Mediocrity killed the reality star

The Quinq is still absorbing the signifance of this. Today sees the 30th anniversary of the seminal track, Video Killed The Radio Star, by the unfortunately named Buggles, then the vehicle for the talented Trevor Horn. Today, as yesterday and the day before, we’re seeing the first publicity for the release of the album Robbie Williams is describing as a turning point in his career, Reality Killed The Video Star, produced by Trevor Horn. Now, back in 1979, few of us saw the relevance or the prescience of the Buggles track. If we liked it, we did so against our will. Many of us have never liked Robbie Williams, who has never had his own style, while borrowing a bit of everyone else’s (mind you, much the same can be said of Madonna, but nobody does). So, some of us will see this new album title as being about Robbie Williams and some will see it as being about Trevor Horn. The Quinq knows where he stands. But the thing is, The Quinq remembers exactly what he was doing 30 years ago the first time he heard Video Killed The Radio Star playing on the radio. Driving up the M1 motorway in a blue Austin Allegro to a rented back-to-back terraced house off Otley Road in Bradford, where he was due to start co-habiting with his then partner for the first time. After months of waiting and preparing, he had finally torn her away from her parents’ smothering clutches and was happily moving up the motorway with her and their seven month-old daughter towards what he thought was going to be the first day of the rest of his life. How optimistic. How wrong. Robbie Williams wouldn’t have known anything about it. He was five years old at the time, fifteen years younger than The Quinq. And his nemesis. In my mind and in my car/We can't rewind, we've gone too far.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Day 18357 (the Revrrbaliser edit)

Everybody’s prodding me for the latest musical sampler. Hang on a while, can’t you! Your electrendster is discovering and listening as fast as he can. Put aside your 13,000 tracks from the past and all of your guitar memory. As ever, The Quinq has something new for you…

Dorian Concept Clap Beep Boom from When Planets Explode
King Midas Sound One Ting (Dabrye Remix) from Cool Out
J Todd Aaaa from Ryzzynynce
Flying Lotus Bad Actors from 1983
Hudson Mohawke Everybody Else Is Wrong from 7 x 7 Beat

Dorian Concept sounds like R2D2 having a breakdown inside an Osaka pachinko parlour. King Midas Sound is a stable-mate of Burial and, therefore, untouchable for that unmistakably skeletal Dubstep sound. J Todd, on the other hand, is the fusion that would have fissioned had Parliament collaborated with Kraftwerk in 1975. My funkatronic favourite from this list. As for Flying Lotus, it’s a kaleidoscopic collision of TV theme tunes and film set soundscapes. The Avengers meet The Professionals for A Few Dollars More. As for the noise of Hudson Mohawke, well, it sounds like nothing less than a Red Indian lost in the middle of a modern metropolis (I saw one once on the night of 4th January, 1981, but he was walking very determinedly towards Leeds railway station). And all of this under the beat of electronica. It’s a far cry from beautiful Röyksopp. But I’m giving you another slice of the future. Go hear it! And don't bother me for a week or so. The builders are in. And The Quinq is learning Norwegian.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Everything is new

