Mark E Smith may look like some kind of nightmare combination of late (as in posthumous) Oliver Reed and E.T these days but the new one "Imperial Wax Solvent" sees the Marquis honing his phlegmy gargle to a quite spectacularly expectoratory degree of vituperative viscosity, adding a whole new level of disgruntled amusement to some pretty generic garage-by-numbers tracks toward the end. Luckily it's frontloaded with gems, containing the wonderfully acerbic, eleven minute tarnished chrome primitivist space rock of "Fifty year old man," sample lyric: "I'm a fifty year old man and I like it!" "Taurig" gets into some strangely sexy whispering New-Beat action, and a more err.... "Can"-like vibe enlivens "Can Can Summer" and "I've been duped," "White Line Fever" Motorik-ised with (I assume) his missus on vocals. It does kind of tail off after "Tommy Shooter" but frankly Mark's reached new heights of delriously funny free association with the title "Wolf Kidult Man," and it's good to have a more spacey, krauty, keyboardy, studio-exploiting Fall back.

MUCH better than "Reformation Post."

Hang on, am I agreeing with Blogglebumcage here? Again! Can't be right.......

The treadmill

1


It all started that Tuesday morning he noticed his belly in the shower. Suddenly there it was, a greyish pink dome protruding into the hot spray, compact, conical, a perfect middle-aged gut. He nursed it in both hands, frowning, as rivulets of foam from his half-washed hair unravelled over it. Now then, where has this come from?

The mystery was how he hadn’t noticed it before. Any difference between days was surely negligible, yet somehow, prodded on by last night’s pizza, maybe that Mars bar he’d had on the way home, it had inched across some perceptual threshold, become visible.

Well. It was a sign of age. He hadn’t had anything like this when he was twenty, even thirty. Alarming, in a way. A short stab of panic went through him as he towelled himself dry and he quickly counteracted it, allowed a certain wryness to insinuate its way into his thoughts. Andrew Carlton certainly wasn’t going to let it worry him. You get older, you get fatter, things aren’t always how you would like them to be. He shrugged. Andrew Carlton was smart enough to accept that. Andrew Carlton, and here he appraised himself seriously in the steam-stippled mirror, had accepted all kinds of things, had he not?

He had.

Nonetheless, despite all the long years in which had prided himself on his unconventionality he was preoccupied for the rest of the morning, fretting over his belly, his vision dark at the edges with irritation, and it was only his tendency to view himself with the degree of ironic detachment that any truly balanced outlook on life demanded that prevented him from sliding over into dismay. He was thirty-nine years old and worried about getting a belly. How trite, how obvious. A mid-life crisis no doubt. How formulaic.

He tried viewing himself from the cosmic perspective, reminding himself how superficial and clichéd it was to get worked up about as trivial a thing as middle-aged spread. All that suffering in the world and so on. He tried to talk himself out of his anxiety, to snort derisorily at it, as he had talked himself into and out of many things. He was even more deeply introspective than usual that morning and his colleagues picked their way around him, sensing his mood.

On the one hand, why must one accept the indignities of age? But then perhaps not doing so was mere vanity, and surely he was too smart, too knowing, to succumb to mere vanity? He wasn’t status conscious and he wasn’t vain and he readily mobilized his healthy reserves of contempt against those who were. Andrew Carlton had spent his life avoiding all the traps that other less alert, more easily herded individuals so guilelessly blundered into, the financial commitments, the kids, the long work hours, the romantic illusions and entanglements, the fruitless pursuits. Yet he hadn’t noticed this sneaking up on him, had he? No matter how he tried to think it away, to think around it, his belly sat there in the middle of his thoughts

He wondered what else he might not have been aware of. To a large extent he blamed his wife. Why had she not told him? He wondered what else might be going unsaid. When he discovered that she had sent him a text message around ten or so he pointedly ignored it.


Andrew Carlton drank even more coffee than usual that morning, spooning in the sugar, trying to lift his spirits, help himself focus on his brimming inbox, and then had to get up out of his chair to go to the toilet every twenty minutes or so. This only served to worsen his mood, standing at the urinal with his gut mockingly before him. On his fifth visit he found himself in a state of mild panic and decided to go and sit in the cubicle in order to have a serious talk with himself.

