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• Kraftwerk and the Blue Mask effect

  April 17, 2012 @ 9:51 pm | by Donald Clarke

  All sensible people will, of course, rejoice at the news that Kraftwerk, one of the five greatest music acts of the last half-century, are set to release a new album. It’s been nearly 10 years since the well-dressed Germans gave us the puzzlingly mono-dimensional Tour de France. It’s been three decades since they released a genuine classic: Computer World. Hang on. I appear to be talking myself out of my own enthusiasm. Do I not? Neither that cycling-related LP nor Electric Cafe from 1986 were in the top rank. It’s also worth noting that the new album will not feature the great Florian Schneider, who, with Ralf Hutter, formed the dual-core of the band. That’s like releasing a Steely Dan LP without Donald Fagen.

  Still, Hutter is no fool and everybody who savours the mechanical rhythms of post-war electronica will look forward to the new release with some enthusiasm. If it is really good then we’ll all feel a little better about the business of growing old. Look. Folk like Kraftwerk continue to perform creatively for decade after decade. Maybe we are immortal, after all.

  

  Yes, it’s really them. Honest, Injun.

  But will we play the blasted thing? Here’s my point. Popular musicians have an awful habit of spontaneously ceasing to matter. It can get to the point where, however good the new album, it just doesn’t seem to want to sit on your turntable (or appear in the iTunes window). A whole generation of musicians now specialise in releasing albums that get good reviews, sound super on first and second listen, but are almost immediately relegated to the file marked “ignore”. Some people have written nice things about the new Bruce Springsteen LP. But, when it comes round to Boss Time again, will they really play Wrecking Ball (that’s what it’s called, right?) rather than Darkness at the Edge of Town or Born to Run? I don’t think I’ve played Bob Dylan’s highly praised Modern Times since the week it came out. Yet I listened to Blonde on Blonde just yesterday. When Saint Leonard Cohen recently released some new batch of muttering, there was, in the coverage, a real sense of “It’s nice that it’s there. But I’ll probably be sticking with Songs of Leonard Cohen.”

  Now I come to the title of this piece. A film writer on another paper once described this condition to me as “The Blue Mask effect“. Nobody is more adept at releasing albums that, though good, don’t invite revisiting than grumpy old Lou Reed (not that I’d say it to his face). Oh goody. It’s The Blue Mask. It’s Magic and Loss. It’s New Sensations. It’s New York. It’s Set the Twilight Reeling. This sounds great. I’ll play it at 10. I’ll stomp around the room. I’ll put it back in its jewel case (remember them?) and never, ever play it again. Never again.

  It is often weirdly easy to pinpoint the point at which an artist drifts into The Blue Mask zone. It happened to Elvis Costello in 1986. That year’s Blood and Chocolate sounds like an LP that’s tuned into the zeitgeist. For some odd reason, Spike, released in 1989, just does not. The new rave culture, Madchester and the pre-grunge genius of the Pixies were bubbling. Still someway short of his fortieth birthday, Declan MacManus sounded like (ahem) a man out of time.

  It’s trickier with David Bowie. Let’s Dance is one of his biggest selling LPs. But it is the first of his records that sounds like a man following trends rather than creating them. (Really! Young Americans may have dallied in Philadelphia Soul, but, in 1975, that music was as foreign to most white rock fans as were nose-flute melodies of the lower Andes.) Proper David Bowie probably ended with Scary Monsters in 1980.

  A few artists have managed to produce records you keep playing for decades. Neil Young had a fair crack at it. You wouldn’t think somebody odd if they played Harvest Moon rather than Harvest or Ragged Glory rather than Zuma. But, yes, Harvest Moon and Ragged Glory are now 20 years old. And I don’t find myself reaching for recent albums such as Mirror Ball or Prairie Wind all that often.

  It just seems that, with the best artists, the  great, early music lodges in your brain and doesn’t leave space for anything new. It remains possible to appreciate fresh work in an academic fashion. One can write an equation to prove that, say, the latest Tindersticks’ LP is a “return to form”. (It kind of is, actually.) But if you have 20 minutes free to enjoy Nottinghamshire misery you’re going to click on one of the master miserablists’ first six LPs. Aren’t you?

  Anyway, let’s hope that the new Kraftwerk LP has a bit more staying power. We continue to travel hopefully. Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn.

• Who cares what Screenwriter’s favourite albums are?

