Southwold Sound

In his own words, Marc Brown says, “The sea has been a connecting thread that runs through generations of my family, which has its roots in East Anglia and Holland…Working in mixed media, my work aims to capture elements of sea and coastline found along my native North Sea coast. I often explore the juxtaposition of large open skies with strands of finely detailed horizons which often focuses on isolated buildings or objects. I am particularly drawn to the vast open stretches of our coastline that feature remote or derelict buildings or structures.” While this captures it ‘like it says on the tin’, it somehow isn’t enough for me. I’ve been wondering about what sort of soundscape would accompany a viewing of the online gallery of this Southwold-based painter. The vast open shorelines seem to call for an absence of noise, but silence is not what I hear. I needn’t have worried. Marc recently emailed me, along with his other supporters, to announce a new website, featuring this gallery of his work (http://www.marc-brown.com/). His home page details several influences. You’d expect visual artists to appear on the list. They do. There’s De Chirico, Edward Wadsworth and Jean-Pierre Roy. But it’s music I hear when I stare at Marc’s mixed media work. So, it doesn’t surprise me at all to see that most of his influences are musical and that most of these musical influences are electronica. Although I find Murcof, one of Marc’s influences, too minimalist and glitchy, the music has helped. I’m not yet able to say in any great detail, however, why I connect with Marc’s paintings. But I’ve been following his progress since my first visit to Southwold in 2005, when I discovered by accident the art gallery in which he was exhibiting his work. It’s very rare that a painting can arrest my attention so that I not only do a double-take, but do a backflip like a slinky spring. But one did. So much so that I felt I had to engage the guy at the desk in conversation. I had to offset the overwhelming feeling of breathless surprise I was experiencing. The last time I felt that was at the age of around nine, when, attending the local brine baths with school sports legend David Field, I jumped in what I thought was the shallow end of the pool, only to find it was the deep end. At the time, I could barely swim and had no explanation for what was happening. Survival was instinctual. The same was happening here, before this painting. In this mixed-media shoreline depiction of a boat, lying lopsided at low tide, I’d no idea that the earth could be so deep. I was drowning in the texture of sand. The guy minding the gallery turned out to be Marc Brown himself, a young, unassuming fellow who, then, of course, rendered me speechless through the revelation of his identity. I didn’t buy the painting, mistakenly valuing the presence of higher numbers on my bank statement more than the transcendental capacity of Marc’s work. Since then, I’ve contented myself with occasional visits to the gallery’s online site. But I had to go back. And 50 provided my excuse. Ever since I bought a small piece of Marc’s art, entitled Distant Mooring, on a trip to Southwold for that very purpose at the end of June, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, hearing and thinking about electronica. Until I’d plumbed Marc’s influences, it hadn’t occurred to me that the painting now facing me on the wall opposite our bed – the last thing I see before sleeping and the first thing upon waking – could be having such an effect. Now, as some of you will know, I’ve been writing about electronica these past few weeks. For me, there’s a sonic temporal loop that connects today with the summer of 1977 that had such a great effect on my life and direction. There is a definite link between hearing Showroom Dummies by Kraftwerk, I Feel Love by Donna Summer and Oxygene by Jean Michel Jarre back then and the music I’m hearing in my sleep after viewing Marc Brown’s Distant Mooring today. Yes, Marc, it’s very tempting to see your work backdropped by the articulate silences of Stars Of The Lid. But to me, you see, you hear, your art has a looped rhythm to it. So, when I look at Memory Horizon or Strange Moon, Orford Ness I get Axel Willner, otherwise known as The Field, working with Sound Of Light – Nordic Light Hotel or From Here We Go Sublime. Whatever, I think I’m saying that Marc Brown’s painting is a time machine, or at the very least, a catalyst for personal transcendence. I’m well aware that I’m making the kind of transformational connection that Andy Blade talks about at the end of his book, The Secret Life Of A Teenage Punk Rocker. Andy talks about his life as if it was like emerging from the other end of a tunnel in his 40s, having entered it as a 15 year-old in 1976. For Andy, the revelation takes him straight back to the moments just before he entered that tunnel. Back then, he didn’t recognise the revelations for what they were – the first stirrings of connection with the real, inner self. Then, he spent much of his life moving away from that inner self, just when he thought he was winning and his chance came to be king. And now, after many, many years and a long journey, here they are again, those self-same feelings of excitement and dawning awareness. Yet, what they really are is a return to self and the meaning of who you are as a person in this world. Except that this time, you now have the chance to live with and explore that self, instead of running away from it. The ebbing tide in the shorescape I’m now moving towards is on an internal horizon. Unlike before, there’s no rush to reach it, because I know it’s always there. I walk towards it every day. Through the Marc Brown window.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

