot of cash), and it is very good music. The musicians tell their stories, though as these people were jobbing musicians rather than people going on the road and getting up to hi-jinks the stories are a bit "I played on this record and came up with this baseline; then I played on this record and came up with this guitar lick". There is not really much about snorting cocaine off the buttocks of underage groupies in this film.

Even so, the musicians do not come across as boring. Tommy Tedesco seems to have been a bit of a roffler, while Carol Kaye (one of few women musicians at the top level of this scene) comes across as an interesting character. Drummer Earl Palmer maybe says the most interesting thing of all of them, revealing that he did not particularly like any music other than jazz, but when you are being paid to play on a rock, pop, or country record you have to play it like it is your favourite thing. That probably is stating the obvious, but I can imagine that very few people are capable of doing it.

There were a couple of interesting questions that the film did not explicitly address. One of these was the question of creativity. The musicians and the other voices talk a lot about the session players' contribution to the recording process, which went far beyond just playing parts handed to them. There is much mention of distinctive guitar riffs, drum rolls and basslines created by the session players, contributions without which these records would lack so much that in many cases they would not have been hits without them. I found myself wondering whether the musicians found these contributions a sufficient outlet for their creativity, or whether they cared. They were being very well paid, after all, and it was striking from the film how few of them bothered releasing records with their own original compositions.

The other question was one that would have jarred in a film that was such a celebration of these musicians. Basically, if you have a situation where the same people are playing on all the records, does it end up with all the records sounding the same? These were very versatile players who could adapt their styles to the type of music they were playing, but did these players' ubiquity lead to music that was plastic and soulless? No one asks this question in the film and there is no real expression of the somewhat rockist contention that bands should play on their own records without recourse to session players.

The film reports that the glory days of the Los Angeles session players came to an end. The bands got better at playing their own instruments so the Wrecking Crew were no longer so needed, and another generation of younger and cheaper players came up and took their place. But the film does not have a "rock music is a shit business" vibe to it. The sense I got was that in the heyday of the scene these people made a lot of money (at one point it was mentioned that in the mid-1960s Carol Kaye was earning more than the US President) and that if their income declined it did not disappear. Perhaps because so much of the music in this film is so appealing, the film could not really leave the viewer with anything other than a sense that music is great.

Links:

Forgotten Heroes: Carol Kaye (Carole Kaye image source)

Drummerworld: Earl Palmer (Earl Palmer image source)

Tommy Tedesco and Friends on the Golden Age of Studio Guitar (Tommy Tedesco image source)

Muscle Shoals (my review of this film)

The Anders' JDIFF music programme

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[live] Jaki Liebezeit with Drums Off Chaos and Burnt Friedman

I went to see Jaki Liebezeit, legendary drummer of popular band Can. He was playing in the Grand Social. At this concert the headliners were going to be Jaki Liebezeit and Burnt Friedman, while the support act was Drums Off Chaos, which was Mr Liebezeit drumming with two other guys. Yes, readers, Jaki Liebezeit was supporting himself.

Full disclosure, I arrived at the event after a wine-tasting at work, so I was feeling a bit *relaxed* and so was perhaps not in the best of states to enjoy the music. But Drums Off Chaos were nevertheless enjoyed by me. There is always fun to be had watching serious drummers doing their stuff. I was also fascinated by the way Liebezeit, like other ageing heads from the German 1970s music scene (e.g. Ralf Hütter and Michael Rother) seems now to have turned into the kind of respectable character who could chat convincingly to your parents about stock options and long term investment yields. He is also older than my parents, but he does not look it.
Jaki Liebezeit and Burnt Friedman was Mr Liebezeit drumming and Mr Friedman playing keyboardy synthesiser stuff. My recollection is that it was more angular, with the keyboards being a bit textural and intermittent rather than either melodic or percussive. I fount it quite interesting but I was overcome by a terrible tiredness so I had to slip out of the venue and go home to my bed. Of the two sets, I reckon that the Drums Off Chaos one would be the one that you would rather hear live while the Jaki Liebezeit & Burnt Friedman would be the better listen at home.