Calm down. You are being ridiculous. There is nothing you can do about the situation now, you are in work. You can deal with this later. You’re being childish. There are more important things in life. He gave that part of himself which chided and directed free reign and slumped, hands linked between his legs and head bowed penitently, nodding along with its exhortations. Yet when he heaved himself up again, immediately conscious of his gut tight against his waistband and scratchy with sweat, all that bright scaffolding collapsed under the weight of his unfounded, irrational dread.

How had he not noticed? How had she not noticed, surely she had, it was impossible for her not to have.


He would carry this belly around with him everywhere, an emblem of his failure, of a failure bound up with his dreaminess, his blindness, how he had been sleepwalking through his life. An emblem of the lack of connection, the lack of interest that existed, that had always existed between the two of them. But then, and here he played the well-worn ace he kept in reserve for just such moments, wasn’t it always this way for everyone, that there was much in life to be endured, that life was imperfect, that people were unknowable, that there was so much that went unnoticed and unsaid that the best thing to do was accept the imperfection, not be an idealist, keep your head down, your focus narrow, get on with it.

Maybe. No, of course. Coming back down the corridor to the office a cold wave broke over him, heart-sickening, gut-cramping and he leant against the wall for an instant to get his bearings. Well, from one perspective, of course, a vertiginous perspective that twisted his life suddenly inside out and left him flailing, he had simply done everything he could to avoid acknowledging his own desires.

He was thirty-nine. Thirty-nine. A surge of hope. His hand was trembling slightly. Perhaps there was still time.

2

Andrew Carlton was not one to fall into the trap of being less than fully informed. In the newsagents across the road from work he bought a copy of Men’s Health as furtively as if he were buying Reader’s Wives and then, half way to the counter, resolved not to be ashamed. Even so, the contrast between the six-pack etched in charcoal and granite on the magazines glossy cover and his own fibrous hump brought a surge of self-loathing up into his throat. He was surprised to find these feelings within himself, but somehow now his default brusque dismissal, the mechanism that had protected him for so long, was malfunctioning, he was bound up in comparison and comparison brought shame.

He read the magazine on the bus home paying particular attention to the article “ From Fat to Flat, Rock Hard Abs in Five Weeks,” his heart sinking. He would have to change his diet radically, he would have to stop drinking, more than anything he would have to do a great deal of cardiovascular exercise, forty-five minutes every day plus three days of working out with weights. Andrew Carlton had always regarded watching his weight and working out as yet another trap, the mirrored pit of narcissism, but the magazine assured him: There Is No Other Way.

In bed that night after a ready-meal and a quietly tense evening in front of the television, Andrew Carlton asked his wife why she had never mentioned to him that his belly was getting bigger. She opened her eyes wide with surprise and chuckled softly then rolled toward him, her hands snaking across the space between them to caress it. Andrew Carlton tried not to flinch. She had that look in her eye, a small spark of lust he had become expert at dampening. It’s a part of you, she said smiling, it doesn’t put me off, you know. Andrew Carlton gently plucked her hands away and returned them to her, eyebrows raised. Then he in turn rolled over and fulminated on the inadequacy of her response. His rectum was also a part of him. His snot, his earwax, the hard skin on the soles of his feet, the fungal nail on his right big toe.

Don’t be angry, his wife said to him, why are you angry? She laid a hopeful hand on his back. He resisted the desire to shrug it away and simply lay there, teeth clenched, taking a small, hot, bitter pleasure in her not knowing what to do next. After a few flummoxed minutes she withdrew it, with a sigh.

He turned out his bedside light. A few seconds later she turned out hers. Perhaps it would all be better in the morning.

But the next day he was still out-of-sorts, angry both with his gut and with his wife, who he watched with distaste as she shuffled puffy-faced around the kitchen making them tea, his belly seeming to point accusingly at her. Andrew Carlton was accustomed to growing angry and disaffected for short periods of time and then becoming reconciled again. Indeed he took pride in the speed with which his own manful stoicism realigned him with his life.