The thick brick I couldn't swallow

Today is the 31st anniversary of the release of Kinnell Tommy, by Ed Banger, on Rabid Records – a punk-related, jokey football song. It reminds us that there was a strong relationship between the working class punk ethos and everyday aspects of life, such as football. And that, very quickly, something like Punk would break down into various elements that people were comfortable with. The same week a year earlier at the height of Punk in 1977 had seen the release of Ain’t Been To No Music School by the same band, then called Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds. Look at the pic sleeve (http://www.punk77.co.uk/groups/nosebleeds.htm or watch it on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WzW246mKy8). This is how most provincial Punks dressed in 1976 and 1977. People have an image of leather-clad Punks with brightly coloured cockatoo head-dresses (but this came later and is largely down to the Kenny Everett piss-take, Gizzard Puke, and those postcards you can still buy on London tourist shop stands). Early Punk in the provinces was naïve and innocent. It may have been leather, chains and razor blades at the London Roxy scene, but, elsewhere, it was about wearing what clothes you had in a different way. You didn’t have leather. You couldn’t afford leather. Besides, leather was what bikers wore. Or it belonged to the S&M scene that Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood toyed with in Seditionaries, their clothes shop that kitted out these early Punks. For the rest of us, following on, there was Millett’s hardware store. It was the only place you could get drainpipe jeans that only blokes who worked in cardboard box factories would wear (thanks, Johnny Moped). You borrowed your dad’s pointed suede shoes from the 50s. And wore a sullen expression all of your own. You didn’t spike your hair, you just cut it shorter – very unusual at the time. In school, you pulled your tie into such a tight knot it wouldn’t undo. The trouble with adopting this semi-styled, dishevelled look was that the kids at school who looked naturally like this didn’t appreciate it because they were (a) thick (b) bullies and (c) in and out of Borstal. And this was one of the credibility issues of early Punk. Were you hard enough to adopt what was essentially a rebellious image? Punk was street-wise music for kids wiv no futchah. In order to gain this credibility themselves, some of the bands produced songs aimed at this audience. Band members in their early 20s were shouting about how crap it was to be at school. It may have rung true for the thickos, but, for the likes of me, a certain dumbing down was required. You could see it in certain bands, too. Howard Devoto left Buzzcocks before this happened to him. Another aspect of the credibility factor was the need to have two separate record collections: first and foremost, the collection you’d be happy to show – your growing set of Punk singles; then, hidden away at the back of the cupboard, would be all your pre-Punk, the stuff you really cherished and played on the sly. You’d have to deny this past, yet it was part of what had influenced Punk and brought it into being. For such a liberating sword, Punk didn’t half have some rigid rules. But I always found this school obsession laughable. My experience of school was about getting on so that I could get out, escape this life. You felt that some of the early Punk bands were from the B stream, the lads who played football and did a bit of bullying on the side. There was no intelligence in it. Some bands, like Eater, were still at school themselves. Or, should I say, of school age, because they never attended. Dee Generate was a 14 year-old drummer. The Damned actually supported them at London’s Roxy Club in January 1977, as did Johnny Moped in February, followed by The Lurkers and Sham 69 in March. Some Punk elements never really escaped from this association with school and yoof culture. You wouldn’t want to bump into any of them in a school alleyway. Slaughter and the Dogs, Sham 69. The Jam actually made something of it and helped to generate an anti-Punk mod revival. While post-punk was metamorphosing into miserable raincoats or multi-coloured New Romanticism, the Ska-beat bands, including Madness and The Specials, also had that lads-next-door, I-hate-school, anti-intelligence feel about them. Which is why it always feels ridiculous to me to see these two groups performing songs about teen life live at the age of 50. Andy Blade, Eater’s leader, finally published a book in 2005 called The Secret Life Of A Teenage Punk Rocker: schoolboy by day and low-rent punk rock star by night. This tells us more about what the Punk scene was actually like than any number of weightier, more erudite tomes. It’s the best book on the era I’ve ever read. OK, it’s London-centric and full of contradictions, but it doesn’t attempt to dumb it all down. It has the ring of truth about it. It feels like it’s describing the period I experienced. It remembers it as it was – The Damned came out of glam, The Clash came out of pub rock, The Sex Pistols came out of hell and went back there. The Heartbreakers were junkies. Sid Vicious was a thug but also a little boy lost. Johnny Rotten was an arrogant arsehole surrounded by sycophants. Malcolm McLaren even worse. So much of that scene is blatant lies that it’s refreshing to read a book like this. At times, Blade says strange things like he couldn’t understand why there was such a violent reaction to Punk and Punks. A bunch of London ne’er-do-wells who stole to fund a habit, ran around in gangs and sold their grannies for five minutes of fame (an image that we innocent provincials then had to live up to or live down). But at least he’s honest and tells it with humility. It sounds and feels right. From a Muslim background himself, he makes a great analogy between Punk and Islam. “The West, largely, sees Islam as an angry, confrontational religion and I can understand that. If punk rock had a corresponding religious belief to match its aesthetics, it would have been Islam. The raging, the rallying, the cliquey-ness of different sects, the refusal to compromise and the lack of tolerance for other movements would have been a perfect match….At Muslim meetings, sermons or whatever, the overriding theme appears to be the laying down of some kind of threat, that God is very angry, getting angrier by the minute and wants you to do something about it before it’s too late. There are no such things as hymns in Muslim ceremonies or services, but if there were, they’d probably sound something like the most ferocious punk-rock anthems ever written.” Near the end of the book, there’s an amazing paragraph where he’s glad to see the back of the 80s. “As the 1980s made way for the 1990s, I felt a tangible sense of relief, a wind of change drifting inexorably towards me. I felt no fear or trepidation, just a calm, welcoming acceptance. I was only too happy to shrug off a whole decade, like the discarding of an ill-fitting jacket I’d never wanted in the first place. For me, it had been a decade of misery.” I felt exactly the same. My appreciation of Punk and experience of post-Punk life was similar to yours, Andy. Except that you took the drugs and I took the education. I never pretended I was thick or hard. My big problem with Punk was that this was a credibility requirement. Nevertheless, we can both ask ourselves the question you left us with at the end of your book: “I sometimes wonder how my life would have unfolded had it not been hijacked by punk rock.” Kinnell, Tommy!!

