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imomus
It's not just the decade that changes between 1989's Don't Stop The Night and 1991's Hippopotamomus. 1990 has been a "marking time" sort of year for Momus, with Creation releasing a compilation, Monsters of Love (featuring three new tracks). Compilations often signal the twilight of the artist-label relationship; certainly things were more distant between Momus and Creation. I was avoiding direct contact with McGee -- who was taking too many drugs and had become erratic and megalomaniacal -- and signed with Angie Somerside at Orange, a management company with The Beloved on their books. All Angie had really managed to do for me, though, was renew my tenuous Creation deal (negotiations with Mute, whose worldview seemed to fit mine better, stalled). Just staying in the same place seemed like hard work.It was also increasingly hard work staying in the context of Britain. After the disappointment of Hairstyle I'd essentially given up on the British market, becoming -- as the headline of a 1990 Gay Times interview put it -- an "internal exile". I'd kitted out my Cleveland Street flat with a mini studio in the shape of an Atari STE 1040 and an Akai S900 sampler; it became an arty sort of bunker where I could weather any storm and still make records. That flat became a bubble filled with french pop -- Mylene Farmer, Lio, Jacques Dutronc, Serge Gainsbourg. That and "daisy age" acid jazz and trip hop -- Galliano, Dream Warriors, Massive Attack, Soul II Soul, Neneh Cherry, De La Soul.
If Don't Stop The Night contains a jaded, unhealthy ambition, Hippopotamomus reflects someone who's renounced all claim on the UK mainstream and found a niche -- a warm, sensual place in the sun, adrift from Anglo-Saxon morals, from guilt and from censure. Hippopotamomus is a post-Three Feet High and Rising take on Gainsbourg's quiet, rude, happy 1974 album Vu De L'Exterieur, and bears the same relationship to Hairstyle of the Devil that the Gainsbourg "monkey album" bears to his 1969 hit Je T'Aime, Moi Non Plus. We'd both retreated to private pleasures -- though not without some residual desire to scandalize.
Hippopotamomus -- recorded the same month Gainsbourg died in Paris, and containing his decanted soul, in many ways -- didn't much please Creation (or the NME, for that matter, who, at the height of their political correctness, blasted it for "sexism"). So how does it sound now? Let's listen. (Lyrics, reviews and interviews are here, and there's a diary of the recording sessions here.)
Momus
Hippopotamomus
1991
1. Hippopotamomus: The album drifts in with an odd juxtaposition: an acid arpeggio figure and the ghostly sound of Flanders and Swann's Hippopotamus Song. The vocal is a comic poem delivered in a sexy, gruff voice (I arranged phlegm in my throat to get the sound of one million Gitanes, then whacked a ton of compression on). The hippo narrator has been caught in volcanic ash in the act of fucking his mate, and put on show at the Museum of Natural History in South Kensington. The track builds rather well, punctuated by the backing vocals of comic singer Preacher Harry Powell, and ends with Flanders and Swann again.How I rate this now: It's not so much a song, per se, as a scene-setter -- an impishly perverse, childish tale you might tell your lover to amuse her in between bouts of lovemaking. What's rather nice here, I think, is that the world-weariness of Trust Me, I'm A Doctor or the bitterness of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous has gone, replaced by the sound of someone who's found some kind of contentment.
2. I Ate A Girl Right Up: The trivial, childish tone continues with this song, which bounces along on fun, bubbly drum and bass programming I'd made with my new Atari and Akai (the bass is a Gameboy sample). A warm, lively reggae feel (punctuated by dirty trombone parps) develops as the cannibal details his human meal. There's some intellectual subversion here, too, though: "I crossed the line dividing clean from dirty" refers to a little book I'd read by Christian Enzensberger, Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt (1972), which linked authoritarianism with obsessive cleanliness and proposed experimental incursions into dirt as a kind of cure for fascism. (The critics, not having read this book, naturally thought it was about Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.)
How I rate this now: I think it's got a very interesting sound -- the fruit of much experimentation with sampling and sequencing -- and it shows me embracing the technology of the new decade with some enthusiasm, as well as achieving a rather pleasant warmth and intimacy. It's not going to win any Ivor Novello awards for songwriting, though.