  December 6, 2011 @ 10:51 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Nobody. That’s who. Nonetheless, every year, I make an effort to compile a list of 10 squeaky, obscure recordings (and that year’s Keith Jarrett release). Not doing this for a living, I don’t pretend that this is any sort of definitive chart. These are, as it happens, just the 2011 records I listened to most often when ironing or eating Marmite.

  1. THE FIELD — LOOPING STATE OF MIND

  

  As far as I am aware, the Swedish musician did not derive his name from the popular John B Keane play about quarreling bogmen. He does produce the most marvellously mellow repetitive rhythms though.

  2. DESTROYER — KAPUTT

  

  This is definitely suspect. Hear it through a heavy door and you could mistake it for something Californian from awful 1976. Actually Destroyer (once again, a person rather than a band) is from Vancouver. Heck, I still like “the Dan”. What am I moaning about?

  3. ALVO NOTO AND RYUCHI SAKAMOTO –SUMMVS

  

  Alvo released a fine solo album this year, but his latest collaboration with the great Ryuchi takes the ambient biscuit. (Actually that’s a good name for a foil-wrapped treat.)

  4. WHITE DENIM — D

  

  Now this is really suspect. It sounds a little like Clarkson Rock played through a Frank Zappa machine. Great though.

  5. KEITH JARRETT — RIO

  

  What more needs to be said? Yet another sublime solo improvisation.

  6. KING CREOSOTE AND JON HOPKINS — DIAMOND MINE

  

  Very soothing. We all need a little time stranded in a rowboat with a Scottish folkie and a mild techno bloke.

  7. WU LYF — GO TELL FIRE TO THE MOUNTAIN

  

  What the hell is going on here? Ellery Roberts appears to have screeched all the lyrics from a building several towns away from the recording studio. I mean it’s shouty and yet not quite audible.

  8. TIM HECKER — RAVE DEATH 1972

  

  Another masterpiece of fuzzy ambient from the man who invented the form.

  9 JULIANNA BARWICK — THE MAGIC PLACE

  

  Okay, if you were being really, really, really, really unkind — I mean really unkind — you might argue that this is Enya out of Brooklyn. Not fair.

  10. RUSTIE — GLASS SWORDS

  

  I have always lived by the rule that the only sort of electronic music worth listening to is the stuff you can’t dance to. Well, you can dance to this. But I don’t.

  As Dave Lee Travis used to say, bubbling under we had: Father, Son, Holy Ghost by Girls; Replica by Oneohtrix Point Never; Slave Ambient by The War on Drugs; The Constant Pageant by Trembling Bells; A Winged Victory for the Sullen by A Winged Victory for the Sullen; Space is the Only Noise by Nicolas Jaar, Tarkovsky Quartet by François Couturier; Celestial Lineage by Wolves in the Throne Room; Smother by Wild Beasts. Is that enough?

  Oh, yeah. We should give a nod to Sony’s superbly packaged Miles Davis — Live in Europe 1967. (The Bootleg Series, Vol 1). It looks as if that company are going to do for Miles what they did for Bob Dylan. An unimaginably tantalising proposition.

  

• I hate the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame

  September 28, 2011 @ 10:02 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Oh Lord, is there anything quite so irritating as the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame? This outburst is prompted by the news that poodle-barband Guns N’ Roses and pop-goths The Cure have been nominated for — such a pompous word — induction into this frightful institution in Cleveland, Ohio. It doesn’t pay to get to naive about popular music. Right from the beginning, the form was compromised by commerce. The smaller record labels were, quite often, as corrupt and money-grabbing as the mighty conglomerates. The first rock and roll singers might have sneered at the cosiness of the cardigan-wearimg crooners, but step back a few paces and it became clear that they were all involved in the business that goes by the name of show.

  And yet. I still naively expect rock musicians to at least pretend to a suspicion of ordered institutions and meaningless decorations. The Americans never really got that. Right from the beginning they were handing each other gongs and turning up at preposterous back-slapping dinner dances. In the United States, even supposed renegades feel that the successful deserve formal signs of respect. Just look at the horrendous Grammys for proof. Eugh!

  Anyway, the stupid Hall of Fame continues to lure otherwise respectable people to its appalling shindigs. The one band who have responded to the event with the disdain it deserves are the mighty Sex Pistols. It hardly needs to be said that, what with those dreary reformations and John Lydon’s butter commercials, the Pistols are not exactly in any position to occupy the moral high ground. But their letter to the hall of fame — gloriously incoherent and misspelled — remains a very impressive venting of spleen. Now this is telling them.

