The Clothed Maja

OGUN RECORDS UPDATE - URGENT AND KEY!

Talk about synchronicity. Well you can talk about any Police album you like, but you'd be far wiser to get to your nearest decent record shop, as I did on Friday, only to find, reissued as two albums on one CD, two of the great Mike Osborne masterpieces on Ogun of which I spoke a couple of weeks ago - Border Crossing (OG 310) by his Trio, and Marcel's Muse (OG 810) - now available at a competitive price for you to purchase.

And although The Naked Maja cannot claim responsibility for this happening, it's a nice coincidence that it is. It's also useful for me to be reminded that the Peanuts Club was based in Bishopsgate, not Stockwell (that'll teach me to confuse it with the Plough, which WAS in Stockwell)! Beautifully remastered and repackaged, if rather sad to see the lengthening list of names who are no longer with us, either in body (Miller, Peter Nykyruj, Marcel's Muse annotator Charles Fox) or in spirit (Osborne), readers are advised to skip lunch for a week in order to purchase this essential and indispensable CD.

EUROVISION

I would guess one way to start would be to observe how Greece managed to come second in this year’s contest with a Jazz Insects cover version. No, alas, it was a different “Shake It,” an energetic does-what-it-says-on-Ricky-Martin’s-tin dance romp with a touch of postmodern Bucks Fizzism (the innate genius of Bucks Fizz lying in the fact that they never KNEW they were being postmodern – staunch Tory Jay Aston cheerfully chirping the anti-Thatcher anthem “Land Of Make Believe”) in that the David Van Day wannabe in the centre ripped the skirts off both of his female assistants, whereupon they immediately ripped off his Mr Byrite collapsible one-wear jacket, causing him to do an involuntary somersault.

One could also observe that Belgium were robbed – Xandee’s fantastic “1 Life” came on like Propaganda doing East 17; an immense improvement on their truly dismal effort last year (I recall the Belgian lass saying that it was a deliberate attempt to lose so that Belgium didn’t have to stump up the cash to host the concert this year). In addition, both Sweden and Germany deserved to do better – Lena Philipsson’s “It Hurts,” rather cattily dismissed by Wogan as “a bit dated,” provides exactly the kind of pain I wanted to extract from Agnetha Faltskog’s rather flat ‘60s covers album. And the German entry – Max’s “Can’t Wait Until Tonight” – was everything the British entry should have been and wasn’t; every other commentator has mentioned comparisons with Weller and the Style Council and are pretty on the money doing so – despite some upper register trouble near the end, this was a terrific straightforward ballad (because it wasn’t quite straightforward) which got straight to the point around which the hapless James Fox dallied rather too aimlessly. True, Britain isn’t much liked in Europe at the moment, but as the juries proved – even with their admirably defiant cries of “to our neighbours!” – a common consensus will usually arise, and the consensus here was that Britain’s entry encapsulated pretty well everything that’s wrong with what I’ll call post-Parkinson Britpop; desperate in its eagerness to please every Daily Mail reader, it ends up making everyone fume with the odours of its miserable politesse (was there even a SONG there?). A country which could present Lorraine Kelly grinning gleefully slap bang in the middle of Old Compton Street – see, we KNOW our core audience! – is capable of offering a far better song.

I would much rather have had Athena (now there’s a defiant name for a Turkish ska-punk band!) coming second or third with their “For Real,” which brought to mind the Higsons playing the second half of “Hey Ya!” with the Bodysnatchers’ rhythm section. And if you’re going to do an unashamed Ibiza anthem, then “Shake It” didn’t for me work nearly as well as Rámon’s fantastic “Para Llenarme De Ti.”

Nevertheless, it is I hope beyond question that the best song won; not only did Ruslana’s“Wild Dances” stand almost embarrassingly towers and plinths above everything and everyone else in the contest, in terms of sex, mischief and an innate understanding of the mechanisms of pop, but it might also represent, as Mark S has intimated elsewhere, a decisive continental shift in pop from West to East. We saw this starting to happen with tAtU – and how appropriate that they should have participated in last year’s Eurovision, even if only as prophets – but it was only with this year’s unquestionable takeover by the Eastern bloc countries, and the results that this produced, that one starts to wonder whether this isn’t the second or third time in history when Eurovision might be said to have changed the story of pop. Compared to the jaded post-Cowell coitality of post-Parkinson Britpop, even the token flute-driven folk song (from Serbia & Montenegro) seemed more actively involved in pop than anything we could drum up (one imagines the James Fox of Performance lurching elegantly around the 1969 Madrid stage crooning “Les Sucettes”).

The first and most important occasion when Eurovision did change pop was of course at the Brighton Dome in 1974, when the screaming confidence of “Waterloo” put out pomp rock at a stroke and ignited the fuse for pop to rule again – Andersson and Ulvaeus had the assurance of old-timers when it came to tailored pop writing, but the other importance of “Waterloo” lies what Abba inadvertently invented while they were trying – essentially - to emulate Wizzard and write a Roy Wood song. As with Dexy’s and A Certain Ratio, they accidentally invented a whole new future for pop.

The second occasion – this time for the negative – may have been with the 1982 contest. That year’s British entry, “One Step Further” by Bardo, was by a country mile the best – acutely in touch with New Pop, crafted and produced by Andy Hill, the Bucks Fizz producer who at the time was involved in an informal cutting contest with Trevor Horn (via Dollar) to see who could make the most avant-MoR electropop record (“Give Me Back My Heart” vs “My Camera Never Lies” – two records which sound weirder and weirder with every passing year). But the Falklands war had just kicked off and Britain was derided by all of Europe for being too frisky and facetious and HOW CAN YOU BOUNCE AROUND THE STAGE SUGGESTIVELY WHEN PEOPLE ARE BEING KILLED, so we ended up a fairly ignominious seventh, and the contest was won by the German entry, “A Little Peace,” crooned nervously by the Austrian nun Nicole (complete with Julie Andrews acoustic guitar) in order to Teach Us A Lesson About Pride And Dignity (are we sure that Gavin Martin and Robert Elms weren’t on the judging panel that year?). Thus pop was frowned upon and the path was open for the ghastly duo of Authenticity and Reality to plough their miserable, life-denying way forward through our failed furrows.

My personal favourite Eurovision entry is simultaneously the most and least straightforward – Luxembourg’s 1965 winner, “Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son,” sung by France Gall and written by Serge Gainsbourg. Musically it comes across as a cattle prod wedding between “Music To Watch Girls By” and “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)” over which Gall’s fragile 17-year-old voice (did Our Serge ever work with any non-fragile female voices?) alternates between the sensual and the defiant (in fact, Mme Gall went on to have the big hit in France with Gainsbourg’s “Les Sucettes,” and was reportedly horrified when the meaning of the lyrics was explained to her). In fact, 1965 seems to have been a vintage year for Eurovision, for the runner-up was a British belter – “I Belong” sung by the doomed Kathy Kirby; a phenomenal eruption of a pop song, worthy of Dusty or Petula (though one wonders whether either wouldn’t have been more suitable – Kirby never quite shakes off the Joan Regan 1950s plummy, vowelly vibrato) complete with a London Palladium standing ovation final big band chord. Kirby ecstatically bellows “All my dreams are answered!” though the preceding doubt of “Too many hours slipped away/Too many loves came my way” unfortunately seems to have presaged the remainder of her life.

However, the Eurovision song I find most touching is the 1975 winner, Holland’s “Ding-A-Dong” by Teach-In. As with Abba (and as with Nabokov, really), they use their linguistic inexactitudes to quite stunning effect. Apart from the fact that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards must have been listening – compare the arrangements on “Ding-A-Dong” and Chic’s “I Want Your Love” if you don’t believe me – one is retrospectively drawn to the fact that this is a song about living in defiance of death. “Ding-a-dong every hour/When you pick a flower/Even when your lover has gone,” they sing with beautifully absurd sincerity. And later: “Try to smile while you say goodbye,” then, at 1:23, before grief has a chance to drown you, the song suddenly veers into a Ray Conniff jolly augmented major fifth chord before returning to the minor (though still uptempo) song proper. So many songs end up coming back to this core truth. That’s why so much of Patti Smith’s recent work fails; there’s so much more life in the damn-you-world defiance of Horses – with just that tiny, aching little elegie at the end to remind us what lies at the bottom of it.