Who was that at Glastonbury with the exploding firework tits? Who was that at Glastonbury with the 50s pantie-girdle and precious little else? Who cares? Seen it all before. Who was that at Glastonbury with the hip-jiving music that sounded like Robert Smith snogging Brandon Flowers? Why, it was Jack Peñate, the best gig at the festival by far. Jack Peñate is 25 today, half my age, yet with considerably more than twice as much going for him. Jack Peñate was born in Blackheath, London, 1984, a few months after I stopped living there. But it was nothing to do with me. Jack Peñate is the grandson of Mervyn Peake, who wrote Gormenghast. My long lost friend, Mark Eason, liked Gormenghast, but I don’t know what he’d make of Jack Peñate. How can someone so sensitive and so talented share the same birthday as Joey Barton. No matter. For, Jack has the best body-jerk dancing style that I’ve seen since my long, lost friend, Max Jingoff, back in Bradford in the late 70s. For me, it’s great to discover that something new can be done with simple guitar, bass, drum and voice. I had thought that, when Japan moved the guitar out of the equation with their 1980 LP, Gentlemen Take Polaroids, that we were done with that particular stringed instrument (which looks so silly on girls – not that some of the girl-led bands at Glastonbury realised). Henceforth, I thought we’d be looking to keyboards and voice, or drum and bass. I was not wrong, though only half right. Robert Fripp has made the guitar sound like an orchestra playing in a cathedral. With everyone else it’s more or less a banjo. With Jack Peñate, everything is different. I know the guitar is there and it looks great round his neck, knocking against those hips. But the main instrument is the voice. I thought I’d heard it somewhere before and I have. Perhaps in a forest, or when killing an arab. Maybe Saturday night 10.15, sitting in the kitchen sink. But I know that everything will be alright. This is a guy who can write about anything because he can talk about death and dying. I haven’t been as excited about a singer-songwriter since the emergence of Elvis Costello. With Jack Peñate, everything is new. Out of the womb/And into the tomb. Indeed.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Are we not Devo?

It’s 30 years today since Bauhaus released their seminal single, Bela Lugosi’s Dead. I ought to talk about Bauhaus. But I’ll save it for another day. For today, I’d rather talk about Devo, who, 31 years ago, released their first album, Are We Not Men? We Are Devo. Now, I liked Devo. They divided opinions like no other American band of the time. They were too intellectual. They were insensitive. They were ahead of their time. They were young. They were old. They were wierdos. Their message was nonsensical or dangerous. Was it really possible then, never mind now, to open the eyes of the world with song titles like Mongoloid and Jocko Homo? They were championed by David Bowie and Brian Eno, who produced their first album. Did Devo invent that snare drum sound that Bowie nicked for his Low LP? Stiff Records took them on board in the UK. There must have been something there, so why didn’t Devo ever crack it? At Knebworth in 1978, in the very month they released their debut LP, they experienced the same fate as U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds had at Reading in 1976. Canned off for being too different, in the wrong place, with the wrong audience. But was there ever a right audience for Devo? Poor Virgin Records. First U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds. Then The Sex Pistols imploded. Then there was Devo. Virgin had only ever had success with Mike Oldfield’s tubular balls. But now they wanted to be a rebel brand who only took on the challenging, so what did they expect? And Virgin wasn’t to get any mainstream success again until David Sylvian’s Japan – and then only briefly, before he, too, walked away from the limelight. (True, Virgin did bring Human League from the margins into the mainstream.) But that’s another story. Back to Devo. Trouble is, nobody ever really knew how to take Devo. In a time of simplistic, cut-through Punk, Devo wanted you to think about this idea they had whose name nobody could quite remember, never mind grasp. I was one of the only one among my peer group who engaged with the de-evolution idea, which went something like this…Forget evolution, think of the opposite. De-evolution. Instead of evolving, humankind is actually going backwards. Just look at all the social dysfunction and mass mentalism of the so-called most developed countries. Especially America. Although bizarre, it was quite refreshing for an American band to avoid flying the flag and all that sentimental chest-beating. It didn’t last. Devo had their 15 minutes in 1978. Are We not Men? We Are Devo flopped and America began to embrace Born To Run whereas Britain eventually turned to U2. But, since Devo, those of us who remember what it was all about have always been able to point at elements of society – from Big Brother to Facebook - and say, We are Devo.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Naked Hippies in Teepees