Image source

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[Film] "Lift to the Scaffold" / "L'Ascenseur pour l'Échafaud" (1958)

The IFI was showing this old Louis Malle film from 1958. The plot is an odd one. One Julien Tavernier (played by Maurice Ronet) murders his shady industrialist boss but then becomes trapped in a lift as he tries to make his escape. A small time crook and a flower girl (played by Georges Poujouly and Yori Bertin respectively) then steal his car, driving off to have an adventure of their own. As they go they drive by Florence Carala, the industrialist's wife (played by Jeanne Moreau), revealed as Tavernier's lover and his co-plotter in the murder of her husband. She sees the flower girl in the car and assumes that her lover has betrayed her.

For much of the rest of the film Tavernier is stuck in the lift, trying to get out, trying not to get killed when he does so, and trying not to be found there. Meanwhile the crook and the flower girl head off to the countryside to spend his money and live the highlife while Florence trawls the city looking for her lover. Although we feel that Tavernier and Florence are the primary protagonists here, far more things actually happen to the delinquent young folk. Things go horribly wrong for them, leading to repercussions for Tavernier and Florence.

So in some ways, not too much happens in the film. Instead it is about mood and atmosphere, with Tavernier making his endless attempts to escape his trap and Florence roaming the city in her futile quest for him. Her journey is a fascinating one, taking her to an endless series of dive bars and low-life hang-outs. The youths' adventure switches from being one of carefree abandon to one of disaster, with them ending up consumed by fear at the consequences of their actions (for all that their fear seems as over-dramatic and detached from reality as their initial quest for adventure). The generally alienated atmosphere is partially brought into being by the soundtrack, a selection of moody jazz pieces performed for it by Miles Davis.

There are hints here to a political subtext. The industrialist is an arms manufacturer, someone who is profiting out of the war then raging in Algeria. In the scene between him and Tavernier at the start of the film, there seemed a suggestion that he might also have been operating a spy ring, with Tavernier the traveller who collects intelligence from field agents and assets. Tavernier is a veteran of the wars in Algeria and Indochina, and his carrying a gun seems to be unremarkable. In some ways the film ends up with the kind of Crime Does Not Pay message common to films of that era, but there did seem a suggestion that the victims and killers all somehow deserved their fate. And there is a very non-Hollywood sense of playing with guns being dangerous and not fun.

This film is apparently seen as hovering on the frontiers between film noir and the French nouvelle vague. Either way it is a most unusual work and something that I recommend to all readers.

Trailer for reissued version of film:


The ponderous original French trailer:


See also:

Derek Winnert's review (Jeanne Moreau image source)

Ascenseur Pour L'Èchafaud (Lift To The Scaffold) : Original Soundtrack (Miles Davis image source)

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[travel] Greece: signs of the crisis

Regarding my travels to Greece, a few people asked me if I saw any signs of Greece's economic problems while I was there, and I would have to say that I did not. It did not feel like a country that was falling apart, though obviously I did not have to engage with the country's healthcare system or state apparatus.

The only thing that came close to indicating the country's economic problems was the train system. This has been severely curtailed as a result of the tightening of public spending, to the extent that there are no longer direct train links between Greece and neighbouring countries. If this had not been the case I may have travelled to Greece through the Balkans rather than by getting an overnight ferry from Bari in Italy to Patras. And because the train line to Patras has been shut down, I had to get a bus from there to Athens.

Apart from that I did not see any direct sign of the crisis: no people rooting through rubbish bins for food, no more beggars on the street than you would get in any country, no obvious signs of there being masses of people sleeping rough in Athens (unlike in prosperous Milan where I saw quite a few rough sleepers). The centre of Athens felt like a prosperous enough place and while the city has its seamier bits, so does everywhere. Sparta (the least touristy place I visited) also did not feel like somewhere in the grip of an economic meltdown. I am not saying this to suggest that the Greeks are only pretending to have endured one of the most extreme declines in living standards ever experienced by a developed country, just to say that the effects of this fall off were hidden from me.

