Demos podcast: Edinburgh messthetics

[imomus]

This is where it all started for me, musically speaking. Here's the ten-song demo I handed Josef K guitarist Malcolm Ross in 1981, the one that persuaded him to form a group with me. The tape was marked, rather confidently, "Pre-demo demo: Germs of Gems". The artist name was "Group of 1" (a reference to a line on Bowie's song "Teenage Wildlife" -- "I feel like a group of one") and, since the tape's purpose was to get me signed to Postcard Records, I added, cheekily, the motto: "The sound of young bourgeois Scotland". Postcard's motto was "The sound of young Scotland", but the "bourgeois" bit was because on the tape I'd written my embarrassingly posh address: 7 Ainslie Place, where I was living in a Kafkaesque mezzanine between my father's flat and the practice of two old lady psychoanalysts.



What strikes me now about this material is how avant and experimental it sounds. Influenced by reggae dub, by the scratchy-funky "messthetics" of early Scritti Politti, by Eno and Talking Heads and ethnic music, recording lo-fi on cassettes and two track machines intended for my dad's language college, I ended up with a homemade quality which I now find texturally a lot more interesting -- despite the muffled audio quality -- either than the sound of the band the tape led to, or the more folksy-trad acoustic guitar sound I embraced on my first solo album. Closer to what I do now when I record, in fact.

Back in 1980, though, the sound was partly a case of necessity mothering invention -- the guitar I had at the time was a battered acoustic with one string -- the fourth -- missing. That divided the instrument into a two-stringed acoustic bass and a 3-stringed top guitar, which I recorded in separate takes to the little two track cassette machine. It also led to much more interesting arrangements than chordal strumming on a "healthy" guitar. The top guitar, with no fixed tuning, dances or slides glassily about while the bass chugs and improvises below.

My lack of an amp also forced me to invent interesting recording techniques, so there are twanging strings with the mic wedged directly under them, cemented into place with wads of tissue paper, or close-mic'ed harmonics above the bridge. There are reverse-decaying backwards guitars or even rhythm guitars recorded without reference to the rest of the song, and laid in at random in the mix, swaying in and out of time and setting up some interesting polyrhythms. The percussion isn't carried by a drumkit, but by all the instruments playing their own frantic, scratchy, eccentric rhythms, with the occasional cowbell or kick drum mimicked by cups, cardboard boxes, and an anglepoise lamp spring for a cymbal. This is a sound I could happily return to, a kind of funky communist avant pop.

The communist bit is in the lyrics, which pay tribute above all to Brecht ("Antigone" takes its entire lyric from a Brecht poem), but also to The Passage (a highly underrated, innovative electronic band on Cherry Red, with committed leftist lyrics), celebrate the Spartacists, decry puritanism and commerce and demand that "lullabies by liberals for sordid sorts by swimming pools" be stuffed full of cotton wool and fed to the dog. Revolution... but not as we know it, Jim. There's also a strain of Josef K-like "nervousness romanticism", and some Dostoyevsky by way of Magazine ("Its tricks drive me furious when they add insult to injury... Why can't my double learn a little decency?" goes one song, sounding an awful lot like "My Tulpa"-period Howard Devoto).

It's interesting that so little of this material got recorded later. Of the ten songs, only three made it onto Happy Family records. So I guess the tape is almost like a "lost album". For something recorded (Christ!) twenty-six years ago, it sounds quite fresh.

Germs of Gems: Pre-demo demo (12.7MB mono mp3 file, 27 mins 41secs)

Deny It
Spartacus
So They Say
Puritans
My Double
Innermost Thoughts
Antigone
The Salesman
Catalogues
For You

Since I was "blogging" back then too -- well, keeping a diary -- I can give you the context for one of the tracks. Here's my entry for the day I wrote and recorded "Catalogues":

"Tuesday, January 1st 1980

The day's first engagement, Kenny Everett at 3.35, presented David Bowie in a padded cell (Kafka's metaphor for the world) and a kitchen with exploding appliances and windows, singing "Space Oddity". His expression was of bewilderment, fear, his little boy lost manner, used to uneasy effect.

