Afternoon – to Claudia Andrei’s to continue helping her with some gardening. It’s the closest I’ve come to actual physical labour for some time. Essentially, she’s cutting away the decade-old mass of twisting foliage, rogue rose bushes and thorny branches that have obscured her back yard for so long. Armed with secateurs and gloves, we get to work, while temperatures hit 30C. For once I’m living up to my namesake from The Secret Garden, with the therapeutic metaphor all too obvious. A decade of unchecked strangulating weeds, snipped away with immediate visual results. It’s work completed which looks like work completed. Something has been done. Progress has been made. Her bathroom window finally has a clear view to the yard. Though her cat is pretty annoyed with us for destroying his private playground.
Then to the Gate cinema in Notting Hill for a rare concert by Robin Guthrie. Rose thorns fall out of my hair on the way in, which seems a suitably Cocteau Twins-y thing to happen. Emily and Kate H from Client say hello and keep me company. The performance is Mr Guthrie plus guitar and trademark effects units, plus laptop plus backdrop of a specially-prepared film: “Lumiere”. Only halfway through, the Gate’s DVD machine gives up the ghost. Still, we’re happy to just hear Mr Guthrie perform, backing visuals or no. And it’s absolutely, blissfully special stuff. Perfect for a sweltering night surrounded by football insanity elsewhere. Here, you can buy a drink from a bar and enjoy something other than football. It can be done.
I recognise a few pieces from his recent score to the movie Mysterious Skin, and presume some of the other instrumentals feature on his latest album, Continental.
Kate Holmes: Doesn’t it sound fantastic? Exactly like the Cocteaus, when we went on tour with them…
She means her stint with the band Frazier Chorus.
After the main solo set, Mr G takes a Q&A from the audience. He seems rightfully cheesed-off about the venue’s DVD player letting him down, and it doesn’t help when, for a encore, the venue fails to provide him with a working microphone to do the Q&A with. It’s like Whit Stillman at the ICA the other week: London arts venues being all too happy to put on great events with an overpriced bar, with lots of management running around. But the merest basic technical requirements seem to elude them. London can be a broken embarrassment at times. Everything’s expensive – AND it doesn’t work properly.
He does mention how much he loved working on Mysterious Skin, and that he’d been waiting since 1982 for a movie soundtrack commission, always thinking his music would really suit the genre. It seems ridiculous that Mysterious Skin is his first (and to date, only) movie score. But then, it’s also ridiculous that the venue is barely half-full, despite the prescence of Emma Anderson (Lush, Sing-Sing) and Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3) after the Q&A, performing live improvisations with the man of the evening. It’s a kind of Shoegazing Legends Tournament.
Meanwhile the latest Orange Mobile TV ad features an ambient tune from the band Oceansize. It sounds impossibly like Robin Guthrie. Elsewhere Mogwai and Sigur Ros, who must surely include the Cocteaus as an influence, sell out venues several times the size of this one. I’m reminded of the time Patti Smith and PJ Harvey both had dates at the Brixton Academy. Ms Harvey’s tickets were somewhat pricier than Ms Smith’s. Once again, no glory for pioneers. Oh, except for The Smiths.
I buy the NME for about the first time in 5 years, because of The Smiths’ ‘The Queen Is Dead’ anniversary feature. And of course, it makes me annoyed. Too many swear words and exclamation marks. What is interesting is that they now carry an expanded personal ads page, including a Boys Seeking Boys section. I’m fairly sure that wasn’t in place last time I took the magazine regularly.
NME gay ads, June 2006:
“You must have GSOH, be emo, skater punk. ”
“WLMT (sic) a caring, romantic, funny, friendly, emo guy.”
DE to Emily: You’re a well-connected young person. What does ’emo’ mean?
Emily: I have absolutely no idea.
Page 46, album review: The Klaxons. I spot at least three mistakes in the following sentence:
“Klaxons once remarked to NME that they bridge the gap between Atlantis and Interzone. Yes, that’s Atlantis the lost Greek and, let’s not forget underwater island and Interzone, sci-fi writer William Burroughs’ dystopic and, let’s not forget fictional place.”
1) William Burroughs is not best described as a sci-fi writer. He is a Beat writer, or a cult author, or an experimental author, or just an author of general fiction. I’m fairly certain a librarian would back me up on this.
2) Interzone isn’t strictly fictional, as it’s Burroughs’s term for the International Zone of Tangier. Which is a very real place. I was there last December.
3) It’s Burroughs’s, not Burroughs’. Burroughs is a name, not a plural, so adds an ‘s’. As in Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Walking home, a man in a football strip kicks me as I pass, and calls me a f—- poof. I blow him a kiss and shout ‘Ah, the Beautiful Game!’. And increase my stride.
I get in to a nice chatty email from Scott Heim, author of the novel Mysterious Skin, which begat the film. So that gives the evening a pleasantly rounded finish.
[The new Robin Guthrie CD, Continental, is on Rocketgirl Records. Highly recommended.]