3. Made of Rubber: This may surprise some, but Little Richard is a big influence on this album. I'd just read his biography, and totally admired the raw sexuality of his 1950s work -- the short, punchy songs with their erotic themes, the inventive nursery talk of "wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom". This song imagines a sexual tryst between the Michelin Man (an advertising icon representing rubber tyres, but also gourmet cuisine, thanks to Terence Conran) and Josephine Baker; he's going to "bump her till her bed's just junk", apparently. If she pumps him up, anyway. I also remember that the lyrics to these songs were scribbled in a Futurist Diary, which might explain the 1920s feel -- that combination of technological novelty and social depravity (the "pneumatic" babes of Ford's Brave New World).
How I rate this now: The stadium reverb is a bit too much, and the song isn't as satisfying, sonically, as I Ate A GIrl Right Up. When Michelin threatened to sue (they apparently read the lyric out at a board meeting -- oh to have been there!) we dropped the song (and the original sleeve) without much of a fight.
4. A Dull Documentary: Freud's Primal Scene for Beginners! The narrator is banging the babysitter, and can't bring himself to stop when the little girl enters the room. Here the subject matter becomes dangerously risqué, at least for prudish British people (it's the song that made the NME reviewer sick). I remember telling friends that I wanted to make the most sexual record anyone had ever released with Hippopotamomus -- not sure if I succeeded (the competition was, um, stiff), but this does cross some sort of red line in terms of subject matter.
How I rate this now: The low voice doesn't really work, and the Chopsticks motif is a little annoying. The song, as you'll recall, was originally part of my abandoned BBC 1 album about television, but obviously fits the Hippo worldview. I don't really enjoy it, though.
5. Marquis of Sadness: It's worth remembering that in 1991 the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom was still banned in Britain, and that Pasolini's film of the novel could only be shown uncensored in private clubs. Hippopotamomus filters sex through french literature -- that peculiarly french sub-genre of pornography written by philosophers and poets (Sade, Diderot, Apollinaire, Verlaine, Louys). I was spending a lot of time in Grant and Cutler -- London's foreign language bookshop -- at the time, and coming home with these elegantly smutty books. Quite possibly the kind of thing the hero of this song (co-sung by my flatmate Vicky) would be going through with pretty students in one-on-one tutorials on his sofa.How I rate this now: I remember this being my mother's favourite song on the album -- we're all a bit literary in my family, and all a bit flirty. This song is fun, a bit naff, mocks your inner puritan, and makes a neat connection between books and longing, poetry and presence. I like the squeal Vicky does at the end -- I had to tickle her to get that exact sound. And, you know, I didn't tickle anyone when making Murderers, the Hope of Women, even if it's a much better song.
6. Bluestocking: The link between sex and books continues as a "bluestocking... gives head", in every sense. She's read a lot, and she gives great head -- in the form of a sung reading list. The reading at the end of phrases from Marguerite Duras' The Lover by Catherine Brouard (aka Zoe Pascale) is lovely, and reminds me how much she influenced me; it was Catherine who first played me Brassens, for instance, and taught me sensual playfulness, and how to explore and share fantasies where anything went. She was my erotic professor and my entrée into French culture, and she had to have a cameo role on this record -- the culmination and climax, perhaps, of her influence on me over the preceding decade. I wonder where she is now?
How I rate this now: One of my favourite tracks on Hippopotamomus.
7. Ventriloquists and Dolls: This is a better song than anything else on the record, a rewrite of Strangers In The Night which tells the tale of a pervy ventriloquist and his relationship with his pretty dummy. Noko's guitar really adds to the creepy atmosphere and inevitably summons Magazine comparisons. I like the theme; that there's a kind of fatal symbiosis between categories of people.
How I rate this now: Shit hot; the best song so far, with a really funky feel (the bassline is particularly good here, and the eerie clouds of mist that drift across the ending).
