Talking Heads – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

The Catherine Wheel by Twyla Tharp

The music links this weekend were all related to my favourite Talking Heads period, 1979–1982, which not only encompasses the release of the band’s Fear Of Music and Remain In Light albums but also saw the individual group members produce some great solo records. I’d been playing one of these, the first Tom Tom Club album, all week while the sun was out. Now the temperature has dropped again, and we’re back to this summer’s default setting of perma-rain, the music doesn’t feel quite so appropriate. In 1981 while Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz were exercising their funk muscles David Byrne was recording My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts with Brian Eno. The score Byrne produced immediately prior to this for the Twyla Tharp Dance Company often sounds like My Life… avant la lettre, with similar musicians (Eno included), sounds and rhythms. This is one reason I favour Songs From The Broadway Production Of “The Catherine Wheel” over Byrne’s subsequent solo albums.

The Catherine Wheel was a seventy-two minute dance film choreographed and directed by Twyla Tharp. The film was part-produced by the BBC and as far as I’m aware was only ever broadcast the once in Britain in 1983. Byrne’s score runs continuously as on the CD and cassette versions, the vinyl release being a re-sequenced editing of the tracks favouring the handful of songs. In dance terms the film was very innovative for the time, employing some subtle video effects and a couple of sequences where a duet is danced with a wire-frame CGI figure. A long end sequence, The Golden Section, predates The Catherine Wheel, and was apparently the origin of the project. Since I hadn’t seen any of this in nearly thirty years my search for Tom Tom Club videos at the weekend made me wonder whether YouTube had any Catherine Wheel clips, only to find that the entire film can be viewed here ~~in a recording from Italian TV~~. (That copy was removed, link now goes to another one.) I’m so familiar with Byrne’s album it’s been fascinating seeing this again, especially since I only saw it on a small black-and-white TV originally and recalled very little of the performance. All the music works well enough on its own but seems completed when heard in this context, especially during The Golden Section. The film is also available on DVD from Kultur so this is another item for the shopping list.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Moonlight in Glory
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Weekend links 56

Ad Astra (1907) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

• Andres Serrano’s works are photo prints so you can’t damage an exhibition item the way you can with a painting. That didn’t stop Catholic protestors in France attacking a copy of Piss Christ on Monday. By coincidence, Dave Maier had posted an essay about Serrano’s work a few hours earlier, and with a reminder that the notorious photograph was part of a series, a detail which is often forgotten or conveniently ignored.

• The Avant Garde Project which made available deleted experimental audio works (see this earlier post) ceased activity a while ago so it’s good to see that its archives will now be hosted at Ubuweb.

…African Head Charge again was a studio name I had to start with, and it evolved into a band about eight years later. That started out again I read an interview in a newspaper where Brian Eno talked about he’d made an album called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with another musician—that Talking Heads fellow [David Byrne]—and he said “I had a vision of a psychedelic Africa”. And I thought, “Oh, that’s pretentious”. But then I thought about it, and thought “No, what a good idea! Make really trippy African dub”.

Adrian Sherwood on thirty years of On-U Sound.

• Related: Brian Eno has a new album out in July, Drums Between The Bells, a collaboration with Rick Holland.

“Do you think Lord Leighton could by any chance have been a homosexual?” enquired Richard. “It says here,” I replied, consulting a laminated information card, “that there is no evidence one way or the other.”

“Rent boys leave no evidence,” said Richard.

A private view of Lord Leighton’s home in Holland Park, London, which opened to the public again last year.

• Passengers, an exhibition of urban transit photos by Chris Marker at Peter Blum, NYC. For a different kind of rail transport there’s this exploration of London’s disused underground Post Office Railway.

• Reappraising the recent past: Jon Savage on Taxi zum Klo, Christiane F, David Bowie and the seedy attraction of Berlin in the 70s and 80s; Iain Sinclair on the Festival of Britain sixty years on.

• Stella Steyn’s illustrations for Finnegans Wake as seen in transition magazine, 1929. And speaking of literary magazines, the return of New Worlds has been announced.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins is an art monograph published next month by Lund Humphries. Clive enthused about the book’s arrival.

• 50 Watts announces the Polish Book Cover Contest.

• 4th June, 2011 is Radiophonic Creation Day.

• Americans: has your state banned sodomy?

• Stardust (1931) by Louis Armstrong | Stardust (1940) by Artie Shaw | Stardust (1957) by Nat King Cole.