But back in the “real” pop world, what songs should Britain have put forward instead of James Fox’s accursed tastefulness (post-Parkinson, post-Holland, post-Hornby; it all adds up to the same mush)? What songs which actually became hits, which sold millions (or at least thousands), would have done well at Eurovision, and which not?

ONES WHICH MIGHT NOT HAVE DONE WELL

QUEEN Bohemian Rhapsody (1975)
Never take too long about your song in Eurovision; the audience and judges will begin to get restless (the greatest pop album title of all time remains Roxette’s greatest hits compilation, Don’t Bore Us – Get To The Chorus!). Finland essayed a three-part mini-suite in 1983 and got the inevitable nul points. Also, given the logistical nightmare of recreating the middle section on stage, and the ongoing mood and stylistic changes, the judges will probably forget to give you any points as they will have mistaken you for the interval act.

BONNIE TYLER Total Eclipse Of The Heart (1983)
Again, it’s about length and pace. On the face of it, this empress of all power ballads sounds like it would walk it – passionate vocals, a musical backdrop escalating in intensity, an earnest choir, thunderclaps for drums – but as with all Jim Steinman’s work, it seems cramped when forced into a four-minute seven-inch format. “Total Eclipse” needs to be experienced in its full seven minutes – especially the crucial second verse which is always missed off radio edits (“(Turn around) Every now and then I know you’ll never be the boy you always wanted to be/(Turn around) But every now and then I know you’re the only boy who wanted me the way that I am” – and the way Tyler almost weeps the word “universe” in the third line of that verse, as if she knows she can never be God, that she’ll have to make do and mend with this slob of a boyfriend of hers, but by God does she love him, even if at times she sounds as if she wants to kill him – “EVERY NOW AND THEN I FALL APART!” – “and then I see the look in your eyes”). Might be a bit rich for a Eurovision audience to digest in one sitting.

THE WALKER BROTHERS The Electrician (1978)
Now you’re just being silly. Or am I?

ONES WHICH WOULD PROBABLY HAVE WALKED IT

THE BEATLES Hey Jude (1968)
Seven minutes 25, but that singalong with All Our Mates clambering up on stage dressed up as Napoleon, Bertrand Russell, etc., would swing even the most cynical of judges.

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD Relax (1983)
But in the 1984 contest, instead of Belle and the Devotions’ Vernons Girls throwback “Love Games.” With the whipping cream and the Esso tiger. And everything else. Imagine what we didn’t try.

KEANE Everybody’s Changing (2004)
It’s a moment of rare luminosity in pop, and by the evidence of their dull album it might turn out to be their only moment. It’s not only the absence of guitar and bass which does it here, but what is done to the piano and keyboards throughout – the triple echoes, the frantic backwards rewind at the end of each chorus – which makes this sound like Marmalade trying to play “Double Barrel” with a subtle nod to New Order’s “Thieves Like Us.” It’s a recognisably 1971 type of bleakness we’re dealing with here – a 1971 which none of these three musicians is old enough to remember – but the desperation in Tom Chaplin’s voice is palpable and connective. Note – as with Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1971 masterpiece “We Will” – how the band prepare to ascend the chorus (the “Thieves Like Us” reference underscores “Try to understand that I”), and then we have those three steps to heaven again: the first cautiously hopeful (“Try to make a move just to stay in the game, I…”), the second verbally less confident, but musically going for the big climactic push (“Try to stay awake to remember my name, BUT…”), and on that “BUT…” the ants are rebuffed by the sadist’s index finger and slide regretfully down to the bottom again as the music diminishes in key – “Everybody’s changing and I don’t know why.” A very British failure to win or comprehend. Europe would have loved it.

THE JAZZ INSECTS

“… Music (and the writing that goes with it, bad AND good) is so routinely used to access and to frame feeling - genuine feeling, masked feeling, mistaken feeling, fake or manipulated feelings - that it's exactly what one can't just wrap oneself in, to escape, or recover, or just gently think and rethink, remember and memorialise. It can make for poor psychic shelter, most of all from the personal or the immediate; its value is often more apparent to those it reaches out to than to those who quarry away at it close up. This is the source of its dangers as well as its strengths. We push it impatiently away for its failed promise; but the promise - of joy in community? of an end to division? - is far from evident elsewhere...

“And of course, we come, don't we, you and I, from a generation that is resentful and appalled we even have to try and learn to express ourselves in regard to things like this. It's as if we're so habituated to being dismissive of the responses of our elders, our peers, the world at foolish large - in matters of art, in matters of anything - that when we need words appropriate to our own lived lives, and those close, we kneejerk back from the apparent clichés, the stock phrases of feeling's dispensation. But have almost nothing to replace them. Eloquence towards comfort seems suspect: and thus what is dearly meant is not always best said. Better then the clumsy, the imprecise - and yet for a time that element of you which remains wary of these may hang back, may sidestep for a time any full mourning.”
(Excerpt from an email from a friend, sent to the author on Sunday 26 August 2001)

It might be that I’ve spent the last 2¾ years trying to disprove this reality; that I felt there was a way in which I could recover my feelings about music and turn them, not just into a psychic shelter, but also a psychic escape hatch which could promise a route towards something new and worth surviving for. Now that there is an element of comfort, eloquence can seem even more suspect and invite cynicism and catcalls from those unfamiliar with the background that led to these words.

As I’ve said before many times, music has a habit with me of turning up, making itself available, exactly when I need it. So it was that the other evening I was examining and trying to discipline into some kind of order the contents of one of many cassette storage boxes I have yet to unpack and unravel. This particular one seemed to date from 1981/2, and among the expected items in there – B.E.F.’s Music For Stowaways (numbered edition no 1175, fact fans), NME C81, Bow Wow Wow’s See Jungle!, Dura-Dance (what seems to have been a promotional tie-in between Duracell and Phonogram, a fantastic dance compilation containing such delights as the full 12” versions of Central Line’s “Walking Into Sunshine,” the Gap Band’s “Burn Rubber On Me,” Light of the World’s “Time” (all eleven minutes of it, sigh…) and Bohannon’s “Let’s Start The Dance Again” (“The message is in the MUUUUUUUUUUUUSIC!”), and thus clearly the greatest album ever made) – there appeared a copy of Swing Therapy, as far as I can tell the only album ever released by The Jazz Insects. It is undated but I would hazard a guess at 1980. It comes in a fairly typical austerely colourful package for the period – the “sleeve” contains Antilles black lettering bordered by orange, typed tracklisting and personnel details, a charcoal etching on the cover by keyboardist Matthew Cohn which eerily seems to presage some of Coldcut’s early logos/motifs, but the cassette itself comes as a standard Sony CHF60 blank tape, again with an orange/white/black label; clearly post-Scritti deconstruction at work here (or, more likely, lack of funds). The lo-fi packaging, however, works in the album’s low-key favour – I’m suddenly overcome with a nostalgia for cassette albums; a great idea, someone should revive them – for Swing Therapy, a quarter of a century down several lines, stands up pretty well, so well in fact that if it had been the next Interpol album everyone would be raving (mad) (ly).

The album is divided into two sides – the Good Side and the Crap Side (a construct appropriate for many recent albums which spring to mind) – and its general tenor is one of reasonably active skank-punk-funk (check out Cohn’s trebly organ, straight out of Compass Point via Tuff Gong) topped by the periodic musings of vocalist David Piddock, who adheres throughout to the then post-punk vocal holy trinity of Byrne, Curtis and Stewart (the album certainly gives the impression that the group had recently been devouring Fear Of Music). There is no drummer as such (“Dr Rhythm” is credited with “drum patterns”) but Kumar Desai’s hyperactive percussion works frantically well with Rob Hind’s bass, both keeping the rest of the group on their toes.

“On The Fence” is a suitably mordant opening; a stealthy punk-funk crawl where Piddock’s mournful voice is nicely balanced out by a neurotic fuzz guitar figure angrily buzzing like a wasp trapped in a jamjar (Hank Marvin’s metaphor, fact fans), while “Elephants” (the only track to have lyrics excerpted on the sleeve) gently mocks with its gentle skank the sinister underbelly beneath the superficial appropriation of “heaven.” “Stand here, wait here/Wait for love to fall on you” croons Piddock, like a defeated Grace Jones ready to be eaten. Waiting for an elephant to fall on us.