I did see a guy protesting outside the Greek Parliament (holding up a sign informing passers by that Wall Street is where he defecates), but I see that kind of thing all the time in Dublin so it was not really much of a novelty. On my last day in Athens there was a big demonstration against austerity. I wondered if it would all kick off with me in the middle of the action, but this proved not to be the case.


One hears a lot about how the far right is on the rise in Greece. I did not see any fascist gobshites parading around, but I did see some instances of graffiti featuring the sunwheel cross, a far right emblem. In most places, any instances of these were defaced, often with an Anarchy sign drawn over or beside them. The only place I can recall seeing an undefaced sunwheel cross was in Sparta. I have read guidebooks saying that Sparta prides itself on being Greece's most rightwing town, which seems appropriate given its ancient history as a centre of slavery and brutal militarism. Apart from that one piece of graffiti, however, modern Sparta did not come across as an obvious hotbed of the far right.


There was a fair amount of graffiti in Athens, some of it political and some of it less so. I do not think you could link the amount of graffiti to the crisis and I suspect that there was as much political graffiti before the crisis as there is now. Possibly my favourite piece of graffiti in Athens was done by someone who wrote "A. MERKEL" in Roman script. I do not know whether the writer was interrupted before finishing his work, or maybe the German chancellor herself was passing by and decided to put down her mark.


Actually no, this is my favourite bit of Greek graffiti:

Cthulhu ftagn!

An account of my travels in Greece: part 1

An account of my travels in Greece: part 2

My Greece pictures

Pictures of Graffiti in Greece

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[live] The Gaudete Singers salute the magic of Carlo Gesualdo

I went to this concert by the Gaudete Singers, a small choral group that one of my pals is in. This was taking place in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin and programme was to be a number of pieces by Carlo Gesualdo with some organ interludes by Johann Sebastian Bach. The Gesualdo pieces (composed) in 1611 or thereabouts) were all of a religious theme. Gesualdo's music has a reputation for being a bit on the odd side, accidentally pioneering techniques that would not reappear until the 20th century. From looking at the programme notes, it seems that this can be characterised as extreme chromaticism, but I am a bit pig ignorant when it comes to musicology so I do not really have much sense of what that means.

I can however say two things about the music in this performance. First of all, I like it. Secondly, it did not sound that weird to me (even though a famous musicologist John Milsom began his review of a CD release of these pieces with the words "Is this great music , or merely weird?"). I do not know what that means - maybe I have listened to so much weirdo music in my life that nothing sounds that unusual anymore.

So all in all, the Gesualdo choral pieces were fascinating and most enjoyable to listen to, as were the two Bach organ interludes. But it would be remiss of me not to conclude by describing the colourful life of Carlo Gesualdo. He was an amateur composer, as his status as a member of the Neapolitan nobility meant that he did not have to earn a crust from music. Aside from these musical pieces, he is best known for murdering his wife and her lover when he discovered them in flagrante delicto. He is also accused of murdering one of his sons and his father-in-law, who had attempted to avenge the first murder. In the end he fell into a deep melancholia and near insanity and seems to have retired to live the life of a gothic recluse in an isolated country castle, from where he published the pieces performed tonight.

The other odd thing about the concert was that someone's phone went off and then rang and rang and rang, with its owner being either unable or unwilling to decline the call. For all that the young folk are the ones seen as being so wedded to their phones that they cannot envisage turning them off, I increasingly have come to realise that it is older middle class people who let their phones ring inappropriately. For whatever reason they seem to find the idea of a turned off phone a concept completely impossible to contemplate.

