The Beauty of Burning the Box of Beautiful Things: Michael Bracewell's Re-Make/Re-Model

I've read a fair amount of band/artist biographies with varying amounts of interest(oddly enough, as much as I love the band Pulp, their 400-page biography by Mark Sturdy was one of the hardest to conquer). I stumbled upon Michael Bracewell's 2007 biography of Roxy Music, Re-Make/Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music, by accident while looking for other Michael Bracewell books. You see, I quite like Bracewell's ideas and style; I've read both England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie and When Surface Was Depth: Death by Cappuccino and Other Reflections on Music and Culture in the 1990's, which both gave me fascinating intertextual insights into popular culture from vastly different angles. The former probes various aspects of Englishness from arcadia to suburbia via John Betjeman, Lindsay Anderson films and The Cure while the latter discussed the atmosphere of the 90s, including a shift from irony to "authenticity" and the gentrification of the avant-garde, and explored topics from Britpop to Howard Devoto to the Millennium Dome to American pop group, Hanson. These earlier works point to Bracewell's intelligent wit and extensive research, aspects which definitely infuse Re-Make/Re-Model.

The key difference with Bracewell's take on Roxy Music's biography, or the band biography genre in general, is that he strictly focuses on the way the band came about; once the band gains a record deal and creates their self-titled first album, the book ends. By the way, this book is nearly 400 pages long. And I finished it in a few days. The difference between this book and that massive history of Pulp is the almost academic take on the ideas, art and socio-historical forces that shaped the band and their music. This book isn't about a meticulous chronology of singles, albums and gigs, power struggles, band member departures, and outrageous gossip. This book isn't about a band's personal relationships as such; it's more about the constellation of people and ideas that provided the perfect conditions to create such a unique band which took high and low art and married them with a camp aesthetic.

The book is divided into three main sections: Newcastle 1953-1968, Reading, Ipswich, Winchester 1964-1969, and London 1968-1972. In doing this, Bracewell can thoroughly discuss the milieus from which Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay and Brian Eno emerged, parallel them, and then join them up in the final section. Of course there are plenty of interviews with the band members themselves, but there are equal amounts, if not more, interviews with people who had contact with the band members, and in effect, "made" Roxy Music as much as Ferry, Mackay and Eno. In the Newcastle section, you learn about the Richard Hamilton-influenced art school concepts that surrounded Ferry and his fellow students, including Rita Donagh, who eventually ended up teaching at Reading University where Andy Mackay was studying English and Music. Hamilton and his postmodern pastiche, Pop Art ideas and Duchampian aesthetics become clear foundations for Roxy Music's borrowing from an eclectic, extensive palette for both their music and their image. But in addition to these high art philosophies, Ferry and his colleagues were equally exposed to Club A-Go-Go, a venue that held lunchtime dances for Newcastle's working class, and the social significance of mod clothing at Marcus Price.

The second section shows how ideas migrated and cross-pollinated between the art schools in Newcastle, Reading and Ipswich, taking in Andy Mackay and Brian Eno's pieces of the Roxy Music story. In the process, Bracewell emphasizes the similarities between Brian Eno's concern for process over product and the theories being practiced in both Newcastle and Reading. While Eno's new, postmodern attitude toward art almost got him kicked out of Winchester School of Art, it demonstrated a new way of approaching both art and music, thus creating unexpected art that wouldn't have occurred any other way. At the same time, at Reading, art students were being exposed to Armenian philosopher, Gurdjieff, who came up with the concept of "self re-membering," a philosophy that says you can create your own being. Through Hamilton's emphasis on Duchamp, the future members of Roxy Music and their milieu learned "art can be anything," and through Gurdjieff, they learned that "you can be anything"; the combination of these two ideologies took their subcultural activities to the mainstream and provided a foundation for what would eventually be termed "glam rock," a deliberately artificial construct. This is also the section of the book that introduces you to the Moodies, the Reading-based, pop art performance group that pre-figured punk, and the avant-garde "happenings" occurring in and around Reading, which are both elements that contributed to how Roxy Music ended up fusing the mass market appeal of pop and glamour with high art consciousness, and more practically, how Mackay came to meet Eno.