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Electronica 3 (the Mark De Boffin mix)

Move over Edward de Bono and Alain de Botton. This is the Mark de Boffin mix. Based on the kind of thinking I call Avantgardening – digging for the roots, nurturing what’s growing at the edge of the world of memory. I’m looking for Numu. That’s new music to you. This is how it’s going to happen. The best voices and lyricists from the world of rock – certainly including Jack Penate and Brandon Flowers – will move away from the guitar/bass/drums four-square rock band format and into electronica. Oh, I know, similar movements have been tried before. But have they succeeded? No, I say. When Billy Mackenzie’s arrogance gave up Alan Rankine, the game was up for The Associates. He kept the name but henceforth, William, it was really nothing. You were a perfect soundless voice in the eighties wilderness. Only when Boris Blank, the sound of Yello, picked you up could we hear your mouth move. Then, you were the rhythm divine on single occasions, inside Yello albums, alongside Shirley Bassey and banks of perfectly orchestrated technology. If only you’d acceded to the request and actually joined Yello, we’d have had the first, perfect crossover. But you wouldn’t and didn’t. The only Associate, your power dwindled. There was no techno-soundtrack to your voice, as there couldashouldabeen. You took to raising racing whippets, won a few prizes, but put yourself down once and for all. For you, maybe the crossover was too early (or too late for your glamour chase). So, I’m calling for musicians to cease holding onto anachronistic modes of making music and cross over into electronica now. Indie, rock, soul, funk, jazz. Move over. The world has become electronica. We are living inside it. Touch wood. Torchwood. If only I were musical, I’d do it myself. I’d make it happen. I’d form the perfect band called Florence Mightinhale, whose first album would be entitled I Sink Therefore I Spam. Not about sampling and stealing and borrowing and begging and all that laziness afforded by technology ever since the early 80s. But a newly minted sound, bouncing inside a triangle of Blondie, Associates and Kraftwerk on a great day (and Abba, Blood Sweat & Tears and Human League on a good day). A new genre incorporating dubjazz called Afrodizzi or Blisstempo; but, of course, electronica, like all good music today. Oh, no, I can smell mushrooms. Hvordan frustrerende! Somebody’s already got there before me. Röyksopp. Junior is the best album in the first decade of this, our last century. I don’t have to listen to all the rest to make that judgement. I just know. Those perfect pop lyrics. The sound of today. Anneli Drecker and Karin Dreijer Andersson, your voices are liquid loveliness. You abbadabadoo it for me. You put the English language through a crushed velvet Manga machine before sending it first class on the Nozomi bullet train from Tokyo to Hiroshima. It’s a sound I can eat for breakfast Melody AM, or when I’m having a Junior Senior moment as the cocks are crowing.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

