There is a lot of good music in the world. Music that flips your head and makes you feel things, see things differently. Or just makes you grin like an idiot. Last night I went to see HEALTH for the first time. Whoah. Their music invades your body, takes over. It’s almost religious. Fuck it, it IS religious. Primal, cleansing, euphoric. Last night I just kept babbling that it was like religious bleeding. It’s akin to an exorcism. Like you’re ridding yourself of something by being there, in the music, cleaning your soul. Some sounds smooth over emotions, calm hearts and soothe heads. HEALTH’s music goes straight for your guts. I am still reeling.
Music in my head
It’s impossible to beat live music. Music happening right there in front of you, in the same air. But it’s also a risky business. A thrill that’s part anticipation, part nerves. When you’ve felt every chord, every beat, every word of an album in your head, there’s always a fear it will fall short in the real world. Roland Barthes wrote about death of the author – one very loose interpretation of which being that the reader of a text also becomes author, infusing it with layers of their own meaning. The same can be applied to music. Our experiences shape the way we listen. We all hear things differently.
Last week I saw The xx at Hoxton Hall. I spent it, hands clasped, on the brink of tears – partly because their music is just so damned beautiful but also because I was relieved it lived up to my own personal experience of it. Man, they’re good.
I wish I was a polar bear
Skull Juice are freakin’, frickin’, finger lickin’ good DJs. I am still very much addicted to the mix they did for Dummy a couple of weeks back. (You can download the Skull Juice mix here.) It features a remix of Grauzone ‘Eisbar’, which takes me straight back to smoky dance floors at Bugged Out in Liverpool and the Bomb in Nottingham about 10 years ago. Sooooo good. Sooooo young. Sooooo I had to look up the original again, released in 1981. What a song. Eisbar, oooh eisbar…
They’re like kisses
I first wrote about The xx back in April last year on my (previously) anonymous super-emo blog when I was too much of a scaredycat to have a proper one. I didn’t write much. Just declared my love. So I was more than just a little bit excited to meet them to chat about their bloody beautiful debut album for Dummy Mag (you can read the interview and get a free download here). They were very lovely indeed – not an ounce of ego – and completely up for getting lost in the dense orange smoke of the the flares that photographer Mikael Gregorsky brought along for the shoot.
The album is called xx. Cos they’ll all be 20 when it’s released on August 17th and also because “they’re like kisses” said The xx’s Romy. It’s a very apt name. My favourites – ‘Islands’, ‘Night Time’ and next single ‘Basic Space’ – have all been adding a layer of melancholic romance to the 133 down Brixton Hill. It’s felt like a long time coming but these four young Londoners have made my album of this year.
17 again
No, not some godawful tween movie. That feeling. When I was a kid, 17 held complete magic to me. In hindsight it’s probably because it was such a cusp age. Absolutely anything is possible when reality hasn’t had a chance to bite.
Anyway, I met Egyptian Hip Hop on Friday. They are all very 17. Part hip kids, part hyper intelligent musicians. They know exactly what they’re doing in a ‘what-the-hell-are-we-doing’ kind of way. They were a lot of fun to interview. I say ‘interview’. What I really mean is loosely guided chaos. I’m not going to go on about them now (except to say they’re bloody amazing) because the piece will be up on Dummy Mag soon but meeting them made me think about the internet…
…and how it is changing our experience of music. The music we used to listen to when we were kids was that which we had access to. So, the music of our parent’s, our friends’, the radio, TV. Today’s kids can listen to anything because they have access to everything. They can leapfrog through the top friends of friends of friends of friends to find music in other cites, other countries, other centuries.
That’s exciting and also strange. I like this erosion of time and space but I also find it bewildering. We can reach across decades and seas in nano-seconds. We can bring people back from the dead. We can be profoundly affected by music that would never have even reached our ears had the internet not been born.
Anyways, that was just what I was thinking this morning.
To Duckie, with love
Last night I had my hysteria diagnosed (worst case the doctor had seen apparently), helped stitch an abortion tapestry, created a perfume that smelled like my mum (dried roses, lavender, and freshly baked bread, if you’re wondering), observed a nipple casting (in chocolate), and visited a lipstick museum featuring the various lip stains of Lady Di, Eva Braun, and Mother Teresa. Oh Gay Shame, we’ve only just met but I’m going to miss you forever.
Gay Shame was originally created by Duckie – incidentally one of my favourite places to dance – as an Arts Council-funded alternative to the corporate overkill of Gay Pride. Now Pride is “a nice little community celebration run by volunteers,” said producer Simon Casson in last week’s Boyz magazine, “we don’t really have any big problem with it, and therefore there’s nothing really to kick against. I think the theme has run its course.”
Going out with a busty bang, this last hurrah was a glorious celebration of femininity. Brixton Academy was transformed into an Alice in Wonderland funfare of sideshows, music, magic and mischief. The inimitable Readers Wifes provided the soundtrack, local dance group Stylinquents impressed on stage and headliners Saint Etienne took us all on a nostalgia trip. Only love can break your heart indeed.
The real stars of the show, however, were the artists and performers running the lovingly created sideshows. Each one was a work of art in itself, an intricately detailed bubble of exploration and adventure. The lines between performer and observer blurred at every turn, each stall inviting participation in spontaneous and unscripted bursts of group theatre. Not that it felt anything as definable as that. What did it feel like? Freeing, actually. Pure play instead of the tired daily roles and routines we ascribe ourselves. Duckie, I salute you.
Radio mum and dad
Some artists occupy an irreplaceable space in your heart without you realising it. Music your folks used to dance round the living room to while you screwed up your face in embarrassment on the sofa. Songs that take you right back to the days of just-ten-more-minutes before bed.
There are so many amazing ways to discover and connect to music these days but the records of your childhood have the ability to reconnect you. They possess a time-travelling power that reunites you with moments, feelings and places your mind had previously lost down the back of the sofa sometime in 1989.
Listening to last.fm radio sent me on this musical memory trip. Strong female singers like Alison Moyet, Joni Mitchell, Chrissie Hynde, and Tracy Chapman were a big presence in our living room. That’s my mum and dad bopping in the corner…
The Pretenders ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’
Joni Mitchell ‘Come In From The Cold’
The Communards ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’
Thompson Twins ‘Hold Me Now’
Suzanne Vega ‘Marlene On The Wall’
Erasure ‘A Little Respect’
Alison Moyet ‘Weak In The Presence Of Beauty’
Joni Mitchell ‘My Secret Place’
Tanita Tikaram ‘Good Tradition’
Ruth Saxelby 