  “Next to the SEX-PISTOLS rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. Were not coming. Were not your monkey and so what? Fame at $25,000 if we paid for a table, or $15000 to squeak up in the gallery, goes to a non-profit organisation selling us a load of old famous. Congradulations. If you voted for us, hope you noted your reasons. Your anonymous as judges, but your still music industry people. Were not coming. Your not paying attention. Outside the shit-stem is a real SEX PISTOL”

• “That’s right, the Mascara Snake. Fast and bulbous.”

  December 18, 2010 @ 7:13 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  “Bulbous also tapered.”
  “Yeah, but you’ve got to wait till I say: ‘Also a tinned teardrop’”.
  “Oh, Christ!”
  “Alright, again. Beginning.”
  “Fast and bulbous.”
  “That’s right, the Mascara Snake. Fast and bulbous. Also a tinned teardrop.”
  “Bulbous also tapered.”
  “That’s right.”

  Bang! Thump! Rattle!

  Captain Beefheart is no more. It doesn’t require too much straining of the hyperbole-glands to identify Trout Mask Replica as the greatest album of all time. The excellent documentary excerpted above features a wonderful contribution from Matt Groening on the subject. He relates how, having bought the thing because it had Frank Zappa’s name upon the cover, he put it on the turntable, lowered the stylus and immediately reeled back in shock. Bang! Clatter! Clunk! “They weren’t even trying,” he laughs. Of course they were trying very hard and, after giving the album another hundred chances,  Matt became addicted to the strange entity. It is a measure of the Captain’s gift that, once you become used to his dadaist blues, you can’t remember why you found the music difficult in the first place.

  Is Trout Mask Replica the place to start? Yeah. Why not throw yourself in at the deep end? If, however, you fancy something a little less confrontational then check out the somewhat more tuneful — but still excellent — Clear Spot or The Spotlight Kid.

• Screenwriter’s albums of the year

  December 5, 2010 @ 10:12 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Not that you care, here are my favourite albums of 2010. As ever, the list is a reflection of an elitist, pretentious and generally sod-you sensibility. Then again, there is some evidence of unreconstructed post-punk conservatism in here. What are you going to do? It’s too late to turn back now. To my serious shame, I note that one of my  10 favourite records was picked by the NME as its album of the year. Jeez. That hasn’t happened since 1980.

  

  Spacebar! Spacebar! Ampersand! Are you digging it, man?

  1. Alva Noto: For 2

  The most gifted artist in bleepy minimalist electronica offers a tribute to his many idols. Screenwriter fans will particularly enjoy the nod to Tarkovksy.

  2. Food: Quiet Inlet

  ECM Records celebrated its 50th anniversary recently and it continues to deliver brilliant, spooky — often rather icy — improvised music. Here veteran saxophonist Iain Ballamy teams up with electronic boffin Fennesz and multi-instrumentalist Nils Petter Molvaer.

  3. Sam Amidon: I See the Sign

  Another great record from the strangely under-appreciated American art-folk warbler. Amazingly, the album features a beautiful cover of an R Kelly tune.

  4. Marilyn Crispell and David Rothenberg: One Dark Night I Left My Silent House

  More ECM. Heavens. After all these years. The improvisations between Crispell, whacky pianist, and Rothenberg, eccentric clarinetist, veer from the pretty to the harshly abstract. So there.

  5. Sleigh Bells: Treats

  Yeah! Fantastic blend of football chant and post-punk clatter. Why is every bloody band from Brooklyn these days? If I lived in Queens I think I’d feel quite sore about it.

  6. These New Puritans: Hidden.

  If the teenage me suspected that, in a few decades time, I would be recommending the contemporaneous version of Barclay James Harvest, I would have thrown myself in front of a bus. Oh, well.

  7. The National: High Violet

  No really. Why is every band from (or in this case, based in) stupid Brooklyn? Admittedly this does sound like something you’d hear in Starbucks. Never mind. You hear Bob Dylan in Starbucks.

  8. Yellow Swans: Going Places

  If they’re not from Brooklyn, they’re from Portland. This is, apparently, the last album ever from the electronic noise merchants. They really are “going places” you see.

  9. Belle and Sebastian: Write About Love

  Yeah, I know. It’s awfully twee, awfully white and awfully awfully. But the fragile Scottish band are writing their best tunes in years.

