Cash from kudos
Feb. 15th, 2009 04:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusQuite a few people asked me this week whether I'd made a trip to London to see the Magazine reunion. The answer is no. I have nothing against Devoto doing it -- I'm glad he has -- and if I'd been in the UK I might have attended. But these things are always something of a let-down. Technically I've "seen" the Sex Pistols and the Velvet Underground live, but I haven't really seen those legendary bands; what I saw were 1990s reunion tours put together to squeeze cash from kudos.
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In Magazine's case I did see them at their peak. I saw them at Aberdeen University Student Union in 1979, touring their Secondhand Daylight album, and even reviewed the show for Gaudie, the student paper, describing Devoto as a "deer trapped in headlights". Then I saw them playing at a club in Edinburgh called The Moon (with Josef K supporting) during their Correct Use of Soap period. I remember being particularly impressed, that night, by the way the mid-section of I'm A Party broke off into a completely different time signature. It was dizzying. And Devoto was still a deer in headlights.
Much later I saw Luxuria at the Forum, the legendary 1988 gig where Morrissey came out and read some Proust. When Devoto and Noko (who's playing guitar in the 2009 shows -- spookily note-perfect reproductions of the late John McGeogh's licks) were featured on Snub TV in 1990 they asked specifically that I should interview them, which I did. Later, I was lucky enough to go for dinner several times with Devoto. Sitting across the table from me he was... a deer in headlights. I remember quizzing him about the line about drugging and fucking someone on the permafrost (he said it was a love song), about why the first line of Philadelphia doesn't turn into a short story ("I write songs differently than you do, Nick"), and I remember how Devoto quoted Eliot's Prufrock as we left the restaurant.
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I wouldn't have missed dinner with Devoto for the world, but I missed the "cash from kudos" reunion tour with equanimity. Because it's part of the kind of Retro Necro culture I abhor (as I said in my tribute song, "I wouldn't want to put you in any Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame -- I assume you view such things with uproarious disdain"). Because I saw them when they were young. Because I saw them while McGeogh was still alive. And because cash from kudos is an exchange subject -- like the human body -- to the second law of thermodynamics; entropy. Energy has a tendency to diminish over time. Even the most brilliant brilliance sags. In the entertainment world's own version of the laws of physics, kudos can be converted to cash, but afterwards kudos is diminished. I'm interested to watch the YouTube videos that have appeared over the last few days of Magazine's latest shows, of course I am. But I also note that, whereas Magazine videos used to be few but intense (like the Cut-Out Shapes video above), now they're plentiful and... less intense. Some of the kudos has become cash. Not as much cash as the most important man alive deserves, but cash anyway.
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I measure the important man's importance today by the searing traces he's left in me. The teenaged me could never have dreamed that an article in The Financial Times on Devoto's re-emergence would mention me, but I'm delighted that his impact on me has become part of the story of his impact on everyone. At my 1979 concert last night Devoto was invisibly there as I sang a song I wrote at 19 which begins: "Time crawls slowly round the room when you, you make your entrance / Eyes like headlights switch on you then I, I seek my vengeance". It was pure pastiche Devoto, one part The Light Pours Out Of Me, one part Give Me Everything. In fact my entire first album (The Happy Family album) is Devoto pastiche: the title track interjects evocative micro-narratives just as Magazine's Come Alive does ("At Leonardo Da Vinci Intercontinental Airport a Swiss pathologist missed his connecting flight").