Hind’s bass decelerates throughout “Moving Out” like a stalled Honda while Piddock debates internally whether he’s prepared to exist in this world (“What about your friends?/What about your future?”). Meanwhile, the guitarist weaves an intriguing tapestry of tactile single-line hi-life phrases interspersed with occasional No Wave clouds of static, like Diblo Dibala and Will Sergeant in pub conference. There’s a very 1980-sounding agonised alto sax hovering in the background (played by one Vicky of the “Wow Federation”) and also some melodica (a nod to A Pablo or to N Order?) which is uncredited but I presume is played by Piddock.

On “Shake It,” the three-and-one organ motif is rather poignant when combined with the track’s extremely busy percussion lines, although there’s one chilling moment when the organ briefly but suddenly thrashes out atonally on the same rhythmic line (sort of Miles on “Rated X” meets Brian Auger on the fadeout of “Indian Rope Man”). The Good Side ends with the rather prophetic “This World,” wherein Piddock sings: “I’ve got friends who rule the world!/Who think like us/They smell of damp” (hahah – the internet!). Again, the main musical interest here is the inventive chordal comping of the guitar, never settling for the obvious.

The Crap Side is rather more troubled. “Join The Dots” begins the side unsettlingly with another ascending three-chord motif which seems to predate half of Warp’s product in the mid-to-late ‘90s. Overhead, Piddock makes some requests of us: “Pick up the pencil and open your eyes/Pick up your wrist and join the line…/Why do you join the dots?”

Worse is to come with the astonishing “Here Comes The Accident” where Piddock awaits inner oblivion – “Something in my room isn’t very nice…/Tearing at my throat, pushing out my eyes/Things like this were on the cards for days.” Behind him, more amazing invention with comparatively limited resources – Hind’s firm bass, those occasional Meek electro-whooshes

(and incidentally it’s Roger Manning’s electro-whooshes which supply the punctum to “Irish Blood, English Heart,” but you knew that already, didn’t you?)

and, most poignantly of all, a lamenting guitar in the left channel, more Hank Marvin tremelo arm wistfulness slowly mutating into pure troubled Arto Lindsay rhythmic frenzy.

“Walk Round” leads us into autumn (“Think about where they work/Think about where they die”) and the album itself trudges to a premature end with the twisted march of “United Nations” (“Under the mice come the rats”), appended with a little instrumental drum-machine-driven skank threnody (and I’m sure that someone in Blur must have heard this). Can we overcome the crap and rediscover the goodness?

It is necessary to walk with great care in this territory. Indeed Matthew Cohn later metamorphosed into Matt Black and became half of Coldcut; but Swing Therapy cannot be dismissed as stock post-J Division miserabilism – there’s too much musical invention (and innate mischief) for that – because any retrospective hearing of the troubled thoughts expressed within the record are inevitably conditioned by the fact that, for one member of the group, these thoughts were horrendously real. What became of Messrs Piddock and Desai I have no idea, but I do know that Rob Hind, the bassist, ended up pushing the whole world away impatiently for its failure to promise, and committed suicide in 1987. One fancifully wonders whether Yazz’s “The Only Way Is Up,” a chart-topping Coldcut production from 1988, wasn’t in some way coloured by this, that this record was cheerfully urging everyone else to live, in preference to death, just to have the final say. I don’t know – I never knew Rob (all the Jazz Insects got to Oxford a few years before I did) but can’t help hearing his pain throughout this record, even though he never opens his mouth on it.

Incidentally, The Jazz Insects’ guitarist was Mark Sinker, the author of the email which opened this piece, someone who is now also one of the closest friends of the present author, and someone who, among the many achievements of his illustrious career since Swing Therapy was recorded, keeps a discreet eye on me to make sure that I – as it were – don’t try it, the “it” in question being following Mr Hind’s example.

What is dearly meant always finds a way to be said, sooner or later.

WHY THERE ISN’T AN ARTICLE ON THIS WEBSITE ABOUT THE YEAR 1962

I spent a rather fruitless and frustrating evening yesterday trying to revise and rework the piece that I did on ILE back in January 2003 about the hits of 1962. Having struggled painfully with it, I came to exactly the same conclusion that Penman did with his Patti Smith review in The Wire – namely, that after having written thousands of cultural-context words, I realised that I was trying to do Frank Ifield and Bobby Vee’s job for them, trying to make something that wasn’t interesting to begin with sound interesting. And the Joe Meek stuff has already been analysed on CoM. And the stuff I was going to say about Ted Dicks, Myles Rudge and Bernard Cribbins has already been said better on Undercurrent. Nor do I have any personal connection to 1962, not having been around then. There was no urgent REASON to be writing this article.

However, for a while I detoured my analysis of 1962 to confront my own feelings about the process of ageing and how that affects one’s reactions to music. Look at Larkin’s biography, or Kenneth Williams’ diaries, and you see the same thing; once they hit and pass forty, something dies in them and virtually everything they do thereafter is necessarily (umbilically?) tied to a now idealised past.

And that’s the problem. I’m now past forty and virtually all of the recent major articles on this website are almost exclusively concerned with the past, and in particular my past. Not to mention that the great majority of my off-duty listening is dedicated to music of the past. I look at Reynolds’ “feeling/really feeling” lists on Blissblog and they just give me a headache – Christ, MORE stuff to take into account; can musicians be forcibly banned from making or recording music for five years to give the rest of us a chance to get our breath back? The only thing on any of his lists which I actually want to hear is the Mountain Goats album, and as for the rest of the records mentioned, whatever their presumed worth, I simply and instinctively think: “no, that’s enough, I’m sorry but I DON’T want you in my life, I don’t have the time or the space to deal with you, however great or visionary you might be, there’s more than enough to be getting on with as it is.”

Yet this is not straightforward Ian MacDonaldism. When a record comes along for which I have genuine enthusiasm and even love – The College Dropout, A Grand Don’t Come For Free – I will waste no time in bringing it to your attention and talking about it at length. Nor is this a requiem for a phantom golden age of pop, for the hits of 1962 were and are demonstrably rubbish, whereas I look at this week’s midweek chart and see loads of great pop records – Eamon, Frankee, Morrissey, D12, Maroon 5 (come on, admit it), Keane (ADMIT IT), and yes Simon, even Nina Sky in the nearness of future. So pop in 2004 clearly hasn’t gone to pot.

Is it just fatigue, then? The entirely unnecessary instinct to be first on the block with everything? Not really. I cannot envisage wasting two hours of my time writing about an indifferent album like Schizophrenia or Madvillainy. I look back at CoM two years ago and note with some embarrassment that I now think and feel differently about nearly everything I wrote about then. Says a lot about the permanence of blogs, doesn’t it? Put together, it all probably means that I might need to take another break from doing this. Everyone gets tired after a while, but if they don’t give themselves an emotional rest, they might end up spending the rest of their lives living in the dark. Or worse, creating a chore out of doing something that should be done for pleasure.

I also have the more sinister feeling that this whole business is an elaborate self-fraud, that this new life I have is a life that I only have because someone else is dead. And I cannot retract the guilt I feel about that. It’s probable that I would have started this blog, or at least the one before it, anyway even if Laura were still here, but it would have been very different in character and far less frequent in appearance. But I can’t get past or over what has happened. I have tried everything I can think of in the last two years and none of it has really worked. I don’t expect any of you to understand. Everything, whatever I do or write, always ends up coming back to Laura and life before 25 August 2001. Perhaps I need to find alternative means of dealing with this.

The whole thing currently feels to me, to paraphrase Alasdair Gray, like the neurotic rat-trap world of an involuntary virgin.

“Beg the music to let me sleep”
(Arto Lindsay, “Sovereign”)

APHEX TWIN
SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME 2
TEN YEARS AFTER

The following is an experiment in uniting thought and expression of emotional reactions to music. The words which you will read have been improvised and written spontaneously in real time while listening to the two CDs which comprise this album, an album which is one of the author’s absolute favourites, and a record which carries past associations to a degree abnormal even by the intense standards of this website. No conscious effort has been given to organising these thoughts into a formal writing pattern; any coherence is dependent upon the inner coherence of the writer. The aim is to minimise as far as possible the gap between the germination of thoughts provoked by the music and their written articulation, and therefore achieve a greater degree of real feelings and emotions as they are made manifest.

As Richard D James does not apply verbal titles to each track, but rather gives them visual titles – designs mainly in various shades of orange and yellow, with the colours acting as triggers for the pictures which the pieces are presumed to paint (this is consequent to, but not derivative of, the similar experiments of Anthony Braxton, who generally names his pieces with appropriate combinations of numbers, symbols and graphics).