It seemed that this, however, wasn’t going to go away.

3

That night he told his wife he would not be eating any more ready meals, nor would he be eating any carbohydrates with his evening meal. No pizza, no pasta. Not even oven chips? Not even them.

His wife smiled, reached out a hand and laid it on his, clenched beside his plate on the table. What’s brought this on? she asked. Is this you worrying about your tummy? She had always encouraged him to look after his health a bit more. Andrew Carlton flashed an icy look back at her. No it was not about his tummy, he didn’t have a tummy, only children had tummies, he had a stomach. He saw how she had always mothered and indulged him and how he had allowed it, drifting along through years of underachievement and on into fatness with her smothering him, a substitute for the baby she was always reproaching him for not wanting.

Alright, Andrew, she said quietly and busied herself with her Tagliatelle. She expected this from him, he was always sinking into moods, bitter reflection, all his frustrations welled up in him and passed, and though he never said anything was wrong, never admitted to it she could sense the dark waves on which he was lifted, the way he rolled waterlogged about in the bed at night. She expected it would pass, as it always passed, only to discover that he was being carried further and further away with each passing day.

4

Andrew Carlton got off the bus a few stops earlier than usual, strode purposefully through the April drizzle to his local, Council-run Gym and asked to be shown around.

It was five thirty or so and the place was filling up as a pockmarked teen in a polo-shirt and jogging pants escorted him back and forth. This is the weight’s room….ok?…. you can do your stretches here…..ok?… this is the cardio suite…..ok?…. all the machines here have been recently installed as part of a two-hundred-thousand-pound upgrade…..ok?…these are the lockers, you can put your bag in the locker for 20p….ok? Andrew Carlton shuffled along behind him feeling ridiculous, there was something about publicly being the neophyte that humiliated him, traipsing along in his suit and cagoule, fixed grin on his face, nodding along to everything, desperate to get out of there. The fact that the gym was largely filled with middle aged fat people didn’t console him at all and he felt a combination of pitying contempt for them, for their and his own inability to live with the world of wobble and sag that forty winters had brought to their door, and burning resentment for the small cabal of buff, boisterous black boys lounging around by the free weights. He felt conspicuous and absurd. This was not his domain.

And yet over the past week, as he had been mustering up the courage to come here, once getting as far as the entrance before finding some excuse to turn home, certain ideas, and the absolute necessity of certain actions, had obsessed him.

More and more he had mused on the situation with his wife, how they had met at university when he was studying Sociology and had been together ever since. She hadn’t been the first woman he had slept with, but almost, then quickly after graduation they had married. He saw how clearly he had rushed to use her as an excuse, to limit the range and freedom of his actions, to dam up those dark, serpentine currents he felt twisting through his soul, how she had shielded him from fear of his own lust, fear of his own power, perhaps, of how high he might have risen or how low he might have sunk had he given himself over to them.

Was this why he had married a plain girl, a girl of limited ambition, to persuade himself that he too was immune to the seductions of beauty and acclaim, that he was above them, a poor plodder maybe, but morally satisfied, grounded, solid and real in a world tormented by illusion? Perhaps he had been unfair to her all these years, certainly he had, using her as a barrier and then resenting her for holding him back from pursuing what he truly wanted.

Perhaps it wasn’t always this way for everyone. No, he began to be more convinced everyday that others lived more congruently with their desires and did not, as he had, construct a life designed to divide them from themselves. There was another man there on the other side of her, the man he had denied himself, the man he must reclaim. A fullness and a solidity of self that he had always imagined he possessed, but in reality had never known.

And so the next day, after an intensely self-conscious scrabble to dress himself in his new workout gear in the changing room, he took to the treadmill.


5

Who was this man before him, clad in strange clothes, sweating and red-faced, his teeth sunk in his bottom lip, his legs pistoning, the breath flaring raggedly through his nose, eyes fixed on some point deep within the mirror?

Andrew Carlton always waited for the treadmill in front of the big floor-to-ceiling mirrors to become available. He liked to imagine that he was running toward himself, that if he went fast enough or lasted long enough slowly his image would come gliding through the dust specked glass and pass into him.