The final section of the book, which is likely where most biographers would start the bulk of their story, ties all the ends up in London, where all of Roxy Music's members finally converge in the midst of new, outrageous fashion from the likes of Ossie Clark, Antony Price, Pamla Motown, and Eno's then-girlfirend, Carol McNicholl; inventive, entrepreneurial hairstyling from Keith Wainwright; and decadent, poetic PR from post-graduate Romantic Literature student Simon Puxley. This steaming soup of embryonic ideas and creative businesses provided the perfect environment for the birth of Roxy Music. Interestingly enough, Roxy Music was initially perceived as emerging too fully-formed by music journalists and critics - to them, apparently Roxy Music hadn't paid their dues in previous music scenes like David Bowie. But if I learned anything from the book, it's how much went into creating the success and critical acclaim behind Roxy Music. They truly were the product of their postwar times and paid their dues in multiple, eclectic arenas outside of the music scene itself, making for one of the most interesting bands of all time.

In terms of writing talent and knowledge, Michael Bracewell is already heads above many other music writers (Morrissey has called him "the most adroitly gifted writer of our generation"); he writes the types of books I need to come back to again and again just to comprehend the full meaning and scope of what he places under the same umbrella. He's brilliant at unravelling pop culture's seemingly seamless tapestry and re-weaving it into a web you never would have expected. With his obvious knowledge of both pop culture and academic theory, he was the perfect biographer for this band, which represented both facets simultaneously. Not only did this book give me a fantastic insight into the people who made up Roxy Music and their music, but it made me think and learn. I fully acknowledge that most bands wouldn't warrant this kind of biography nor stand up with this kind of cerebral analysis; however, the fact that Roxy Music does makes them all the more significant a collection of true artists. In effect, Bracewell takes Eno's process over product philosophy and applies it to the band itself, showing that the process itself can be a work of art.

Re-Make/Re-Model - Roxy Music

Ladytron - Roxy Music

Hearing is Believing or Believing is Hearing?: Experimental Music

One of my MySpace friends is part of a band/musical project called Ear of the Rat, and listening to their work prompted me to think about experimental music and ask some important questions of myself that I haven't done in awhile. You see, Ear of the Rat produces highly experimental pieces, some more accessible than others, and provides them all for free download. Are these people the true artists? They aren't doing it for any financial gain whatsoever and they have uploaded their work to Open Source Audio, a site where music is truly shared for the creative good of everyone participating. But what is music as an art? Is all this endless criticizing, reviewing and proselytizing about music a load of rubbish in the end?

There have many experimental music projects, especially since advances in both communication and music production technology. The early 20th century saw French composer Erik Satie become the father of both ambient music and muzak. He called what he was doing "furniture music," and for him, it represented the aesthetic of boredom, music deliberately produced to be ignored. Then, decades later, John Cage pushed music in a different way by developing the I Ching into a strategy for making experimental music. Of course the likes of people like Brian Eno then took this concept further. In many ways, Ear of the Rat reminds me of early Pink Floyd (in fact, they do a version of Interstellar Overdrive) and The Velvet Underground with their seemingly endless experimentation and spontaneous musical "happenings." There's also something vaguely Ariel Pink about them. Like many bands from past and present, Ear of the Rat don't appear to have an agenda except to continue being creative. They plunder samples and ideas from other pieces and produce them as lo-fi as possible. What's one of the terms for music like that of Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, and Brian Eno? Art rock. Isn't all music art? At what point does it become sufficiently "arty"?