  10. Emeralds: Does it Look Like I’m Here?

  Jolly, melodious electronica from a durable, prolific Cleveland mob. You can’t get (jointly) much further from Brooklyn and Portland without leaving the Union.

• On the Guardian’s list and lists in general.

  October 24, 2010 @ 6:49 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  One of the selling points of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity was the author’s investigation of the contemporaneous urban male’s obsession with best-of lists . Fifteen years after that book emerged, the observation seems so banal it is hardly worth articulating. Every second website now includes some chart detailing the 10 best monkeys, the 20 worst mustards or the 100 most amusing limericks. But, strange to relate, nobody had noticed this before. I guess that I am the same generation as Hornby — about seven years younger — and it was, for some weird reason, our mob that first became totally obsessed with such things. It was, perhaps, to do with the fact that no previous gang of saddos had quite so much popular culture to process. Keith Richards talks amusingly about travelling for miles just to look at an obscure blues record. Our lot (though starved in comparison with the internet set) had hundreds of albums, TV shows, films and comics to manage. The list became an essential tool for making sense of promiscuous consumption.

  There had always been huddles of Listmania in various corners (jazz fans, for example, loved their “poll winners“), but, until the mid 1990s, the best-of list remained a rare pleasure that brightened up December and, on special delirious occasions, other less end-of-yeary parts of the calendar.

  I can well remember (sad, sad bastard) opening up the Christmas NME in the mid-1980s in a state of dizzy, distracted excitement. Would the writers’ poll tally with my own informal list? They would surely pick The Smiths’ The Smiths or Scott Walker’s Climate of Hunter as their favourite album. Wouldn’t they? Hang on. What’s this? The Poet II by Bobby Womack? Oh, yeah. I was really into that. I dig Womack all the way. It’s the best album of 1984 by a long shot. (Cue hurried trip to Freebird or Liffey Street Golden Discs)

  Meanwhile, a hushed aura grew around the British Film Institute’s poll of the ten best films of all time. That chart, initially involving just critics, now taking in film-makers as well, remains an extraordinary record of waxing and waning critical reputations. Consider, for example, that, in 1962, just two year’s after its release, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura was installed as the second greatest film ever. Intriguing. Isn’t it? Antonioni is still very highly rated, but the notion that L’Avventura might be the film to challenge Citizen Kane’s apparently unshakable hegemony now seems slightly preposterous. Maybe a Michael Haneke film will sneak its way to a similar spot when the next chart comes out in 2012. Who knows?

  Here’s the 2002 critics’ list:

  1. Citizen Kane

  2. Vertigo

  3. La Règle de Jeu

  4. The Godfather/The Godfather Part II

  5. Tokyo Story

  6. 2001: A Space Odyssey

  7. Battleship Potemkin

  8. Sunrise

  9. 8 1/2

  10. Singin’ in the Rain

  Yes, the thing about the BFI poll is that it only comes along once every 10 years. As a result, it still retains a degree of respectability. Just a degree, mind. Since Hornby and his generation (Hem! Hem!) let the genie out of the bottle, best-of lists have become so ubiquitous that they barely carry any meaning. You can be fairly certain there’ll be one in this week’s Mojo, this week’s Empire and, likely as not, this week’s Screenwriter.

  Anyway, all this was triggered by The Guardian’s recent, genuinely weird list of the best ever films. As we mentioned last week, there were some very odd decisions regarding genre. The print supplement listing “Arthouse” films included The Godfather and The Graduate. The online version of that chart may have added “drama” to the definition, but that still leaves The Graduate — a comedy, surely — in the wrong race.

  At the end of the exercise, the paper voted on the winners from each category and deduced that Chinatown was the Best Film Ever. I suppose it’s as good a choice as any. But the reductive nature of the list does really render it more than usually pointless. Still, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been arguing about the thing with my blasted associates every time we attend a press screening. They are a terrible drug these lists. I don’t know just where I’m going.

• Excellent poem from The New Yorker.

  September 7, 2010 @ 10:37 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  When I started this “blog” I never thought I’d end up recommending a poem in The New Yorker. Have I gone fey? Do I now care that, after encountering a dead hedgehog, some middle-aged academic has set to contemplating eternity? Not a bit of it. Here’s is the superb verse from this fortnight’s edition in its entirety:

  ON THE INEVITABLE DECLINE INTO MEDIOCRITY OF THE POPULAR MUSICIAN WHO ATTAINS A COMFORTABLE MIDDLE AGE

  by David Musgrave

  O Sting, where is thy death?