The explicit association with the concept of lucid dreaming, as pioneered by Dr Celia James, is for the purposes of this piece taken as read and understood.

Needless to say, this piece will be best experienced if read in tandem with listening to the record and specific tracks in question.

CD ONE

Track 1
Baby talk. Birth. Major key. Already trying to make it minor. Rhythm like bloodflow. The quiet bits of Art of Noise’s Into Battle were always the deadliest. Again and again, I’m drawn to music which sounds like STARTING AGAIN. Afterbirth, afterlife, after apocalypse. There a marimba. Generating an echo. Wish I was six again. Marimbas in pop, feel warm and comforting, like a big gigantic hug. Just My Imagination. Vincent. And I Love You So. Music sounding like we’re learning to talk, to communicate. Original Whim by Extradition. What would it be like if we made music for the first time? That’s why the Gail Brand/Morgan Guberman record matters – listen to it in the sense that these are two people, two creatures, trying to learn the art of communication with each other, their efforts to form a language. The trombone is treated more like a drum. Rowing away rowing away. Boats in Stanley Park, 1968. That 1968. Boards of Canada of course, as if I could get away with not mentioning them. Magic, baba, papa. Voice stuck on a papa loop. You like your father, isn’t it? Careful the seesaw doesn’t collapse mid-swing. Gurgling Gail and gabbling Guberman. That marimba. Learning to distinguish what notes are in a primary school class. Walls of wood. Minds of steel. Because, look, we’re here and how is it we’re here, but while we’re here. Now nothing left except the marimba. It’s a beginning. Blurring slightly out of focus and then BACK IN again. In the back of the taxi coming back from Glasgow Royal Infirmary, December 1964, having escaped death for the first of several occasions in my life. So far it’s the first of four. Does oblivion or familiarity wait at the other end?

Track 2
I can’t grasp these chords. They’re wavering. Mummy. Like the corn. We never had corn in Bothwell, just cricket stumps. It looks so real, doesn’t it? But can you touch it? Corstorphine Road in the Wednesday morning September sun, just after a rainfall. Not quite South Kensington. Though sometimes you’d like it to be. Duffle coats. When you’re in the coach and it’s midwinter and it’s raining and blowing so hard that you momentarily move into nowhere – the subnormal lighting of the old A40 route, or the Lake District at 3 am in December. David Penhaligon. What caused that? Thinking of the drowning. Never quite got away from it. What’s that quack? There’s a duck above me. And to think I’m scared of drowning, feart because I might end up getting eaten by a duck. This music’s trying to raise its head upwards, above the water. Let’s Evolve. Sudden Sway. The glistening gills as you BREAK THE SURFACE to find Port Meadow still there. Remember to keep your eyes tightly shut at all times. Keep out the greenness. And the salt. Because you could be floating nowhere. And that strange steepness near the top of Muswell Hill. Hidden record shops in Cambuslang Main Street. Blue Circle cement factory. From the school playground it could have been the Himalayas. I didn’t forget Martin Denny. Bend those rhythms, as you can, because you’re trying not to be born, nor to founder somewhere in Kidlington. She was taking photos in Stamford the Sunday before it happened. The last good Sunday. “She looks so like her mother.” Even then we knew. So did she.

Track 3
The North Sea. St Andrews, 1981. Michael Furey. The Bog of Allen. Ghost ships. South Queensferry. Aberdour. Burntisland. Everything looks like you’re in heaven. Flying over people. Why do I keep thinking Architecture and Morality? Fennesz, of bloody course. That cracked old gargoyle of a face of a city. The most colourful city in the world, although no one who actually lives in it will ever acknowledge it. And the Oxford. And the river behind the Hall of the Lady of Margaret. The mists as I was escorted to my interview, Tuesday 9 December 1980, the morning after Lennon was shot. Cole Porter. How did he get in? Remember the shot of him, lying, grinning, in his own grave. The best thing about the White Stripes. Sealand Sealand SEALAND. Where no one can touch me and where I can never be touched. Observe passivity as your tool of trade but never mistake it for a token of affection. The doing of nothingness. The cottages at Anstruther. The 95 bus, but what if we stayed on it all the way to Leven? Would we, could we, ever find our way back? What lay behind the Ploughman’s Tower? Or was it the Plowman’s Tower? That Chaucer block of slums in Tooting, hidden safely away, protected by the ruthless bend of Garratt Lane. So grand in its emptiness. There a bassline, steadily and methodically proceeding around the wreck of a melody like an exhausted lighthouse keeper. Silhouette, the horse and the campfire. Where Gabriel ceases to exist. When he realises he has lived for nothing because he can never compete with someone who is beyond competition, because they are safely dead and DIED FOR HER OH YES BEAT THAT. The snow is general, the fog less obviously permeating the atoms which make up you. All good ghosts of heaven and hell unite on the second promontory to the left of the eighteenth hole.

Track 4
Sirens. Take the song, twist it, shift it out of focus, down several registers and it becomes a WARNING and suddenly you are SNAPPED OUT OF THE REVERIE OF GHOST SHIPS AND ARE FACED WITH THE PROSPECT OF IMMINENT GHOSTHOOD HAPPENING BEFORE YOUR EYES AS IT IS NOT THE HOOT OF A SHIP’S SIREN OR THE POLICE TRYING TO SHOOT YOU AS YOU STAND WITH YOUR MELODICA ON THE BEACH AT PORTOBELLO IN OCTOBER 1987 but is an ECG machine, or the hum of a ventilator, there QUICK there the snatch of an organ YOU’RE ALREADY HEARING THE FUNERAL the memories have not yet happened AND NO ONE SHALL BUILD A STATUE FOR ME and suddenly the sounds have become cold, steel and real, you are not in an idyllic afterlife of endless bookshelves and the reproachful rooftops of SW10 but in a ward watching life drain away systematically HOW COULD YOU HAVE THOUGHT THAT IN 1994 it is true, in 1994 I merely thought of ships, of ghost Lancasters flying over our heads, the police helicopter which always used to hover in the wastelands across the way from the train station with a tonality as uniquely dissonant as that of OMD’s “Statues” but it fitted in with Springsteen’s “Streets Of Philadelphia” but you are in REALITY and it’s all functional fuck function it’s fading she’s going.

Track 5
Great, vast industrial mechanisms. Brunel where are you operating now. The Hawaiian waving grasses having been nuked. Nothing but the sea, and there, my God there, coming in, looming in from the distance, alternating semitones and bitonal semitones at that WHAT IF THERE WERE NOTHING ELSE ON THIS EARTH BUT THIS the waves of water and the ghosts of never-existing ships? How would you feel? Would there be a you to feel? The southern tip of Goldsmith’s College, radiant in the greyness of a Camberwell afternoon. That Friday, walking back from Denmark Hill to Victoria. Kids passing by outside the curvature which shields the Oval cricket ground from humanity. Oval House there on the other side, where he had previously been many a time to witness improvisatory goings-on, before the money ran out, but is it still open for gatherings? No obvious point of entry. And down the road, just behind me, the Imperial War Museum. Can I venture there alone? Can I feel emptier there than anywhere else in the world. It’s all moving in slow motion. Steadily, without fuss. The radiation from the MI5 building. Getting a bit too Iain Sinclair. But you can work it out. The 1928 meets 1971 façade of the redbrick grocery shops which form the corner of Fentiman Road and South Lambeth Road, just as the latter turns into Portugal. There a crescent, across the road from the library, Tradescant Road. This was a soundtrack to the daily re-enactment of the final journey of Elias Ashmole which I undertook every working day. Tautology. Ha ha. Nothing ha ha about that siren which has gradually been breaking free from the music. But is it an air raid? Happening twenty galaxies away or just around the corner? Could I still hear that howl all the way down, the entire fucking length of, the Botley Road? Right the way down to Habitat? The Sunday Times. A different West Way, but if you stuck to the path and headed due south you would end up on the real Westway. Westminster Way, even. Did they think to call that Botley shopping centre Westminster? Just to kid us that it might be an obscure, obsolete extension of Westminster? Where Politico’s bookshop is shortly not to be, round the corner and into Victoria Street. Sometimes that’s like venturing out of Greenland. So alien. So un-London. I close my eyes for not too long else I might probably find myself in Botley when I open them again. Frequently I did. Did I mention sex yet? Because, in a way…where are you going?