And I'm still doing it today. Here's an exclusive: the first draft of the song Ichabod Crane from the Joemus album. It's called The Accident, and it's one part Because You're Frightened, one part Spiral Scratch:
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The Accident
Drudgery and buggery and someone else's lover
Sent me on a journey with your idiot brother
Well he's shallow and he's callous and I'm green about the gills
With a book of filthy pictures and a bunch of daffodils
Well I get a little nervous at the summit of the mountain
You are nowhere to be seen and there are thunderstorms gathering
I try to work out just exactly where you put the synth
But your brother's got no manners and the cliff's a labyrinth
Then it happened
The argument
That's when we had
The accident
Like a spiral in a record I am spinning round and round
With a stupid needle in me, screaming stupid sounds
And my stupid friends are far away, smoking cigarettes
And indulging in occasionally gratifying sex
Then it happened
The argument
That's when we had
The accident
To escape your fucking mother and her yellow telephone
This endless fucking mountain was the only place to go
But the last thing I expected was that she'd be here to get me
With a loaded gun, a croissant and a book by Dostoyevsky
Then it happened
The argument
That's when we had
The accident
Thank you, Mr Devoto, deer in headlights, most important man alive. Kudos to you, and may the cash keep flowing.
[Error: unknown template video]
In Magazine's case I did see them at their peak. I saw them at Aberdeen University Student Union in 1979, touring their Secondhand Daylight album, and even reviewed the show for Gaudie, the student paper, describing Devoto as a "deer trapped in headlights". Then I saw them playing at a club in Edinburgh called The Moon (with Josef K supporting) during their Correct Use of Soap period. I remember being particularly impressed, that night, by the way the mid-section of I'm A Party broke off into a completely different time signature. It was dizzying. And Devoto was still a deer in headlights.
Much later I saw Luxuria at the Forum, the legendary 1988 gig where Morrissey came out and read some Proust. When Devoto and Noko (who's playing guitar in the 2009 shows -- spookily note-perfect reproductions of the late John McGeogh's licks) were featured on Snub TV in 1990 they asked specifically that I should interview them, which I did. Later, I was lucky enough to go for dinner several times with Devoto. Sitting across the table from me he was... a deer in headlights. I remember quizzing him about the line about drugging and fucking someone on the permafrost (he said it was a love song), about why the first line of Philadelphia doesn't turn into a short story ("I write songs differently than you do, Nick"), and I remember how Devoto quoted Eliot's Prufrock as we left the restaurant.
[Error: unknown template video]
I wouldn't have missed dinner with Devoto for the world, but I missed the "cash from kudos" reunion tour with equanimity. Because it's part of the kind of Retro Necro culture I abhor (as I said in my tribute song, "I wouldn't want to put you in any Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame -- I assume you view such things with uproarious disdain"). Because I saw them when they were young. Because I saw them while McGeogh was still alive. And because cash from kudos is an exchange subject -- like the human body -- to the second law of thermodynamics; entropy. Energy has a tendency to diminish over time. Even the most brilliant brilliance sags. In the entertainment world's own version of the laws of physics, kudos can be converted to cash, but afterwards kudos is diminished. I'm interested to watch the YouTube videos that have appeared over the last few days of Magazine's latest shows, of course I am. But I also note that, whereas Magazine videos used to be few but intense (like the Cut-Out Shapes video above), now they're plentiful and... less intense. Some of the kudos has become cash. Not as much cash as the most important man alive deserves, but cash anyway.
[Error: unknown template video]
I measure the important man's importance today by the searing traces he's left in me. The teenaged me could never have dreamed that an article in The Financial Times on Devoto's re-emergence would mention me, but I'm delighted that his impact on me has become part of the story of his impact on everyone. At my 1979 concert last night Devoto was invisibly there as I sang a song I wrote at 19 which begins: "Time crawls slowly round the room when you, you make your entrance / Eyes like headlights switch on you then I, I seek my vengeance". It was pure pastiche Devoto, one part The Light Pours Out Of Me, one part Give Me Everything. In fact my entire first album (The Happy Family album) is Devoto pastiche: the title track interjects evocative micro-narratives just as Magazine's Come Alive does ("At Leonardo Da Vinci Intercontinental Airport a Swiss pathologist missed his connecting flight").