Whenever I think of aesthetics and questions of art theory, I'm reminded of Tom Wolfe's book The Painted Word, his criticism of modern art criticism. Essentially, Wolfe argues that the art came first and then the people in the ivory tower and at the top of the social ladder created a reason for it. In order to see a work of art, in this case a painting, there has to be a persuasive theory behind it. As Wolfe states, "Not 'seeing is believing,' you ninny, but 'believing is seeing,' for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text." Isn't this what most pretentious art critics, including those who write in-depth reviews of music, work off? The potential to get bogged down in academic musings and theories when discussing art is massive. It's as though the world has said "art serves no practical purpose, thus it must be justified." In fact, every faculty of arts in university is dedicated to analyzing and developing meaning for things that can't be put to practical use. It is this kind of education that leads me to write babbling propositions like this about modern art. I've been effectively trained to look for meaning in everything, which while enlightening, may have also killed my ability to feel art for art's sake and nothing else. So, to attempt to answer my earlier question of when does music become art, I suppose music becomes art when enough people with influence agree it is. The modern art critic is the equivalent of the indie hipster.

Does theory and the meticulous extrication of meaning from art matter? Is it all part of experiencing art? Do I need to understand art before I enjoy it? Replace the word "art" with "music." Do the answers change? If pushed to answer, I would have to say that there are pros and cons to theorizing and understanding context. Back when I knew much less about music and its history, every album or artist I listened to sounded new and I responded to it on a purely emotional level without overthinking things. Now I find myself comparing the music I listen to with others and placing it in some sort of context for myself in order to evaluate its worth. Like the critics in Wolfe's book, I sometimes realize that I'm trying to make excuses for certain music and trying to understand why it should be considered valuable. Of course it becomes very reassuring to have the artists themselves come to me and say that I completely understood what they were trying to do (this has happened more often than I would have expected) - at least in those cases I know I didn't shoehorn them into some sort of pre-meditated framework. Oh, the occupational hazards of being a music critic, as amateur a version I may be.

Along with the pushing and testing the limits of genres and musical possibilities, artistic advancement has also developed alongside the capacity to participate and share in music creation; the line between listener and performer has blurred. A strong, and perhaps simpler, example of this process in action is Phil Kline's Unsilent Night, where people in a particular locale all bring out their portable stereos to blast whichever Christmas music they happen to have and walk through the streets together. Supposedly, the ever-shifting soundscape comes to represent community and a non-hierarchical performance in which everyone's ability to perform is equal. Musical communism in a way. Via faster computers and Internet service, sharing information, including music, has become possible at an unprecedented level. But aside from wholesale downloading of completed tracks and the sampling done in the hip-hop and electronic world, would all that many "regular" people bother collaborating on musical projects over long distances? Do artists need to bother? Isn't creating music always going to be an indirect collaboration anyway?

Art comes from art. It took me a relatively long time to learn that, but it's true. There's nothing original in this world, just original ways of re-assembling. To declare some band as utterly revolutionary is always a fallacy. They didn't create in a vacuum (and if they did, they may be suffering from the lack of necessary gaseous elements), so like John Milton said, plagiarism of a work occurs only "if it is not bettered by the borrower."

But does this highly experimental music have a chance at resonating more than a tightly produced four-minute track with that many people? There are times when listening to a twenty-minute track of noodling and improvisation that you start thinking this is what reading Finnegan's Wake would be like. If I'm completely honest, most of the music I own and listen to on a regular basis is accessible. I would say 90% of it is based on some recognizable semblance of musical structure and the songs are usually under eight minutes long. Is it pretentious to love and champion the music that pushes the limits so far that it becomes inaccessible just because it is inaccessible? I think it only becomes pretentious when you're not being honest about it.

I'm not going to attempt justifying Ear of the Rat's output, nor am I going to explain why I would likely listen to New Order or The Smiths more readily than Ear of the Rat, or even Pink Floyd for that matter. Nor am I going to worry too much about what that says about me as a music lover. I think there's a difference between finding a piece of music interesting and truly loving a piece of music; some music is meant to be furniture music for me. I admire artists like those in Ear of the Rat for doing the art they do for the reasons they do it for, but I don't want to fall into a "believing is hearing" state of mind. I live for those songs that I will never be able to explain my reactions to. It's that incommunicable connection with certain pieces of music that keeps me listening and believing.

Wind Cries Mary - Ear of the Rat

Interstellar Overdrive - Pink Floyd

Shaken, Not Stirred...and Pass the Jelly Bellies: Sparks' Exotic Creatures From the Deep

The outrageous and witty Mael brothers of Sparks are back and to celebrate the release of their latest album, Exotic Creatures From the Deep, they decided to create a mad twenty-one night run of London shows in which each gig showcases an album from their back catalogue. The run kicked off on May 16 with Halfnelson and will run until the premiere of Exotic Creatures From the Deep at Shepherd's Bush Empire on June 13. The album itself will release this Tuesday. I really enjoy Sparks, and I've come to realize even more keenly with this album how they never fit into any one genre or period, so their sound constantly appears contemporary and unique. While they were originally included in the glam scene early in their career, their blend of genres like vaudeville, classical, jazz, pop, electro, and rock, combined with Russell's fey, semi-operatic vocals and characteristic staccato delivery, put them in a strange class of their own. In some ways, they had similarities to their contemporaries Queen, but with a wittier, artier slant. Perhaps Sparks altered their sound a bit with each development in music technology (ie: their '80's albums utilize a lot more synthesizer and drum machines), but they still make the same zany, tongue-in-cheek theatrics. I love their mixture of sophistication and absurdity. They're like a martini garnished with jelly beans. And they continue with this album, which is a natural progression from their last album Hello Young Lovers.

Exotic Creatures of the Deep is loosely held together by an intro which then appears as a reprise halfway through the album, only to reappear again at the very end of the last song of the album, Likeable. The nearly accapella refrain of "I don't care if you love me, just so you like me" is a memorable hook and makes much more sense when it finds itself in the final song about a narrator whose best feature is his intangible likeability. The second track of the album, Good Morning, features newer musical techniques by dipping into the electro scene for fuzzed out beats; however, this story of a man who wakes up without any recollection of the night before, has the signature Sparks schizophrenia with soft, symphonic interludes and Russell at his most falsetto. This flirtation with new sounds persists in I Can't Believe That You Would Fall For All the Crap in This Song, which could have been an electro-burlesque tune by either Kylie Minogue or Goldfrapp, and features lyrics that satirize the genre of love/lust songs. One of my favourtie songs on this album is the completely mad Let the Monkey Drive. Sparks' staccato, clipped style works magnificently in this tune about allowing a monkey to take the wheel on a Californian highway, so that the narrator and his companion can do as they like in the backseat. The melody is hugely catchy and romps along so fluidly you can almost miss the fact that apparently the car is actually the monkey's in the firstplace.

Their wit is in full working order with songs like Strange Animal, which comments on the process of making a song in a postmodern fashion, and the enormously catchy (She Got Me) Pregnant, which places lyrics about a woman getting a man pregnant over dark cabaret worthy of Danny Elfman. The intelligent craziness keeps going with This Is the Renaissance, a song that strings together facts about the Renaissance period to another dark cabaret backdrop, praising the rebirth of art and science, and insisting that Gutenberg is printing a centrefold, "so let it all hang out." Any band who adds "contra butto" to their lyrics in passing is bound to make me happy. And to prove their fabulous consciousness of pop culture and their currency (see Perfume from their last album for an example of their exhaustive pop culture observances), they created a song entitled Photoshop, which takes melodrama to new heights in the age of technology as Russell belts out "Photoshop me out of your life." Another one of my favourite tracks on this record is Lighten Up, Morrissey, which tells the frustrated story of a man who cannot get a woman to notice him because she idolizes Morrissey so much. She criticizes the narrator's intellect, masculinity and meat-eating ways to the beat of a stomping rock song. Sparks revealed in an interview with Jonathan Ross that they first ran the song by Morrissey and he found it very amusing and gave his approval.

Overall, Exotic Creatures of the Deep maintains the cinematic flavour and ambition of Sparks' music that began with Halfnelson, and which has held my attention through twenty-one albums. If anything, they've just expanded into even bigger and bolder soundscapes and storylines, though maybe not quite as ambitious as 2006's Lil Beethoven. In the aforementioned Jonathan Ross interview, the Mael brothers expressed their desire to write a film soundtrack; with their signature ability to shift styles and genres within songs in order to tell their stories, I would love to hear their soundtrack score. Maybe they need to attempt the next James Bond soundtrack. Who's more sophisticated and absurd than 007?

Let the Monkey Drive - Sparks

This is the Renaissance - Sparks

New Art For the People: The Indelicates' American Demo

I just received my copy of The Indelicates' debut album, American Demo, in the mail (it was released in the UK on April 14), and I'm hugely impressed. I wrote about them earlier in my SXSW post, and I shall continue to rave about them. This English duo manages to combine elements from many of my favourite bands and artists - the satirical observations of Pulp, the voices of Luke Haines and Kate Bush, the melodies of The Auteurs. The two Indelicates (a moniker they each use as a surname), Simon and Julia, met at a Poetry Slam, hence, their lyrics are some of the best ones I've ever heard - they often take you by surprise and dwell in the shadows cast by the sunny music. And for someone who did their Honours BA in English Literature, lyrics are often a huge issue for me. Others have already appropriately compared The Indelicates with The Auteurs and Art Brut, but I would say that they go beyond wit for its own sake and make political statements about the state of the world today. At the same time, their politics feel like they're wrapped up in a big pink bow of narrative. Personal losses and disappointments extend to a universal malaise, frustration and apathy.

The first two Indelicates tracks I ever heard were the contagious tongue-in-cheek ode to youth, Sixteen, and the up-tempo but bittersweet, Julia, We Don't Live in the '60's, and both are included on this album. American Demo begins with New Art For the People Theme, a sweet orchestral piece led by a violin, which is an instrumental re-working of the later track, New Art for the People, a deliciously depressing dialogue between Simon and Julia about fighting for art's sake in a fatuous environment and failing - in many ways, with its sense of broken dreams and misguided hopes, it feels like an updated version of Fairytale of New York. With a similar theme of disillusionment and loss, The Last Significant Statement to Be Made in Rock 'n Roll, a song with driving guitars and Simon on lead vocals, sounds like The Auteurs meets Springsteen's Born to Run. It also includes fantastic lyrics like "Once, in a corridor in Memphis/Was a singer took a breath/And wrote the birth of the teenager/Now we come to write his death," which is one of the best lines about Elvis that I've come across. Our Daughters Will Never Be Free is a playful breakneck number complete with handclaps and Julia taking over breathless lead vocals while the lyrics lambast feminism and its many failures. Stars sounds like a tinkling music box as Julia sweetly croons, "I'm in love with the boy next door/He treats me like a filthy whore/I give him everything he wants for nothing in return." Unsettling and twee at the same time...kind of like a song in a Tim Burton stop-motion animation.

One of my favourite tracks is ...If Jeff Buckley Had Lived, a song that goes against the typical music fan's reaction to his untimely death - rather than pity the waste of such talent and wonder how genius Buckley could have been if he had lived, The Indelicates predict that Buckley would have fallen flat by never being able to live up to his brilliant first and only album, and without his death, he wouldn't have become the mythological figure he is now. The music itself in this song is beautifully melancholy and expansive with a pulsing rhythm, light piano, and gently whining guitars. Another song that I find fascinating is America, a stately tune with frenetic guitar arpeggios and a rather provocative take on America, taking the conservative stance and deriding England with its "weak-chinned snarls and red guitars." The track Heroin once again reminds me of Bruce Springsteen with its passionate overwrought guitars and raspy vocals, and even though I don't really like Springsteen, I enjoy it - perhaps because The Indelicates have hit upon an alchemical mixture of American bombast and English irony.

I'm going to include a couple of tracks from the album and then one particularly fabulous demo song, Waiting for Pete Doherty to Die, that was available for free download on their Web site. They say everything in this song that I would want to say about the state of the media, music industry and pretentious fans, and they do it much more eloquently than I could. In many ways, it's a companion piece to the song We Hate the Kids on American Demo, a song which states: "And no one discusses what they don't understand/And no one does anything to harm the brand/And this gift is an illusion, this isn't hard:/Absolutely anyone can play fucking guitar/Oh yeah, we mean it/We hate the kids/Useless children genuflecting/To the idols who exploit them." Despite the cynicism, The Indelicates do, indeed, make intelligent new art for the people. And I'm thankful for it.

New Art For the People - The Indelicates

...If Jeff Buckley Had Lived - The Indelicates

Waiting For Pete Doherty to Die - The Indelicates

Super Furry Animals They Ain't: Clinic's Do It!

Clinic's fifth album, Do It!, was released last week to generally positive reviews. The Liverpudlian band has always had a rather eclectic, off-the-wall sound that makes them difficult to categorize, a problem which of course makes them terribly interesting as a band. They tend to sound just as unhinged and idiosyncratic as the old organs and keyboards that they ostensibly salvage from flea markets. Clinic's music also makes me think of some gothic circus performing in a swamp in the American Deep South. The fact they obscure their identities by wearing surgical uniforms during performances and photo shoots adds further to their bizarre art rock credentials. Though they've been around for over ten years, I only really became aware of them via Visitations, the album before Do It!. Intrigued by their sound, I went back and listened to their older albums, discovering that Clinic can swerve back and forth between hypnotic and frantic or weave both together to sinister effect. Somehow they manage to both mesmerize and unsettle you at the same time.

In most of the reviews I've read about Do It!, the album is described as psychedelic and perfect for summer, which makes it sound like the record is a Super Furry Animals album - a completely errant assumption to make. I would say that it is less frantic and whirling, less of a dark hoedown, than Visitations - perhaps as sunny as Clinic can get. While their sound has tended to be quite dense in previous albums, Do It! has many lighter moments like the plinking Tomorrow and dreamy Corpus Christi. As usual, Ade Blackburn's vocals sneer, sputter and slur over oscillating rhythms and unexpected arrangements and time signatures, but it's like their sound has been aerated. In some ways, I suppose they have returned to some of the lighter sounds from Internal Wrangler.

Album opener, Memories, begins with chimes reminiscent of Eastern sitar music, but then shifts into fuzzy, romping guitars only to move again during the vocals into a milder psychedelic waltz with organs and cymbals. The Witch (Made to Measure) bumps along like a ride in an apple truck without the vicious, brutal drive of some of Clinic's earlier material. Free Not Free ticks along lazily like a finger trailing alongside a boat with some woodwind sounds, but is interspersed with quick guitar parts that erupt in surprising places. Shopping Bag seems to imitate what a person going mad might hear in their head as dissonant squeals compete with fast guitars and Blackburn's vocals hit falsetto heights. The following track, Emotions, returns once again to a 3/4 time signature, lazily spinning to guitar arpeggios until more fuzzed-out guitars clamour in - it's almost like Johnny Rotten crooning to an old standard. High Coins brings some of the militant rhythms found on Visitations back, but still keeps them at a more restrained level, more likely to hypnotize than to give you auditory vertigo. Mary & Eddie sounds like a Mediterranean song with subdued guitar and simple percussion, but whizzing sound effects and a trembling guitar that sounds like an accordion add more complexity. The final track, the appropriately titled Coda, begins with staccato organ, but as more instruments, including peals of bells, join in, and the spoken vocals begin, the song unwinds into a psychedelic cacophony.

So Do It! does end up being a good summer album with its sunnier sounds and lighter melodies, but it remains a signature Clinic album in its constant disruption of norms and moods, never complacent, never completely relaxed. While Gruff Rhys and Co frolick like puppies with benevolent vocals and spaced out happiness, Clinic always has an underlying current of strange darkness. They may lull you as you sway in a hammock. Only to come up behind you and tip you out of it.

The Witch (Made to Measure) - Clinic

Shopping Bag - Clinic

Emotions - Clinic