Track 6
What’s that voice saying? Twin? Plan? It sounds a lot surer of itself. Does that mean it’s growing up? Oil refineries. Grangemouth. How could the Cocteau Twins have come from anywhere else? Do we have to mention Kraftwerk? How all of this is being dreamed and how after a while I expect not to be entirely conscious while I’m typing this? The war memorial at Ebury Bridge. At least I’ve always assumed it to be one. Keep your views to yourself. Can’t understand why I understand Maxinquaye without knowing it. Where’d that come from? The ‘90s. Extinction not a thought then. Nowhere near my mind. As if. Bright, this beat, bright and sprightly. Then it momentarily rests but I know it’s coming back. It’s just stopped to get the paper and a Yorkie and change a tenner. It dies down to almost a funereal tempo, slowing down and you imagine it’s never going to speed up again, but there the voice, battling to bring it back again, now muffled, now processed, but keep at it…no, it’s a goner.

Track 7
Angels skating in the park. On a deserted Sunday evening, no, afternoon, in November. It is dark. But they are happy. Such grace, such ineffability in foreseeing its own closure. The darkness of the surrounding trees form their own protective cradle for us. If I knew how to skate. Christ Church Meadow on the first Friday in January, when it’s bled white with frost and no one, no tourist, will venture into it. We have all of it to ourselves. That blinking light, a signal to let us know, to remind us, where we are, even though we are nowhere. A dance which will last forever as it is self-regenerating. The effortlessness of anti-gravity. The understanding – Guillem as Juliet – that to be lifted is to be transcended. She has to KNOW that she can fly, can be passionate by how her body relates to gravity, to the lover supporting her, can reach to become more than flesh and blood, even if it’s the absolute core of why she’s doing it. Why can I not listen to this music forever? A Charleston, denuded of gaucheness, for the benefit of the ghost of Dick Diver. The implied secondary rhythm throughout, like a central pulse which will beat regardless of the moves you are making in the snow, on the ice. It’s a Sunday. Everyone’s away. Alice blinks as the most abstruse of conceptions. You start to imagine higher registers – no, hang on, there it is, sure and stubborn. And the funny thing is that, although it’s winter, we feel warm. Warm, snug and cosy. That was very important to us. More important than you realise. That vague sense of yearning towards the end. The music box imperceptibly winding down. To a graceful gavotte. Alvin Lucier’s grandson tapping the radiator in the kitchen, echoed and reproduced into infinity, until the radiator in the kitchen becomes indivisible with the ice rink of your mind, your heaven, and in 1994 it does not seem like an afterlife, not like the junction of Stamford Brook Avenue where it turns into King Street and suddenly begins to become the shabby genteel end of Hammersmith, Ravenscourt Park, those familiar-looking joggers vaulting the fences at 6:28 am, impatient for their run so that work can happen. Where there is a definite gateway between an imagination of the world and its concurrent reality. Strand on the Green. Or Gunnersbury. Or life. Or death. Or ice. Slow down now. Come to an end. Shut off.

Track 8
Why am I thinking of the “Three Fingers” 16 rpm mix of “Moments In Love”? Such vastness of grieving, such elementary ghosts being coaxed out of that piano Midge Ure abandoned thirteen years previously. Where is your Vienna now? Left to the whims of the deadly electrician. The most aggressively solitary of musics in its stateliness. Abandoned mansions. The winding river of abandoned boats. Sometimes your misinterpretation of others’ words can accidentally lead you to the emotional core of what they’re trying to say. And I am thinking 4AD. Such coldness. I’m shivering. A 38th birthday spent alone, in wreckage. A 30th birthday spent in ecstasy. The sun was still shining then. Still this music cut through me then. I didn’t want to guess. The great baronial desuetudes of the nursing home halfway up Nightingale Lane. That piano trying to creep upwards. Random. Robert Wyatt’s Sea Song. Of course. It’s again. Of course, again. On course to drown. And become something else. When the light distils itself into the negotiating shades of early winter, and you are impounded within a somewhat unreal world. What do you need me to tell you? How I still see and converse with her ghost when I am dreaming at night. How lucid can this possibly get? How long can I stay alive?

Track 9
Beat a little more assertive. Edging back into the major, key-wise. Robert Wyatt, again, Matching Mole. You’re waiting for the Lear free associations and bass clarinet to make their way back in. But they do not. There, another nursery melody, on a distant organ. Sean O’Hagan caught that mood, just short of wistfulness, in the later stages of Stereolab’s Mars Audiac Quintet. Almost a light interlude. A testcard for an alternative 1969. It does feel like that. You’re trying to discern the music; you can hear it but it doesn’t quite fit with what you recognise as a tune, and at that moment you realise you are dreaming, you are in fact quite conscious that you’re dreaming, and for the briefest of lucid moments you revel in the dream-ness of your dream. You are exceeding yourself because for that moment, just for that micromoment, you are truly yourself as you cannot be touched by anyone else or made to change into someone you are not. That’s why we like dreams; because then we are in control of our lives. An anvil. Can’t quite banish the Stakhanovite reality to which you are forced to awaken. Keep it at bay for a little while. Who knows, if you can control yourself sufficiently you might never wake up! There what I recognise as the closing motif. Time gentlemen please. No good moaning about it. What if I kept on doing this in decreasing, declining states of wakefulness – I mean it is getting fairly late – and managed to finish this piece while I was actually dreaming? How would you like me then?

Track 10
That bass sonority is sounding a threatening cloud again. Because it’s back to fucking reality, isn’t it? The emptiness of the corridor at night, unlit except for the steadily diminishing contents of the confectionery vending machine? Walk out into Banbury Road (at one end) at a certain time of night and you feel that you have entered a zone of the dead. Walk out into Walton Street (at the other end) and all you’ll get are hoohahs and hurrahs edging out of the Phoenix cinema and the winebars and whatever the Jericho Tavern’s now calling itself. And now you realise you’ve been looking at one thing from ten different angles – so far – getting closer to, approaching, those ghosts, those ships which sail serenely up what should be tramlines. But that hum, in the unpopulated ground floor corridors of the Radcliffe Infirmary. I DID NOT WANT TO GO BACK TO FUCKING WORK I WANTED TO STAY THERE AND NOT HAVE TO BE OBLIGED oh what’s the use what good could that or I have done and what’s this all got to do with 1994 anyway every perspective is by necessity tainted. What if there were nothing except that one string synthesiser line, yearning, but no there’s that crocodile of a bass, munching its way back in to devour the whole bloody album if he gives it a chance. And then it’s away again. And back. And forth. Maybe it’ll swallow me up in the end and I’ll never have to think again. Who said anything about thinking? Porphyria, Philadelphia, Padlocks, peppermint, plantars downgoing. The Persian army without all the deserters coming over from the Spartan side. Because they wanted to be on the winning side. They thought they could delay their deaths. Now a Fender Rhodes trying to wander into the territory, the prohibited post-nuclear territory, and did a bomb go off why of course it did, right before this record started. The side-streets which lead off the Banbury Road. Thence begins Antarctica. You can’t get away from the thing which is with you at all times, even past what used to be the tip where there was a very decent burger van, the best burgers I’ve ever tasted in fact, and that thing is death, my friend, death which follows you the other way, past the Park End Club, whether you’re walking past there at 4:48 am or on a 100 bus, there’s no escape from it. Or past the deceptive ashen sunrise over Ladbroke Grove, as you passed it that Tuesday morning in October, looking down at it from atop the Westway, briefly looking back before the turnoff into St Mary’s to see those plumes of smoke wafting up like forgotten chimneys.

Track 11
What, there’s more to say? A blip. The marimbas again. Circularity. Like Terry Riley. But not really. Slightly blurred and bleary. Imaginary, yellow-walled chip shops in Hatcham at 2:34 in the morning. When nothing is quite palpable, least of all your own sanity. A sharp intake of footsteps. An ECG machine which drones at sopranino pitch as if you’ve somehow neglected to breathe. Balletic. What if I woke up and found myself in a yellow-walled chip shop in a part of the city I could never find it in myself to place, except I’d have to go out of it at some point and what the fuck would I do if I were confronted with the dome of St Paul’s, at eye level to me, at 200 times its normal size, and would I expire from the sheer shock, and is that why I am reluctant to exeunt from that yellow-walled chip shop, because despite the almost racing certainty that I will emerge into a non-specific, undefined southern high street with nothing and no one to populate or desecrate it, there’s just that slimmest of possibilities that the next station from Sloane Square will not be Victoria, but rather Baker Street? And what if it were Dover Street tube station? And that I will, I might, come out of it and walk straight into my own cemetery? Without a middleman? Or walk out and be gobbled up by…that damned ECG bleep, it subtly penetrates everything, doesn’t it? The ardour, the candour, the fear, the faithlessness. That melody, it’s now warping ever so slightly. Where shall I find myself when it has ended? I haven’t forgotten to acknowledge Chesterton. Thursday’s face filling, and finally constituting, the entire sky shining above Earl’s Court, which suddenly becomes Leicester Square? What horses could be so swift?