About time

Today, we celebrate the 138th birthday of Marcel Proust, who invented our understanding of the purpose of memory – to rediscover and reconsider the past in order to better appreciate the present. If you think this is telling you what you already know, you’d be right. (Yet, as Mark E Smith has said: ‘There’s nothing stranger than the things you know but don’t quite realise.’). It’s just that you haven’t done enough of it. You certainly haven’t made an art form out of it, like Marcel did. Today, nobody expects you to read the six volumes of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. And few could. It’s a marathon. It’s an ocean. I took my first dip in my early twenties, yet only found the necessary time commitment when commuting for four hours a day about ten years ago. Proust died at the age of 51. He’d spent the previous 15 years writing these volumes. What was he doing, shut up in his cork-lined bedroom, with papers spread all around him? Well, he was making an investigation into the infinity of tiny moments of time, officially gone, but effectively re-happening as he found them, as new psychological events. For most people, it appears that the past is a dead zone, best left unexplored. For some who cannot but help remember, it’s full of creatures, admonitions and warnings. Here be monsters. Yes, life is about moving forward, constantly pushing the boundaries of the present beyond arms’ length, plunging headlong into the future in the hope of catching it by the tail. Yet, within this momentum, is always the opportunity of exploring pockets of experience we call time past. Nobody should believe that Proust was just an aesthete who gave up on life and retreated to his room to contemplate a disappeared world he could not hope to recapture. He did rediscover that world and he continued to live in the now. Alain De Botton said as much in How Proust Can Change Your Life. It’s short. Read that instead. ‘Though we usually assume that seeing an object requires us to have visual contact with it…this may be only the first, and in a sense the inferior, part of seeing, for appreciating an object properly may also require us to recreate it in our mind’s eye…It suggests that having something physically present sets up far from ideal circumstances in which to notice it. Presence may in fact be the very element that encourages us to ignore or neglect it, because we feel we have done all the work simply in securing visual contact.’ For De Botton, Proust and other artists like him, actually bring back to life valuable yet neglected aspects of our experience. When I was growing up, the title was translated as Remembrance of Things Past, which misses the point in a big way. Today, the title is translated literally, as Proust intended, as In Search Of Lost Time. For that is what it is about. Time. And extending the memory muscle in pursuit of it. If I take a moment to consider, all my favourite authors take time as their common subject, in one way or another. James Joyce captures a culture and a lifetime in one Dublin day in Ulysses. Haruki Murakami enters parallel universes through doorways from everyday, mundane life. W G Sebald literally walks through time and illuminates layers of the past. Samuel Beckett watches time drip from a tap and waits. Gabriel Garcia Marquez stretches time until you can feel its sinews snapping. My favourite films and film makers follow suit. Edgar Reitz with his Heimat trilogy and Wim Wenders with Wings Of Desire. And, as I keep saying, music is about time. Well, I would. Like Marcel, I’m a natural born reflectionist.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Electronica 2 (the Avant-gardener mix)

I like various aspects of electronica and always have. Now, I'd like to explore it more, to see if there's something new I can take in. To see if there’s somewhere new it can take me. For me, it will always be a means to an end, a technological support system to convey another feeling. That first feeling was pop - what we grew up with. Or should I say Popcorn? Hot Butter re-recorded this, the first synthpop instrumental hit in 1972 (and covered again by so many since, from Jean Michel Jarre to Herb Alpert and Aphex Twin - and, another techno-dance favourite of mine, Daft Punk, who included elements of it in Around The World). Popcorn emerged around the same time that Brian Eno was wowing us with his synth. I remember that it was the Roxy Music single Pyjamarama (not on any of the LPs) that did it for me. Stuck in a long traffic jam near Llangollen on the A5, on our annual summer pilgrimage to the homeland in Bangor, I recall shouting at my father to switch the station back on half way through the song. I was 13 and very aware that I had just walked my mind into another world and there was no going back. When Kraftwerk emerged with Autobahn in 1974, I knew Bowie and was growing into a world of rock music. This German band represented the acceptable tip of a world of dark and brooding LP covers I'd discovered in W H Smith's record department from bands called Amon Duül, Can, Cluster and Neu! Autobahn was my first experience of ‘found sound’ and the appliance of technology to replicate real-life noise. When Lou Reed produced Metal Machine Music in 1975 (the aural equivalent of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake), it was nothing to do with electronica and more about his state of mind and bad relationship with his record company. Just as Brian Eno was inventing ambient, with slightly disappointing albums like Another Green World, Kraftwerk were changing their sound, introducing the Minimoog among a whole bank of new technology in a purpose-built studio called Kling Klang. I read about it and wanted to be there. Radio-activity was a superb LP, yet somehow also disappointing, because, title track aside, Kraftwerk had turned away from the approachability of Autobahn. It wasn’t until mid-77 when they re-emerged. I’d gone into Stafford’s only Punk record shop to buy God Save The Queen, but what I heard was Showroom Dummies. I was as knocked out by this as I had been five months earlier by Bowie’s Low – still the best album and electronica of 77, ahead of Marley's Exodus for me. This track, and the accompanying LP, Trans-Europe Express, took electronica into another dimension. It was entirely behind my desire to go around Europe by Interrail, which I finally did in 1981. But Kraftwerk still didn’t truly make it to the mainstream until the Man Machine LP in May 78. By then, we’d had the Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder breakthrough I mentioned. Yet, as beautiful as Man Machine was, it seemed like a swan-song to me. That Kraftwerk had reached their height and, from now on, would just be an influence for others. And so it proved. While we were all distracted by Power Pop, Mod and Ska revivalists, Kraftwerk paved the way for many of the Post-Punk and New Romantic bands, from the drum machine of Echo and the Bunnymen and Martin Hannett’s production of Joy Division, to the techno-funk of A Certain Ratio on the one hand, to The Associates, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode on the other (the latter, amusingly, claiming to have invented the incorporation of ‘found sound’ into recorded music!!). Rediscovering the catalyst of electronica was a great lifesaver to me when I emerged from two years in the heart of darkness at the end of 1980. As ever, electronica was the way to somewhere else. But the purest sound of electronica will always be Kraftwerk’s to me. OK, they’d topped out and were in Computerworld by 1981. But everything else we hear today is ‘son of’. They’ve toured as recently as 2007/08. The resultant double LP, Minimum-Maximum, has its good points, but it sounds like what it is – a retrospective without the energy and excitement and sense of time and place of the originals. Nevertheless, I was listening to the version of Radio-activity on this album as we entered Hiroshima, by bullet train, in April this year. But I guess the big point I’m making in all this is to say that, for our generation, the baby-boomers, electronica was never an end in itself, but only a means to carry something else that already existed into a new place. I read an interesting article today about Generation Y – the kids born 1978-1994. How, for these people, rather than us or Generation X (1965-77), new media are not a tool, a means to an end. Technology is where they live. The medium is the message. That’s why so much electronica is mediocre, even crap, soulless and unedifying – rather than the exciting, cutting-edge support system, the escape route, it was for us. In our day, so much rock music was also dull, average and lacking. That’s where we lived. So, what electronica needs is its own Punk revolution to weed out the dross, clarify all that has gone before and set a new direction.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Electronica (The Quinquagenarian Mix)