Mostly he looked past himself, not being, by habit, a vain man. What did he see within those depths but a future that was slowly being pulled toward him, each footfall bringing it closer just as each footfall incrementally excavated the man he had buried deep inside himself. One day, if his will held out, he would encounter, here on the treadmill, a moment of consummation, a moment of perfect congruence, in his place there would be a man he had never known inhabiting a place he had never been.

He was thirty nine. He closed his eyes as the sweat from his forehead stung them. Thirty-nine. There was still time.

Andrew Carlton chuckled to himself, he was a realist, he accepted certain things. He had come to terms with his situation, had he not?

He had.

6

One way or another a man ends up on a treadmill.

Terrence Malick for twelve-year-olds.

Hipster paradise. I'm ashamed to say.

Que sorpresa!

An efficient adaptation of a mediocre novel! Oscars all round!

Bollocks!

Right, I really don’t want to do it, now is absolutely not the right moment as for all manner of pragmatic reasons I should be getting together an-honest-to-goodness pitch for the novel I’ve been working on, not to mention the fact that I’ve just embarked upon a suicidally large attempt to read every major modernist novel ever written about the break up of the Austro-Hungarian empire ( a surpsingly large number), none of which appear to be under a thousand pages, at the rate of one a week, with my beardedly intense workmate Chris, plus of course I’m trying to learn Russian, and Spanish, and socialize a bit more, and go to the gym, and do some extra hours at work….

So now is absolutely not the right time for me to write a long blogpost about David Lynch, is it? given how much of my waking life this will consume for the next X number of weeks/months, which will be read by about three people (and which will certainly leave me feeling dissatisfied), especially as I will feel obliged to re-watch all of Lynch’s movies again, including “Inland Empire”, which I didn’t like, (I will when I watch it again though won’t I? EXACTLY as I did with Lost Highway which now lives in my IMAGINATION in the way only Lynch can!) but the soundtrack to which I’ve recently been playing obsessively.

Really a bad time to embark on it, except I have no choice. Sorry, what was that? I was thinking about David Lynch, there. On the way to Tesco’s for bogroll I’m practically muttering to myself in the street. Drifting through seventeen pages of “ The man without qualities” (again) and it’s all-Lynch-all-the–time, who cares about bleeding Ulrich. What a fucking pain in the arse. Why has it come upon me now? It’s been gestating away somewhere down there for years and now it wants out, writing is but midwifery! Fact is I’ll have no peace till I do it, and then only a modicum after. For I am constituted thus!

I’m going into Lynchville now, I may be some time…..

Hasta la victoria......

He can't go on, he'll go on.

Good man!

Pere Ubu,

shame i was seventeen and living in barrow in furness at the time...still, i only have myself to blame..

Pere Ubu,

this is going to exist on youtube for about two minutes so you should probably watch it now as it's the best bit of live ubu footage EVVVVVA!!!

Post below in two parts. I had to trash Portishead to get it in sequence.

10.5 ways of looking at an UBU.

Cubist blues.

Conflict lies at the heart of Pere Ubu’s aesthetic, the impossibility of any final commitment, the equal impossibility of abandoning the project they’ve embarked upon. The only certainties are: that it will consume them, that they will fail, just as the only certainty I have in writing about them is that I will fail. They’re too big, too important, too quixotic to capture. They can only be approached, and from any one vantage point what they are will be different, and mostly hidden away.

Failure, certainly. But still, it’s the quality of the failure that counts.

The Holy Greil

David Thomas has appended a quote form Greil Marcus to his biography on the Ubu website.

"Thomas' gnostic argument - that art exists to at once reveal secrets and to preserve them - makes sense of a particularly American - or modern - form of storytelling. In a big, multifaceted democracy, you're supposed to be able to communicate directly with everyone, yet many despair of being understood by anyone at all... Out of this comes an American language that means to tell a story no one can turn away from. But this language - identified by D. H. Lawrence in 1923, in Studies in Classic American Literature, as the true modernist voice, the voice of Hawthorne, Poe, Melville - is cryptic before it is anything else. It is all hints and warnings, and the warnings are disguised as non sequiturs. The secret is told, but nonetheless hidden, in the musings, babblings, or tall tales of people who seem too odd to be like you or me, like us - like the author who puts his or her name to the story, insisting that he made it all up, that she just did it for the money.”