Image source (Wikipedia)

Carlo Gesualdo: composer or crazed psychopath? (Guardian)

The Gaudete Singers

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[live] The Zurmukhti Music Ensemble play in a church

This lot were playing live as part of the Five Lamps Festival. In case you are unfamiliar with Dublin, the Five Lamps is a north inner city landmark (a lamppost at a junction with five lamps) that to an extent gives its name to the surrounding area. The area is a bit heart of the rowl. The Zurmukhti Music Ensemble were playing in the St. Laurence O'Toole Church on Seville Terrace. The ensemble's name is an odd one but it has a meaning. The group sings Georgian polyphonic music and Zurmukhti translates into English as Emerald (for Emerald Isle). And this is the singing group that Irene has been singing with and this was to be possibly their first proper public concert.

The songs brought us on a musical tour of Georgia and were performed sometimes by the full choir and sometimes in smaller groups, with most of the songs probably being performed in trios. All of the songs featured the sustained notes and three part harmonies I think of as Georgian music's thing. I understand that if you know about these things (i.e. if you are a member of the Zurmukhti choir) then you can see clear stylistic differences between the regional repertoires, but for someone like me their overall Georgianness was more salient than anything else.

They finished with a song that had the whole choir blasting forth at us and I was impressed at how they had programmed the show to end with such a bang. Afterwards Irene revealed that most of them had never heard the song before and were just copying the handful who did. I don't think anyone in the audience noticed.

Afterwards I was lounging around with some of our friends who had come along to the concert, and one of them remarked of one of the Zurmukhti members that she was smiling a lot and looked very happy about things. I revealed that she was none other than one of the presenters of the evening of erotic songs and stories of the night before.

Zurmukhti Georgian Ensemble

That evening of erotic songs and stories (do not click on that link unless you are broadminded and adult enough to handle a frank account of an evening of erotic songs and stories)

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[film] "Inside Llewyn Davis" (2014)

This is the latest Coen Brothers film and it does not feature any vampires, though it does feature a character who is revealed to be a heroin addict, with vampirism in films (including Only Lovers Left Alive) often serving as a metaphor for heroin addiction. It follows the titular character, a struggling folk musician (played by Oscar Isaac) whose musical career is going nowhere and who learns the lesson over the film that it is time to give up, but finds it surprisingly hard to do so. As is the way of Coen Brothers films, he finds obstacles placed in his path and he must also approach various important men sitting behind desks. Davis comes across as a bit of a dick, though it is unclear as to how much of this is the bitterness of failure. He is also more or less completely ignorant of the extent to which other people's generosity is keeping him afloat, but that is true of many of us.

In culture generally we are often presented with the idea that any artist with belief in their own success will eventually succeed. In real life this is bullshit, with success happening for any number of reasons separate to the magical self belief of the artist. So it is refreshing to see a film about artistic failure. For all that this sounds a bit miserable, the film is surprisingly light in tone and I did not leave the film feeling a great sadness at the plight of the main character (unlike, say, with The Man Who Wasn't There).

I should mention i) the cat who serves as a bit of a plot bunny and ii) the film's oddly cyclical nature, with a scene from the beginning recurring near the end. Does the latter signify that Davis' life is caught in a rut of endless repetition, or should we infer something else?

The soundtrack is a load of folkie songs specially recorded for the film (mostly sung by actors in the film like Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake). Irish readers will particularly enjoy the performance of 'The Auld Triangle' by a group of Aran Jumper wearing Irishmen.


Image sources:

'Why Inside Llewyn Davis doesn't get inside the Village' (Guardian)

Minimal Cat Poster

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[Film] Under the Skin (2014)

This is another film with a somewhat vampiric theme. It is also a low budget Scottish film in which Scarlet Johansson plays an alien or something who drives a van around Glasgow luring young men to their deaths. As well as the more intelligent of vampire films, it also reminds me of Upstream Color, in that it does not bother to over-explain what is going on, with many key elements remaining unclear at the film's close. So although we see that Scarlet Johansson's unnamed character is some kind of inhuman creature preying on the single men she picks up, we never really learn why she is doing this or where she has come from. Likewise, we can see that the man on the motorbike (and the other men on motorbikes who appear in one brief scene) clearly have some association with her, but its precise nature is never made plain. And the scenes in which the men she predates on meet their doom - are these literal depictions of their fate or just metaphors?