Meanwhile the media paraded predictions, people projecting their own psyches onto the future.

Soon I returned to my two-track machine to regain the purposeful & creative element so necessary. The chief achievement was 'Catalogues', starting as a rhythm track with tin, bottle and shoebox percussion, then gathering layers. Finally it had a stereo vocal, an alliterative, nonsense-cum-critical lyric with stuttering rhythm. I worked some time on different versions, very tensed and eager. Listened to it on the stereo while Father and Chris Garner (colleague in Athens) talked shop; predictions again. Some very bitter coffee compounded the effects of my nervous mood, and I continued my bizarre habits regarding sleeping hours.

Scraps: dinnertime conversation touched the possibilities for my future (Father thinks missionary work!) and the over-exuberance of [name removed] last night, lifting his kilt to his guests, insulting his wife.

The hamster grates his teeth up and down the bars of his cage, widening the furrow in his jaw, as if his life depended on it."

It might be fun to transcribe more of these 1980 diaries... They could have their own blog somewhere! Meanwhile, the only photo of myself at 20 I have to hand is this fuzzy one of me listening to Joseph Beuys.

There's just one more demos podcast I want to release after this, a tape called "Innermost Thoughts" which compiles all my experiments pre-1981. I'm still searching for that one in the cellar. In the meantime, if you want to make donations in exchange for these podcasts, there's a button here.

Comments

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"The sound of young bourgeois Scotland"

Oh, you are such a card. I daresay I haven´t laughed this much since last night when I started rereading Cold Comfort Farm.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Do The Bastinado!

I have longed for a reference to The Passage for so long now. One could hear a Pindrop all the way from Anderton's Hall. What happened to bands whose album sides HAD to be 23 mins long AND people would NOTICE that?

"Are you ready, get ready..."

The Passage's Dick Witts is now a Music lecturer at Edinburgh University

We used to play them full blast on ghetto blasters we would take into some of the first Safeways, especially the one out at East Craigs by the dump. The Number 12 bus from there to Prestonpans was one of the longest bus journeys in Edinburgh.

Speaking of busses I spotted a Number 47 in one of those pics. A friends proto New Romantic outfit were struggling for lyrics and I gave them a scribbled poem called "47 home". All broken mirrors and cracked faces. Those were the days!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

We're all cracked facets of the same jewel, Raymond! Or do I mean cranked fawcets?

Somewhere I have a photo of me and Dick Witts posing together in the Gardening section of Borders on Oxford Street.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

By the way, the photos of Edinburgh are from a 1966 film I found on a DVD (http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/films/15310) here in Berlin. Great stuff, three films:

* "Waverley Steps" (the 1948 Edinburgh classic, a sort of fictionalised documentary)

* A restored 1937 film called "Northern Capital" showing everyday life in Edinburgh (trams everywhere!)

* A 1966 film just called "Edinburgh" and shot in Technicolor.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Hats off to those recordings, Momus! Have you seen many japanese movies by the way? I have these small memories of a japanese movie I saw several years ago:

When I was younger I saw a Japanese movie about a woman who enjoyed painting poetry on peoples bare naked bodies. She soon had an affair with a western young man who knew a publisher. They start working together and the woman in question writes poetry on the mans body and delivers it to the publisher. Soon though she realise that the publisher and her lover are having an affair as well. She breaks up (I think) with her former lover and start painting poetry on other peoples bare naked bodies. To her publishers own wrath though she has started to paint her poetry more secretively. Her publisher even throws out a man who got her poetry painted on the tounge... Well, there my memory stops.

If you happen know what movie it is, I would be very grateful if you could tell me!

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

It sounds like The Pillow Book (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114134/) which is my sexiest film of all time...