8. The Painter and his Model: This sounds like Kraftwerk jamming with Shakatak (a piano-oriented 80s easy listening band). The artist narrator is making a painting of a woman using shreds of her clothes, and there's much play on the double meaning (mimetic and biological) of "reproduction". The Theatre and Its Double is a book by Antonin Artaud, and the idea is that art-about-sex maps to sex itself, a theme that will return in the final song (in a legal framing), and which also raises the question of how close the "pornographer" making this record is to an actual seducer, and whether crimes described are the same as crimes committed. This was an era, remember, very much interested in the possibility of thoughtcrime.
How I rate this now: It's slight, but pleasant. On its own this wouldn't be much, but I think that by this point we're really feeling the cumulative force of the album's unrelenting theme, its obsessive fixation on transgressive sex. In that sense, what emerges from Hippopotamomus is a lot stronger than its individual components.
9. A Monkey for Sallie: Sallie was a girl I'd dated in 1989, someone who worked at Rough Trade (she later married Bill Drummond, though I believe they're divorced now). She adored her labrador and was distraught when it died in 1990, so I suppose this song gifts her with a substitute. But it's also a Gainsbourgian tale of a masturbating monkey which -- like the album itself -- permits itself anything, and comes across as rather cute and appealing as a result. Playing with yourself "from dawn to dusk, from dusk to the crack of dawn" -- as monkeys notoriously do in zoos -- could be a sort of utopia, after all; a life containing only pleasure. Actually, this song applies very much to my current pet, my oversexed rabbit Pok.
How I rate this now: I find this quite charming. Musically it all meshes quite well -- the fretless bass, the sample from Stockhausen's Kontakte, the Mellotron-like chords.
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10. Pornography: Believe it or not, I saw very little pornography until my late 20s. Before the internet you had to go into shops to buy it, and I was much too shy and prim to do that. When I did finally see hardcore pornography -- in a Hamburg hotel room, whilst touring with Primal Scream -- my initial reaction was that this supposedly toxic thing, this thing UK Customs searched you for and the UK police raided you for, was surprisingly natural and innocuous, just naked bodies and people enjoying themselves. Was this really going to bring down the state? So, while pornography isn't quite "a young girl's diary", it is "just the body". Nothing to be scared of. And indeed, by 1991 the British government was allowing me to enjoy heavily-censored soft porn movies via Westminster Cable TV, many of them accompanied by gorgeous 1970s easy-disco soundtracks; another influence here.
How I rate this now: This simple song has something spookily beautiful about it -- it's one of the album's most gorgeous. Chilled-out sounds from Warp's Artificial Intelligence series give this a very 1991 feel, and prefigure the otherwordly atmosphere of some of the Aphex Twin's Ambient recordings.
11. Song in Contravention: This spacey ballad owes a lot to Gainsbourg songs like Mélodie Interdite (the theme) and Ballade de Johnny Jane (the music). The language is legalistic, reading like a writ. The "love outside the law" this time is homosexuality, and the song's target is the Section 28 legislation the Tories have enacted against the "promotion of homosexuality". Britain, it seems to me, is sexually sick. The album ends -- on some lush, sensuous string chords -- with the lines "the prosecution rests its case", and the sound of what might be a spacecraft taking off for new lands -- a world, perhaps, where human sexuality and human society can co-exist in harmony.
How I rate this now: Rather gorgeous, and a surprising ending -- the rather flip and glib and gigglish songs at the start of the album have led to some kind of soulful sci-fi sound suffused with longing. This -- a sound I'll christen "science fiction melodrama" -- will become the dominant tone of my next two albums, my last for Creation: Voyager and Timelord.
Next: Voyager (1992).
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-18 09:59 pm (UTC)I need to download "Don't Stop The Night" and "Hippopotamomus" as, for various reasons, I only owned them on cassette, and didn't retain my cassettes when moving to the US recently. I also need "Live Whilst Out Of Fashion", which I only had on vinyl, but got damaged.
Interested to see what you have to sy about Voyager next - it was the first Momus album I heard but didn't like...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-18 10:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-18 10:02 pm (UTC)-r
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Date: 2008-12-18 10:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-18 10:28 pm (UTC)I have Voyager cd I can numerise if you want mp3, do you want me to send u songs?
