imomus | The most beautiful man alive

When I delivered Mike Alway the master tapes for the very first Momus EP he delivered, in return, a classic double-edged compliment. "I love," he told me, "how you sing as if you're very, very good-looking, Nick."

I knew exactly what that "as if" meant. I wasn't good-looking -- I was a man with a narrow horsey face, a jutting triangular nose and a slightly receding golfball chin -- but somehow I felt good-looking inside. Perhaps I thought I could become charismatic by force of will, forcing others to accept my own self-appraisal by acting the part I wanted to be. Or perhaps I wanted simply to inscribe myself into a tradition of music made by good-looking people.

I was an ugly narcissist who admired narcissistic singers; at that point David Sylvian, David Bowie and Joni Mitchell were heroes of mine, and their work was full of a glamourously tragic sense that they were each just a little too beautiful to live. Combine that "fell to Earth" quality with life's inevitable banalities and tragedies -- "World's Most Beautiful Man Scarred in Car Crash" ran The Sun's headline when Sylvian was involved in a minor traffic accident -- and you got a compellingly mythical masochistic dynamic, a New Romantic-inspired, gay-friendly aesthetic which could link Derek Jarman's Sebastian with The Man Who Fell To Earth, and Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ with the imagery of Pierre et Gilles. Given a touch of canny music hall comedy, it could even give you Morrissey.

I was thinking about this stuff again yesterday because, manning a stall at the Smart Deli festival, I saw Maximilian Hecker. He was with the only girl I've ever found attractive in Berlin, a hipster student I completely embarrassed myself trying to impress three years ago.

Check out his videos on YouTube and you'll quickly get a sense of Hecker (essentially self-generated, but borne out by those around him, and written into the very core of his songwriting) as "the most beautiful man alive". There he is in Polyester wearing a suit of armour and singing in falsetto how "touching flowers we are screaming". He looks a bit like Toog, but he sounds uncomfortably close to Coldplay, and completely lacks Toog's self-deprecating sense of humour. Unless... unless it's all some sort of grand conceptual joke?

I've never really known what to make of Hecker. I saw him live at Kunst-Werke once. He was hunched over his piano like a fashion goth version of Richard Clayderman. His act really burned with narcissistic intensity. "I am too intense, talented and good-looking to live," it seemed to say. But it was in an art gallery, and that's a place where gestures are always ambiguous -- quotes of other gestures, masks concealing other masks. My jealousy of his youth and beauty -- and the fact that he was friends with "the only attractive girl in Berlin" (apart from my girlfriend, of course) -- led me to conclude that he was simply ludicrously narcissistic, but at the same time I found that interesting; that there should be a young German singer, signed to the trendy Kitty-Yo label, dabbling in German Romanticism. Oh, and modeling.

Yes, for a while Hecker was on the books of Viva Models. In advertising campaigns, dressed up and styled, he could look like a young Alain Delon or Jacques Dutronc. Reviews of his work always mentioned this; Pitchfork, for instance, made it a central plank of their ambivalence towards his debut album that he was, to Viva, "the very essence of the "poor sweet shy-boy thing". Others noted a resemblance -- cultivated by Hecker himself; he used to do Oasis covers live -- to Liam Gallagher.

The way Hecker is presented in his Fool video certainly makes him look more like a sensitive, effete Gallagher than, say, a Patrick Wolf. There are shades of Richard Ashcroft, too, in the absolutely missionary sense of vanity; both Ashcroft and Hecker seem to want to launch a crusade with images of their own faces blazoned on the flags. "Fool" also sounds like enfeebled Coldplay, except for one very interesting section where a Michel Legrandesque arpeggio gets edited against the beat, forming a gentle jump cut. Here I prick up my ears; narcissistic-romantic epic balladry combined with left-field avant pop editing is something I've been much attracted to on my last few albums. I like warmth and sentimentality and smoochiness, but feel the need to keep cutting up the too-traditional chord sequences of Enka or Chinese drinking ballads with something more challenging.

Unfortunately this is the only place in Hecker's work where I can find him taking formal risks and optimizing his marginality. Elsewhere he seems to be aiming to be "the German Cat Stevens of 21st century". He clearly wants to be mainstream and fill stadiums with dreaming women, not just in Germany but, as The Guardian put it, "to seduce those finger-twiddling Coldplay fans beyond the Black Forest". The thing is, the Anglo world won't buy this "beautiful man" schtick any more -- not without some sort of working class grit angle, or at least a few overdriven guitars. It isn't the New Romantic era any more. Pitchfork mocks "the boiled-until-flavorless "Today," a sappy plea for maternal love on the day that Hecker plans to kill himself" and approves a darker moment in which "Hecker repeatedly mumbles in malevolence, "I'm using gloves".

According to one super-precious album title, Hecker "is a virgin, is a mountain". I wouldn't go so far. I'd say he's a classic, and pretty, pale young man. At the moment he seems to be big only in Taiwan, which is fine, it's a big market. Aesthetically I'm much more interested in his labelmates Tarwater, whose music is full of fabulous textures and who write fantastically elliptical lyrics with real literary quality. But those few chopped-up seconds at the end of "Fool" prevent me from discarding Hecker as "just another pretty face". Or rather, stop me saying that that's inherently a bad thing to be. Inside Maximilian Hecker there may yet be a David Sylvian. Or, even better, a Dutronc from the period of "Les Roses Fanées": beau garcon ironique. Or, as Jane Birkin smirks, "gigolo, gigolo, gigolo".

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From: (Anonymous)

not without some sort of working class grit angle, or at least a few overdriven guitars.

Seems to be a theme of yours, a kind of reverse chippiness that pop is associated with the working class and you didn't make it in the UK because you were too posh. Not sure I really buy it. Not sure I really buy that dandyism is dead in the UK either.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

Oh, it's not dead. But look at one of its exemplars, Paul Weller. Note that he combines prettiness and delicacy with an edge of aggression, derision, hostiiity. That pretty brow of his is always slightly creased into a frown, and that for me is terribly British. The same goes for Ashcroft or Gallagher. There's never the sexy smirk of a Dutronc, or the wide beam of a Julio Iglesias. And the frown is definitely a class signifier. And its aural equivalent is an angry sounding guitar, slightly overdriven (but not so much to upset the essentially ballad quality of the melancholy stadium anthem you're singing).

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