Track 12
It’s a voice! Voices! A frantic bell ringing! But they’re speeded up, I can’t make out what they’re saying. They’re laughing. But I’m disturbed. What fucking mutation of a shop have I just walked into? Or am I hearing the biased voices of the doctors trying to save me? There’s a laugh, but what theatre am I lying in? Screech of brakes, there, was it? Almost into focus there, I nearly got it, but it’s blurred back out again. Tibetan bells, if you feel that way. The strange comfort you feel when you’re immobile and semi-conscious in intensive care, the relief at never having to do anything for yourself again.

CD TWO

Track 1
Someone is hammering on my coffin. Trying to get the heart started again. But time’s running out, so I have to get everything in. That melody which swoops down to embrace me. The clock is ticking away, can you hear it? What can I tell you about names to be named? There are too many and some of them, if not all of them, wouldn’t want me to name them in this context. Double speed and half-speed. Because there was the Muiredge, and there was the Grammar, and once upon a time there might have been an Uddingston, and there was certainly an Oxford, as there is just as certainly a London, even if it doesn’t exist except when I’m there, as with all of these places. That’s why if I go back to Uddingston, people still greet me routinely as if I hadn’t been gone for 23 years. But I can see that light, just up there, and I’m not sure whether it’s the sky or whether they’ve set my bunker on fire. I’m shortly to find out one way or the other, however. Is that a vibrato I can detect in the synth line there? Pop, pop. Popping music. Unthinkable without that speed bump of a heartbeat, just to be sure. And it could be such banal matter if not seen in extreme close-up and magnified in extremis. The belching of the sugar refinery at Silvertown. Chartres Cathedral. The medieval city of Bruges, which I am fearful of gazing upon lest I find myself in a parallel universe Oxford. Lincoln Cathedral, of course, the grandest approach to any city on any rail network in Britain, with the possible exception of Waverley. The way in which you feel you are going underneath, excavating, Princes Street and the Castle. Especially when it’s a cloudless blue sky.

Track 2
Harsh, sawtooth, what is this language and what are you trying to communicate to me with it? A drill. Machinery. It could be a sterile non-world. MRSA lurking beneath every veneer of cleanliness. Yet that implacable melody constantly asserts itself – and this is another in a major key, oddly imposing, like Arthur’s Seat – as a monolith which can never be destroyed, even if gnawed away at for centuries. That intimation of the minor, though. Gradually the melody becomes predominant at the expense of the bassline drill, or at least tries to. Sometimes it sounds as if it is sobbing. For us, for you, not really for me. But certainly by me. That subterranean bassline which keeps looming back into view, like a benign whale. A drone, a continuo. It breaks slightly, the solidity. And becomes luminous, untouchable, Rothko-esque in its grievously isolationist sureness of colour. Eventually the drone fills all of your head. The thoughts you cannot expel or excuse. Il miglior fabbro. Now, see how they’ve come a semitone apart and become dissonant right under your very nose, between your very ears? The nobility of indeterminate ruination. It dies off at the fade, diving down back towards the seabed, confident of its own extinction.

Track 3
Static explodes into rhythmic life. Shall we dance? All you had to do was ask! That beat, though, crackling up as though it’s being burned for bacon. That sudden HOWL there! Joe Meek trying to claw his way back to us! A SCREAM, almost! Made me jump! The acetate of this music is burning up faster than we can register it. The semblance of what might once have been a guitar meme. Now the bass comes in. Underworld at 25 rpm. Can’t get started.

Track 4
A desolate, mighty wind. Or is the might imaginary, from my perspective only? Is that someone trying to get through, to tell us that they’re still alive? The shifting, whispering sands. A tinkle of bells (to remind us that there was once a thing called Christmas) now giving way to a burbling synth line. All comprising trapped voices, voices of long-gone people doomed to resonate in space forever, at consistently diminishing levels, but still succeeding in existing? Then back to the wind, and are those footsteps or a gong? The howling wind becomes higher in pitch, searing, and then vanishing. Now, low noises like nature being wound backwards. Trying to restart the world. I see. Does he succeed?

Track 5
I managed to avoid mentioning Kraftwerk until now. But in another life this formed the basis of a minor Top 40 hit single (“On” - #32 in November 1993). A beningly burping melody, reflecting upon itself with moderate lustre. Not too demonstrative, lest the hall of mirrors be irrevocably revealed. And so brief.

Track 6
Beaver and Krause again. It had to happen. Those undulating flutes. The ghosts of Strawberry Fields Forever as well, naturally. Tablas. The things which trigger off the process of remembrance in your life. Flutes to a three-year-old mind in 1967. Gas stations. Strawberries. Was I ever young? Was I ever young like that? Was I once a child in Glasgow? The TV was on in the dark. Destination Moon. Central Pier. Aston Martins. Norman Vaughan. Robert Kennedy. I remember it all. Somerfields when it was called Coopers. Thinking that Tommy Cooper ran it. Mary Hopkin. Cornelius Cardew. Counting rods of different colours, from one to ten. The Marble Arch record label, forever hitless. Don’t try to tell me that I dreamed it all. What else could have constituted reality? That little acknowledgement of 1983 electro there. That whistling’s steadily getting more piercing. Then it goes on its rounds.

Track 7
I don’t suppose we can escape – or at least I can’t escape, you’re free to go at any time, reader – a reading of religiosity in this music, somewhere down the line. And here it is, a church organ, as someone paces patiently up and down the aisle – it surely cannot be another clock ticking. Art of Noise – “Memento.” Those footsteps continue – wait, they’ve just stopped. They never approach the listener, us. But there is also a great deal of Sylvian’s spirituality here (I keep thinking how so much of Fennesz’s stuff is predicated by this record). The footsteps return. Not going anywhere especially. Worship. Awe. Marriage. Death. Never birth. Not yet anyway. The contented hum of a power supply which will continue to be operative for as long as anyone wants it to be. The careful ticking of the heart at the earth’s core. Deeply moving. Some people just won’t get it. But I can almost feel at peace listening to this. Hear how it is slowly rising out of the waves, Atlantis reborn, counter melodies and counterparts methodically being added to the central motif. A generator which will continue to generate after all generations have departed. Astute readers will notice how I’m not writing so much for each track now as the record progresses. Because sometimes you have to sit, pause and worship. You just have to. Is this still coherent? Was it ever? What are you to make of me, who for the last two-and-a-half years has not been talking about this record specifically, aside from continued leitmotif-style passing references – those footsteps have slowed down to a halt again – and what am I to make of what you should make of me? Does it mean I still have the right to be, to exist? Because we’re getting near the end now, reader – two more dislocated footsteps, then another little collection, falling into disrepair, into unconsciousness, into death, and here, HERE, when there’s nothing left but those three organ chords, is where it transcends everything. Into somewhere else.

Track 8
Could almost be the introduction to a David Gray record or something, couldn’t it? Good grief (and there’s no good in grief, only good as a consequence of grief), it looks like the sun might be trying to shine again – I think remotely of the chorus of Madonna’s “Take A Bow,” forgetting that the latter song’s all about saying goodbye. A clarinet is not quite forlorn in the distance. As the underscoring melody line comes in, it’s a reassertion of life, despite everything. Uplifting, it feels as though the drowning artist has finally broken the surface of the sea and can make his way safely to shore, to refuge. The distant Vienna piano returns, now sounding reassuring, re-enlivened. There has to be a happy ending somewhere. Although there is still unfinished business to clear up. Is that an alarm clock going off at the end? Do you fancy waking up? I haven’t even been to sleep yet, though am rapidly getting there.

