Electronic harlequins

[imomus]

Yesterday I watched Synth Britannia, a fascinating BBC4 documentary about the development of synthpop in the UK from the mid-seventies on. This was a time -- I remember it well -- when music show Top of the Pops and future tech show Tomorrow's World went out back-to-back on a Thursday night, and it didn't take a huge amount of imagination to start wondering what would happen if you put them together. Kraftwerk first appeared on Tomorrow's World (promising that their next album would be played with instruments built into their suit lapels), but soon came to dominate Top of the Pops, in influence if not in person.

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The rest of the documentary is here.

Now, in the parallel world where this is a national synthesiser documentary commissioned by Italian state TV network RAI, it's a much shorter film featuring just one participant: "computer harlequin" Alberto Camerini. Although he was born in Brazil, Camerini became the most Italian of the synthpoppers in the late 70s and early 80s, melding the sound of bands like Plastics and Telex with a persona straight out of the 16th century Italian theatre tradition of commedia dell'arte.

Whereas the synth bands featured in Synth Brittania influenced my very early years, the electronic artists who influenced me from the late 90s on were what you might call "retro-marginal Modernists": acts like Telex, Plastics, and Camerini. I was interested in how electronic sound negotiated with national folklore at what seemed like the edges of the world (Japan, Italy) and back in the mists of time.

The last time I discussed l'arlecchino elettronico -- in a 2001 website piece entitled Synth Pierrot -- YouTube hadn't even been invented yet. It was hard to find a still photo of Camerini online, let alone videos of him in performance on Italian TV. Now, if anything, there's rather too much, revealing the harlequin's roots as a Rod Stewart wannabe, his post-shark ska phase, his late Michelin Man period. Through it all, though, there's something rather intriguing: a man unafraid of stylistic excess, able to meld the ludic, the lunatic and the ludicrous. A man who seems likeable.

Today I've selected what is, in my view, the essential Camerini. Since he's a very visual and physical performer, you don't have to speak Italian to appreciate what's going on here. Let's start with the Rod Stewart phase, pre-electronics:

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Alberto Camerini: Serenella

You can already see the admirable willingness to make himself ridiculous, the physical language and garb of the harlequin. All we need now is to add electronics. This next one may sound, to Folktronic fans, a little familiar at the start:

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Alberto Camerini: Rock'n'Roll Robot

Tanz Bambolina alternates between a verse that sounds as if he's been listening to DAF and a gulpy-gaspy 50s revival chorus straight out of Grease. Visually he's Bowie in Ashes to Ashes, a matador with Flock of Seagulls hair, an "automatic clown" a retro-rock Pierrot. The audience are apparently robots too -- they applaud throughout:

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Alberto Camerini: Tanz Bambolina

"You shouldn't cry" sounds more like Stiff label New Wave -- or Martha and the Muffins -- than synthpop, but I love the look:

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Alberto Camerini: Non Devi Piangere

Another wonderful costume -- sort of Rollerball-influenced -- here:

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Alberto Camerini: Neurox

I like the synth trumpet flourishes and time sig change in this one:

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Alberto Camerini: Morgana e il Re (1981)

And here's 1982's Telex, which really does sound a lot like the Belgian band of the same name:

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Alberto Camerini: Telex

Here's the very Analog Baroque Mon Ami, again about robots and marionettes and Scaramouche:

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Alberto Camerini: Mon Ami

I love the little break at 1.50! Could we call this -- on the model of "bamboo music" -- "macaroni synthpop"?

Finally, The King of Plastic, which again might sound familiar in places to Momus listeners:

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Alberto Camerini: Il Rei de Plastica

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's absolutely the best bit, and the one that points most directly to the commedia characterisation of Harlequin as clumsy, physically quick but mentally slow, downtrodden but upward-rising in his gestures (see this characterisation (http://www.shane-arts.com/Commedia-Arlechinno.htm)). Any old rocker can look "cool", but it takes a very great one to employ a physical vocabulary of uncoolness and fumbling awkwardness. Bowie -- educated in the commedia stock characters by Lindsay Kemp -- is a master of this. Watch these videos. First, the tentative hand gestures in this take of "Heroes":

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Now the desultory giving-up gestures and winces in Be My Wife:

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Now, the clumsy enthusiasm in When I'm Five:
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Finally, the facial gurning and uncool gesure-memes in Fashion:

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[iamjamesward.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

The Be My Wife video has always stood out as one of his oddest. The setting of the plain white room is identical to the Life On Mars video, but where that is so treated and bleached that Bowie's face becomes just eyes, lips and nostrils poured into a turquoise suit and topped with neon orange hair, in the Be My Wife video he genuinely looks scary.

Dressed fairly conventionally and with a neat side parting, he looks terrifying. Ill. Distracted. The bit at 1.30 where he gestures vaugely, I suppose suggesting "all over the world", but not quite - it's slightly too late - and then flicks his guitar pick from one hand to the other but then misses it, never really made sense to me, unless you consider it in the context of the deliberate awkwardness of gesture you're talking about. Fascinating.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes. I think greatness lies in evoking -- in wanting to evoke -- maladroitness rather than mere adroitness. Other places it appears: in the "uncool" character in the Blue Jean video, who sits at a table in the club snapping his fingers at the "cool" Screaming Lord Byron, leering foolishly and looking around for confirmation from the people around him (a confirmation he doesn't get).

Bowie's character often alludes to Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel too. In fact Lindsay Kemp describes him, in a memoir somewhere, as being like Stan Laurel.

During his pop star years (Ziggy, the Young Americans period) Bowie concentrated on a victorious gesture lexicon. After that -- and for me this is the most interesting period -- he develops a repertoire of gestures of sympathy for, or identification with, losers, the uncool, the clumsy. It reaches its zenith in his portrayal of the Elephant Man, of course.

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If Ziggy is Bowie's Nike-Jesus-Narcissus (victory, messiah, narcissist) character (although also delusional and doomed), this later, lower, more self-doubting klutz-clown is a correction, and a much more humanist and compassionate character to put on the stage (or on the covers of records: on "Heroes" he's grimacing and pulling his hair out, on Lodger he's gone splat in a bathroom).

[iamjamesward.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

In the long-form Blue Jean video, even the "cool" Screamin' Lord Byron character is a bit of an insecure wreck - the "Is that you, nurse?" before uncool "Vic" crashes through the ceiling; the weedy "go away" he offers as he hides behind the cupboard. And even though Lord Byron ultimately steals the girl from Vic, at the end, Bowie slips out of character and now, as David-Bowie-The-Actor, addresses Julien-Temple-The-Director and complains about the injustice ("I just wanted a happy ending).

Incidentally, I always thought (elastoplast aside) that Vic looked a lot cooler than Lord Byron, and recently found out the suit he wears as Vic was designed by Antony Price. It's the same cut that Peter Godwin would wear a couple of years earlier: http://iamjamesward.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/suit-envy/

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're right, I just watched the long-form vid again and if the window-cleaner/ligger character is Tommy Steele, the Screaming Lord Byron character is... well, as the window-cleaner shouts after him: "I'm speechless, you conniving randy bogus Oriental old queen."

[(Anonymous)]

Bowie is simply extraordinary in these videos. I'm afraid he leaves Camerini in the dust.