[(Anonymous)]

You called your Dad "Father"? How Edwardian! I'd totally read a blog of your 1980 diaries. Were you still a virgin when you did these demos?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I lost my virginity in May 1981, so possibly right between "My Double" and "Innermost Thoughts". Can you hear it?

[(Anonymous)]

The precise moment it all went wrong for you, Momus. You were seduced into a world for which you're eminently ill-equipped. If Ross had turned you down, you'd probably now be lecturing about design at some trendy art school, and much the better for it.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, but then we´d all be missing out on posturing and being clever in his journal, and what a loss that would be.

[(Anonymous)]

Apart from Bowie and The Passage, what music would you have been listening to back in 1980? Were you a Joy Division fan? Were you into disco at all? What did you think of all the New Romantic stuff that was going on then? Is there stuff that you hated then and like now, or vice versa? 1979-81 seems like a bit of a mythical time to me, the zenith of post-punk - did it feel like that at the time?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

what music would you have been listening to back in 1980

The other side of the demos cassette goes some way to answering that: it's stuff I taped off Peel.

New Order, Fire Engines, Ludus, The Associates, Rip Rig and Panic and a touch of NDW in the form of Die Partie (a "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" rip called "Die Freiheit des Geistes").

I was also listening to a lot of Wire, and Wire offshoots like Dome, Cupol, ACMariasAC, etc. I was a Joy Division fan, but not enough to bother seeing them live (I remember listening to them through the door of the Aberdeen Capitol, just hearing the throbbing noise, but not bothering to go in). I did like "Closer" a lot, though. Side 2, anyway. I was into Sylvester and Donna Summer, as far as disco went. I was a bit snooty about Gary Numan, but loved John Foxx's "Underpass" single. I liked Simple Minds until they went Thatcherite with all that "big gold dream" rhetoric. I followed Paul Haig's solo career, but found that he never lived up to the greatness of Josef K. We were all impressed, in Edinburgh, by Heaven 17 and the Human League -- that idea of intelligent chart-enterism. (Plus Jo Callis was one of ours.) I also liked people like Thomas Leer, home recording mavericks. And Scritti, and Vic Godard. Orange Juice veered a wee bit too much into the trad, the twee and the sentimental for my tastes. Aztec Camera were too precious and narcissistic. I loved The Birthday Party too. And PiL.

I'd say that period really was -- from the perspective of now and from the perspective of then -- a zenith, a time when independent music really was the most exciting thing happening. The UK music press -- the NME in particular -- was also better than it would ever be again. An incredibly sharp and intelligent paper back then, constantly talking about Nietzsche and Barthes and Camus and Bataille and even Beuys...

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

Dude, the Joseph Beuys pic caused an oxytocin surge.

Awaiting CD Box Set...

[stjamesdawson.livejournal.com]

Yet another set of songs that those of us who still buy CDs would buy on CD. (Having a dial-up connection is hell...) Throw everything you've uploaded together, make it a box set, thrill the Luddites like me who are in your readership. (And don't forget to include "I Killed a Little Bansai Tree"...)

Re: Awaiting CD Box Set...

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

If you want, I could always split up the songs and email them to you one by one. I sympathize with you, up until June I had dial-up, and it was most certainly hell.

[(Anonymous)]

You absolutely MUST blog your 80s diary.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

this was wonderful. thank you

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Damn it Nick, because of you I had a dream about Brecht! It drove me crazy in my dream trying to pronounce his name!

http://www.davidbowie.com/ $64.95

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Listened to it while I watched "Women in Uniform" with Nina Mercedes with the sound off. I swear there is some B. Dylan in there. Just add a harmonica. Sort of "MoMUS" unplugged album. Domo

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

That's fucking great! Why don't you send it to Paw Tracks or something, just for fun?