33 years on, I still can’t get my head around August 21st, 1976. On the day, it seemed quite simple. Wake up in a tent in a Hertfordshire field, your first night away from home with mates, aged 17. Following a magical evening of camp fires, acoustic guitars, joss sticks, awe and wonder. (One of the Plonker People - as we called the naked hippies in the teepee - sold Corf what turned out to be a soggy cigar butt for 10 pence.) Hoards of hairy, kaftan-wearing youths, all here for one purpose. To see the one and only Rolling Stones headline the Knebworth Festival. Some of us had even paid the extraordinary sum of £4.50 for our ticket – nine houses on my Saturday window-cleaning round. For this was also to be one of the last live performances from 10CC at the time of their biggest hit single, I’m Not In Love. And, little did we know, but this was also one of the last gigs by the complete line-up of Lynyrd Skynyrd, before the crash that killed half the band. Then there was Todd Rundgren and Hot Tuna. And instead of the few tens of thousands expected, over 200,000 more gatecrashed the event. Like ants and locusts, they climbed the fences and overwhelmed the turnstiles. So large was the crowd that those at the back heard reggae, off-beat versions of the bands, as the speaker banks at each corner of the massive event struggled to synchronise. We loved it – Buffalo Johnson, Corf, Pubic and me. We didn’t know it was the end of an era. Or that what was about to change that era was actually happening that very same day at another festival in France, at Mont De Marsan, where Nick Lowe, Pink Fairies, Eddie And The Hot Rods, Tyla Gang, Little Bob Story, Count Bishops, The Boys and The Damned, were featuring at a famous Punk Festival. It was the day where Ray Burns actually got his Captain Sensible moniker. But we were oblivious. We read about these upstarts in the paper the following week. We even saw Eddie And The Hot Rods as the Reading Festival the next weekend. But this was yet another festival from the old school, featuring the likes of Rory Gallagher, Camel, Black Oak Arkansas and Ted Nugent. The change was under way. Some people may well have seen The Sex Pistols perform at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 76 and had their world changed overnight. But this never happened to the majority of the people in the sticks where we came from. So, for us, August 21st, 1976 was a seminal day. And we didn’t even know it. We just enjoyed it for what it was. By the way, I’ve still got the packet of joss sticks I bought the previous evening. I wonder what happened to the Iron Cross I put round my neck. And that red and green, harlequin-patterned Knebworth ticket hanging up on our toilet wall today is fading somewhat now…

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Night 18340 (the Insomniac mix)

