Thursday November 13th – evening
I’m already regretting my “come terminal disease” archness below. I seem to have lost the hearing in my left ear. So it’s off to Catpower at the Garage with semi-deafness, Otex eardrops dripping down my neck.
Getting ready, I listen to the Field Mice compilation, “Where’d You Learn To Kiss That Way?”. It’s vitually everything they recorded for Sarah Records. The songs left out from the Sarah canon include a number of forgettable instrumentals, plus “Song Six”, “Think of These Things” and “You’re Kidding Aren’t You”.
I’m reminded of dropping in on Matt Haynes’ place in Lambeth last week. I’d just been to a poetry reading at the Imperial War Museum, and he lives round the corner, so it seemed silly not to finally pop round. The last time I visited him was when he lived with Clare Wadd in Bristol. She helped me move to London, before they both upped and followed my example, albeit separately. I still owe them far too much, both culturally and in the line of friendship. Their sheer selflessness and striving for independent integrity in, all of all place, the British music business, never failed to startle me.
And it did so again last week. Matt’s flat was strewn with cardboard boxes of Field Mice CDs, sleeves and booklets, all waiting to be individually sleeved and packaged by hand. By his hand, mainly, though friends have helped. It looked like a particularly twee episode of Starsky and Hutch. I offered to help of course, but he was having none of it. I asked him why couldn’t he sell the double, suavely designed album at £12 rather than £10, and pay a factory to do the business for him. “I don’t really trust them”, he ventured.
I asked him about choosing which songs to not include on the compilation, and he told me the lyrics of “Song Six” etc never really fully endeared themselves as much as the others. “Think of These Things” could be interpreted as worryingly possessive, almost stalker-like, being as it is a song about a boy wanting to possess every aspect of his girlfriend’s life. and “Song Six” is a little wince-inducing by going too far the other way: “they don’t see there’s a difference/ between a woman and a slave”. These are only minor niggles, but faced with the choice of a flawed three-CD album and a perfect double one, I think Matt/Clare/the band chose wisely. Two and a half hours is long enough of any band too, even the sublime Field Mice.
This is always the problem with “best of” compilations. More often than not, one’s favourite songs are left out. The new Culture Club compilation doesn’t include “The War Song”, which is a good thing, but it also omits “The Medal Song”, which is frankly criminal.
Which is why I bought yet another Supremes/Diana Ross collection. The new one is the first to include both 60s and 70s Supremes hits, plus Diana Ross’ “Doobedood’ndoobe, Doobedood’ndoobe, Doobedood’ndoo”, an early 70s solo song, and possibly one of the best ever songs with a worst ever title. I probably now have about 8 different albums with “Where Did Our Love Go” on them. Which is no bad thing, of course.
Thursday November 12th
After reading my Anti Pro Life rant below, I’ve just remembered what Pro Lifers do to their enemies. And what happened to Bill Hicks. No, what the conspiracy theory says.
If I die suddenly, you will see that there’s a full investigation, won’t you?
Saturday was spent watching the band Pansy Division at the Garage. Hot in from California, and the house is packed, though after chatting with the singer, the amiable Mr Jon Ginoli, it transpires they are spending their UK tour sleeping on floors. Touring on a small-to-medium indie level is so expensive and loss making that major labels put aside a fund called Tour Support for their bands, counted as part of the promotional budget. It means Orlando stayed in hotels or on sleeper buses when we were playing to three gerbils and a stamp book.
I buy a Pansy Division plectrum. With their own logo on it. Not a common article of band merchandise. I presume it’s to encourage gay kids to pick up guitars rather than get into boy bands or dance music. Or perhaps just because they really like the idea of having their own brand of plectrums. They put on a hell of a Show, as opposed to a Gig, complete with costume changes and charismatic stage banter. Pansy Division Live is an wonderful experience of glitter, jokes, and punky tunes even the grumpy, frumpy likes of me can mosh to. In my winsome way.