Like so much else of this film, the ending is a bit odd. The Johansson character seems to discover some kind of humanity after sparing a victim suffering from a pretty extreme facial disfigurement but then has a bit of a breakdown. Eventually she ends up in a forest where she is attacked by a perv, but once he discovers her true nature he douses her in petrol and sets fire to her (spoilers). Was this meant to be some kind of ironic reversal - female alien sexual predator falls victim to tawdry male human sexual predator? Either way I was uncomfortable with this. Depictions of human sexual criminals are distasteful to me in a way that ones of vampiric aliens are not. And I was also unclear as to what stopped the alien doing to the perv what she had done to the hapless Glaswegian men.

One thing I did like was the alien woman being English while everyone else was Scottish (apart from a Slovakian guy) and blessed with largely incomprehensible Glaswegian accents. This allowed Johansson to show off that unlike most American actors she can do accents. It also accentuated the difference between her and the people around her, but by giving her an English accent closer to what is the centre of gravity of the bourgeois London controlled anti-Scottish media the alien ends up seeming more familiar and normal than the humans she predates upon.

The film is also like Upstream Color in that it uses sound and music most effectively in conjunction with its careful visuals. And like the lead in that film, Johansson has interesting hair, though not hair as interesting (and possibly a wig, unlike the three lovely hairstyles sported by Amy Seimetz in Upstream Color) But this does bring me to another thing about Under the Skin. It has in some quarters been billed as an exciting opportunity to get your eyeful of Johansson's naked body, but I reckon that if you had gone to see it on that basis you would leave the cinema rather disappointed. I would like to think that this is not why I too found the film a bit on the boring side while watching it and initially concluded it was not all that. In retrospect, though, I find myself liking it more and more, its unexplained elements intriguing me rather than leaving me feeling like this is a film half-finished.

Links:

I saw Upstream Color

"How Scarlett Johansson helped me challenge disfigurement stigma" (Guardian interview with Adam Pearson)

image source (review on Glide Magazine website)


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[film] "Only Lovers Left Alive" (2013)

This is the Jim Jarmusch film in which Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are two immortal vampire lovers. As the film opens one of them is in Detroit, working on music and feeling a bit mopey while the other is hanging out in Tangiers with Christopher Marlowe. The Tilda Swinton character (Eve) returns to Detroit to be with the mopey Tom Hiddleston character (Adam). Rather than being the kind of old school vampires who prey on people and suck out their blood, they instead source what they need from corrupt doctors with access to blood banks, though this seems to be as much for convenience as for any love of humanity.

Bad things happen when Eve's sister Ava shows up. She is played by Mia Wasikowska, an amusing bit of casting for anyone who has seen her in Stoker, where deliberate misdirection suggested falsely that there was something vampiric about her and her family (spoilers). Ava is a more wild and careless character than her sister and she fucks it up for Adam and her sister by killing Adam's human fixer (something that to the audience was self-evidently going to happen but which caught Eve and Adam completely by surprise; immortality may not necessarily lead to higher intelligence). This obliges them to hightail it to Tangiers, where the film ends with them on their uppers, attacking two young lovers to temporarily satisfy their inhuman appetite.

The plot is not really what the film is about, though. It is more about the sense of detachment that comes from immortality and the accompanying loss of humanity. This is largely accomplished through shots of Tom Hiddleston looking sad or through tracking shots Detroit at night. Some time ago I saw a documentary about Detroit called Detropia, picking up from it that people from there are a bit hostile to the pornography of ruins thing people attach to their city. Perhaps so, but the city has seldom been better used as a backdrop suggesting the impermanence of human endeavours and the likely apocalyptic future faced by our society everywhere. The lute-tastic score of Jozef van Wissem (amped up here by being played with some metally group called Sqürl) adds to that sense of decay and melancholia.

There are odd features to it all, though. Like where do Adam & Eve get their money from? And why do they have none of it at the end? And can you really fly all the way from Detroit to Tangiers without seeing daylight?