Yes, I know I should be listening to the Marcin Wasilewski Trio or Tom Farrell, but I’ve given in to a need to explore electronica. I’ve had to do something about a knowledge which began with Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, got drunk on DAF in the Palais Schaumburg, then stumbled up the Holger Hiller before falling foul of Aphex Twin and The Orb. So I dove into the deepend of a music download site somewhere on the west bank of the Rhine and emerged with Kompact Total 4 between my teeth and a piranha called Superpitcher on my tail. The latter’s version of Eno’s Baby’s On Fire sounds like Boney M doing Hendrix. That good? That bad? It’s all pretty relative, isn’t it? ‘Are you in the market for repetitive beats?’ the download site asked me. Actually, on first hearing, much of this stuff sounds like the klang you curse the 18 year-old knobcheese who drives past your window at 80mph four in the morning blasting out a death pulse from a neutron star. You feel like you need a day’s gardening after enduring Frei’s Freiland, or quality time at a health spa after subjecting your spirit to the doorbell disco of Maria by Closer Musik. A lot of it sounds like the soundtrack to a vicious burglary, produced by people who have forgotten what it means to put their arms around another person. This is the noise of a cold criminal nailing a cat to a wall in Yates’s wine bar in the centre of a city like yours. To get anything out of this you surely have to be more plastered than a plasterer from Plaistow. Or totally wired, can’t you see?! But you have to get through this cloud of confusion. There’s a long way to go and you need to enjoy the journey, so pay attention! After all, what with people so obsessed with genres these days, it’s difficult to take two steps forward into electronica without zig-zagging left and right and getting quite, quite lost. 2-Step/Garage. Abstract. Breaks. Dance. DJ Mix. Downtempo. Drum ‘n, Bass. Electroclash. Electronic Ambient. Electronic Dub. Electronic Experimental. Electronic Industrial. Global. Groove. House. IDM. Jungle. Krautrock. Leftfield. Nu-Jazz/Broken Beat. Remix. Techno. Trance. Trip-hop. Turntablism. Not to mention Aphrodisiac, Cannibalism and Roadrage. Actually, I made up the last three, but you get my point. Everybody wants their own genre in electronica. And, in this world of digital recording, precording and frecording, is anything not electronica? Or, looking at it the other way round, does electronica exist at all, or is it just a way of playing another style of music? I’m surprised about how incestuous it all is – everybody recording and remixing everyone else’s versions. You wipe my bottom, I’ll wipe yours. I don’t knock this approach – The Good Son vs The Only Daughter is a brilliant, Sylvian-supported remix of his album, Blemish, probably better than the original. But wipe your own arse is all I’d say, you 21st century gigolos. But is electronica worth it? That’s my question. Do I like it beatless, banging, grinding, sensual or glossy? You ain’t going to keep me out with no semantic smokescreen, Jörg! Even though, today, electronica is as wide as jazz and as deep as a painting by Marc Brown. Just because it starts with synthetic pop of the Rice Krispies variety like Röyksopp and ends way over the horizon with the avant-garde emetic of Triola. I will find something I like and turn it into memory mix. But just a word, D J Koze, about your mix of Reinhardt Voigt’s Zu Dicht Dran...remember you’re a human being - not even a dentist would do that. Finally – it doesn’t take long if you’re persistent - I think I’ve found something under Nu-Jazz: an album by Craig Taborn called Junk Magic. Sounds like The Pop Group or James White’s Contortions put through a synth. But I might start with The Field’s From Here We Go Sublime, a bottle of Adnam’s Innovation and a couple of Neurofen.