By way of distinct contrast, I spend the following evening at a classical piano recital, invited by a charming composer called Laurence Armstrong Hughes, who has a very fast walk. It’s a Percy Grainger event, he of the “English Country Garden” and maverick invention fame. One piece is written for 11 hands. To my disappointment, they didn’t produce a mutant Shiva-like creature from the wings, but instead crammed six pianists around three Steinways. I feel about classical music in the same way I feel about art: I get the sense I’m dwarfed by the sheer history of it, that I’ll never “catch up”, but that I can take the bits and pieces I like and enjoy them in my own way: Modern minimalists like Nyman, Glass, and Reich mainly, but I’m also an admirer of (and listen to) Chopin, Debussy, Mussorgsky, Mozart, Stravinksy, Beethoven, and today, Haydn.
After the show we crash the aftershow party. For a classical concert. It’s a different class of people, let me tell you… Outside, Westminster looks beautiful by night, and Laurence points out the balcony in Whitehall where Charles I stepped out to be executed. We also pass the Cenotaph, decorated with fresh wreaths from the Remembrance ceremony earlier that day.
After reading about where Edmund White got the title for his novel “The Farewell Symphony” from, I seek out the Haydn work in question and enjoy it immensely. The story goes that Haydn’s patron was overworking the composer and his orchestra to the point where the musicians were so eager to go home that Haydn wrote a piece where the players could walk off, one by one, during the piece, until there was just Haydn and his first violinist left duetting.
This is now an evergreen stage gimmick often used by bands, the singer going first, then the guitarist, and so on until either just the bassist and drummer or even merely the drummer, are left alone on stage to finish the song. Fosca #1 did this a couple of times. It’s always an entertaining and memorable way to end a show, as long as the rhythm section don’t decide to end with an excruciating ten-minute “jam”…
The end of year polls are already out, and it’s not even halfway through November. Still, I venture my own choices:
1998:
Best Single: Lauryn Hill “Doo Wop”
Best Album: Trembling Blue Stars “Lips That Taste of Tears”
Best Compilation: The Field Mice “Where’d You Learn To Kiss That Way?”
Best Film: “The Last Days of Disco” and “Love and Death on Long Island”
“Public NME”, the gossip column, mentions Orlando for no other reason than to be nasty. Erstwhile journalist stalkers that are to be avoided at parties, goes the gist, presumably by Mr Mark Beaumont, whom for some reason has always had it in for me and/or Orlando. Once again, I sigh but feel flattered that I don’t even have to go out to get into gossip columns, that I made a mark in his world, even if it is that of whipping boy.
The thing is, I still am a stalker of journalists. Here I am, obsessed with my own press, naming the anonymous hacks, putting it in my diaries, wasting time and energy on the negative. Will I never learn? No. When Orlando started, it was all part of the plan. Tim and I loved the tales of the Manics keeping dossiers on individual music journalists, and then of Menswear taking such buttonholing and press obsession to the level of an art form. If the Richey thing hadn’t happened, would the Manics be on the same level as Menswear today? Examine and discuss.
And I have to plead guilty to the other count, that of being the sort of person to avoid in public. I was filmed today for an interview that features as part of a project by another journalist, Mr Jonathan Selzer. It was about, fittingly, the personae assumed by people who use the Internet to be more “themselves” than they are in real life. He laughed at my badger jokes, which was nice. When it came to checking the recording, I flinched, even grimaced at the sight of my own face, nattering away on the TV. I can’t stand looking at myself move about and speak, if truth be told. If my double got on the same Tube carriage as me, I’d have to get out at the next stop. If I saw myself in the street, I’d have to cross the road to avoid a conversation.
And I’d definitely avoid myself at clubs and parties. So who am I kidding?
This kind of self hatred is only tempered with a thin veneer of vanity, to keep me afloat, to avoid facing the void. The make up, the bleach, the suits: it’s all correction, and protection, not decoration.
This is my predicament: a vain, self obsessed narcissist that hates his own guts, his own image and wants to die, but doesn’t have the courage to take the easy way out. (“come, o terminal illness!”) I’m in love with my reflection, but only when it shows the bits of me I prefer. The edited highlights.
This is what makes me, in essence, a ridiculous, tragic, doomed figure.
I always was a bit of a drama queen.