And I'm still doing it today. Here's an exclusive: the first draft of the song Ichabod Crane from the Joemus album. It's called The Accident, and it's one part Because You're Frightened, one part Spiral Scratch:
[Error: unknown template video]
The Accident
Drudgery and buggery and someone else's lover
Sent me on a journey with your idiot brother
Well he's shallow and he's callous and I'm green about the gills
With a book of filthy pictures and a bunch of daffodils
Well I get a little nervous at the summit of the mountain
You are nowhere to be seen and there are thunderstorms gathering
I try to work out just exactly where you put the synth
But your brother's got no manners and the cliff's a labyrinth
Then it happened
The argument
That's when we had
The accident
Like a spiral in a record I am spinning round and round
With a stupid needle in me, screaming stupid sounds
And my stupid friends are far away, smoking cigarettes
And indulging in occasionally gratifying sex
Then it happened
The argument
That's when we had
The accident
To escape your fucking mother and her yellow telephone
This endless fucking mountain was the only place to go
But the last thing I expected was that she'd be here to get me
With a loaded gun, a croissant and a book by Dostoyevsky
Then it happened
The argument
That's when we had
The accident
Thank you, Mr Devoto, deer in headlights, most important man alive. Kudos to you, and may the cash keep flowing.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 04:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 05:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:radiodrama
From:Re: radiodrama
From:(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 07:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 07:22 am (UTC)Also, something magical happens when you play this (http://imomus.com/mostimp.mp3) overtop of the teenage momus tapes.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 07:22 am (UTC)なんとかしてよ。
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 08:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 07:51 am (UTC)ルイスと一緒におしゃべりしていて、頭がいかれてしまった。
ちょっと。どうしてくれるのさ！
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 07:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 07:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 07:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 07:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 07:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 09:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 11:03 am (UTC)Yeah, this was my pretty much attitude - but I went anyway, and, god - just one of the best gigs I've ever been to. I dunno how they managed to pull off, but it was pretty magical.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 01:28 pm (UTC)Just to give a tiny example, Devoto is seen "conducting" Noko through the guitar riffs in many of the YouTube videos of the new shows. When he's not singing, he's doing this "conducting" gesture. Now, 1979 Devoto would not have done that. He projected an aura of cold, powerful detachment, something glacial, somewhat related to Bowie's Thin White Duke character. He turned his back on the audience, climbed a specially-constructed microphone stand, stared like a Gogolian madman. To go over and make a conductor gesture in front of the guitarist would have seemed uncool to this Devoto.
Now, of course "cool" is silly, something we grow out of just as surely as we lose our youthful arrogance. But cool and arrogance create their own power, a power that seems to have been lost in these new performances. I'm sure that new forms of power replaced it, though: a warm sense of nostalgia, a sense of genuine human frailty, the maxim tempus fugit, and so on.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2009-02-15 04:06 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 11:37 am (UTC)- They were never a pop band
- They always looked embarrassing
- They always dressed badly
- They always represented outsiderdom
- Their core emotions - surreal, angry, frustrated, animalistic - can even improve with age
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 11:39 am (UTC)magazine reminder
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2009-02-15 12:15 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2009-02-15 02:32 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 02:29 pm (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
Devoto sings "I know Obama will look after me". The original version of the song said "I know the cadre will look after me", but so many people misheard it as "I know that Carter will look after me" that Devoto made that the official lyric. Then when Reagan was elected, he sang (in particularly chilling tones) "I know that Reagan will look after me". And now (skipping Bush pere, Clinton and Bush fils entirely) it's Obama who will look after the immortal communist backslider.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 02:32 pm (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 02:51 pm (UTC)Now that I'm out of touch with anger
Now I've nothing to live up to
I don't know when to stop joking
When I stop I hope I am with you
Years of perusal
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2009-02-15 05:43 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe: Years of perusal
From:Re: Years of perusal
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2009-02-15 10:37 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 06:14 pm (UTC)But how sad I feel thinking of Magazine and my brother--he, who was usually a very pop consumer, bought the first two Magazine albums when they came out, and I was immediately captivated (though I still prefer the Wire albums of that period). Surely my brother was the only Magazine fan within five-hundred miles of us then--and now he's dead, and Magazine is alive, after a fashion. You're right--bringing back the dead is wrong, it places them within a context where they no longer make sense and a world they don't belong in, as if I were to bring back my brother and expect him to cope with the world today.