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From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-18 10:38 pm (UTC)men are scared women will laugh at them, women are scared men will kill them
Date: 2008-12-18 10:49 pm (UTC)OMG I want to listen to it now but I only have it on vinyl and it's late.
Thankyou.
Date: 2008-12-19 12:09 am (UTC)JOEMUS
Date: 2008-12-19 12:18 am (UTC)thoifm@aol.com
Re: JOEMUS
Date: 2008-12-19 12:20 am (UTC)the verse in bluestockings....
Date: 2008-12-19 12:27 am (UTC)this is the earliest momus album i own and one of my favourites.
Re: the verse in bluestockings....
Date: 2008-12-19 12:34 am (UTC)Re: the verse in bluestockings....
From:(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-19 12:42 am (UTC)HIPPOPOTAMOMUS
The new LP from MOMUS
There now follows a short documentary.
1. Stuart Maconie, NME: 'Momus is probably the most original voice operating in pop today.'
2. Music plays, we see the Michelin Man with a hippo's head. Momus murmurs 'Then a team of boring scientists shoved us in a crate, packed it up with straw and then conveyed me and my mate to the Museum of Natural History, where between two stuffed camels they stuck us in this case labelled 'copulating artiodactyl mammals'.
3. A fat nursery-maid in a Czech animation of 'Alice in Wonderland' jiggles a grotesque baby and sings 'He only does it to annoy because he knows it teases'.
4. A Simon Frith review getting edited for a press release: 'Nick Currie, seductive song titles, seductive songs, an old bohemian project: delightful form, loathsome content.'
5. Bret Easton Ellis reading from his new best-seller, 'American Psycho': 'In the kitchen I try to make meatloaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her body, then I rest by watching a tape of last week's new age sitcom, 'Murphy Brown'.
6, R. Masud Khan, a psychoanalyst recently defrocked and stripped of his credentials for having sex with his own patients: 'The newborn child is polymorphously perverse, it gets pleasure from stimulation of any part of its body. But experience leads it to focus pleasure on specific activities. The first stage it goes through is the Oral. The child puts everything in its mouth. Remember the Christian doctrine of Original Sin - mankind was cast out of paradise for putting an apple in his mouth! The second stage is the anal. The child learns voluntary control of its bowels. Holding on or letting go are deeply pleasurable. By shitting, the child is 'making' the world. But this 'gift' is rejected and the child is blamed for giving it.'
7. The ghost of Michel Leiris, the surrealist anthropologist, drifts through the wall of a club called the Syndrome on Oxford Street. Bobby Gillespie and members of Lush blink. 'Prometheus the Titan made a man out of damp, smelly mud. The gods couldn't stand his audacity, so Prometheus got chained to a rock and an eagle was sent to peck out his liver. Momus, the critic of the gods, was also punished, banished from Mount Olympus for suggesting, not that Prometheus should never have made the man, but that he should have made him better, with a window in his chest so that everyone could see what he was thinking.'
8. Momus, the 'gaunt minstrel of modern angst', on stage between songs. 'I wrote some songs, and in them I tried to tell a beautiful lie about happiness, I imagined you could be happy without being trivial, I imagined Robert Johnson, not with a hell hound on his trail, but a lapdog in his lap, Sleepy John Estes with an old person's railcard, Blind Lemon Jefferson after laser surgery. I'd like if I may to sing those songs to you now.'
9. 'Small World (Chrysalis) is the most ambitious, artistically satisfying record yet produced by Huey Lewis and the News, the angry Young Man has definately been replaced by a smoothly professional musician. It took something like a hundred people to put Small World together (counting all the extra musicians, drum technicians, accountants, lawyers -- who are all thanked), but this actually adds to the CD's theme of community and it doesn't clutter the record -- it makes it a more joyous experience.' Bret Easton Ellis, 'American Psycho'.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-19 12:43 am (UTC)11. Christian Enzensberger, poet and professor of literature at the University of Munich, reads from his book 'Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt'. The film is grainy, it seems to date from the early 70s. 'Clean is well and good, Clean is cheerful proper nice, Clean is above and here, Dirty is ugly and elsewhere, Clean is obviously the answer, dirty is underneath and evil, dirty is pointless, Clean is right. Against this dirty is, clean after all is... dirty is, how can one describe it... dirty is somehow unclear, dirty is by and large, clean at least is, but dirty now that is real.'