[(Anonymous)]

Awesome!
Almost like a lost Captain Beefheart album in parts!
I dig the lo-finess for sure

[(Anonymous)]

Excerpt from a Pitchfork interview with Daryl Hall:

"He's enthusiastic about the "anything goes" attitude of the 00s, where pop, punk and soul rub elbows and nobody's too cool to dig "Rich Girl". "What's happening now is the best thing that's happened to music in 40 years," says Hall. "And it's great for people like me, because I am not easy to categorize."

Pitchfork: You've been talking about how the business is more indie, and you have control over your career, and you've got the fanbase, the website, and the history. And I've talked to a lot of artists at a lot of different strata who have that opportunity, who can run their careers that way, and it's really great to see it.

DH: I look at myself as a bit of a pioneer about that too. In the mid-90s, that's when I went indie. We started making indie records out of necessity, and we were trying to figure out how to deal with it. And we've been doing it now since the mid-90s. And I think that our contemporaries are catching up to us. I mean, everybody I know, if they're not indie, they're suffering. You can be Rod Stewart, and be Clive Davis' dog, and have a career at the expense of your artistic soul. I have nothing but negative things to say about that, because I respect him as a singer, and I hate what he does. He sold his soul. And I take that personally.

But if you're not going to do that, and you're not going to scramble around, then you are really out of necessity forced these days-- and luckily, we had the jump on it-- to think out of the box. Even if you don't want to, you've got to. And that's what we've always done. I just say, "Okay, here's a wall, let me go around that wall." And we have ten years of experience on everybody else about that. And we've learned how to do it, we're still learning because it's changing constantly.

I'm into the change, I love it. I love the fact that the record companies are all going down. This is a personal triumph for me. I beat the record companies. Sony Music may go out of business, but I'm not going out of business. And Tower Records, I walked down the street six months ago and saw the boards on the walls, and I went, "I'm still here, and they're gone."

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/44913-interview-daryl-hall

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I once had nextdoor neighbours who used to play a lot of Hall and Oates. I'm still here, and they're gone.

[(Anonymous)]

Just the other day, I was reading an unnecessarily extensive fan-interview (http://caughtinthecarousel.com/Interviews/interviewsJAZZBUTCHER.html) with Pat Fish (The Jazz Butcher), wherein he recalls:

At the end of 1981 I moved briefly to a village in Northamptonshire. I didn’t know anybody there and I didn’t have any money, but I did have this old Amstrad twin deck cassette player where, thanks to a truly life-changing design oversight, you could make primitive and very hissy overdubs. You see, the internal microphones stayed open while you were copying a tape from one deck to the other. I’m sure it wasn’t meant to be like that, but it suited me just fine. As I taught myself to play guitar, I also taught myself how to make the most of primitive music skills by arranging simple shit together on tape. Using an electric bar fire as a drum kit (you get a great spring reverb on the “snare” from the heating elements inside), a nylon string guitar liberated from the Royal Navy, a tenor sax and a glockenspiel, I embarked on a period of learning/writing that provided the raw material for all of [first Jazz Butcher album] Bath and about 35% of [second one] Scandal.
...
The initial cassette was in a run of four. One went to my mate John Silver, with whom I had been in a band. One went to a man called Terence Walpole, who is a mad lunatic of my acquaintance. One went to Mike Alway, then at Cherry Red Records, because I thought it might make him laugh. The fourth went to D. Elvis Barker at Glass Records, because he was about the only person I knew who had a record label. Scarcely credibly, for the cassette was shit, Alway wrote back by hand, demanding more. Then Barker phoned up and asked if I wanted to do a single. I was more than astonished. When young ‘uns come and say, “Uncle Pat, you’ve had the odd record deal. How do we go about getting one?” I always have to tell them that I have no idea.

You'll understand why I raise it...

Germ of Gems

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, you bastard - 64kbps - is that all you could manage? Or is that just to stop unscrupulous people piling this onto a CD-R and flogging it for vast sums of money on eBay?
Hmph - nice to have anyway.