Ambivalence
Date: 2009-02-15 07:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 07:40 pm (UTC)You are just an old prog rocker at heart really. I think all the kudos Magazine are receiving is a bit over rated, they had a few good songs, yes, but when they start to venture into prog rock territory it it's just embarrassing. The Buzzcocks were way better, I wonder how they would have progressed had Howard not left when he did?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 08:03 pm (UTC)I think Spiral Scratch is great, but, as Devoto says in the Tony Wilson interview I embedded, the band provided a very limited character and musical palate for him to be stuck in for long. The answer to your question on how they would have developed is: Magazine.
As for the Shelley Buzzcocks, I never found them at all interesting. Not sure why, really. If Devoto sounds at times too macho, cruel, detached, exotic, voyeuristic, Pete Shelley sounds too camp, too fey, too ordinary, too trivial. You know, compare Shot By Both Sides (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwKv3H9WAkY) with Lipstick (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bacJKFAW0FA), Shelley's use of the same chords and riff. How it's possible to throw the power of that away, I don't know, but Shelley manages.
Magazine reunion
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2009-02-15 09:06 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe: Magazine reunion
From:Re: Magazine reunion
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2009-02-15 11:31 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2009-02-15 09:33 pm (UTC) - ExpandLip shots
From:Re: Lip shots
From:Re: Lip shots
From:(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-15 11:27 pm (UTC)What put me of, in the end, was the hiatus between Magazine originally folding up stall and these reunion concerts.
After twenty seven years, surely Devoto must feel like he is in a covers band, these songs were written by an angry, cerebral, sensitive but arrogant young man and after almost three decades away from them it must seem like performing someone else's songs..
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-16 12:55 am (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
As a piece of revisionism, this is on the scale of Kraftwerk changing Radioactivity -- in their 1990s concerts -- into "Stop Radioactivity!" It's obviously relevant to yesterday's discussion on the meaning of simulated rape in video games, and I have to say I think in both cases (Kraftwerk's and Magazine's) there's a real loss of dramatic power involved in making the songs fit a politically-correct message. The original Radioactivity song was as objective as a Wikipedia entry ("discovered by Madame Curie"), but the revised version is just a pamphlet someone presses into your hand at a demo whose objectives you agree with.
Permafrost, in the original version, is one of the most chilling and nasty songs ever written, I think. And its power comes precisely from that stark, callous quality. "I have no idea what you want, but there was something I meant to say..." And what this distanced, uncaring person meant to say was that he would rape the other character under Arctic conditions. Suddenly the appalling sadness of that scenario in a landscape of utter barrenness meshes with the tremulous thrill of the guitars and the icicle synth lines to make some kind of horrific beauty. In the new version, though, it's just two consenting adults larking about in the cold. Sure, it's nicer, but was the world really just waiting for a kinder version of Permafrost?
For comparison
Date: 2009-02-16 12:58 am (UTC)Re: For comparison
From:(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-16 01:31 am (UTC)Re: Magazine reunion
Date: 2009-02-16 07:10 am (UTC)Magazine
Date: 2009-02-16 08:45 am (UTC)2nd Law
Date: 2009-02-16 09:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-17 12:48 am (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
This was the song that convinced me, in 1978, that Magazine were great. I heard it on Peel, and that was it; I had to get the album. The way the music and the poetry conjur the scene, the rising anticipation, the suddenly mounting pace, the rush of the limousines themselves, the sirens, and the narrator projecting himself, at the climactic moment, into the back of the car, and the bathetic futility of the great man's choice between coffee and tea...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-17 12:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 08:01 pm (UTC)