Track 9
Now we’re flying. Untethered to the earth. We could have died of course, can’t quite rule that out. The feeling of mortality which Vaughan Williams’ music could never quite avoid. Synthesised woodwinds play as if waiting for Nick Drake to give them words in the next world. Astonishing, the light which has intruded into the latter quarter of this record – strayed would be a better word than intruded – because now we’re back on the beach, and I’m five again, and I’ve said all this before. New Age by any other nitwit’s name, but as a kind of contented coda to the disturbances which have gone before, it is immensely affecting. I think of the summer of 1994, I think of how happy we were for so long a time, of who and what existed then and who and what now exist only in my memory. The brilliant Saturday morning sunshine. We always liked to face the sunshine. God help me live.

Track 10
God help me hold on, because those howling winds won’t go away – they’re slightly further away from me now, and there are more definable voices, though still not so definable that you can hear what they’re saying, but it sounds like a female voice, and do I have to keep being dragged back to the horrid reality of the August Bank Holiday weekend of 2001 because it was so fucking hot, so horrendously hot and stultifying and suffocating that I still dread the coming of the month of August every year with an intensity that no one else will ever quite understand. WHAT ARE THEY SAYING? AM I THE ONE WHO’S DYING? Well, take me instead, she’s got a future, I’ve lived my life. But no one would listen or heed. I CANNOT KEEP ACKNOWLEDGING THIS, THE CLOUDS HAVE TO BREAK AGAIN, THE SUN HAS TO SHINE AGAIN, HOW CAN I HOPE TO LIVE IF THE SUN NEVER SHINES AGAIN, STOP THIS STOP THIS REVERSE THIS BUT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. Impossible. The choir holy. Cannot get away from it, it pursues me because I keep allowing it to pursue me. Where’s the way out? Forwards or back, progression or regression? Those voices persist, and everything on this track sounds as if it were generated by a human voice, and yet I know there is no humanity here; it is the most deliberately abandoned of musics, a music stripped of human beings, a desolate landscape which exists for a reason long since forgotten, and STOP STOP STOP STOP

Track 11
A drill runs through my head. A curious melody, like a desecrated brass band, tries to break through, but I’m letting the pain exclude all of it. It’s uncomfortable, fucking unbearable in fact, in its extreme closeness. The phantoms of old Shadows riffs recede sadly in the background, but then you realise that the sounds are doing their best to try and kill you. The melody, the scant remnants of beauty, cannot be reached and can only be heard with difficulty because THIS FUCKING DRILL is cancelling all of it out. Cut the thread, cut the oxygen, have done with it and buona sera you overrated fucking planet. I don’t know about dreaming; all of a sudden I’m wide awake again and this sound is unimpeachably and indisputably real and it goes ON AND ON AND ONANDONANDON so get the memories while you’re here oh shit oh no they’ve all been written down all the important ones anyway just go and read them and then do something else and I can’t bloody think because it’s HURTING it’s FUCKING TEARING MY HEAD APART and my head needs to be SOMEWHERE ELSE WHY CAN’T YOU LET ME BE A KID AGAIN IS IT SO WRONG TO WANT TO BE A KID AGAIN because it had its flaws admittedly I’m not concealing those but it was preferable to being systematically buried in concrete and that drill isn’t even going to help me drill my way out again once I’ve been entombed and DIDN’T I DESERVE BETTER THAN THIS WHERE’S THE TUNNEL THE SCREENS THE SCREENS THE SCREAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

Track 12
Now I’m buried, but here I am, I’m still trying to breathe, breathe deeply, and the oscillating synth sounds return, those dessicated Hank Marvin lines, repeating and entwining themselves – there I growl – now I leave the melody line to itself, bemusedly adapting into a different focus, one which isn’t quite mine, because of the alternative perspective, that of the living dead, and now there’s a cackle there, a laugh, and it’s a palpable laugh which sounds like it’s coming from a viably real human being – not speeded up or distorted, but a loop of a laugh. Then of course it’s just a loop, like Neil Innes’ laugh at the end of “Slush” by the Bonzos – the progenitor of the laugh perhaps themselves long gone. A bassline attempts to sidle its way upwards, through and past the undergrowth, but it’s a forlorn mission. More voices on the right, then trying to cross the barrier, but no, they’re distant again, nothing really to do with me, they can’t be talking about me, can they? They cannot be mocking me when I can’t respond? The pitch of the laugh has become lower, less human, more grotesque in its unrealness. Tantalisingly close these voices come sometimes, but now closer than the ear can hear (Escalator!). Now everything’s sounding unnaturally close up, and I’m now not entirely sure that I’m dreaming this, or that I’m having a dream that is distorting my perception of this music. Strange when you think of all the times I’ve listened to it – and we DID things to it – in full consciousness. On such occasions you tend not to notice a lot of the music’s components. They only become apparent once you have loosened your conception of consciousness to a small but sufficient degree. Thus am I half asleep, but still wanting to find my way out of this now forbidding labyrinth. The bassline’s back again, slightly more to the fore. I must have imagined that laugh. FUCK THEY’RE COMING INTO THE ROOM RIGHT UP TO MY FACE AND THEY ARE TALKING TO ME AND I CAN’T FIGURE OUT WHAT THEY’RE SAYING AND NOW THE LAUGH’S AT 200 RPM – this might be a worse hell than the drill and if I’m not typing doggerel by now which I might have been doing all along – there it slows down to let me breathe and figure out an exit.

Track 13
The release. I had to face it. It’s 1976, I am 12 again, and a tune and a bank of synthesisers straight out of side two of Vangelis’ Heaven And Hell. And it’s all in front of me, I’ve got it all to look forward to though am vaguely conscious that I might already have had the best of it. A Hollywood ending; how appropriate. Now everything, look, is coming into focus; I could scarcely be more lucid because, here, Blake’s engravings, and there, the stone in Virginia Woolf’s coat pocket, and over there, the last minute reprieve for Hart Crane, and there, resplendent and profound even to a schoolboy with Saturday morning satchel westering to his spiritual home in Kelvingrove, the sublime and holy art of Sir Stanley Spencer for the goodness and benefit of all humanity to enrich our spirituality and sexuality because it was about sex, Christ (Resurrection!) I’d worked that out at a very early age, because that’s what it’s been about all along, that’s how everything keeps coming back to the glorious and beautiful resurrection which shall await everyone who deserves it and in whom I believe and have never ceased to believe.

A cut-off point. Abrupt.

Life before it’s lived.

But not life before it’s ended.

Never.

JOE MEEK AT 75

“I could afford to be arrogant if I wanted,” chuckles an impossibly youthful-looking Sir Joe Meek, gazing out from the top floor of his recently refurbished Triumph plc Studios in Holloway, “but I realise that a lot of what I’ve achieved in my career has been down to luck as well as my skills, such as they are. I’ve had a lot of bad breaks followed by an avalanche of good ones. Most people buckle under the bad ones. I ought to know – I nearly did.”

Looking back at Sir Joe’s remarkable career, it’s easy to forget how close he came to a nervous breakdown in early 1967. His run of pop hits had dried up and he was in imminent danger of eviction and bankruptcy. “God it was depressing,” he reflects. “I’d wake up every morning and argue myself into existing for another day. That is if my landlady didn’t start the arguing first. I didn’t feel I was getting anywhere. The money from ‘Telstar’ was tied up in a court case, money wasn’t coming in elsewhere because I wasn’t getting any hits, I was doing drugs – I really felt like packing the whole thing in, and I don’t just mean the music business. Everything seemed dead or in the past to me.”

As everyone knows, salvation came in the unlikely shape of Kenneth Williams, with whom Meek was in the tendency of socialising in the Holloway area around that time (“Don’t forget, it was only made legal towards the end of ’67…”). Impressed by his performance in the 1963 Home Service production of Gogol’s Diary Of A Madman, Columbia Records had asked Williams whether he wanted to turn this into an album.

“They had strange ideas,” remembers Sir Kenneth, now 78. “I think when they heard the original BBC broadcast they were interested in the sound design as much as, if not more than, my actual performance of the text. So Columbia wanted me to come into the studio and redo it as a record, but they wanted to update the background – ‘make it more psychedelic,’ I was told at the time, though of course then I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant. But it seemed as though they wanted the sound design to be a bit more far out, to mirror the narrator’s gradual mental disintegration. When I asked about who was going to oversee the production of all this, they suggested Joe, whom I knew vaguely from the gay scene of the time, as someone who was good at producing interesting noises. I was sufficiently intrigued to say yes. And I’m glad I did because that experience really opened a door for me – before then I was going nowhere in all these farcical comedies, Carry On and what have you, and I was getting pretty frustrated about it I can tell you. I was just part forty and just about ready for the scrapheap, or at least that’s how I felt. But after doing Diary Of A Madman with Joe, I felt less pent-up about trying new and different things and I came out of it with a determination to improve my skills and develop myself as a proper actor, not just some lard-faced raconteur. Hard to know where I’d be today if I hadn’t taken the chance and done it.”