This locates Thomas in a singularly American tradition, one more voice in the great, endless argument as to what America is, how its unique promise can be fulfilled, what language, if any, is adequate to articulate this “last, best hope”. It is this energy, this tension between the human necessity of a fixed meaning and the ethical impossibility of any resolution that is America itself, a question, endlessly rephrased, admitting of no closure. It’s precisely this “democratic” energy, a form of monumental existential panic that feeds the dynamism of American culture. The Great American Novel can never be written, it can only be quested after. “Moby Dick” presents us with the canonical image of American life: Ahab in pursuit of the white whale, the Master A-signifier in all its gigantic, unreachable blankness. America itself and its tormenting infinitude, the individual lost in the American Cultural Sublime.

But really here Marcus is talking about mid-to-late era Ubu, from the Fontana years onward, through Thomas’ work with the Two Pale Boys and his “Opera” “Mirror Man,” the point at which Thomas has already rolled back toward the American axis in his thirty plus years of oscillating between the two poles that define the vast cultural domain within which Ubu operate, pre-war Europe and Post War America. The name of this band is, after all, Pere Ubu.

The Tenement Year.

Unpicking the tightly interwoven strands of European and American influence that make up Pere Ubu’s singularly complex DNA is a forbidding task, but the “Tenement Year” an album which exists at a rough mid-point in Ubu’s career partially does the job for you. It’s the point where Thomas begins to return home again, where the separating out is at its starkest, the pendulum swinging away from the European avant-garde anti-rock elements that had reached a peak on “The Art of walking,” were partially reintegrated into more familiar song formats in “Song of the Bailing Man” and which broke through again in Thomas’s post Ubu work (collected on the box set “Monster”) up to “Blame the Messenger”, officially attributed to The Wooden Birds, but largely acknowledged as the first record of Ubu’s reformation.

Two tracks on the “Tenement Year” (the first song is tellingly entitled “Something’s gotta give”) exemplify the split. “George had a hat” is recognizably Ubu of old with its flatulent overflow of honking bassoons and chirruping synths, Thomas chanting the nonsensical Dadaist refrain “George had a hat but it wasn’t where it wasn’t at” while “Busman’s honeymoon” is a straighter, more melodic vision of the great American Out-There, his friends “afraid of this strange, free, wide-open land.” This is the line that Ubu increasingly refine over the next two albums, “Cloudland” and “Worlds in Collision” exploiting Thomas’ hitherto well-hidden knack for melody. The emphasis in “Avant-Garage,” Thomas’ formulation both for the manifest destiny of rock as the great synthetic art form bridging the transatlantic and the high/low cultural divide, here falls on the Garage.

Heartland Rock

The four albums collectively known as the Fontana Years are effectively Ubu’s take on Heartland rock, a genre largely defined (at least in commercial terms) by Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp. For Euro-oriented art-fags Pere Ubus dalliance with populist musical reactionaries like Mellencamp was an aesthetic heresy, but it is consonant both with Thomas’s Dada derived concerns and his take on the centrality of rock as the great Twentieth century art form. Heartland rock with its emphasis on isolation both geographical and emotional and the decline of blue collar industry, hitched to a belief in the redemptive power of music, plugs directly into Ubu’s concerns.

Whereas a group like the Minutemen (who are themselves a variant on heartland rock, I’d argue) might have scorned the Industry Manufactured Blue Collar of someone like Mellencamp through their anti-capitalist, Punk ethos, Thomas has no such reservations. Thomas is undoubtedly a conservative, keen to distance himself from punk’s pseudo-egalitarianism and political pretensions from the start. Nor is it necessary to abandon Europe in the return home. Absurdism’s focus on the necessity of the individual creating his own meaning and purpose unfettered by history or tradition can sit readily alongside grassroots Rugged Individualism.