The genius of Captain Beefheart

Mission: unlistenable
His music is described as a metal sock, an action painting and a mad, giant watch—yet it has inspired bands from Talking Heads to the White Stripes. John Harris gets to grips with Captain Beefheart

John Harris
Friday August 4, 2006
The Guardian

IN THE 1980s, American researchers found that the average album was played 1.6 times. Given the new practice of impatiently scouring a CD for one or two highlights and then discarding it, the iPod age has presumably seen that figure tumble, but the basic point remains: most of the music we buy lies pretty much unplayed – either because it is rubbish, or because it says a lot more about our vanity than what we actually like. On the latter score, history’s most shining example may be Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, an allegedly classic album that must surely sit undisturbed in thousands of households. Playing it—or rather, attempting to—is a bit like being in one of those cartoons in which the principal characters cagily open a door, only to find all hell – elephants, possibly, or a speeding train – breaking loose behind it, whereupon they slam it shut again. Its opening moments let you know what you’re in for: a discordant racket, all biscuit-tin drums and guitars that alternately clang and squall, eventually joined—apparently by accident—by a growling man complaining that he “cannot go back to your land of gloom”. Skipping through the remaining 27 tracks does not throw up anything much more uplifting. Indeed, one song finds the same voice rather distastefully evoking the Holocaust: “Dachau blues, those poor Jews/ Dachau blues, those poor Jews/ One mad man, six million lose.”

When this kind of experience happens to a rock critic, it can easily bring on a chill feeling of inadequacy. After all, Beefheart—those in the know rarely use the “Captain”—remains a gigantic influence on so much rock music that has claimed to stand as something more than mere entertainment, from the post-punk likes of Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, Gang of Four and Public Image Limited, through names as varied as Tom Waits and Happy Mondays, and on to such talents as PJ Harvey, Franz Ferdinand and the White Stripes. Equally importantly, he is a crucial part of the gnomic culture through which those people (men, mostly) whose lives have been hopelessly afflicted by music commune with one another. It’s not in the film, but the Jack Black character in High Fidelity was surely a Beefheart obsessive.

Continues here.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Brian Eno and David Byrne’s 1981 album gets a remastered reissue this month, something I’m looking forward to hearing as all the early Eno albums sounded pretty crappy on their initial CD release. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is being given an added publicity push this time round with much being made of its status as an inspiration to later generations of musicians and DJs. The album site includes tracks that will be available for anyone to download (after signing a Creative Commons form) for purposes of remixing.

While the album’s wonderful grooves certainly deserve their reputation, I still get rather aggravated by claims made for its landmark status as “the first sampling album” or similar. These assertions derive from the way most of the tracks mix recordings taken from American radio or from Arabian “world music” albums in a manner that was unusual at the time, but certainly not without precedent. I think Eno and Byrne would be first to acknowledge that they were popularising a technique that already existed, just as Eno brought Terry Riley’s tape loop experiments to a wider audience on recordings such as (No Pussyfooting), Evening Star and Discreet Music.

There are at least two Terry Riley-like figures behind the genesis of My Life…. One is Holger Czukay, bass player from the German band Can, and editor and tape collagist for all of Can’s music. Czukay released a solo album in 1979 called Movies which does exactly what My Life… does but considerably better for the most part (there’s even a track entitled Persian Love that mixes Middle-Eastern radio singers with Czukay’s guitar). My Life… overlays the voices (almost all from a single source only) on the music in a manner which isn’t particularly inventive; Czukay on the other hand not only interleaves multiple recordings across his tracks but even makes it sound as though the radio recordings have been made specially for each track. Cool in the Pool contains a lengthy sax solo taken from the radio that matches Czukay’s music so perfectly he must have planned the entire track around the place where the solo would occur. Eno would have been well aware of this album seeing as he’s a lifelong Can aficionado and played with Czukay on a couple of the Cluster releases in the late-Seventies.

The other eminence gris behind My Life… is Jon Hassell, a composer and musician I’ve had the good fortune to work as a designer recently. Eno was very impressed by Hassell’s early “Fourth World” albums and helped Hassell produce the third of these, Possible Musics, in 1980. He also invited Hassell to play trumpet on Houses in Motion when he was producing Remain in Light for Talking Heads in the same year. Hassell has always maintained that My Life… came out of this period of his association with Eno and Byrne and that the album was originally intended to be a three-way Fourth World collaboration. Whatever the veracity of this, Peter Gabriel recognised the lineage in 1982 when he compiled the first WOMAD album, Music and Rhythm. Among a number of acknowledged talents from different countries playing what people still class as “world music”, there was Jon Hassell with a version of Ba-Benzélé from Possble Musics, and Holger Czukay with Persian Love. Oh yes, and a piece by David Byrne…

If this sounds like a denigration of My Life… it isn’t intended as one. I bought this album when it came out and still have the original vinyl copy. The criticism is addressed to lazy journalists whose assertions about musical history don’t always stand up to close scrutiny. To his credit, Paul Morley in the sleevenotes to the reissue acknowledges both Can and Jon Hassell but then he always was a journalist capable of thinking for himself, rather than parroting the platitudes of others.

Finally, here’s my copy of the book that gave the album its title. I’ve had this for years and still not read it. Maybe now would be a good time.