Maybe we make too much of electronica. It used to be nothing more than sequenced keyboards. Brian Eno showed its true worth, as ambient sound. Post-Punk bands like Human League and Simple Minds were keyboards-based bands. Remember, Punk had banned keyboards from the stage. They were Rick Wakeman’s toys. Yet, the summer of 77 may be recalled for the flowering of Punk, but I also recall it for two big tracks, I Feel Love by Donna Summer and Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre. These changed music forever. The Giorgio Moroder-led I Feel Love became the platform for the dance music we’ve known ever since. Oxygene was MOR Tangerine Dream, spawning the soft ambient and trance music to come. Interspersed with Dub and Punk, I played them over and over again. With Punk out of the way, keyboards were back. The early, experimental Human League singles and albums went nowhere. The hypnotic, multimedia live shows were witnessed by two students and a robot dog. Electonica had arrived on these shores. And it didn’t have to be Germanic or intellectual. It took a while for Human League and Simple Minds to work this one out. Cabaret Voltaire and bands like 23 Skidoo never did or didn’t care. They were happy with art-house. Then the New Romantics came along, bringing brightness and fun and a recall for Pop. With synth drums the technology of the day, electronica progressed into the mainstream. Simple Minds were very much part of this progression from German experimentation into British pop. They grew out of the ashes of a fake Punk band with a great name – Johnny And The Self-Abusers. They got their new Post-Punk name from Jean Genie by David Bowie, or Play It Safe by Iggy Pop. One way or the other. They were influenced by Lou Reed but interested in the experimentation that new synth technology now offered. So, early albums tended to reference Kraftwerk and Neu! and the more unapproachable Teutonic groups. It was not until they signed to Virgin that they began to make headway (this label had faith and patience and gave the breakthrough for so many bands, including The Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd, Magazine, Human League and Japan). They were even produced by the hippiest of hippies, Steve Hillage. They got to support Peter Gabriel. When I first saw them in March 1981, they were stretching out to headline places like The Venue in London. Jim Kerr would stride onto the stage in knee-length leather boots and jodhpurs. For all the world, the 21-year old electric equestrian. Something was changing. There was a new dream of gold. Jim Kerr is 50 today and much more has changed. Simple Minds occupied my thoughts greatly in 1981 and 1982. They promised me a miracle but they delivered something considerably less than that to the multitudes thereafter, during the course of the 80s. After a brief flirtation with pop somewhere in a new romantic summertime, they became a bloated stadium rock band, produced by the same man who went on to produce U2, Steve Lilywhite. In this, they had their greatest success. So that, at one point in the mid-to-late 80s, there was little difference between Simple Minds and U2. A long, long way from the roots in electronica. And that’s what I mean – electronica used to be a means not an end. The drum machine was never the star, only the satellite of love. Now it’s owned by the German death-heads once again. Personally, I like the bands who are trying to take it away from them and breathe some humanity back into it - like my favourite Norwegians, Royksopp.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Incendiary Device