12. Robert Chalmers is a journalist who interviewed Serge Gainsbourg before his recent death. We see a fax being evacuated from a fax machine. It reads: 'Some might say that Momus has ripped Serge off, I prefer to see it as something between symbiosis and a tribute. 'Hippopotamomus' is clearly a reference to Gainsbourg's I973 song 'L'Hippopodame', about a 'Hippopotawoman'. This appears on a curious LP revolving around the unsavoury theme of the 'popo' or shit. Hence wordplay on hipPOPOdame and POPOcatepetl -- puns which Momus steals. Even the tone of voice -- cool, deep, joky, sexy and aggressive -- owes much to Serge (who of course cultivated it with several million Gauloises -- Momus has clearly been taking short cuts with a cheap expectorant). Sex with minors was also a big theme with Serge, whose favourite books were 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Lolita' and whose motto was 'Provoke! Always provoke! But remember, stay human!'
13. Serge Gainsbourg leans towards us as if in a dream, eyes damp and drunk and soft and aggressive, nose a shocking crook, ears pure cabbage. 'Provoke! Always provoke! But remember, stay human!' he whispers.
14. Don Watson is an embittered ex-pop Journalist. He is driving along the seafront at Tynemouth. In profile: 'To make a record about pigs, hippos, monkeys and dolls at a time when all forms of rebellion seem exhausted in pop, when no-one is the least bit surprised to hear the Happy Mondays in the background of Barry Norman's trailers for Film '9l, or The Clash on the cover of NME because an ad agency is using them to flog denim, is...' -- but a commercial break cuts him off, The Beloved advertising Alpen.
16. A lawyer in a plush office. An air conditioning unit, some tomes. He has a tan. 'Pornography is a special case. When you consume pornography you can be as aroused at a description of something as you would be by doing it. So the problem of representation, of talking the private and putting it into a public space, hitherto a purely artistic problem, becomes a legal one. In law the mere representation of an illegal sexual act can carry a penalty greater than the act itself. English law almost seems to be saying 'You can do or be what you like so long as it's kept private. It's only when you represent or reproduce your act that we must suppress it and penalise you."
17. Alan McGee and Dick Green at the offices of Creation records. 'Basically Momus is on the label because he's a fuckin' genius songwriter,' says McGee. 'He is still on the label, isn't he Dick?' 'He is, Alan, this month.' The phone rings, a brother of a member of Primal Scream sticks his head round the door and says a name. 'Who? I'm in America!' says Alan. 'I'm at the bank,' says Dick.
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From:(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-19 12:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-19 12:48 am (UTC)-Spencer
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Date: 2008-12-19 01:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2008-12-19 05:25 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-19 03:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-19 04:23 am (UTC)I might as well tell you how a 'yank' like me found your music in the first place. A long time ago when Napster was still up and running i typed in the word Bishonen into the mp3 search engine to see if anyone had made that into a dong. You were the only result.
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Date: 2008-12-19 04:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-19 07:06 am (UTC)song in contravention
Date: 2008-12-19 06:57 am (UTC)david says
Date: 2008-12-19 07:31 am (UTC)the vinyl
Date: 2008-12-19 09:22 am (UTC)Creation Advent Calendar 4: Hippopotamomus
Date: 2008-12-19 11:03 am (UTC)Samuel... stuck in Amsterdam
It may sound odd...
Date: 2008-12-19 01:21 pm (UTC)Life in 1991 seemed to be on the up and there was a wave of euphoria (or was that MDMA?), I felt that in some way this tapped into that vein and was going to take your from cult to charts. Good job I never worked in A and R.
Herbal T
Re: It may sound odd...
Date: 2008-12-19 01:36 pm (UTC)Tracks 11
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2008-12-19 03:35 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2008-12-21 10:42 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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Date: 2008-12-19 03:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-12-19 04:37 pm (UTC)