Why he hates women.

There is no contradiction between aesthetic or formal radicalism and political conservatism, Thomas is largely “Art pour le art”, and any objections he may appear to have to the current state of the music industry are largely the same set of Paleo-conservative complaints that Heartland rock adheres to: small business good, big business bad, the Fifties and Sixties as a Golden Age. The Other David, Lynch, occupies much the same territory: a nostalgia for the Fifties, the mom and pop business, Main Street’s cavalcade of neon-lit, faintly illicit pleasures, the wild sounds of rock and roll on the radio, good girls, bad girls. This is one aspect of their shared heritage. Lynch has even made an overt heartland movie, “The Straight Story” whose overlap with Thomas’ Mirror Man is pronounced.

George Lucas’ dream vision of the fifties, “American Graffiti”, the first “musical” to use an uninterrupted stream of golden-oldies as the soundtrack and sculpt the narrative around particular songs presented a womb-like vision of a life cradled within a web of keening rock and doo-wop, sunk in the car’s luxurious upholstery, the harsh edges of life impressionistically blurred by signs and streetlights. It’s hard not to read much of the glow of Fifties nostalgia, and much of the music itself as an extension of the frustrations of not getting laid, the infamous and presumably ubiquitous “blue balls” that protracted arousal without the prospect of relief brings, a neon-edged, numinous fuzz. “Why must I be a teenager in love?” Lynch understands that sex is the portal into the profane world out of the heightened perception that supercharged teenage libido produces, the virginal bobby-soxer who won’t touch your dick keeps you suspended in a world of agonizing softness, the woman who’ll crank your shank thrusts you back into the sourly concrete. The Sonics hit the dichotomy right with their two most famous tracks “Psycho” and “The Witch” (you hate the woman who gets you hard, you fear the women who gets you off.) It’s there in Garage, it’s there in the Beach Boys, another of Thomas’ touchstones. Thomas has covered Surfer Girl with Ubu and Surf’s Up with the Two Pale Boys, reveres Van Dyke Parks, who he wanted to produce Worlds in Collision, as one of the three great geniuses of American pop music, the other two being, at a guess, Don Van Vliet (Beefheart’s Dadaist blues is everywhere in Thomas’ work of course) and Brian Wilson. The Beach Boys offer up softly-layered, billowing hymns to the intense sensuality of Californian sun and sky coupled with the interminable, insatiate longing for release of young manhood in its hormone saturated, quiveringly oversensitive prime. It’s this tremulous accumulation of orgone energy that Psychic TV undoubtedly recognized in the Beach Boys. The pure, sweet, blameless girl who puts you through pleasurable hell. “The girls won’t touch me ‘cos I got a misdirection.”

American graffiti versus American modernism.

The drift toward the kind of vaporous sensuality that American Graffiti’s image of the fifties might have opened up onto, or the surge and release of heavy rock are both consistently and self-consciously undercut, especially so in the last few Ubu albums and solo releases that lead into the Fontana years, sensualist indulgences chastened by modernist, angular anti-groovism, all choppy timings, squalls of synth, frenetic drum patterns, lopsided riffs, breathless yodeling, a Futurist hyper-alertness and hyper-individualism in the face of the one-nation-under-a-groove hedonic or headbanging drowsiness. Ubu, for all their textural experimentation have always been about piercing you, wrong-footing you, recalibrating expectations. Where dub influences do turn up, for instance in “Codex” from “Dub Housing” with its fluorescent guitar line going up like a flare against the enveloping darkness, its skanking, slave-ship rhythm section and mournful lyrics, (re-visited in “Rhythm King” on the “Tenement Year”) they’re used to pointedly lugubrious effect, stripped of up-fullness and sunshine. Ubu use dub to sound the depths of their misery, to set themselves resonating to even deeper frequencies of melancholy and estrangement.