I’ve been writing about the causes and effects of Punk. One rarely mentioned influence is humour. An important and often overlooked element of it all is the people who brought a smile to our faces towards the end of a very grim decade. It was more than the names of the bands or band members, though these were massively attractive in their own right. For some, the humour detracted from the seriousness of the message and the impact. It was plain for all to see when The Sex Pistols toured with The Clash, The Damned and The Heartbreakers at the end of 1976 that Captain Sensible and his crew were just not serious. Yet, for many of us initially put off by the violence of The Sex Pistols and the earnestness of The Clash, The Damned were the way in. Not that the Captain wasn’t political. He was originally a member of the Green Party. Even recently, in 2006, passing 50, he formed his own political entity, the Blah! Party. In his launch statement, he said: ‘Politics is dead. The British public aren't voting because the parties are totally ignoring their opinions. At the moment, the only real method of mass protest against this is by not voting, which is why voting figures continue to fall. But we believe that voting is an important part of the democratic process, and we want the Blah! Party to be the party of protest: a channel through which the people of the U.K. can vent their dissatisfaction at nonsensical everyday things, and protest against the government and the current crop of political parties.’ Now, it’s very hard to take someone seriously who wore a ballet tutu on stage. But somebody had to do the nonsensical thing back in 1976. We needed the fun that ought to be part of life when you’re 17 or 18, when you don’t really care about voting. To make a splash, The Damned were more than happy to forget the message and cover themselves with foam or margarine for a newspaper or album cover. Ray Burns, aka Captain Sensible, had been trying to make his mark on the music business for some years. As I’ve said, Punk, and therefore Punks, had history. They didn’t just arrive out of nowhere. Although it does, it shouldn’t surprise us at all that Captain Sensible ended up topping the charts with Happy Talk in 1982. Already 22 by 1976, he had to get a move on. And he’d started his musical career as part of Johnny Moped’s band. Paul Halford, aka Johnny Moped, was and remains a mysterious figure. Throughout his admittedly short-lived career as an unlikely Punk icon, Paul Halford had trouble holding on to his job in a cardboard box factory. In 1975, Halford, Burns and a bunch of Croydon mates managed to record but not release a single called Disco Girls. By mid-76, they were calling themselves Johnny Moped and could say that they were around at the birth of Punk in the UK. You only had to look at Paul Halford and you’d burst out laughing. Unprepossessing was the word. Yet you soon forgot this when you heard the vinyl or saw the band play live. Not that they had any vinyl until the summer of 1977 – today’s date, in fact. Incendiary Device/No-One is still considered a Punk classic. The growling voice and hard-driving rhythm was the best that the Chiswick Records label - second only to Stiff Records in re-launching the careers of never-has-beens - had to offer. Ray Burns left after weeks in 1976 to form The Damned. But he introduced his replacement, Slimey Toad, who had played with Damned drummer Rat Scabies in a band which had had a residency at a mental home. Johnny Moped first really came to the notice of the Punk press through being one of the early bands to play live at London’s Roxy Club. Indeed, their debut on vinyl was their live contribution to Live At The Roxy WC2 album in June 1977. But it wasn’t as good as Incendiary Device. John Peel championed it and it became number 15 in his Festive Fifty of 1977. One critic described it as moronic punk ‘n’ roll. OK, the lyrics wouldn’t win the Germaine Greer prize for poetry (Walking down the road with my incendiary device/Looking for an ear to blow it up with gelignite/Stick it in her lughole/Watch it blow her head apart/Stick in her lughole/Stick it in her other part/My device is nearly ready/Grab her neck and hold her steady/Stick it in her), but its energy enabled Martin and me to bounce off the corridor walls of our halls of residence in Bradford a few months later. It may well have been beer-sodden pub-rock, but it gave us what we wanted. But Paul Halford wasn’t giving his band members what they wanted. He wouldn’t give up his job in the cardboard box factory, which tended to get in the way of recording and releasing their first LP while the Punk boom was still on. To get their singer to a recording session, the rest of the band had to kidnap him from his workplace. Once, they painted him all green so he couldn’t go back. The paint didn’t come off for weeks. On another occasion, they found him queueing up to get into one of his own gigs to see himself. The band split. After the band split, that’s when they decided to record the album. That was Johnny Moped for you. Halford was persuaded to gig some more, to great acclaim. They reformed for a couple of well-received gigs at London’s Roundhouse. In March 1978, they even released a second single, the wonderfully titled, Darling, Let’s Have Another Baby (only Johnny Moped could have got away with the lyric I’ll be quite happy/To wash and change his nappy; you can see Paul singing this with his wife, Brenda on a recent YouTube clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtCo2nxh1XA). This was quickly followed by an ignored classic of an LP, Cycledelic. The Guinness Encylopaedia Of Popular Music names it as one of the best 50 Punk albums of all time (personally, I’d struggle to name 50 Punk albums!). And I still hadn’t seen them live. When the chance came to see them support Adam and the Ants at the 100 Club on London’s Oxford Street in early April 1978, I couldn’t resist. Max Jingoff and I cancelled our lectures for a couple of days and hitch-hiked our way there and back. It was a fabulous gig, riotous and energetic, number eight in my all-time top 25 gigs. Johnny Moped was an eccentric. Both Punk and the world of cardboard box manufacture would just not have been the same without his humour.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

I like Jodie Foster, but...

