Terrific post by Simon Reynolds (Blissblog, link at right) on receiving music in the mail; brought back lots of memories. Yes, I think the whole music blogging thing does in many ways amount to a “scene” in the way that fanzines do/did. It is also, as has been said elsewhere, reminiscent of the kind of world of ideas/arguments that was the NME in those Good Old Days. The best thing we ever received in the mail, unsolicited, in the days of Zeeeeen!, was a box of cassettes from some people called Growling Porcupine, who were based in Canberra. That man Darren has the box and its contents to this day; I saw them sitting beneath a desk at his house last January. It might be interesting to listen to them now: with their blend of low humour, and disco rhythms driven by cheap synths, 2004 could have belonged to them. Sample song title: “Ofra Haza Went To The Plaza”. What I didn’t know then that I know now is that the “Plaza” referred to is a big suburban shopping mall in south Canberra that would be in walking distance of our house if we weren’t so darn lazy.
Reynolds, author of what will surely be the definitive (even if only through lack of competition) book on the post-punk era, also sent me a nice email recently, to which I guess this whole rambling entry is a reply. He listed therein two of the four Things I Can’t Abide (Music division). Those four things are, with exceptions noted, the following:
1. Lou Reed (previously mentioned hereabouts). Exceptions: the obvious.
2. Sting. Exceptions: the second Police album, and parts of “Synchronicity”.
3. Bono. Exception: “The Unforgettable Fire”. I was coming to the end of The Eno Years, and the thrill (such as it was) was to discern his hand on the tiller; e.g. backing vocals on “Pride (In The Name Of Love)”.
4. Free jazz. (By which I mean the kind of bad scene where you have six or so people on a stage yelping and bleating away without a script or score until someone decides it’s time to go home now.) The Necks should never be thought to be of that ilk, notwithstanding lazy journalists’ categorising them accordingly. The only thing “free” about the Necks is the freedom they give themselves to set rigid constraints on what they are going to play, and to work within those constraints, playing out an idea until it can go no further. The difference, as I see it, is a matter of taste and judgment. And, just maybe, the listener’s own preconceived ideas as well. We only let in what we want to let in, only hear what we want to hear, etc.
Lately I have found that I am becoming open to musics that in earlier years I would never have given the time of day to. I suspect this is in some way hormonal. (I am also finding myself on the brink of tears with some regularity these days, Olympic medal ceremonies included, but also, and I can’t explain this either, upon hearing songs, even familiar ones, suddenly in a new way that sets the waterworks in motion. Life is interesting, isn’t it?)
The other thing Reynolds did recently on Blissblog was to restore some long-lost credibility to a record that got me through the summer of 1985-1986, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ “Rattlesnakes”. I don’t see why that record should be anybody’s guilty secret. I’m not going to critique it at this late stage; it’s either a small piece of you or it isn’t. I had taken a tape of it back to the farm for the University holidays, and barely had it out of my ears for the whole time. My father had me doing quite a bit of tractor work for pocket money, and I was lucky enough to get to use the white Case tractor, which had a cabin, so I could listen to Lloyd Cole as I worked. As well as keeping out much of the external noise of the tractor, the cabin acted as essential protection in case a blade were to shear off the slasher in the direction of the driver. I don’t think such an accident has ever actually happened, and I don’t know how much protection a tractor cabin window would be against a flying slasher blade, but safety was the order of the day, and anyway the alternative would have been to use one of the numerous grey Ferguson tractors that lay around the property, in various states of repair. The Fergy was the king of farm tractors, but was completely open, noisy as heck and thus not compatible with listening to music, which, let’s face it, was the object of the exercise: if I had been lying on the bed with my headphones on, my mother would have mysteriously found fifty jobs for me to do. (I still have no idea as to the purpose of getting up a ladder and cleaning out the gutters when there was no tree within 100 yards of the house.) Much better to be out in a tractor with the Walkman strapped on, and getting paid for it too.
The other thing about “Rattlesnakes”: I had had the record for about a year when one day, having previously vowed to use the CD player for nothing other than classical and Brian Eno discs, I suffered an inexplicable rush of blood to the head and bought the CD of “Rattlesnakes”. One listen to the depth and clarity of “Speedboat” and I had a serious freakout episode: I instantly knew that this would mean I could never be happy to listen to any of my vinyl collection ever again, on account of diminished sound quality. After enduring a sleepless night of worry and panic, I did the only thing I could think of: I rang my friend Anthony Elliott and offered to sell the CD to him at a greatly reduced rate, to be rid of it, an offer he was glad to accept notwithstanding his being a bit nonplussed at my explanation, and my sweaty palms as I handed it over to him. And that was the way things remained for several years, until there was no longer any choice but to give in to the tidal wave of Digital Audio and enjoy guilt-free superior-quality sound (sorry, purists) in any musical genre.