To my hoards of readers, thanks for waiting. For weeks, I’ve been immersed in the world of Electronic music, considering the role of the sublime in art, defoliating my blight-ridden tomatoes, amid a host of other blog-smothering activities. Last time I was here in front of you all, I was wondering about the Electronic influences of Southwold painter, Marc Brown. I’d discovered The Field and Murcof and bemused myself at the starry array of sub-genres within the Electronic fold, of which Techno is but one sliver. Now, I can say I’m more experienced. The Quinq has been places in his mind he didn’t know existed. And, sitting on the patio of my long lost friend, Rog, in Nottingham last Saturday evening, I was minded to describe my new found love for the winning Electronic genre of our times, Dubstep, sometimes known as Electronic Dub. I’ve found that you can tell someone you like Electronic, but, although they may be a fellow devotee, they may not have heard of the artists you can name. There are as many artists as there are sub-genres. I had to step back in time to pull up 70s Dub Reggae as the continuum here. Had King Tubby, Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo had this technology at their disposal, what might they have achieved? For me, with the eclipse of Reggae in the 80s at the hands of Rap and Hip-Hop, and with the impenetrable ugliness of most Dancehall, it’s a joyful relief to hear the re-emergence of Dub, albeit in a darker guise as a sub-genre of Electronic. No longer a purely black music preserve, Dub is, in its new Electronic form, susceptible to the influence of many formats, from Ambient to House and even Nu-Jazz. Now, I get to combine best of three worlds I’ve loved – Dub, Electronic and the dark night noise that characterised some of the Post-Punk era, including A Certain Ratio and Joy Division. And nary a guitar in earshot. Dubstep has been a long time coming. When XTC tried dubbing their music with a freebie inclusion to their second album, Go2+, nobody picked up on the excellence. Andy Partridge himself hated it and moved on to become the hippy he really wanted to be. But it’s all collected together in the wonderfully titled Explode Together – The Dub Experiments 1978-80. A step up from German bands like Can, 23 Skidoo championed an anarchic ambient noise that I hear in Dubstep way back in the early 80s. Check out their Seven Songs LP from 1982. Everything was moving away from Reggae and towards Rap and Rave. Apart, that is, from New Order, whose own dub experiments were a world apart (but, then, as a band, they were a world apart in the 80s). But now it’s time for Dubstep. The Garage, 2-Step and Grime influences of Dubstep seem to have passed me by, but the new sound has caught me by the hairs on the back of my neck. Oh, I can’t follow any of the 140 beats per minute technicality of it all. But I do know it incorporates elements of music I like, including Dub – if not the Reggae beat, then the sound effects. One of these days, I will discover Lee Scratch Perry up to no good in the thick of it. Dubstep may well be a technique, but it’s an atmosphere, a layered sound collage that induces a feeling, moving from the spaced-out to the edgy. I even hear it in the 80s German film music of Nikos Mamangakis, particularly Die Zweite Heimat. Whether it’s Burial, Skream, Pinch, Distance, Starkey, DJ T or 2562, it seems there’s a time for listening to Dubstep – a few minutes either side of 3 o’clock in the morning. Dubstep is your inner soundtrack, your personal sonic dreamscape, the sound your memories make. Dubstep is a surprise encounter with a recollection, just around the corner from your heartbeat. Dubstep is a pause in the sentence you use to describe your life. Dubstep is an echo of something you meant to say. Dubstep is your shadow demanding to be heard. Dubstep is a tacit understanding between an insomniac and a nightwalker. Dubstep is a crepuscular exchange at the edge of your world. Dubstep is reaching out to something just beyond your fingertips. Quite alien at first, Dubstep can sound very familiar after just a couple of listenings. But then, the Quinq is close to any form of expression that’s just below the pavement. When I listen to this kind of music I can sense people walking overhead on the world of surface. And, like the track from DJ T’s perfectly entitled album, The Inner Jukebox, I feel I’m Lit From Within. So that the imagery I see is on the back of my eyelids. Yes, as much as I like The Field and Gui Boratto and the lighter side of electronic, in Dubstep I think I’ve found what I was looking for. With my limited exposure to date, I’m assuming that Burial has truly defined Dubstep in his two albums. It is a dark mood, a Dickensian fog enshrouding the Thames, but very definitely a backdrop for humanity. All breathy heartbeats and footsteps, voices in puddles, one song seeping into the next. Amplified for every glitch, the background becomes the foreground - what I used to hear in the ante-room of The Smiths, A Certain Ratio, Joy Division, Pet Shop Boys and even Neil Young. Personally, I don’t care whether Murcof fails to make the list of Dubsteppers. The album from this Mexican, Martes, evokes the same mood in me as Untrue by Burial. It doesn’t matter that Amon Tobin and Craig Taborn cannot make the Dubsteppin cut, because their albums Bricolage and Junk Magic give me the same feed as Underwater Dancehall by Pinch or My Demons by Distance. Dubstep only really works as a thematic collection of songs – which is why some albums, like Skream! by Skream, don’t cut it as an entirety and are less than the sum of their parts. But since you asked for a sample of Dubstep, The Quinq is only too happy to oblige with 10 up…

Burial Near Dark from Untrue album
Distance My Demons from My Demons album
DJ T Lit From Within from The Inner Jukebox album
Ezekiel Honig Broken Marching Band from Surfaces Of A Broken Marching Band album
Modeselektor The White Flash feat. Thom Yorke from Happy Birthday! album
Pinch Widescreen from Underwater Dancehall album
Skream Kut-Off from Skream! album
Starkey Time Traveler from Ephemeral Exhibits album
Swayzak Distress And Calling from Some Other Country album
2562 Techno Dread from Aerial album

Quite clearly, in order to get a handle on the future of Dubstep, I’m going to have to walk backwards into Grime, 2-Step and Garage, its forbears. Watch and hear this space.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

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