The refusal of the diffuse, the drifting, the languorous within Ubu, or at least the struggle against it, is both anti-hippy, true-aesthete-asexuality and partly a protest against the decline of Modernism’s Technological Sublime. If the Technological Sublime supplants the angst of frontier man confronted with the vastness of American wilderness by means of an equally vast and monumental subduing and ordering of its dazzling emptiness, a humanist sublime supplanting the darker, inhuman “pure” sublime of nature, then with the break up and decline of traditional industry as capital enters its liquid phase, the “Darkness at the edge of town” begins to reclaim the souls of its inhabitants. Modernism’s aesthetic ideals are martially reasserted in the face of it’s unfulfilled promise, Capitalism brought under the power of the human will, its amorphousness limned, its contours drawn momentarily into focus and fixed, the fantasy that somehow it can be arrested or harnessed, crisply defined, contained. “A mighty maze but not without a plan.”

“Who stole America?”

One thing that has remained constant is Ubu’s packaging: its repeated sleeve shots of industrial deadzones, abandoned buildings, anonymous lots, distant bridges, as though capital really were a monstrous physical entity rampaging across the land and strewing the wreckage behind it. Something has been through here. For Ubu the promise of modernism, its dialectical optimism, is being pulled away from them just as they reach manhood, they are committed to the future, a notion of progress, the possibility of artistic maturity and the future is already lost, sold. Much of the Fontana years finds Thomas trailing in the wake of the changes that have been wrought on the landscape of his youth, wondering where it all went. How this world he once knew has been conjured away, “ the good and the bad, the things that we had/ now they’re parking lots.”

Three attempts at a telling synthesis:

Hopper/Munch:

The two great images of twentieth-century alienation are Munch’s “The Scream” and Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks at the Diner.”

While “The Scream” approaches the viewer, tries to communicate something to them, reaching out of the frame, entreating us, Hopper’s subjects are always at a distance, lost, folded in on themselves, pure objects, so resigned to their lives they’ve been drained of interiority. Night thick around them as though the bar itself were floating in space. If the vital energy of European angst is turned outward, can still be a demand, a disruption of reality then the vital energy of America is inward, tending toward self-regulation, a pallid, heartsick homeostasis.

The two great existential figures, the man behind the wheel of his car seeking out the impossible promise somewhere in the heart of the American night, the poet maudit, raging at reality. Cutely, Pere Ubu have a record that might well sum up this European/ American distinction: "One man drives while the other man screams.”

Although perhaps Hopper has his own version of the Scream, the pale, imploring public deathmask of...

Gene Pitney/ Cathy Berberian

Thomas’ trademark vocal technique for most of the pre-Fontana year’s solo works was an eccentrically anti-melodic doo-wopping whoop that slowly evolved into a scalded eunuch's yelping falsetto, a litany of gelded whinnies and snorts. This is partly Thomas deciding to make an avant-virtue out of necessity. His is not a rock voice, no rasp, no grain, no edge, no command, no attack, no cool, no blues. He has no option but to push forward into shrill music-concrete abstraction. Why must I be a Dadaist teenage in love? highly strung, flibbertigibbet with pre-ejaculatory panic. This is part of the flight from rock’s machismo and philistine phallocentrism, an asexual anti-language, words collapsed, crushed and mangled. It’s only once we return to the Heartland that words become important again.

Alfred Jarry/ Sam Peckinpah

Thomas is about to present an adaptation of Jarry’s Ubu Roi under the title “Bring me the head of Ubu Roi”, and attempt, we can only assume at this stage, to combine Peckinpah’s heroic American absurdism with Jarry’s heroic European absurdism. Thirty years on the quest remains the same, whatever seeming detours have been taken along the way.

A quote.

Absurdly, all this could have been avoided with a simple quote from Tzara’s Dadaist manifesto:

“a howling of contorted pains, interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, of the grotesque, of the irrelevant: LIFE.”