Williams’ career – including his surprise 1973 best actor Oscar for his performance in Death In Venice – is of course well documented. And, on Diary Of A Madman, Meek also enlisted the musical aid of a group of Cambridge art students who would become as closely identified with him as the Beatles with Lord Martin – Pink Floyd.

“They were a fairly standard blues band of the period,” recalls Meek, “but Syd in particular was interested in stretching the music out. He was listening to Stockhausen, Coltrane, all sorts, and that was very much the direction in which he wanted to push the group. In particular he was very interested in sonic manipulation – getting weird effects out of his guitar, the use of pure feedback, etc. – which I suppose must have been a consequence of Hendrix coming over here. It took a while but the rest of the band slowly followed his lead. And when I was looking for musicians to work on Diary Of A Madman, Pink Floyd sprang immediately to mind.”

Diary Of A Madman caused a sensation when it was released in March 1967. Hailed as the first true British psychedelic album almost by default, it notoriously sent the Beatles, then ensconced in Abbey Road recording Sgt Pepper, into a tizzy. “Our mouths dropped open when we heard the playback,” remembers Paul McCartney. “It was like, how the hell are we going to top this? We’re sitting here doing jolly little songs about traffic wardens and old age pensioners – clarinets, if you will – and we knew immediately that that wasn’t the way forward.” Thus the astonishing Sgt Pepper album which emerged, and which blew virtually all of pop music apart in that summer of 1967 with its extraordinary tracks such as “Carnival Of Light,” “A Day In The Life” and “Revolution #9.”

It certainly caused Meek’s shares to go up. Soon afterwards, he and Pink Floyd locked themselves away in the Holloway Road studio to record their classic double album debut Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, with side four given over to the 25 glorious minutes of “Interstellar Overdrive.” Says Meek, “It pretty much gave me a kick up the arse; I knew that I didn’t necessarily have to stay with pop, that I could go and explore different and new territories and that somehow I’d still find an audience. I think the experience was good for the band as well. I was very old-school strict with them; no drugs, no booze. One day Syd came in with some funny-looking pills which he said some German mates had given him. I took one look at them and immediately flushed them down the toilet. Syd was just about ready to take a swing at me, but ever since then he’s thanked me for doing that, almost on a daily basis.”

Further extremes were to come. In 1967 Pink Floyd shared management with the then already notorious improvising collective AMM, and it was on the direct recommendation of Syd Barrett that Meek was approached to produce AMM’s second album for Elektra Records. Remembers AMM percussionist Eddie Prevost: “Joe didn’t just produce it, he effectively became our fifth member. The nuances of his production – done live, on the spot – gave our music a new dimension in which to move, more sounds to manipulate and nurture.”

The Crypt became a surprise bestseller, the essential record to be seen with in every student bedsit, a Top 3, gold album in the UK, and a declared influence on Hendrix’s approach to production on Electric Ladyland. Suddenly Joe Meek gained the reputation of the most happening, avant-garde record producer in Britain, if not the world. And while he was busy breaking sonic boundaries with Pink Floyd and AMM, he was continuing to produce equally extraordinary pop hits, including “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Scott Walker’s groundbreaking number one hit of February 1969, “The Electrician” (“Scott was screaming for my services! Joe’s the only one who will understand where I’m going with this! He probably could have done the job just as well himself, as he’s proved on his records since then”).

With the “Telstar” court case finally resolving itself in his favour in July 1968, Meek’s royalties were unfrozen and he received a welcome flow of several million pounds into his bank account. “Nothing could stop me then,” he recalls. “It was the ideal opportunity to upgrade the old Holloway studios. I was able to buy the whole building outright – as well as pay for a nice cottage for my long-suffering landlady to retire to! – whereupon I gutted the place, completely refurbished the studios and made it as state-of-the-art as I could. I think I had the first polyphonic Moog synthesiser in England.”

Among the lengthening queue of musicians queuing up outside his doors for a touch of that Meek magic was David Bowie. “David was at a bit of a loose end by ’69,” says Meek. “He’d been knocking around the fringes of the scene for so long, no one was taking him seriously any more. He had this song about being an astronaut, and having heard songs I’d done like ‘Sky Men,’ thought I’d be the ideal person to arrange and produce it. He was very worried about turning into an Anthony Newley for the ‘70s, with the working men’s clubs but without any money or career to speak of. He didn’t want ‘Space Oddity’ to be a cheesy novelty.

“So I really worked on it for him, put everything I could think of into the pot. I got Keith Rowe to play that amazing guitar line which sounds like 20,000 pods exploding in gravity-free silence. I got Rolf Harris in to play his Stylophone. Echoes, backward phasing…as far out as it was possible to get in 1969. And it got to number one. He trusted me after that.”

In fact, Bowie trusted Meek enough to let him oversee most of his classic early albums – 1971’s Ziggy Stardust, for example, with its startling number one single “Boys Keep Swinging.” And all the while Meek continued to develop his close relationship with Pink Floyd, culminating in their record-breaking 1972 epic Kid A – a pioneering album which ran the gamut of sonics, involving the participation of a 190-strong line-up of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra on one track, and the entirety of side two being performed by the band on household objects. In the grey autumn of 1972, Kid A struck a resonant chord, giving Meek a double albums and singles number one, as it topped the album chart the same week as Lieutenant Pigeon’s “Mouldy Old Dough” – virtually a throwback to Meek’s Tornados days - made it to the top of the singles chart.

When punk came along, Meek was immediately sought out by Malcolm McLaren to produce the first Sex Pistols records. However, Meek got on particularly well with John Lydon – who admitted that his “I Hate AMM” T-shirt was ironic – and as such was instrumental in the startling personnel changes which saw Steve Jones and Glen Matlock replaced by Keith Levene and Jah Wobble (Meek: “I mean, I turned down the Beatles in ’62, silly fool that I was – why would I want to produce them again?”) and even more instrumental in the era-defining first Sex Pistols album, Metal Box (1977), with its songs like “God Save The Queen” (which, as number one in Jubilee week, kept another Meek production – Hot Chocolate’s “Put Your Love In Me” – off the top), “Death Disco,” “Poptones” and “Submission” which forged a decisive way out for the cul-de-sac which punk was then already becoming.

Work with the Damned, Alternative TV and Magazine followed – how different would the latter’s “Permafrost” have sounded without Meek’s inspired input? – and he was also responsible for producing the original RCA demos of Joy Division, though the band demurred from using him as producer of their debut album (“too much fookin’ Kraftwerk and Moroder, not enough Iggy!”). Trevor Horn, a session bass player on some of Meek’s mid-‘70s hits (for example, Tina Charles’ 1976 number one “Search And Destroy”) and later a studio apprentice of Meek’s, certainly took many of Meek’s lessons to heart when embarking on his own production career (Meek was the arranger on Dollar’s “Give Me Back My Heart” and Propaganda’s “P.Machinery,” and judging by his epic work on the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent,” Meek later seemed to have learned something from Horn in return).

In recent years Sir Joe has concentrated on recording contemporary classical and improvised music (“Those royalties have to be put to some use; you can’t shove all of it up your nose!”) though in 2003 made a surprise return to his early ‘60s roots with his production work on the White Stripes’ Elephant album (“they came to me and asked if we could make it exactly as I would have done in 1963. Naïve pair – I had to explain to them that it wasn’t quite that simple, but I think they were more than satisfied with the results”). However, of his recent work he will probably be best known for his astonishing sound design for the films of David Lynch – he won an Oscar for his innovative “score” to Blue Velvet (Lynch: “I’d been listening to I Hear A New World quite a lot and wanted the bones of the music to be re-gutted, like a candle, only middleweight”) and his seamless fusion of abstract sonics and pure song for Mulholland Dr. has rightly been adopted as a template for future development, although, as Meek says: “It was only the logical development of what I’d started with the KLF when they asked me to produce their Chill Out album. It was a bizarre experience, trying to resuscitate Acker Bilk…” Living in domestic harmony with his partner of 20 years, the playwright Lord Orton of Leicester, one suspects that the best of Joe Meek is yet to come.