  Good. Isn’t it?

• I can’t get Bouncing Babies by the Teardrop Explodes

  June 23, 2010 @ 10:07 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Farewell then, Frank Sidebottom. If you don’t know, Mr Sidebottom — and you really should — he was a northern entertainer with a papier maché head of genuinely macrocephalic proportions. Never an enormous star, he nonetheless cheered up the 1980s with entertainingly jolly versions of Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite and Anarchy in the UK. He also did a darn good version of the Smiths’ Panic.

  Frank’s representative on earth, Chris Sievey, died earlier in the week. Unsurprisingly most of the attention focussed on his association with Mr Sidebottom, but mention should also be made of Sievey’s excellent group The Freshies. Sometimes unkindly labelled a novelty group, The Freshies were best known for their quasi-hit I’m In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk. That tune — later renamed I’m In Love With The Girl On a Certain Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk after bread-head Richard Branson whined — certainly deserves its place in the canon, but I always preferred the superb I Can’t Get Bouncing Babies by the Teardrop Explodes. Much as I love the Teardrops, The Freshies’ tune might even be better than the song it eulogises. Amazingly, it is actually on iTunes. What else are you going to do with €1? Think of his family. It seems the unfortunate bloke died in poverty (really).

• Malcolm McLaren and Princess Pegleg.

  April 9, 2010 @ 5:59 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  It was sad to hear of Malcolm McLaren’s passing. As manager of, first, The New York Dolls and, later, creator of the monster that was The Sex Pistols, he proved himself to be a great English impresario in the mode of Binkie Beaumont, Tyrone Guthrie or (tending towards the less obtuse) Brian Epstein. He also managed to deliver at least two great singles in his own name: Buffalo Girls and Soweto.

  There was, however, a grisly irony to the way his death was announced. “No future for you” the Pistols famously sang to the Queen and, presumably, the extended British Royal Family. Yet, on last night’s BBC1 News, Princess Camilla of Horsetershire breaking her left fetlock was regarded as more significant than the death of a genuinely game-changing cultural figure. Certainly, that news story was reported ahead of the piece on McLaren’s passing. The snootier papers — The Telegraph and The Mail — carried a photograph of Camilla over one of our Malcolm.

  Now, I suspect McLaren would be amused rather than infuriated by all this. After all, God Save the Queen was hardly a reasoned argument for republican democracy. It was, rather, a crude, abrasive — and rather brilliant — exercise in taunting the bourgeoisie. These days, he’d encourage the team to write a song abusing Nigella Lawson or Steve Jobs. That’d really set pulses racing in today’s upmarket suburbs.

  At any rate, it’s grim to lose one more figurehead from the most important youth movement of the past 40 years. Get pissed. Destroy.

• Don Cheadle is Miles

  March 18, 2010 @ 1:03 am | by Donald Clarke

  Good grief. You go away for three days and all hell breaks loose. Winslet bolts from Mendes. Peter Graves dies. Jack Kirby’s relatives try to set up a rival Spider-Man franchise. And it transpires that Don Cheadle is set to play Miles Davis in an upcoming biopic.

  

  Farewell then Peter Graves. Sadly, your surname is now tragically appropriate.

  Cheadle doesn’t look much like Miles and he has, perhaps, rather too amiable a persona for the famously horrible trumpeter (he’s dead, so he can’t sue). But I still reckon he’ll do a pretty good job. Taking in the history of jazz from the origins of bebop to the birth of fusion, Miles’s story has the makings of a very decent picture. As long as they don’t get Brett Ratner to direct we might be okay.

  Such thoughts set one pondering about unmade biopics. The genre is, of course, very often an excuse for deadeningly dull hagiography. But a few complex characters do cry out for the treatment. Where’s the Aleister Crowley film? Where’s my Thelonious Monk picture? More interesting still, what about an Ezra Pound film? Think about it. The eccentric old versifier went barmy and they brought him back to America in a cage. IN A CAGE! Just imagine how much fun such restrained actors as Sean Penn or Ed Harris would have with that. “Munch, munch, munch! Me love scenery. Munch, munch, munch!” Yeah, I suppose all that fascism stuff was a bit of a problem. But what a yarn!

  Munch, munch, munch…

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