Like Detroit, the Tangiers setting is also well used as somewhere that seems both exciting and interesting but also seedy and the wrong kind of edgy. When Adam & Eve walk the streets there they are continuously offered drøgs from a succession of shifty types straight from the pages of Edward Said (though I was reminded of the first night I spent with friends in the small Moroccan tourist town Essaouira). Against that unpleasantness there is also a beautiful moment when they stumble onto a woman singing with musical accompaniment in a small café, the kind of thing you wish would happen to you when you are abroad.

One thing I did find a bit distasteful was the reaction of some audience members to Ava's killing of Adam's fixer (and not just because, like me, the fixer is named Ian). The sight of his dead body, drained of blood engendered laughter on the part of some people in the cinema. I do not like the tendency of some vampire film viewers to identify with the sad plight of the vampire and to ignore the fate of the people on whom the undead prey. There is a certain reactionary outsider elitism, as they too at some level like to think of themselves as cut off from the swinish multitude with their own deep thoughts and angsts the like of which ordinary people could not even begin to understand.

But you should not judge a film by how some people react to it. Only Lovers Left Alive remains a stunning piece of work and an atmospheric evocation of alienation and emotional estrangement. With its combination of sound, music and visual images it is clearly a masterpiece of cinema and if other Jim Jarmusch films are even remotely as interesting as this I have a lot of catching up to do.


Links:

Detropia

Tilda Swinton image source (a review from Totally Dublin)

Sad Tom Hiddleston image source (We Got This Covered)

I saw Josef van Wissem

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[Live] Songs of Lily and Willy: an evening of erotic songs and stories

My beloved and one of her visiting singing friends were going to this event, which was part of the Five Lamps Festival. It was suggested that I could come to. Initially I thought this was crazy talk, but the event sounded so bizarre that I thought, what the hell, I am broadminded and willing to give anything a go. So I went. The venue (the In-spire Galerie on Lower Gardiner Street) was rather hard to find but I got there in the end.

The event was presented by a man and a woman, Andrew Ilsey and Fiona Dowling. She told the stories and he sang the songs (with Ms Dowling assisting on some of them). The stories varied between ones that were genuinely a bit saucy to ones that were more notable for having sexual content but being more based on humour or bizarre situations. Of the latter category there was an interesting tale of the Lakota Indians about the recurring legendary character Iktomi. In this one he finds himself in a village of women and has to teach them the arts of male-female copulation, but rather than being a tale of one man who can't believe his luck, the one-man-many-women situation leads to Iktomi fleeing lest the arduous women wear him out. Another French story featured a knight who, in an unlikely sequence of events, becomes able to talk to the vaginas of women (or any animal that has one) and have them answer him back. Apart from talking vaginas this story features almost no smutty content.

The songs were pretty much of the fnarr fnarr school of double or single entendre folk tunes. They feature many women having their meadows ploughed by obliging farm hands and so forth. The funniest was perhaps the first, because the singer kept forgetting his lines, just as it was reaching the saucy bits, making him a bit of a song tease. With the tunes generally I was curious as to whether any I recognised would show up, with the 'Bonny Black Hare' being an obvious candidate. In the end, the only song I knew was 'Gently Johnny', in the version set to music by Paul Giovanni in The Wicker Man.

My overall view of this event - well it was a bit strange. The erotic is something we are conditioned to experience in private. Or perhaps in semi-private public spaces, like darkened cinemas. Society has something of a taboo against public sexual arousal, so at an event like this there is a strong social pressure to swim against the erotic tide of the performers' material and make it something that is interesting or amusing but as unerotic as possible. Which is kind of missing the point. Or maybe this dialectic is the point.

It turned out that there were a lot of my beloved's Georgian singing friends at this event. After it was over they milled around and I suddenly realised that they were about to have one of their impromptu "polyphonic sing-songs", which would leave me feeling like a bit of a spare wheel. So I made my excuses and left, walking home in the rain.

rabbits

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