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!

[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!

[(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]

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]

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)]

I dunno, a parallel-universe Momus-as-design-professor would probably still be blogging, or at least writing books.

dinnertime conversation touched the possibilities for my future (Father thinks missionary work!)

Given the didactic nature of a lot of this blog, the old man wasn't exactly wrong, was he?

[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.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think he was bang on. Job description: Secular Missionary. (In secondhand Missoni.)

[(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...

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Sounds like all the bands 20 year olds still listen to now.

[(Anonymous)]

Indeed.

Thanks for that, Momus. It does seem like it was an amazing time, a sort of final outburst of creativity following the pop explosions of the 60s and 70s. Not a lot original has really happened in pop/rock since.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And that's what's so extraordinarily sad. Can you imagine us, in 1980, having nothing better to listen to than mid-1950s rock?

Someone said last week that I was just being an old man, saying "It were better when I were a lad". But even if we cast aside qualitative arguments, look at the quantitative stuff: in 1980 there were four weekly music publications in the UK -- Sounds, Melody Maker, NME and Record Mirror. All looking for new music, all ready to bring interesting bands to the attention of their readers. Now there's just one, a lobotomized NME that, despite being the sole survivor, can't even scrape together the readership it had back in 1980. Not only is the tone dumber, the paper really isn't rewarding innovation -- which we could define as "doing something a bit different from musicians 27 years before".

Of course, the irony is that it's precisely people saying "modern music is rubbish" which makes the bands go back to old music, which in turn makes modern music rubbish. It's a vicious circle. And really, it's out of control, because it's all about demographics in the end. The reason we have retro necro (http://imomus.livejournal.com/255928.html) culture is because of pigs in the pipe (http://imomus.livejournal.com/283498.html).

[(Anonymous)]

Post-punk might have been the swansong for the sort of pop that developed from the Beatles and the Velvet Underground. But surely it's no coincidence that hip hop was picking up speed just as rock went into decline. But rock had a pretty good run as the locus of "meaning" in our culture, from the mid-fifties to the mid-eighties.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Paul Morley:

"Now that the musical spirit of the early Eighties has been allowed into the mainstream, it seems a shame that it's all so chained and cute. Although the music sounds like the music of PiL, Joy Division, Fire Engines, Wire, Go4, Josef K, Scars, Monochrome Set, sometimes unnervingly so, it lacks understanding of the political, social, artistic and moral reasons the music originally sounded the way it did."

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"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..."


That wasnt the 80's, that was a parallel universe, you accidentally tripped into a worm hole. The Daily Mail never used to be a left-wing newspaper that championed the liberal agenda, you got it all wrong Momus! I'm glad you're back with us though.

NME is an indie rag nowdays. Who gives a shit about how much coke pete Doherty is doing or wants to see naked pictures of Beth Ditto coz she's topped NME's cool list?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on everything except the use of the word "indie"! To me it still means something. And does Doherty use an independent distribution network? Does he fuck! He's on EMI / Parlophone, whose only claim to indie cred is that EMI is the only remaining UK-owned major label. It's something, I suppose, but "indie" it ain't!

Indie is... ME, damn it!

[(Anonymous)]

Isn't this just playing the rockist card? It was authentic back then, it isn't now... and isn't this "signifiers floating free from the signified" something you'd actually be praising if it was happening in Japan?

Also, let's not forget that a lot of those post-punk bands copped criticism at the time for ripping off 60s rock. I remember Echo & The Bunnymen being accused (a little justifiably) of sounding like The Doors, Joy Division obviously owe a large debt to The Velvet Underground, and everyone in that scene owes a debt to Bowie... at the time it wasn't so clear that everything was marvellously new. You may not have all been sitting around listening to mid-50s rock, but you were certainly lisening to mid-60s rock.

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

I'm dealing with this with my younger sister (20) right now. I don't think she can see any ideological difference between the old stuff and what's coming out now. But I do. The new stuff just seems like a veneer, a lifestyle, what you listen to so while you drive yawnily through McAnyplace, vaguely dissatisfied but not willing to do a damn thing about it except buy stuff. Sk8er Boi!

My favorite comment, from sis' boyfriend: "They don't even know what real punk is. They don't listen to, like, the old stuff like Green Day and stuff. They don't even know who that is."

...I was a Birthday Party, Patti Smith and Kraftwerk girl.

[(Anonymous)]

And yet if EMI actually came calling, don't tell me you wouldn't sign on the dotted line!

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

Dude, the Joseph Beuys pic caused an oxytocin surge.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

At a certain point -- 1992, to be precise -- I was flirting with Murray Chalmers (Pet Shop Boys / Morrissey press officer at EMI) and hoping to get signed by Parlophone via the "gay mafia" -- manager Tom Watkins etc etc. You can hear the forking of the ways very clearly that year: there are two Momus albums, a topical, lush, rhetorically universalizing dance record called Voyager and an eccentric indie one called The Ultraconformist.

I think there are benefits to both, and I try to keep populist and quirky stuff going on in my music to this day. But signing to a major cuts you off from the R&D side, the quirky side, the try-anything side. Sure, Radiohead "used electronics", but were they emotionallyexperimental?

The trouble with success is that it makes it so hard to succeed. Whereas if you fail, you can't fail.