Late Saturday night I broke one of my own rules for life. I was wide awake, waiting for the flush of alcohol to dissipate – after a Mojito, half a bottle of a decent NZ Pinot Noir, topped off with several shots of a Guavita, a Cuban liqueur, sweetening a fine Monte Cristo cigar. When I drink too much these days, which is rare, I have to wait for my head to clear before going to bed. It’s a dangerous time. What do I do with this intoxicated me that isn’t me? Read? No, impossible. Listen to music? I seemed to require something visual. So the mistake I made, and the rule I broke, was to switch on late night TV, instead of watching a favourite film. It could have been Blue Velvet, or Rumble Fish, Wings Of Desire or any of Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, even something from the Marx Brothers. But no, it was TV – which is always a mistake for me, whatever my state of sobriety. For, at this time of night, or any time of night for that matter, all there is to watch on TV is crime. I have not yet fathomed why the entertainment providers (that TV companies are) have decided to force-feed us crime. People do not like crime. Everything is about the human short-cut that is crime: the worst side of human nature. First, I watched Flightplan, an unlikely but compelling tale of a woman whose child is ‘stolen’ on an airborne plane by a hijacker and secreted in the hold. It was the ‘one person against the world’ scenario that Hollywood regurgitates constantly, with Jodie Foster playing the female Bruce Willis. Jodie Foster excels in such roles. I always stick with her films because I find her very attractive. It would, however, be good to see her in something that didn’t involve rape, murder or some other form of grisly violence. But my negative force field wasn’t sated yet. From this, I went on to watch Wallander, the original Swedish film of a TV series that Kenneth Branagh has recently starred in over here. Incest, religious bigotry, insanity, murder, the lot, in yet another police detective drama. The whole thing only redeemed by a performance from the female lead, Johanna Sällström. There was always the off button, I can hear you saying. But these dynamic women kept me watching. And I always wonder about women and crime. How crime is, by and large, such a man-made thing. How, by and large, women are caught up in it. Different chromosomes. But I was there, still watching, waiting for burning alcohol to escape my body, feeling acutely sensitive to such subjects. To watch them is to feel vulnerable and, eventually, desecrated. And to realise that there is a need for an intoxicated part of me to watch them is what makes me sad and depleted. When I finally went to bed it was 2am. Wary and weary of humankind, I went into the spare room, having a need to be alone. I slept badly, awaking at 8 to the enervating sound of barking dogs, let out by our anti-social neighbours. I felt that there was something I had to attend to, but could not bring my mind around to it. I felt dizzy, nauseous. Our own dog needed walking. Eventually, I knew I would have to spend my day undoing the damage I had done to myself in the late hours of the previous night. I had left myself wide open to a virus from the world of entertainment. At such times, I know only one tool that works. Music. I keep coming back to that thought. The one invention of humankind that justifies the species. So, after walking the dog, a long, difficult, hot walk with a humming in my head, we eat breakfast. But there is the joyful Sunday morning sound of Jazz FM. I hear something that reminds me of Steely Dan and sends me off into a reverie of how much this band saved me in my nervy mid-teens back in the 70s. When I’ve made a mistake and broken my own rules for life, there is always somebody to help in the world of music.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

He did Poinciana his way

It’s a hot day. All the windows are open. Different thoughts are competing lazily for attention, if such a contradiction is possible. It’s the right day for listening to Poinciana, the song Ahmad Jamal released in January 1958. It’s a perfect foreground to the ear-splitting grinding of roof tiles going on three doors down the road. Ahmad Jamal, 79 today, was a favourite pianist of Miles Davis, who felt that his playing revolutionised the use of space and time in jazz. Both got a huge amount out of very few notes. Loads of people have recorded Poinciana, before and since. Dave Brubeck, Glenn Miller, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner, Nat King Cole. It wasn’t Jamal’s song, but it was after he’d recorded it live. He owned it. Just as Sid Vicious owns My Way, leaving Sinatra’s version trailing in its wake. And, yes, Jamal’s version of Poinciana is also better than Sinatra’s. OK, one is instrumental and the other vocal. But, hey, Nat King Cole’s is better than Sinatra’s.

Today, last night, in fact, a very long, lost friend came to the forefront of my mind. I haven’t seen or heard from Martin Higgott since we were both 12 years old. We’d spent the previous three years growing up on the same housing estate. His father had been a triallist for Stoke City. His sister had got pregnant while listening to Albatross by Fleetwood Mac. Presumably, someone else was involved, though we all felt it was supernatural at the time. But, then, we were only 10. Martin didn’t have his own football boots. I was picked for the first team at our secondary school. First game, away to Rising Brook, 0-0 at half-time. Me, substituted. By Martin. Can I borrow your boots? Goes and scores a hat-trick. In my boots. 5-0 to us. He stayed in the team and I didn’t get a look-in till he left the school over a year later. I never lent my boots to him again. But they never scored three for me. Anyway, Martin, you’re 50 today, somewhere. So, happy birthday!

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk