The Saatchi Gallery Magazine Art & Music Summer 2009 by The Saatchi Gallery Magazine Art & Music

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

Hardeep Phull toasts three decades of Sonic Youth From Napolean to Jarvis Cocker, David Lock celebrates the portraiture of Elizabeth Peyton Let’s Wrestle Exclusive artwork from the men you will grow to love soon Plus… David Byrne, Billy Childish, Camera Obscura and more…

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

Features

12 Eternal Youth

12 Eternal Youth Hardeep Phull checks in with durable New York avant-rockers Sonic Youth and pinpoints how their history of art-indebted activity has led to their current status as ‘cultural curators’ 26 Live Forever David Lock considers fifteen years worth of Elizabeth Peyton’s dreamy portraits, including those in her recent show at Sadie Coles HQ and this summer’s solo exhibition at the Whitechapel 32 Manchester, So Much To Answer For Twenty years on from the second Summer of Love, Karen Frost traces its enduring influence on the Manchester music scene

Cover image: Elizabeth Peyton Jackie and John (Jackie fixing John’s Hair), (1999) Collection Mr. and Mrs Jeffrey R Winter Courtesy Regen Projects/Sadie Coles HQ/ Gavin Brown’s enterprise

Specials

Regulars

20 Phonic Youth Daniel Tapper cherry-picks the essential albums from Sonic Youth’s hefty back-catalogue

6 News Nine months on from the launch of Damien Hirst’s boutique editions shop in New Bond Street, we check in and find out what Other Criteria are up to now

24 Resonance:’74/’80 Pete Astor imagines the Thin White Duke as perceived through the eyes of (sonic) youthful Bowie fan, Thurston Moore 40 In The Court Of The Wrestling Let’s Jamie Holman lends his ear to the debut album from art rock’s youthful meteors, Let’s Wrestle. Meanwhile frontman Wesley Patrick Gonzalez’s artwork – essayed exclusively for Art & Music – offers further insight into a strangely fecund teenage mind

8 Picture This A&M’s visual round up of upcoming exhibitions, gigs and releases not to be missed 44 Lost & Found David Christian thumbs through the pages of Neal Brown’s Billy Childish monograph and salutes the mustachioed painter-rocker’s cult following. Gemma de Cruz braves Mayfair to see new work by Jim Lambie. Jamie Holman venerates the latest offering from Glasgow’s Camera Obscura. Antoinette Hächler gets down with David Byrne live and Glen Johnson goes New York improv in Dalston 50 Intimate Strangers Jimmy Cairney and Chris Parkinson from the award winning Poetry Brothel reveal some strange facts about each other’s eating habits

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

“I tried to like noise music for five years,” Wes Gonzalez, lead singer and sleeve artist of the band Let’s Wrestle tells me. It’s a Tuesday night and we’re standing in the doorway of The Lexington, North London’s newly established epicentre of indie cool. Pretty girls and boys are coming through the door and nodding coy greetings to Wes, who will later take the stage. He muses further and concludes that the only noise band from the no-wave genre he does like is Sonic Youth; his favourite song being ‘Schizophrenia’, the lead track from their 1987 Sister album. All I can think to say in response is “Were you even born in 1987?” “No”, he says. I feel better when the conversation swings round to Hollyoaks – which I’ve been trying not to like for five years. It seems that everyone I ask has a different favourite Sonic Youth song, album or reason for liking them. For me it’s always been about Kim Gordon’s stage presence. For my local librarian it’s their Dirty album, while Art & Music contributor Jamie Holman tells me, “Lee Renaldo is a hero because he re-pressed loads of lost records (including the much missed Lee Hazlewood back catalogue)”. But how have Sonic Youth stayed so cool for so long, where did they fit into the ‘no-wave’ movement, and how did noise music feed off what was happening in the New York art scene back in the early ’80s? If you’re looking for the answers, turn to page 12 and let Hardeep Phull’s feature enlighten you. In it he traces the interwoven art/music history of Sonic Youth from their early days playing in artists’ lofts to their recently released Eternal album and Sensational Fix, an exhibition which brings together many of their art/music collaborations. If you feel you need a gentler introduction to the world of SY, or if you simply can’t get enough, check out Daniel Tapper’s selected Sonic Youth discography, celebrating cover artwork by contemporary art heavyweights such as Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter and Raymond Pettibon.

Noise music and Hollyoaks aside, June also sees the release of the aforementioned Let’s Wrestle’s debut album, In The Court of The Wrestling Let’s (a witticism fans of King Crimson will appreciate). To celebrate its release Wes has made a series of exclusive drawings for Art & Music. Get yourself round to page 40 and check them out before you crumple too many pages. Sticking with the youth theme, David Lock takes a personal look at the work of Elizabeth Peyton in line with her forthcoming show Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton opening at the Whitechapel in July. Elizabeth Peyton rose to fame in the mid-nineties with her loosely painted, small scale portraits of cult celebrities and historical figures and was instrumental in the revival of illustrative figurative painting that followed. As Lock remarks, it’s hard to believe this is Peyton’s first museum show in the UK. Also in this issue, Karen Frost looks back at Manchester’s Summer of Love and we’ve extended our reviews section. The more hardcore A&M devotees amongst you will also notice we’ve got a brand new glossy jacket. We figured that if we’re going to insist on making ourselves so über collectable, we should at least make it easier for you to keep us on your shelf! Gemma de Cruz

The Saatchi Gallery Magazine Art & Music Art Editor: Gemma de Cruz Music Editor: David Sheppard Copy Editors: Katie Grocott, Susannah Worth Art Direction: Alfonso Iacurci Sales and Marketing: Deirdre McGinnis Staff Writers: Tunde Yeboah, Keiron Phelan News Editor: Andrew Davies Magazine Assistant: Antoinette Hächler Thanks to: Chris Stone and David McKendrick for the inside tip

The Saatchi Gallery Magazine Art & Music is published four times a year by Art & Music Publications 13A Claremont Square London N1 9LY t: 020 7502 0275 f: 020 7502 0275 e: info@artandmusicmagazine.com www.saatchigallery.com/artandmusic Printed in the UK by Warners

UK subscriptions: £10 for four issues. To subscribe please email info@artandmusicmagazine.com or call 020 7502 0275 To request a Media Pack please email advertising@artandmusicmagazine.com We welcome your letters and emails about the magazine. Please write to the music/art editor at the above address, or send an email to editor@artandmusicmagazine.com The contents of this magazine are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced without permission. The views of the writers in Art & Music are not necessarily shared by the publishers.

The Mayfair address and chic interior gives Other Criteria a fitting luxury venue to showcase some of the most desirable artists’ editions. But unlike the fashion boutiques and blue chip galleries that surround it, Gemma de Cruz finds Other Criteria has something to suit every pocket.

Damien Hirst, Life (2009)

Damien Hirst, To Love (2008)

Nine months ago Damien Hirst caused a stir with Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, his recession-busting auction of new work at Sotheby’s. Amidst the frenzy, he quietly opened Other Criteria, a boutique editions shop just a few doors down from the auction house on London’s New Bond Street. Ever the businessman, Hirst originally launched Other Criteria as an online publishing company which then expanded its range to include limited editions by new and established artists–everything from a beach towel by Alex Katz to Cindy Sherman tea sets. The shop in New Bond Street was designed by Rundell Associates, the architects behind White Cube Masons Yard, but the vibe is closer to the Parisian concept store Colette; framed prints line the walls, there is a large table of books and one of Hirst’s own steel and glass display cases filled with 3D editions. But, unlike the intimidating, fashion-conscious Colette and indeed the icy Stepford Wife greetings you receive in most galleries, the staff behind the desk at Other Criteria are actually friendly people with a genuine interest and extensive knowledge of what they have for sale. Nobody saw that coming. Meanwhile at the second Other Criteria shop in Hinde Street punters can view a wider range of products in a lower price bracket. It all kind of makes sense when you think about the way Hirst treats his position in the art world, always trying to sidestep gallery snobbery and make art more available. Not much has changed since last September: everyone is still talking about the recession and who and what is being crunched. Over-inflated prices are coming down and galleries who had shows selling out before they were hung are now not so flush. This is where Other Criteria have correctly gauged the market. With limited edition prints and multiples 6

Damien Hirst, Regeneration (2009)

ranging from under £1,000 to £100,000 it’s still possible to make a sound investment. The OC shop staff have noted that their merchandise has attracted a new wave of young collectors. Tobias Thomas, shop manager, explains that despite the recession, many people still have cash in their pockets that they want to spend on art, but rather than take a risk on something they don’t know, they’re choosing to invest in artists with a proven market. And, now that Julian Opie and Tracey Emin both have their own online shops, we could be witnessing the blurred boundaries that Damien Hirst anticipated. With Hirst’s contacts and imprimatur, (not to mention work by the man himself), Other Criteria’s range cannot be seen in any other gallery in the UK and beats most editions hands down. This summer, they’re releasing a new series of sculpture editions by Gary Webb and Paul Fryer’s gold pendants depicting Jesus in an electric chair on rosary style chains. On the publishing side, Eloise Fornieles’ book about three of her performance works launches in September; Gary Hume releases his first major monograph, and Fiona Banner’s book, ‘Performance Nude’, focuses on her text-based life paintings. Past publications feature essays and interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gordon Burn, J.G. Ballard, Michael Bracewell, Rudi Fuchs, Neal Brown, Jeremy Miller, AA Gill and New York art critic, Bruce Ferguson. A&M Summer Subscriber Offer: 10% off Other Criteria T-shirts for A&M subscribers who bring their Art & Music membership details to the shop. Closing Date 15th September 2009

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Damien Hirst, Beyond Belief

Fred Tomaselli, RED Auction – Red Bird

Josh Cheuse, Jumping Rasta

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Anna Barham, Magenta, Emerald, Lapis (2009) Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. runs from 17 June until 23 August 2009 at the ICA

New Tortoise album Beacons of Ancestorship released on 22nd June on Thrill Jockey Records

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

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picture & this 4

Loops Issue One, Published by Faber and Domino, 2 July 2009, £12, Paperback

The debut album from The Bobby McGee’s, L’Appropriation Bourgoisie de le Bobby McGee’s is released on June 29th 2009 on Cherryade Records

Eva Rothschild, Open Ends, 2009 Courtesy of Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Eva Presenhuber Gallery, Zurich, 303 Gallery, New York Eva Rothschild at Modern Art, London 4th July–22nd August

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Issue 06 » Summer 2009

“Youth has no age,” claimed Pablo Picasso, a point surely proven by New York music veterans, Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Renaldo and Steve Shelley – collectively Sonic Youth, a quartet who should surely be known as Sonic Maturity by now, were they not as hungry, influential and effortlessly hip as scenesters half their age. As they prepare to release their fifteenth album, The Eternal, and celebrate Sensational Fix, a major Sonic Youth exhibition currently touring European galleries, Hardeep Phull quizzes the band and examines the influence of experimental art on the evolution of leftfield rock’s ageless caliphs.

When people find out that I carve out a living as a music journalist, the most frequent question that follows is almost always along the lines of “Who’s the biggest dick you’ve ever met?” Of course, I try my best to recite anecdotes of hissy fits and arrogant rock star strops as best I can, if only because I know that’s what most people are really fishing for. But if I’m being completely honest, the biggest dicks are the ones who try to claim they have created their work in a vacuum. You know the sort; morose looking vocalists in drainpipe trousers and Hitler Youth haircuts who claim never to have heard a Joy Division record, or groups who deliberately drench their songs in howling feedback but get upset at repeated mentions of Psychocandy. For me, it’s the height of rudeness for an artist of any description to deny their influences in an attempt to suggest their own originality and, using that rationale, Sonic Youth are surely the politest musicians I’ve ever come across. The New Yorkers have long been the envy of the alternative rock world, mainly thanks to their longevity, which is firmly rooted in their ability to retain a unique musical identity while never going over old ground. In short, every Sonic Youth album sounds like Sonic Youth – but different. It’s a progression that is fuelled by deriving inspiration from just about every art form and cultural facet they come into contact with – and being forthright about these influences in the hope that others might pick them up too. Through such open citation and honest referencing, Sonic Youth have helped coalesce the worlds of music, film, writing, visual art, photography, television, fashion and countless other realms into a vast, interconnected whole in which they have become one of the most respected lynchpins. “We never thought we were ultimately referential, but we play with the idea,” explains their towering singer/guitarist Thurston Moore. “Ultimately, we are our own inspiration but we get very excited by the other things around us. It’s something we employ. We’re interested in the broader community in which we belong, no matter how big or small it is.”

Having spent the best part of 30 years exploring so many different cultural byways, Sonic Youth are now part of a vast worldwide network of creativity. However, the community in which they germinated at the start of the 1980s was positively parochial in comparison. An avowed follower of rock‘n’roll, Thurston Moore moved to New York in 1976 just as the scene that would later be dubbed ‘no wave’ was bringing together scores of artists, bohemians and nihilists in a brief but explosive period of crosspollination in downtown Manhattan. “The personalities involved were these wild, alienated young people who came to New York looking for a community that they could belong to,” Moore recalls. “There they would come into contact with much older artists. So you had people like [radical musicians] Lydia Lunch and James Chance who were very young, coming into contact with someone like [downtown scenester/artist] Diego Cortez who was already very established. I don’t think the young people really came to New York to ‘make it’ or to produce art that was a response to anything. There wasn’t a lot of analysis of anything and it was over really quickly. It wasn’t a case of people talking about high art or low art… for the most part you had people like Lydia Lunch saying ‘fuck art, let’s kill!’” Bassist/vocalist Kim Gordon began her life in New York entrenched in the city’s more established art world, populated by the likes of Dan Graham, Richard Prince and Jeff Wall. So when Gordon and Moore finally met, the two combined their artistic backgrounds, granting the embryonic Sonic Youth a firm foundation that straddled both art and music. Guitarist/vocalist Lee Renaldo was the perfect complement to that. Originally an art student with a penchant for drawing and sculpting, he had moved to New York and began pursuing music more actively with his band the Fluks before quickly becoming part of the electric guitar ‘orchestra’ put together by downtown composer Glenn Branca. The role of Sonic Youth drummer would not be conclusively settled until 1985 when Steve Shelley joined their ranks but the core of the band was in place by 13

Posters from the Sonic Youth archive, Sensational Fix installation view © Hardeep Phull

1981. Moore was the noise rocker, Gordon brought her artistic sensibility, Renaldo was part of both circles and together, the trio were immediately hotwired into the New York art world. As they began to release music and touring took them further afield – first across North America and, by the mid-1980s, much of the world – Sonic Youth’s web of inspirations and like-minded fellow travellers grew wider and more diverse. Indeed, theirs was an unconventional approach to rock music which not everyone appreciated, not least in the UK. Kim Gordon: “At first, the gigs we could get were in galleries but we felt it would be more challenging to go outside of that world. The idea was always to make other people have to deal with us [laughs]. It seemed much more interesting than your peers patting you on the back, but we were looked down upon when we left that environment and tried to do our music in the rock world. That happened a lot when we first came to England. We were sneeringly referred to as ‘art school brats’.” However, that change of context did provide an insight into other forms of creativity for those who were curious enough to investigate. Any music fan who took an interest in Sonic Youth’s early activities could quickly find themselves exposed to the band’s cultural preoccupations, be they the sex‘n’gore movies of Richard Kern, the misanthropic rantings of Lydia Lunch, the delicate photo-paintings of Gerhard Richter or the pulpy, sci-fi visions of Phillip K. Dick – and all this was years before the internet would make information on such cultish figures instantly available. It wasn’t just the obscure or highbrow realms of culture which Sonic Youth co-opted either; just months before they released their 1988 art-rock masterpiece Daydream Nation , the band paid an all out tribute to the pop world with The Whitey Album which was released under the guise of Ciccone Youth. Not only did it feature tongue-in-cheek salutes to the 14

burgeoning hip-hop scene and a karaoke machine cover of Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted To Love,’ it also honed in on the group’s collective fixation with Madonna, proffering covers of ‘Burning Up’ and ‘Into The Groove’, as well as using a photocopied close-up of her Royal Madgeness on the cover – all of it achieved with the pop icon’s full consent. “I think she knew we weren’t really selling any records so there wasn’t much point in suing us,” laughs Gordon. “You’d never be able to do that now.” It’s commonly repeated how Sonic Youth provided a leg-up for their musical contemporaries (most notably Nirvana) as they made their late ’80s ascension from the underground to something approaching the mainstream by signing to the Warner Brothers-backed Geffen label following the success of Daydream Nation. There was also plenty of room on this lofty new platform for the band’s other allies, inspirations and collaborators. The cover of their major label debut, 1990’s Goo, for example, showcased the work of Raymond Pettibon – formerly the in-house artist at the definitive American hardcore punk imprint SST Records, the label which had released Sonic Youth’s earliest work. Pettibon’s darkly satirical, comic-book style drawings had been celebrated for years in the underground but his interpretation of paparazzi photos of Maureen Hindley and David Smith (witnesses in the infamous Moors Murders trial) on the cover of Goo coincided with Sonic Youth’s first protracted chart exposure and exposed Pettibon’s work to a whole new audience as a result, as Moore recalls: “Shortly thereafter, he started getting shown in galleries which was fantastic. But no one thought he would become such a blue-chip artist because he was so esoteric.” In 1992, it would be the turn of artist Mike Kelley to make an impact on the music world by providing the cover to the band’s next album, Dirty. Although Kelley was already highly regarded in the art world, his stuffed animal images nevertheless attracted attention from the grunge rock generation just as Sonic Youth began to creep inexorably into the mass media spotlight. Those album covers are now established benchmarks of indie-rock iconography but Sonic Youth’s artist remit was an everbroadening church and their ideas would embrace wild abstraction performance and art just as easily as relatively accessible 2D imagery. Kim Gordon, for example, co-directed a video for The Breeders’ 1993 alternative hit single ‘Cannonball’, alongside the then emergent director Spike Jonze. In it she drew on the little known performance work of Dan Graham to inform what would become a heavy rotation, MTV staple. “I liked Dan’s idea about the relationship between the artist and the audience, in that he acknowledged that there was one,” Gordon remembers of her old muse. “Not many people had done that before. In one of his early pieces [Performance/Audience/Mirror], he had a big mirror behind him and he would just describe what they were doing as they were watching him. Then he would turn around and describe himself, describing the audience in the mirror. I utilised that idea in the Breeders video. The band and Spike had no idea where the idea was from but they liked it. His idea was the cannonball which I didn’t get either so there were these two different ideas from opposite ends of the scale that worked in this context of a music video.” As their dalliance with MTV showed, for a brief moment during the early 1990s, Sonic Youth were close to achieving a tangible level of fame as something like orthodox, marketable musicians. “We never had management or the label sit down and talk to us about it but I think it would have been appreciated if we focused more on the hard rock aspect of the band and re-wrote ‘Kool Thing’ [the band’s 1990 US Top 10 single] over and over again,” says Moore, wryly. But to concentrate on so narrow a creative strand was never really an option for such inexhaustibly magpie minds. Instead they turned away from the bigger productions of Dirty and Goo and settled on a grainy, lo-fi feel for subsequent albums, beginning with 1994’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star. The quartet

would continue to explore an ever-expanding panoply of extra-curricular pursuits throughout the rest of the decade, however. Moore’s brief widened to include movie soundtracks and his first full-length solo record. He remained, uniquely, as comfortable contributing to REM’s stadium rock as he was improvising with British ‘free’ guitarist Derek Bailey. Lee Renaldo worked on numerous visual projects with his artist wife Leah Singer and aggressively pursued his love of spoken word with a string of his own releases, as well as collaborating with such luminaries as beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Aside from concentrating on being a mother to her and Moore’s first born child Coco, who arrived in 1994, Kim Gordon also found time to start her X-Girl clothing line and work with Pussy Galore’s Julie Cafritz and Yoshimi from Japanese trash combo the Boredoms in the group Free Kitten. Meanwhile, Steve Shelley founded his Smells Like

an essential album of the last decade. 2009 sees them make a full return to indie world as they sign to New York’s Matador label. It’s a perhaps appropriate moment for them to take a rare backward glance in the shape of Sonic Youth: Sensational Fix, an exhibition which was first shown in France last year and is currently on a tour that covers Italy, Germany, Sweden and Spain. The vast display is a full scale art-project in itself and collates the band’s multi-disciplinary activities over six separately themed satellites, helping to illustrate clearly just how far beyond the parameters of rock music Sonic Youth have travelled. Although the official curatorial duties were assigned to Roland Gronenboom (who first worked with Kim Gordon on her ‘Kim’s Bedroom’ installation in 2000), Sensational Fix explains exactly from where the ‘art’ in ‘art-rock’ is gleaned. “I’ve always seen them as a

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

Guitars from the Sonic Youth archive, Sensational Fix installation view © Hardeep Phull

imprint and worked on albums by Cat Power’s Chan Marshall long before she attracted the kind of fanbase she now enjoys. Collectively too, Sonic Youth’s status as a ‘Renaissance band’ became increasingly evident; one minute they would be depicted on The Simpsons stealing watermelons from Peter Frampton, the next they were releasing a string of experimental noise EPs on their own SYR imprint and writing their sleeve notes in foreign languages. By the close of the century, Sonic Youth were largely, perhaps thankfully, marginalised again, with barely a toehold in the mainstream music world. While rock critics relied on hindsight to bestow on the band the mantle of innovators and pioneers, excellent but somewhat overlooked albums such as NYC Ghosts & Flowers found Sonic Youth being as honest about their influences as ever, once again underscoring their debt to a grand lineage of art, as a candid Lee Renaldo reflects. “On that record we were digging deeply into the idea of New York as this cultural spawning ground from as far back as the 1920s and 1930s. It felt like this very fertile ground that we felt very close to. There was the William S. Burroughs painting on the cover and on the back was a painting by Joe Brainard who was a product of the St Mark’s poetry scene. We were paying homage to the people we were ripping off in one way or another!” If the last ten years of Sonic Youth has proved anything, it’s that they are not art school denizens, and neither are they pioneers in the truest sense, but rather they are judicious cultural curators. It’s a role that they have grown into slowly and which is reflected in their mature, postmillennial albums. Murray Street, Sonic Nurse and Rather Ripped offer the most confident and accomplished music of the band’s career and each is 16

cultural magnet but also as a diffuser,” reasons Gronenboom. “Everything they attract, be it musicians, artists, photographers, fashion designers, whatever, they give it back in some way. They have the ability to transfer all these things into their songs and the other work they do. For me, art and culture comes through the band and they’re so interested in sharing it with people. They’re not one of those artists that just think ‘I’m gonna do my thing’ and that’s it. They approach their work by saying ‘I’m gonna do my thing… but who else can I involve?’ That idea of collaboration and community is not something you find too often in music or art in general.” The way that breadth of community reflects in the various patrons of Sensational Fix was all too evident as I took a walk around the exhibition when it was staged in Düsseldorf recently. It wasn’t difficult to spot the young indie rockers paying close attention to the assemblage of exotic electric guitars in the hope of finding some kind of insight into the band’s distinct and dissonant sounds. Then there were the more thoughtful looking art lovers who pondered the sacrilegious intent of Christian Marclay’s assemblage of thousands of pieces of vinyl across a floor, which the visitor was invited to trample over. It’s a remarkable and singularly unique experience to see these two worlds – and others besides – being brought together under the auspices of what most people would simply regard as a band. Lee Renaldo: “The exhibition pulls together the different things that we feel are important. That’s kind of what it’s all about – the band as curators – and it’s a mixture of things everyone knows and nobody knows. We have so many interests and it’s kept us going. You feed off one thing, then you move on to another and all the things we do personally – whether it’s writing projects, artwork projects, other groups,

compositional work, record labels – all that stuff flows into one collective thing. It keeps us inspired and I think the interests that we have has contributed to how long we’ve been around.” Creativity, like life itself, requires sustenance and Sonic Youth continue to show that they feed themselves very well with their latest album The Eternal. Once again, the songs are teeming with overt references, this time to the obscure Massachusetts-based noise artist Noise Nomads, beat poet Gregory Corso, punk band the Germs’ suicidal singer Darby Crash (aka Bobby Pyn). The cover this time carries a striking abstract piece by legendary, late ‘American Primitive’ folk guitarist John Fahey. Even after all this time, their enthusiasm for cultural stimuli hasn’t waned in the slightest. For fans, the way to get the most out of Sonic Youth remains to treat them as a portal to a wider artistic world. But with such a consistently referential attitude, Sonic Youth suggest that true artistic originality is always elusive. “What’s really innovative?” asks Kim Gordon rhetorically. “Something always comes from something else. It doesn’t come out of nothing. Certainly with pop melodies in particular, there’s a lot of shared history to draw on. It sounds awfully pretentious to say that we’re pioneers.” So what would she call the band? “I kind of like the term ‘sacred trickster’ which was something that [midtwentieth century French artist] Yves Klein came up with [and is also borrowed for title of the The Eternal ’s opening track]. He liked to think of himself in that way. People just didn’t take him seriously at first but you look at his work now at it just seems so modern…” As a member of a band who have made the transition from ‘art-school brats’ to feted creative luminaries, it’s easy to understand that sense of affinity.

Christian Marclay, Untitled (1987) Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, NY © Marc Domage

Sonic Nurse album cover, artwork by Richard Prince © The artist and Sonic Youth

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

Five artists who have rocked with Sonic Youth

As told to Hardeep Phull

Richard Kern Lee Renaldo: “We were turned on to him in our early period – around 1984 or 1985. He was working on the same kind of indie scale as we were and he had a fascination with gore films. He was doing those special effects on a very low budget in his early films and that’s what led to the ‘Death Valley 69’ video. He was most interested in the scenes that made us look like we were blown away, with our intestines hanging out and so on. We also liked his dry, cynical sense of humour which added to the kinship we felt with him.” Richard Prince Kim Gordon: “I’ve known Richard since the early 1980s when I was doing some work that was similar to his idea of appropriating advertising images. His work has been in my consciousness since then. His cover for Sonic Nurse works really well in the way the image has come from pop culture (pulp novels) and been taken into the art world and then going back into pop culture through the album.” Gerhard Richter

Goo album cover, artwork by Raymond Pettibon © The artist and Sonic Youth

Kim Gordon: “Initially, I was friends with Gerhard’s then wife Isa Genzken, who was living in New York for a while during the early 1980s. We met through Dan Graham. It was actually Thurston who suggested we ask Gerhard to use one of his paintings for the Daydream Nation album. I would have been far too intimidated to ask because he was such an idol for me. Being an East German, I think he has a certain scepticism about western capitalism, so I wasn’t sure if he would be into the idea of mixing the two worlds. If it wasn’t for his wife, I don’t think he would have gone for the idea of having his work on a record cover.”

Daydream Nation album cover, artwork by Gerhard Richter © The artist and Sonic Youth

Raymond Pettibon Thurston Moore: “Raymond was always someone who was exciting to us because he was publishing these small, stapled books in the early 1980s. He distributed them through SST records as though he was a band doing 7" records which no one else was doing in the music world. He was involved with Black Flag, who were the main proponents of hardcore music at that time, and what made them interesting beyond the music was the visual content that Raymond provided them with. His work was very telling and very smart. We started doing records with SST and it was only a matter of time before we did something with Raymond. It was just ironic that the time finally came when we were on a major label. We thought it was a perfect time to do it because we could keep that connection.” William S. Burroughs Thurston Moore: “For NYC Ghosts & Flowers I had a print of that X-ray image and I thought it would be a great cover partly because the title was related to the lineage of poets and writers. We had visited [Burroughs] a couple of times in Lawrence, Kansas before he died too – one time we went down there with Michael Stipe when were on tour with REM. He [Burroughs] was always important to me and my discovering of radical literature when I was younger. Patti Smith would talk about him and I would see him get referenced in rock magazines, so finally I started buying his paperbacks and was blown away at the language and the construction. It was kind of like rock ‘n’ roll in a way.” 19

Sonic Youth band photo © Amanda de Cadenet

A perpetuum mobile of a band, the ever-prolific Sonic Youth leave in their wake one of rock’s most dense, challenging and thrilling back catalogues. Daniel Tapper navigates two decades worth of vertiginous electric guitar assaults and coruscating art rock epiphanies.

Originally released in 1983, Confusion Is Sex is Sonic Youth’s first fulllength album. Included on the album is a cover of The Stooges’ song ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, an early example of Sonic Youth’s enduring interest in covering their musical heroes – an incongruous list of people including The Fall, Madonna and The Carpenters. Those accustomed to the later, more atmospheric SY albums will be tested; Confusion Is Sex is abrasive, dark and barbarous punk rock. Listen and sob. Cover image; a sketch by Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. If Confusion Is Sex was Sonic Youth embracing punk rock then Evol (1986) was the band attempting to master the sound of the ineffable. It was a marked change from their previous album, the haunting Bad Moon Rising (1985); an album charged with references to Satanism, Charles Manson and pop artist Edward Ruscha. Comparatively, Evol was a hard shot of pure, unapologetic romance embodied by epic, impressionistic songs like ‘Expressway to Yr Skull’. Liner notes by writer/performance artist Lisa Crystal Carver (aka Lisa Suckdog) say it all: “Even the music is in love. Plunging headlong, silently, with great noise all around, to destruction. The Bliss of near impact.” New York performance artist Lydia Lunch co-wrote the song ‘Marilyn Moore’. Cover image; photograph by Richard Kern. Sister (1987) was a monumental change in Sonic Youth’s musical trajectory. Rejecting the self-indulgent traps of experimental noise music, it erred toward a more melodic and elegant sound enhanced by its analogue recording and the use of relentless, throbbing sheets of feedback. Album opener ‘Schizophrenia’ simultaneously showcases all of Sonic Youth’s most important traits, namely their ability to create moving, visceral and poetic music – transcending all that was before them. The mystically enticing songs of Sister were inspired by the work of sci-fi novelist Philip K Dick; the “sister” of the title refers to Dick’s fraternal twin, who died shortly after her birth. The epic Daydream Nation (1988) has received sheaves of critical approbation over the years and is regularly cited as Sonic Youth’s best album (replete with striking Gerhard Richter cover art), and somewhat overshadows the subsequent Goo (1990). In fact, Goo marked a major sea change for the band; it was their first album release after signing to

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

major label Geffen Records, and as such introduced their work to a wider audience. The psychedelic tendencies of the band’s previous records were replaced by concise but intelligent pop songs, a direct but still dissonant challenge to the mainstream. Songs like ‘Kool Thing’ and ‘Mote’ became teenage anthems and as instantly iconic as the album’s artwork. Cover image; a comic illustration by Raymond Pettibon. Thanks to producer Butch Vig, the potency of radio-friendly album Dirty (1992) was in its ability to break free from the confines of experimental music, proving that Sonic Youth could infiltrate the mainstream. Yet the dreamy sound of Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (1994) choose to reject the grungy, ear-bleeding riffs their fans had become accustomed to, standing in stark contrast to the terse pop of albums like Goo and Dirty. Sonic Youth were once again proving unafraid of intelligent change. Also, clean melodies compounded with Thurston Moore’s beatnik-like lyrics banished any lingering predisposition toward nihilism. If Sonic Youth records adhere to rigid conceptual threads then Experimental Jet Set’s theme is unquestionably that of reverence and melancholy. Washing Machine (1995), A Thousand Leaves (1998), and NYC Ghosts & Flowers (2000) marked energetic years for Sonic Youth. Washing Machine produced the haunting song ‘Little Trouble Girl’, featuring vocals by sometimes ‘troubled’ Pixies/Breeders member Kim Deal and boasting an evocative video made by feature film director Mark Romanek. Kurt Cobain is eulogised in the song ‘Junkie’s Promise’, while the album culminates in the unforgettable twenty minute long ‘The Diamond Sea’, a sprawling landscape of melodic noise. Broadly speaking, A Thousand Leaves and NYC Ghosts & Flowers evinced the band’s abiding interest in the avant-garde while implementing a cleaner-sounding production.

Ciccone Youth album cover, detail of photograph of Madonna © Sonic Youth

Evol album cover, artwork by Richard Kern © The artist and Sonic Youth

Murray Street (2002) is often marked as the first of Sonic Youth’s ‘mature’ albums, identified by a sort of melodic subtlety and succinct richness that evokes Television’s Marquee Moon, a sound aided by their collaboration with guitarist/producer Jim O’Rourke. The comparatively minimal sound of Murrry Street feels like no other Sonic Youth record; it’s as though every dissonant note and abrasive scream of feedback from the past has been ruthlessly condensed. The result is one of Sonic Youths most timeless, sensual records. And if it wasn’t already clear that Sonic Youth are one of the most significant bands in rock history they go and produce one of their finest essays to date; the mellifluous, pointillist instrumental ‘Rain on Tin’. Listening to Sonic Nurse (2004) you wouldn’t think that this is the seventeenth album from a group with an average age of 48. The songs sound energetic, angular and intricate; they radiate inspiration from such diverse influences as painter Richard Prince (whose ‘nurse’ painting graces the cover), science fiction writer William Gibson and an overt loathing of George W Bush; Sonic Youth hadn’t sounded this young since Washing Machine. Recruiting Chicagoan musical provocateur/ polymath Jim O’Rourke as a full time band member (this was actually the third Sonic Youth longplayer on which he’d appeared) was a catalyst 2

for further evolution; the band stepped away from the dissonant Glenn Branca-inspired sound of the mid-1980s and replaced it with a wistful introspection anchored by guitar riffing reminiscent of the yielding axe style of Neil Young’s Zuma. Murray Street and Sonic Nurse were unquestionably confident albums; Sonic Youth had carved out their own independent sound, a sound that rejected a natural leaning toward the punk-infused roots of the New York no-wave revolution. Furthermore, the 2006 album Rather Ripped consolidated the band’s trust in their own unique signature; marked by a proud use of stirring melodies laced with strong, clean, angular riffs; simultaneously radio-friendly and highbrow. The album was described by Thurston Moore as “a super song record” containing “rockers and ballads” – what more could anybody want? Indeed the resonance of songs like ‘Pink Steam’ and ‘Incinerate’ are perhaps only comparable to the music of Dinosaur Jr, a band who managed to blend intelligent dissonance and straight-up rock with equally mind-blowing results. Even the album’s title, Rather Ripped, like the name of Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace record label, betrays the self-assurance of a band happy wallowing in its own goofy, transcendental ways. 1. The Destroyed Room album cover, artwork by Jeff Wall © The artist and Sonic Youth

2. Kali Yug Express album cover, artwork by Monique Voorhout © The artist and Sonic Youth 3. Sister album cover © Sonic Youth 4. NYC Ghosts & Flowers album cover, artwork by William S. Burroughs © The artist and Sonic Youth 5. Psychic Hearts album cover, artwork by Rita Ackermann © The artist and Sonic Youth 5

6. Rather Ripped album cover, artwork by J.P. Robinson © The artist and Sonic Youth 7. Dirty album cover, artwork by Mike Kelley © The artist and Sonic Youth

Resonance: ’74/’80

Perhaps surprisingly, Thurston Moore, flannel shirted avant grunge god, has emerged as a lifelong David Bowie freak; he recently introduced ‘Early Music Videos by David Bowie’ – part of MoMA’s Looking at Music exhibition. This fictional piece imagines his early encounters and interactions with Bowie’s work. Initially we find the teenage Moore in the mid-’70s, discovering Bowie’s music while living in Bethel, Connecticut, and being taunted by the local ‘rock bozos’ for his Bowie look and fixation. Then, we fast forward to a snapshot from the 1980s when Moore was living in Manhattan and beginning his mature musical work, playing with Lower East Side composer Glenn Branca, developing his explorations in music, art and noise – and still listening to Bowie. Spring 1974: the evening sun is burning a dull gold between the big houses on Spring Hill Lane. Mom and Dad are out and I’ve got the living room TV to myself. Tonight, it’s the Don Kirshner Show and in between all the dross there might be something good. It’s time to steal one of Mom’s cigarettes and settle back. Shot from above the singer walks on – guitar slung, Elvis-style, behind his back, legs apart, ready. The Spector snare hit cracks – cut to the drummer shot from above, two hands playing with orchestral beaters – nothing Don Brewer would ever use. Bowie is in a petrol blue-black plastic leather jacket; big fake fur collars, unnatural carrot hair; the band, static and shadowy, behind. He’s singing, talking, a lip-curled first verse. It sounds a bit like Jagger, creepy English – no idea what he’s saying, but he’s moving like an alien. After the first line he looks back, like he’s spitting out meaning over his shoulder. Now he’s starting his words again. Like Bruce Lee coming in, taking aim; eyebrows lift, his shoulder ticks up, then the eyes fix you and the hands come off his hips and up – zapping us, wheeling to the side and the voice hardens and rises: “Oh no dear, oh no dear / You know I neeeeeed to know dear”, hugging his skinny self. “Move me, touch me”, he continues, the last word really high. Cut to the drums again – a

straight roll on the tom and cut to Bowie, still and serious now: “John, I’m only danc-ing / She turns me on.” Man, he’s got an anchor tattooed on his cheek! And he’s talking to his boyfriend, saying: don’t worry, I’m yours but I like girls too. Bowie’s bi and beautiful, he’s Rock and Roll and he’s now. He comes from another place and I want to go there. It’s December 26th and I’ve got my new Koss K6 headphones on, plugged into the stereogram, watching family stuff happen, far away. I’m listening to ‘Five Years’. It starts with just the drums, bass drum answering snare, two hits, bap-bap, bap-bap; then the piano chords, then the voice; thin, serious: “Pushing through the market square / So many mothers sighing. The news had just come over / we had five years left to cry in.” It’s so far from the Marrakesh Express and all the kids in Bethal rolling up on copies of Sweet Baby James. ‘Five Years’ takes place in a realer world where the cop kisses the feet of a priest – a world where the dark heart of now is coming through. Bowie’s voice is speaking to those that can hear, telling us how we’ve got five years, five years, stuck on our eyes. When he sings about the glimpse of his girl “in an ice cream parlour, drinking milkshakes cold and long” and his voice goes hard and sharp, “smiling and waving and looking so fine”, you’re there, in the damaged, resigned voice of the narrator. Things are breaking apart but there’s a doomed beauty there for all of us who don’t fit into this place with its daily milk floats and football games and a life mapped out forever in real estate, assurance policies and family comfort. * It is winter 1980 on the Lower East Side. Our friend Cathy came back manic from her summer in Europe, telling us how Bowie is Jesus and is talking to her. She says he knows; he told her all about what was happening. She says everyone understands there. On her last night in the UK five teenagers on main street did the thing the people do in front of the digger in the video, bending down, kinda like priests or something, touching the ground, walking slowly towards her. The words have it all mapped out; he’s writing about everyone, all the lost souls. He knows: “I’ve never done good things, I’ve never done bad things / I’ve never done anything out of the blue” with that Sinatra “whoa-o-whoa” at the end, as he’s going down. We’re all drowning, she keeps saying, there’s nowhere to go in these times. The clip’s all over the US now, too. That alien beginning, like The Man Who Fell To Earth, the rust over everything, Bowie by the sea holding a memory window to himself in a future padded cell. And the voices: “The shrieking of nothing is killing us / Pictures of Jap girls in synthesis / And I ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no head.” And the whispering voices of the ones round the fire, burning remains, after the bomb. “And he wants to kick but the planet is glowing, we know, we know, we know / Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, we know Major Tom’s a junkie / Strung out in heaven’s high / Leading an all time low.” The fit of those words to the tune, the major to minor chords, the descent, the images, the people, the story of Bowie himself; it pulls at your eyes, your ears and your fucking soul. Pete Astor

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

Elizabeth Peyton Blue Kurt, (1995) Private collection Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ/ Gavin Brown’s enterprise Opposite page: Elizabeth Peyton Jarvis on bed, (1996) Collection Laura and Stafford Broumand Courtesy Regen Projects/ Sadie Coles HQ/ Gavin Brown’s enterprise

Elizabeth Peyton’s intimate and romantic paintings, depicting an eclectic brew of rock stars, actors and historical figures as well as more recent images of her friends and fellow artists, are among the most familiar and acclaimed portraits of recent years. David Lock presents a personal portrait of the artist. 26

Since the mid-’90s, American artist Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings have continually popped up in key exhibitions, such as Dear Painter... Paint Me at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, the Whitney Biennial and, most recently, The Painting of Modern Life at London’s Hayward Gallery. Her paintings are now as familiar and covetable in the art world as the celebrated subjects she so often paints. Other than in several one-person shows at Sadie Coles HQ, there has been little opportunity to view her work en masse, or the chance to consider it in any detail while absorbing her career as a whole. This summer, however, the Whitechapel Gallery is set to afford Peyton her first important survey show in a public gallery here in the UK. I’m particularly looking forward to her return to the Whitechapel this July, as one of my earliest encounters with her work was in the group show Examining Pictures there in 1999. Crowded around oversize paintings by Margherita Manzelli, Philip Guston, and Richard Prince, Peyton’s small painting John Lennon, age 6 (1996) imprinted on my imagination more than anything else in that show; such was the intensity of the portrait – all milky flesh tones and watery brushstrokes. I couldn’t get the painting out of my head. This was not only thanks to its deft, intuitive handling, but for its presence and ability to be so dominant, while simultaneously being so modest. Peyton’s paintings, built up in layers of light-capturing glazes, with loosely applied broad brushstrokes, typically resonate with an arresting, emotional intensity. When encountering an exhibition by Elizabeth Peyton, the small scale and intimacy of her paintings can seem surprising. Often no larger than 10 x 8 inches, she compresses her usually larger-than-life subjects into a small private world of her own making. Her portraits of Britpop mainstays Jarvis Cocker, and Liam and Noel Gallagher, such as Jarvis and Liam Smoking (1997) or Noel and Liam (MTV Awards) (1996) are by turns

comradely, and all macho posturing and attitude. She painted an effete looking Jarvis Cocker, again and again, at once alone and melancholy with impossibly crimson lips and cigarette in hand, as in Jarvis after Jail or lanky and louche as in Jarvis On Bed (both 1996). These pictures today retain their charm and presence, many years after the colour and noise of Britpop’s heyday has subsided. The paintings never offered the perspective of a musical ‘insider’, but were created from torn-out pages of the NME and Rolling Stone – images that were already in mass circulation. It was with these ‘devotional’ paintings, alongside those of another cult musician, Kurt Cobain, that Peyton first attracted wider attention. Peyton’s oeuvre could never be dismissed as playing to one tune, however era-defining her rock star portraits became. Like Andy Warhol before her, she was too smart to be pigeonholed. From the very outset, she was equally drawn to historical figures such as Queen Elizabeth II, Oscar Wilde, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, Ludwig II of Bavaria and the poet Rupert Brooke; figures who fascinated Peyton by “standing for their own ideals of independence”. Several of these portraits featured in her early shows, including one at New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel in 1993 where she exhibited charcoal drawings in a rented room (viewers had to request a key in order to view the work). The subjects, choice of venue and approach all highlighted the importance of the presentation of the pieces; how the atmosphere and fabric of a particular location were elements that would in turn resonate through the work itself. Peyton herself has commented that what she is drawn to in her subjects is “that particular moment, when they’re about to become what they’ll become”, which suggests her desire to give permanence to the fleeting, inspirational moments in a person’s life. In several cases, the androgyny of her subjects seems reinforced by the protective shield of a maternal figure. In a way it emasculates the men in her paintings and bathes them in a lush softness that can be at times syrupy, but never banal. This is evident in the portraits of Elvis with his mother, Gladys and Elvis (1997) or Jackie Kennedy, in headscarf and shades with John Kennedy Jnr, Jackie & John (Jackie fixing John’s Hair (1999). This is powerfully contradicted, however, in her paintings of Prince Harry, whom she has also painted repeatedly; often alone – as a fragile small boy in tie and sandals, in the crowd at an Arsenal match or surveying the flowers after the death of his mother. There is a quality of loss here which Peyton seems continually drawn to (less controversial brother William rarely figures in her paintings). Of Prince Harry, Peyton once remarked “I just felt more for [Harry]. He’s younger, he’s not going to be the king. He’s the one maybe not as looked at.” In an era where the concept of the ‘celebrated’ is de-mystified, obsessed over and devalued like no other, Peyton’s paintings almost feel out of time; they recall an time when the cult of celebrity had a genuine aura and mystique about it.

Elizabeth Peyton, Jarvis and Liam Smoking (1997) Collection Tiqui Atencio Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ / Gavin Brown’s enterprise

Jonathan (Jonathan Horowitz) (2009) Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ / Gavin Brown’s enterprise

In conversation with Laura Hoptman, Peyton remarked that “Celebrity itself is not that interesting to me, but it is interesting what people do... I think about art and what it is in society through the people I paint and how [they] are a part of their time, maybe more than other people are.” It is this authenticity that makes her paintings so alive and personal. Often we can feel we share that intimacy with these famous subjects and Peyton has an uncanny knack for enshrining the most memorable, and thus most enduring, aspects of a personality and allowing us to feel somehow connected to those subjects. Peyton admits to being “fascinated by that moment when a person’s worth and destiny are revealed, whether to themselves or to the world.” From the moment they first gained currency in the mid-1990s, Peyton’s work seemed such a direct confrontation of, and a thawing antidote to, the cool, detached style that then predominated. Her charming, accessible, and simultaneously tough paintings unbuckled our attitude to what contemporary painting could be about and, along with contemporaries such as John Currin, contributed in no small part to the resurgence in figurative portrait painting. That influence has been felt by a new generation of artists including painters as diverse as Hernan Bas, Annie Kevans and myself. Latterly, Peyton has turned her attention towards a more personal world, concentrating on her close friends and artist contemporaries, making some of the most confident paintings of her career – notably in her portraits of the British artists Nick Relph, Spencer Sweeney and, most 30

memorably, the Polish artist Piotr Uklanski. All are portrayed with similar unifying qualities: angular cheekbones, crimson lips and tousled hair, characteristics which have been the hallmarks of her career. Interestingly, her most recent paintings of Matthew Barney and Michael Clarke suggest again a challenge to this norm; here there is a darker palette, less overtly glazed, a greater degree of naturalness and a newfound fondness for portraying balding men, in stark contrast to her earlier archetypes. This new, moodier tendency was much in evidence at her solo show at Sadie Coles HQ in London this May, where she showed a mixture of paintings and drawings featuring an array of mainly artist friends alongside still lives of flowers. There was still the odd ‘celebrity’ portrait, like a pencil image of the rapper Jay-Z, which seemed inert and less appealing by comparison. Nevertheless, the outstanding painting of the show, Dakis, Matthew and Boris (2009), with its sombre palette of greys, blues and browns, almost suggests Lucien Freud’s portrait of Bruce Bernard – a marked contrast to her more habitual influences: Hockney, Matisse and Warhol. The upcoming Whitechapel show, which arrives from New York via Minneapolis, finds Elizabeth Peyton in mid-career. She remains, despite all her success and the apparent accessibility of her work, as enigmatic as ever. Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton 9 July–20 September, Whitechapel Gallery

Dakis, Matthew and Boris (2009) Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ / Gavin Brown’s enterprise

Manchester, so much to answer for

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

Twenty years ago it was British music’s humming nexus; the drugs were ecstatic, the trousers baggy and the business sense dubious. Karen Frost ruminates on the legacy of the scene they christened Madchester and finds much to be positive about.

The Stone Roses © Ian Tilton

…whatever had been brewing in Manchester over the previous months had bubbled up to the surface in the nick of time The Haçienda Original stills courtesy of Brian Nicholson / Malcolm Whitehead

On the 23rd November 1989 The Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays both appeared on Top of the Pops, and a nation awoke to the news that ‘Madchester’ was up, running and open for business. The Mondays performed ‘Hallelujah’, a track from their Madchester Rave-On EP, the Roses, ‘Fool’s Gold’. Both bands were interviewed by Nick Kent for The Face who, in a predictably phonetic rendering of their Mancunian voices, laid their inarticulacy and drug-love bare and despaired: “A hundred years ago, most of this mob would’ve ended up on a pressgang. Today, one month shy of 1990, they’re the two great dark British hopes of pop for a whole new decade. So what does that tell you about civilization and the nineties?” Well, with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall during the very same month, civilisation was doing quite nicely, thank you very much, but a cursory glance at the pop charts reveals that whether gormless gurn-fest or genuine musical revolution, whatever had been brewing in Manchester over the previous months had bubbled up to the surface in the nick of time. The back end of 1989 had seen the distressing chart dominance of Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, a father and son outfit fronted by a cartoon rabbit. Seemingly straight outta the working men’s club circuit, their inane cut ‘n’ paste of re-recorded early rock‘n’roll records betrayed a cynicism that would have made Stock, Aitken and Waterman and the entire cast of Neighbours blush. Here, to save us, was a scene when we needed it most: drugs, swagger, naughty boys, strange trousers and funky drumming. Oh, and a nightclub, the Haçienda, to enjoy it all in. Perfect. 34

The Haçienda’s role as crucible for the musical alchemy that created ‘Madchester’ in the late ’80s and early ’90s has become the stuff of legend, if not cliché; embedded as it is in the stories of New Order, The Happy Mondays, Anthony Wilson and Factory Records and immortalised in Michael Winterbottom’s movie, 24 Hour Party People. The Haçienda has become emblematic of the period, a convenient symbol of the time when indie met dance, loads of people necked some E and got down to the same tunes. Its famously shambolic day to day operation (it was never ‘run’ as such, just kind of let loose) is also pretty useful for misty-eyed reminiscences about a time before everything got corporate; you know, the good old days. In an interview given to The Times in 2007, former Haçienda DJ and author Dave Haslam talks about the haphazard way the club developed: “It all evolved in a very unforced and instinctive way… there was never ever a meeting about the music the DJs should play; we just got on with it, did what we felt was right. Since then I’ve become aware of how much cultural activity isn’t like that; it’s all marketing theories and focus groups and corporate sponsors.” While that undeniably wistful memory comes over a bit “we had a trip to the cinema, a bag of chips, a packet of fags and change from fourpence”, the idea of a genuine, creatively chaotic, heterogeneous music scene existing beyond the machinations of ‘the Man’ is incredibly seductive and

Air Cav

it’s genuinely depressing to imagine that it might never happen again. Clearly, the attempt to corral diversity and creativity into a neat, tidy and easily ingested package like ‘baggy’ (a name coined in honour of the self-styled Mancunian uniform of voluminous jeans and outsized parkas) is reductive; one that goes hand-in-hand with the ‘marketing theories’ of commodification. Nostalgia too, has a part to play. As the musician and writer John Robb points out: “Even bands that are seen as very much part of this legacy like the Stone Roses were once outsiders and only now comfortably fit into the myth because the passage of time has blurred the edges.” However, according to some, the domination of major labels at this time had a negative influence on the growth and survival of young bands. The journalist Jon Ronson remembers the frustrations of his brief stint as a band manager in Manchester in this period: “in 1989 the Roses and the Mondays became so loved, and were so charismatic, that anyone who wasn’t really like them got swept away. There was a fantastic culture of Smiths-inspired bands that really got swept away, and awful baggy Mondays wannabes got major deals.” Twenty years later, an increasingly decentralised music business has provided the space for diversity to flourish. Contemporary Mancunian musicians are overwhelmingly positive about a wide-ranging music culture that is sustained by a supportive infrastructure of venues, festivals and creative initiatives. Sophie Parkes, violinist with Mancunian psych-folk combo Air Cav, is one such: “There is a strong music community in the city, I feel, mainly because there are so many local venues/festivals/radio stations that are interested in the music that the city is creating and actively go out of their way to promote it. There are many platforms for local bands to get their music heard. I think the city’s music scene is fractured to a degree, though, as it is segregated by genre – but I think that’s inevitable, as that’s how we consume our music now.” Brothers David and Neil Newport, who comprise two thirds of the dance-electro trio Shmoo, agree: “There doesn’t seem to be any one ‘particular place’ where everyone wants to play in Manchester any more, as there are so many good venues and performance areas cropping up all over the city. All have their own personal feel/atmosphere which suits the huge variety of artists emerging.” This ‘huge variety’ manifests itself in smaller communities of musicians developing at their own pace, as musician and club promoter Jay Taylor confirms: “Plainly there’s no all-pervading genre at work here (there never has been) and across two and a half million Greater 36

Mancunians you’ll find devotees covering every base. What you will find is countless small communities huddling around their individual projects – festivals, labels, rehearsal spaces, studios, online resource sites and of course a handful of smaller venues serving as some sort of nucleus for these emerging communities to congregate and mix in. It was difficult for the Haçienda to do this with nascent scenes as it was so damn huge.” The internet is invaluable here, of course, with services such as Twitter providing instant contact and communication. Jay continues: “Gone are the days when event and release information rested solely in the hands of newspaper listings and street posters; music consumers now have the huge benefit of minute to minute information.” This all suggests a very healthy DIY culture: motivation and a bit of business nous on the part of musicians allowing for an unprecedented pluralism in the city. The received wisdom on pre-baggy, post-punk Manchester is that the gloom of unemployment and boredom, combined with an inherited punk ethic, led people to music (or to football, but that’s another story). The empty warehouses and factories provided cheap rehearsal spaces, and the success of bands such as the Buzzcocks, the Fall, Joy Division and the Smiths provided inspiration. The pervading culture was DIY by default: in a lousy economy, and with no other alternative, bands worked hard on their projects and forged a community, crossing paths at the same gigs, clubs, rehearsal rooms and parties, not to mention the Government funded ‘Restart’ courses for the long-term unemployed. Today, in our technologically empowered times, DIY has evolved. David and Neil Newport agree. “In terms of the DIY-ness that bands were adopting back [in 1989], this is something you see now more than ever. With the scale and power of the internet over the music industry you see more and more DIY indie labels coming up or being put together.” This is where initiatives like the Un-Convention conference come in. Launched by Manchester’s Fat Northerner Records, the conference aims to address the issues faced by self-releasing bands, promoters, agents and DIY labels in a constantly evolving music industry. With panel discussions debating topics such as the effects of the current economic climate on the live industry, Un-Convention is practical, forward thinking and inclusive: event organisers ensure that tickets are kept to a reasonable price and, rather like the Ladyfest festival, the development of the format in other cities (the next one is to be held in Belfast) is actively encouraged and supported. It was, arguably, the success of the bands of the baggy period that laid the foundations for today’s kind of creativity to happen. According

“Britpop was arguably Madchester part two: a version of Madchester played out nationally with London bands joining the fray.”

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to John Robb, whose oral history The North Will Rise Again – Manchester Music City 1976-1996 details Manchester music in this period, the legacy of this era is felt far and wide: “The baggy period made it easier for independent bands to chart and even Radio One started playing guitar music. This resulted in the boom of guitar bands throughout the next twenty years.” He continues: “Britpop was arguably Madchester part two: a version of Madchester played out nationally with London bands joining the fray.” According to Robb, the self-confidence generated by this level of success and influence even has a distinct physical presence in the city: “You could argue that the baggy/Haçienda/acid house period rebuilt the whole of the Manchester city centre; the ideas were already in place and the opening of the Haçienda in the early ’80s showed the way […] the celebration of the Haçienda myth at the heart of the city’s music scene and culture has been replicated right across the city.” This sense of reification has taken shape in more ways than one: ever self-aware, Manchester’s creative elders gathered together in 2008 to stage a 24-hour conversation as a tribute to Anthony Wilson, the late Factory Records founder and enduring Manchester music icon. Billed as a “Binge Thinking Session” Reification: the Tony Wilson Experience featured a panel of music and media creatives in conversation before a selected audience of two hundred young people from across the city. According to Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester City Council, the body funding the event, “the Tony Wilson Experience [was] designed to stimulate, inspire and engage the next generation of cultural innovators from Manchester”. While undoubtedly nostalgic, with the potential to turn into one big Mancunian smug-athon, the impetus behind this event points to perhaps the greatest legacy any era can leave, the passing on of 38

knowledge: encouraging, nurturing and valuing independent cultural activity. Whether this leads to the kind of high-profile successes of the Madchester period or not, a culture that actively promotes participation rather than passive consumption can only be a positive thing. John Robb was one of those who took part in the event, and in his view, the most constructive aspect of it was the opportunity it afforded for people to build relationships: “The connections they made are one of the things that makes a city culturally work – people knowing each other and working together: that was one of the key factors in eighties Manchester – the so called ‘village Manchester’, when everyone seemed to know everyone else and no matter how diverse the music scene was there was a sense of community. The Tony Wilson Experience was an attempt to rekindle these ideas with one generation attempting to pass its energy to the next generation and also mix the ideas up.” Ventures such as this and the Un-Convention conference suggest a new approach: while the Haçienda’s ‘instinctive’ and spontaneous, unplanned evolution and attendant cultural impact belong to days gone by, there is now more room than ever for innovation. As Jay Taylor puts it: “In this respect Manchester is in far greater shape than it’s ever been [...] yes, there is far less instinctive, organic growth here but budding musicians, promoters, managers, label owners, publishers and punters are far better served which is unequivocally a good thing.” In the re-imagining of Manchester’s Madchester years it is the sense of diversity that gets lost, a scene in that sense is necessarily insular, parochial, something that belongs to the past. Now with an increasingly sophisticated relationship between music producers and consumers, and the global reach of the internet, it seems a good time to move on.

27/5/09

Tickets 8 June – 16 August 2009 0844 209 1919 Sponsored by 12:25 Page 1 www.royalacademy.org.uk

Saatchi.indd 1

When You’re a Boy: Men’s Fashion Styled by Simon Foxton

“An exceptional singer and inspired arranger” 4/5 - Mojo --------------------------“An often glorious album” 4/5 - Independent On Sunday ---------------------------------“Stardom awaits” 4/5 - Clash -----------------------------“Excellent debut album” 4/5 - Q

17 July – 4 October 09

Open Tues – Sun Admission Free 16 – 18 Ramillies St. London W1F 7LW Oxford Circus www.photonet.org.uk From Galliano’s Warriors, photographed by Nick Knight, styled by Simon Foxton. Published in Arena Homme Plus, Summer/Autumn 2007. The Photographers’ Gallery is a registered charity no. 262548.

www.fredoviola.com

w out no

29/05/2009

Tribute To John Wayne Gacy

Let’s Wrestle In The Court Of The Wrestling Let’s (Stolen)

The drummer is a punk (in the old fashioned way: bondage strides, leather jacket and short Mohican). The bass player is a dandy with big shades and extravagant hand gestures. The singer/guitarist doesn’t really exist in the world at all until standing on a stage, where he becomes utterly compelling – this year’s unlikeliest pop star. When they are all together, as with all the best groups, the sum of the parts is near perfect. I love this group. The press release for this, their debut album, mentions the influence of Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and Syd Barrett; also that it is a punk rock record. All true enough, but throw in The Fall, Pavement (had Steven Malkmus gone to school in North London with Lawrence from Felt living in his attic, as did LW singer Wes), Buzzcocks and a Grange Hill-esque take on the Shangri-Las (complete with “bah-bahs” and hand claps) and you’re getting there. Impressive influences for any band, let alone a trio of callow 18 year-olds. ‘I Won’t Lie To You’ is the most immediate of the sixteen-track album’s many standout essays. On first listen you think that Mark E Smith has counted them in before the buzzsaw guitars and cracked falsetto kneecap you, the vocal stuttering: “The duvet’s on fire and so is your hair / But darling that’s the way it is”. Later on there is a song about Princess Diana’s coiffure and one titled, brazenly but not inaccurately, ‘We Are The Men You Will Grow To Love Soon’. It’s perhaps the art pop statement of the year. Sample lyric “We’re going down the job centre / And soon we’ll come out with a job”, which later evolves into, “We got enough money to buy some G&Ts for the girls / We are the men you’ll grow to love soon”. And so it continues; cracked, skewed, hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking. You won’t hear more original songwriting this year. There is nothing flimsy or whimsical about this group; behind the awkward adolescence, shambling intros and pathological lies is a steely-eyed determination to succeed. If there is any justice in the world, the powers that be will resurrect Top of the Pops just so Let’s Wrestle can be the opening band on the comeback show. BBC endorsements notwithstanding, these really are the men you will grow to love soon. Jamie Holman

Man Hugs Tiger

Big Marv

Issue 06 Âť Summer 2009

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

Billy Childish: A Short Study By Neal Brown (The Aquarium)

It’s another Boston Arms, dirty water Billy Childish night; those same three chords, biting joy, twenty years of dancing to the hip-shaking bone crunch in thee church of Billy C. I’m wondering how you’d explain the whirlwind of rock‘n’roll force, this giggling demob prince, to those too unfortunate or too hip to climb aboard his rusty freighter. So I get this new book [Billy Childish: A Short Study], beautiful brown paper cover, short and concise like a Milkshakes riff, a mere 42-page essay on the very same subject – the wylde and wayward world of Sir William Childish. First of all it’s NOT, happily, one of those scholarly, pretentious tomes of thesaurean blabber (the very antithesis of the Childish credo) but a simply enrapturing read – well done Mr Brown, sir. It’s divided into three parts: Billy the man/force, his art and finally his religious, social and artistic protest. At the back is a nice array of thumbnail paintings, book covers, record sleeves and so on. To explain the world of such a polymath is no easy task but Brown makes astute links between Childish’s Van Gogh-esque painting, his dyslexic prose and that Bo-Diddley garage thump. What Brown gets across is the undeniable reeking roar of LIFE in all Childish’s work – a vitality of anger, joy, love and hate. The paintings burst with moving colour; the bitter, naked texts spew spittle, the Link Wray-esque garage punk splits the speakers. Like the tales and images of Chatham low-life and high spirits, everything here manifests in simple, from-the-heart directness. Childish’s unrelenting volume of work seems to be some kind of revenge on existence; the poetic punk soul disturbed by physical evils, sorrows and sick excitements – a stoic standing up to death with a gurning mouth and a Sid James cackle. I won’t dwell further on the study as you should buy it and read it yourself – but I dug the metaphor of Billy as a fruit farmer tending to his various crops. Needless to say, this is no ‘outsider art’ – that most voyeuristic of modern terms. Childish speaks of, and to, the community – naked and howling for the disappearing proletariat. He’s a man who bows not to the bovine commentators of the art/poetry/music scenes, one who prefers not to call his song lyrics ‘poetry’ but ‘words that rhyme’ and who started making records that sound the way they do because it’s what he and his

Camera Obscura Billy Childish, The Drinker (1998)

mates wanted to listen to. That’s also why he paints and writes – for the sheer enjoyment and release rather than the pull of the pound or the stroke of the ego. Much like fellow punk survivor Mark E Smith, Childish is a pub William Blake – poetic mysticism replaced by the concise, howling sound of the naked soul and a life bent on catching the elusive spirit of life with humour, spite, a paintbrush, a pen and a Vox amplifier. Billy Childish: A Short Study by Neal Brown is available from The L-13 for £9.99 www.L-13.org David Christian

That’s also why he paints and writes – for the sheer enjoyment and release rather than the pull of the pound or the stroke of the ego 44

My Maudlin Career (4AD)

Tattooed in twee and unfairly compared to every Scottish group that went before them (most often fellow Glaswegians Belle & Sebastian), Camera Obscura once seemed destined never to find their own voice. With this, their fifth album, they appear to have finally shaken off the shackles of lazy comparisons that dogged their early career. In truth, the band’s basic approach has changed little since the days of ‘Eighties Fan’ (the hit track from their first album, 2001’s Biggest Bluest Hi Fi), when singer Tracyanne Campbell was the belle of the Bowlie ball. Her vocals are still as distinct, effortless and beautiful as ever and the band are reliably solid (but subtle) and chiming (but driving), their ‘ooh-oohs’ and ‘Be My Baby’ drum beats never overpowering the tear-in-a-beer country narratives. But Camera Obscura have now refined all that early promise into something bigger and slicker. No longer restricted by the modest ambition and budgets of the bedroom indie labels they grew up on, they have quietly matured into major league contenders. Now their albums are stocked in Tesco and they are endorsed by Paul Morley – which tells you more than the constant press release references to John Peel. What relevance Peel’s imprimatur has to seventeen year-old record buyers these days is a moot point, but significantly, while a host of bands who emerged around the same time as CO could claim the great DJ’s patronage, none of those ‘also-rans’ are still standing.

On the surface, My Maudlin Career offers no immediate departures. The trademark strings and big bold production of their last album, Let’s Get Out Of This Country, are still present and correct (as is producer Jari Haapalainen) but this doesn’t mean they haven’t developed. Lyrically this is an ambitious record and, despite the upbeat tone of most of the songs, a sly melancholia remains at the heart of everything they do. In fact it’s very easy to forget what a good songwriter Campbell is; perhaps if she were an ‘anorak’ indie-boy she would be recognised as such. These are love songs that make you dance as easily as they make you cry and come brimming with lines such as: “We turned the radiators on and there was no way back / Did you know you had the plough star trail on your back?” (‘Other Towns And Cities’). You have to wonder why the world is Guy Garvey mad while Tracyanne draws breath. Still, like (Garvey’s band) Elbow, CO have stuck it out and made their own luck. Perhaps these ‘underachievers’ won’t have to try quite so hard next time. Greatness awaits. Jamie Holman

lost & found

Issue 06 » Summer 2009

Neil Rumming

‘Dirty Transmission’, The Police Gym, London

David Byrne

Royal Festival Hall, London, 13th April 2009

A series of six paintings, oil on canvas, warm the cold walls of the basement of a decommissioned Edwardian police station in the depths of London’s New Cross. Neil Rumming’s solo exhibition at The Police Gym is accompanied by a series of diary entries in place of a press release: 00.18 October 28th The heads are refusing to move. The lubrication added to the fingers is not working… Tired and quite demoralised. The rudimentary nature of my drawings and lack of understanding is beginning to surface. My invention alone is not enough to spark these creations into life. Unlike the tight, flat and painstakingly constructed works Rumming became recognised for at the beginning of the decade these works are large, loose and expressive of struggle. Struggle with scale, media and the process of painting. They depict disembodied human heads, feet and fingers, cogged wheels, tracks and pulleys. The human and the machine merge into crude, defective hybrids. The titles express dull routine and dysfunction: ‘Coming and Going’, ‘Stand-Up Routine’, ‘Three Wheel Drive’ and ‘Dirty Transmission’. The accompanying text continues: 19.42 January 6th Enthusiasm is ripe, new inspiration has been obtained. Picasso, Guston, Bergson and Vaucanson have been the core voices but new ones have emerged. Chaplin, Lang and Tinguely have added fresh impetus. I have stimulated the heads with sugar water and they seem excited and motivated. Their repetitions and willing desire is commendable. The paintings are thus presented as having free will, their own determination separate from that of the artist – raucous, unruly children outside of his control. The influences of mid-twentieth century painting, Bergson’s critique of Kant and Jacques de Vaucanson’s eighteenth-century robots are clear yet these works never reference them directly or fall into illustration. The wheels and body parts that dominate each canvas are, however, more obviously inspired in character, if not exact theme or form, by Charlie Chaplin’s Modern 46

Times (1936), where Chaplin’s Little Tramp is consumed by machinery. It seems likely that Chaplin’s film will find new impetus as we enter an economic recession similar in scale to the one that inspired it in the late ’30s. Yet Chaplin’s influence here is not rooted in a disaffection with the modern world or any notion of economics but in the slapstick comedy and resignation to a more ancient idea of the wheel of fortune. Each painting can be seen to deliberately fail and succeed in equal measure. The diary entries continue: 16.44, February 18th …They have started issuing demands for more food and drink, sitting idle, joking and sleeping. They whoop and coo as they watch the system slowly decay and collapse, doing the bare minimum to stave off death. Rumming’s paintings are perhaps more than anything a depiction of the creative process and an exploration of painting itself – what it means and what it’s for. Whilst such pursuits in contemporary art are normally tightly controlled and self-conscious, Rumming’s are created with generosity, loose abandonment and a celebration of thick, visceral paint.

David Byrne is currently on something close to a world tour to promote the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today – his collaboration with producer supremo (and sporter of the most fabulous hairdo of the ’70s) Brian Eno. New York art rock enfant excentrique, David Byrne first manifested in the music scene with his band Talking Heads and he and Eno have a long collaborative history going back some three decades. Eno produced three Talking Heads albums in the late ’70s and with Byrne released the wildly influential, proto-sampling, African-flavoured My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts in 1980. The third Talking Heads album, Fear Of Music released in 1979, still sounds vital and edgy and contains some kicking dancefloor fillers. By the time Talking Heads came to an end in 1988 Byrne had already amassed a barrel-load of side projects, ranging from composing contemporary ballet scores and film soundtracks to directing and starring in the film True Stories and becoming a champion of obscure Brazilian pop. Since going solo, his subsequent multifaceted artistic output is simply mind-boggling. With all that in mind, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to see a performance that was anything but your average 45-minute set. Byrne’s sharp and humorous opening banter set a good tone for the night and within five minutes he had beguiled a full house at the Royal Festival Hall with his steely, intense charisma and kooky dance moves. The set was a mix of old and new, the biggest chunk comprising songs from the new album with a few Talking Heads numbers bedded in nicely. What really made the evening a brilliant event was the choreography, with three contemporary dancers complementing Byrne’s own unique way of moving. With his guitar strapped on, he often took part in the dance moves, as did his three backing singers. The feel was ineffably New York, kind of early ’80s avant-garde (appropriately), with sparse yet intricate and repetitive movements that sometimes gave the feeling of watching a film running backwards. A third of the way through the set, people started to get off their seats and file down towards the stage to dance. As the gig drew to a close the whole auditorium was up and moving – a rare sight at the sober RFH. The feelgood factor was palpable; in fact it was almost unbelievably euphoric, like gorging on your favourite food and then going in for seconds. When I listened to Everything That Happens… prior to the gig, I wasn’t bowled over – its laid-back sound didn’t immediately grab me; but to see the show confirmed the white haired but still boyish Byrne’s brilliance as a performer. He does it not only through his music but by incorporating a very strong visual element and exuding an incredibly infectious stage persona. He’s funny, he’s moving and he’s kind of freaky in the best possible way. The uninitiated should check out Byrne’s incredibly comprehensive website, which lists everything from art installations to tour dates. You can listen to the new album for free too. Visit www.davidbyrne.com and click on journal. It’s a very entertaining blog. Antoinette HÄchler

Rob Tufnell

lost & found Issue 06 » Summer 2009 Jim Lambie, Gypsy (Stevie Nicks) (2008) © The artist and courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Okkyung Lee/Steve Beresford/ John Butcher/Christian Marclay

Jim Lambie

Cafe Oto, Dalston, London, 1st May 2009

Television, Sadie Coles HQ

When you’ve hit your fourth solo show with your London gallery and have one of the most envied CVs in the art world, there is a giant spotlight on whatever you do next. But Jim Lambie seldom fails to impress, recycling ideas and materials to full effect. In fact along with gallery mate Sarah Lucas, Lambie is one of those rare artists who can turn inanimate found objects into art and make it look easy, formally elegant and thought provoking. Television is centred around a version of ‘The Strokes’, a floor painting made from strips of glossy vinyl tape. The orange and pink tape is placed in small areas of concentric swirling lines that navigate the entire gallery floor, travel down the stairs and continue into the basement area. At strategic points concrete blocks are placed around the space, apparently semi-grounded into the floor. There are also a number of wall based works comprising of black and white portraits covered in collaged flowers while others combine cracked mirror glass and cut out reproductions of eyes. The concrete set against the psychedelic stripes and fractured glass lends an apocalyptic edge that is darker than Lambie’s usual upbeat installations. The ‘portraits’ of a young Stevie Nicks and Bob Dylan combine a modern idea of portraiture – enlarging a photographic image – with traditionally made flower painting. The heavy collage obscures the stark black and white photograph and makes the final ‘painting’ seem intentionally artificial and soulless. At first it feels like Lambie is commenting on the inherently transient nature of the music industry; over48

decorating an already idealised view of these musicians. But despite the pretty faces, flowers and colours, these portraits appear without expression or sentiment. Lambie’s work has always been more than an homage to the music and musicians he’s referenced and it’s never really felt like his art is about music. Clearly he does borrow an aesthetic and sensibility attached to a particular dirty, druggy guitar scene – which he himself existed in pre art school – but what makes Lambie’s work continue to be interesting is that he uses these references without relying on them to dictate or provide a meaning. Using vinyl records, belts, magazine reproductions and song titles, rather than traditional artists’ materials injects a pop edge without overpowering the formal quality of the final work. Gemma de Cruz

What I always admired about Sonic Youth was their blatant disregard for the sacred cow of rock‘n’roll convention. Surely Mr Tambourine Man would sound better with all the strings tuned to D and a brick on the 8th fret? Likewise, tonight’s assembled cast of improv luminaries, Okkyung Lee, SY-collaborator Christian Marclay, Steve Beresford and John Butcher, do their utmost to run as far away from concord (and a tune) as is humanly possible. Anyone wandering in off the street would no doubt consider this a bloody racket but, as a packed Cafe Oto would attest, there’s not only much underlying rhyme and reason to improvised music but also the potential for boundless fun. As with wrestling, the night begins with a straight one-on-one. Korean cellist Okkyung Lee, whose I Saw The Ghost Of An Unknown Soul And It Said album was released on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label last year, locks horns with British improv heavyweight Steve Beresford, on piano. What ensues is a battle of wits; each vying to stretch their chosen instrument as far away from its ‘common’ range as possible. What begins as a fairly graceful call-and-response gradually deteriorates into a no-holdsbarred spat. There’s not so much eye contact as ear contact, Beresford echoing Lee’s quick-fire, caterwauling cello with ever-more frantic fortissimos. Amidst this cacophony Beresford, exasperated, seems to be thinking, “Damn, this bloody thing! Why aren’t there more octaves?!” Octaves aren’t uppermost in Christian Marclay’s scheme of things. His chosen weapons, junkstore vinyl records and foot-pumped turntables, connect near seamlessly with John Butcher’s stuttering alto sax. There are no headphones in sight, but Marclay knows his armoury

like the back of his hand. There’s something of the cocktail bartender in the way he flips and spins vinyl from the table behind him onto the decks without so much as checking the label. Butcher, meanwhile, is pushing his sax to its absolute extremes, wrenching out sounds that knit tightly with Marclay’s amplified static and bastardised loops; a mockingbird effect. Up to this point, these improv pairings have been akin to rather serious chemistry experiments, but when Marclay is teamed with Beresford things lighten and liven up immeasurably. Beresford, seated at a table choked by a smorgasbord of effects pedals, pulls sounds out of thin air and with a sleight of hand; loops, stretches and reverses them until, voila! A balloon giraffe! Well, not exactly, but there is an element of Carl Stalling’s famous cartoon soundtracks, albeit warped to the point at which Bugs Bunny is no longer recognisable. It’s here that the seated, silhouetted audience blossom into laughter, and these looney tunes are arguably the high point of the night. At its worst, improvised music is loaded with a disquieting gravitas that threatens to alienate all but the most esoterically attuned audience. At its best (see John Zorn, Sonic Youth or even tonight’s Beresford/Marclay game of tag), the ride can be both all-inclusive and a blast. For the finale, all four performers take the stage, but without an obvious ringleader there’s a noticeable lack of direction to what they produce. Whether that’s reverence or just polite reserve is hard to tell, but this masterclass in freeform sonic engineering, although impressive, could have used a little less self-absorption and a little more of that cartoon playfulness. Glen Johnson

Intimate Strangers Chris Parkinson and Jimmy McGee (lead singer of the Bobby McGee’s) first met in 2005 whilst heckling at poetry nights. Together they set up the world’s first Poetry Brothel, which caused a furore as part of the 2007 Brighton Festival and went on to beat Gordon Brown to a Best Literature Award. The Bobby McGee’s’ first album, L’Appropriation Bourgoisie de le Bobby McGee’s is out in June – with Chris’s artwork in the inlay sleeve. Chris Parkinson

Chris Parkinson: So Jimmy, you used to be a wrestler. What’s the largest animal you’d be confident of defeating in a wrestling match? Jimmy McGee: This is one I’m asked a lot and it’s a tricky one. I’d have to go with a vole. I’m not as young as I once was and with the onset of age comes a natural decrease in my testosterone levels, which has a large part to play in the outcome of these events. Is a mango an animal? CP: One thing I’ve always wanted to ask but never dared – is it true that you killed and ate a swan, blamed it on some gipsies and tipped off the Daily Mail? JMG: It was a duck. CP: What sacrifices would you make in the name of ‘art’? Would you, in theory, be prepared to play all your future gigs wearing a fox outfit with creepy human hands and eyes? JMG: In practice, yes. In theory – theory is a thorny area but one that will always be important to my music. I think the whole digital download thing has had a real impact on the theories we can work with ‘Certum Est, Quia Possible’. CP: Cheese rolling contest – inhumane or a nice day out? 50

The Bobby McGee’s

JMG: It will sound like a cliché, but I really do think this ‘credit crunch’ will have a real effect on the way we view these style of events – I am all for colloquial pursuits and am a definite proponent of the ‘quaint’, but Chris, people are dying. JMG: Chris, you recently beat a world leader into second place to win a highly respected literature prize. Given your penchant for the political novella and biography, which other world leader would you enjoy beating? CP: Well, it’s a little known fact that, back in 1994, I beat former prime minister John Major at Connect 4. We went best-out-of-five but I still won. I’d love to challenge Gordon Brown to a game of Monopoly. Or Pinochet/Cluedo, for that matter. JMG: Music, the food of love. Poetry...? CP: ... it’s kind of a dip, if you’re going to extend that metaphor. In the Belgian sense of the word, where you have about 40 different flavours of dip. That’s poetry, and the reader’s just left holding a chip, enthralled. JMG: You listen to a lot of what I can only

describe as ‘dark metal’. How has it influenced your work as a poet? CP: That’s quite a difficult question. Firstly, I think you have to be a bit more specific – ‘dark metal’ is a very broad (and often flaming) church – and so is poetry, come to think of it. All my favourite poetry gigs have involved doom metal, crowd surfing, and on one memorable occasion, pigs’ heads on sticks. JMG: Towards the end of the movie Jaws, as his boat is filling with water and quite clearly sinking, Quint, shark hunter and ex crew member of the USS Indianapolis, hands Brody a small hand pump with the instruction ‘pump it out, chief’. How would your understanding of 20th-century poetry have helped you cope with this situation? CP: Wendy Cope once said that most male poets couldn’t perform simple tasks and were proud of it. In his essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, T. S. Eliot asserts that “the only good poet is a dead poet”. But could either of them patch up a leaky boat or make a fire using two bits of wood and a block of magnesium? I doubt it.