Doubtless the music press is going to be full of reviews and features eulogizing Nick Cave’s magnificent return to form with the Bad Seeds (and he‘s even done half the work for them, implanting the idea Derren-Brown-style in their brains by calling the album “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!”) I’ve been doing my best to dissent, imaging that once a year the Impostume could dole out a kicking to an increasingly frail and withered Cave for being terminally spent, but really, it’s pretty good. “Grinderman” may have been a bit of a trial for the rest of us but it seems to have fired up the Bad Seed's musical imagination, the rhythm section’s up front laying down some mighty grooves as garage keyboards vamp and scrape, plus it contains one really superb track, "Night of the Lotus Eaters” a clattering graveyard percussion loop that sounds bizarrely as though it’s been lifted from the Gravediggaz mighty, hiphopolyptic “ The day the earth cried.”

The main focus will doubtless be (as it was in yesterday’s Guardian) on Cave’s lyrical genius, his dryly intelligent, literary lyrics. But is Cave a great lyricist? In some ways he’s the worst thing about his own records. I’m tempted to say he’s been treading two decades worth of water since “Mutiny”, which was in itself far and away the best of the stuff he wrote for The Birthday Party give or take a few memorable lines here and there (“oh god please let me....” “Fingers down the throat of love,” “ Hands up, who wants to die!" ) Can anyone remember a particularly great line from The Bad Seed’s stuff? Cave is also weirdly obsessed with disavowing his best work, "The Boatman’s Call" too, because it was too personal, a lot of weeping and pining over lost love.

What Cave lacks are the attributes of compression and precision, the tightness and rightness that gives a line its impact, it has to be honed, sharp-edged enough to slip between your ribs. In terms of a practical example it’s hard to imagine Cave capable of a line as compressed or nuanced as the best of Richard Thompson’s, or being equally prepared to give new inflection to standard tropes*, which is really where the power in a lyric lies, making the familiar resonant. The skill is in skirting dangerously close to cliché without succumbing to it. Cave wants to be Literary, which equals Wordy and Referential writing filled with Big Symbols and ostentatious Cultural Capital. Something like Thompson’s “Beating the retreat/ Back home to you” which captures a whole heartbreaking scenario in seven short words is inaccessible to Cave, whose wearying garrulity and prolixity would render it “ Well, baby I went out there, into that great cruel world, with its hard red dangers and seething dark corners, searching, baby, searching, for that missing piece, that elusive something , that in our lives, I said, in our sweet domestic BLISS, I cold not find and though I searched high and low, from the foulest of the tenements to the pearl and gilt struck palaces of kings, through the dirt of the desert and the jungle’s steaming foam, it could not be, I said it could NOT be found! and so I came slinking, whipped and beaten, defeated, my tail slung between by trembling shanks, like poor Job beaten under the Lord’s cruel blows, to paw at your dress and beg for a bare corner of the floor.”

Well….. that’s half a kicking then.

And on the subject of old heroes re-invigorated, Firewater have a new record coming out sometime soon-ish ( I illegally downloaded it! Todd loves that punk-rock shit, sticking it to the man and .. err.. what do you mean he’s suing me….)

Todd is another would-be-mordant chronicler of the chaos and disillusion that accompany us down all the days, a determinedly barflying** underclass anti-hero who tells it like it is and kicks away the security blanket of easy pre-packaged romanticism in favour of dark and difficult pre-packaged Romanticism etc. When he gets it right, within his register there’s few who can touch him and on the first two Firewater albums, (above and beyond their being utterly exhilarating bits of No-wave inflected ethno-punk of course) Todd really is despoiling himself in high-style with the Muse, having chloroformed her and bundled her into the boot of a hijacked taxi as she was on her way round to Tom Wait’s place. The over-familiar Millerworld of beautiful losers, gutter bohemians, junkies, whores and hucksters has hardly ever been done so well, or so funnily.

But it’s a delicate balancing act of course and the danger is stumbling over into that peculiarly American self-aggrandizing Outsiderdom that industrial and metal too often go for. I may be abject, confused, desperate and a horribly self-centred manipulative little shit, but that’s because I FEEL more than you and am HONEST about my confusion and therefore noble!***The inverted dignity of being more-fucked-up than thou ( see “ Dirt” by NIN, with it’s images of kingliness: thorn of crown’s /liars chair/ empire etc) Mostly Todd was self-aware enough to play with the limit at which rueful reflection slides over into self-righteousness but the latest, after the disappointing “Man on the burning tightrope” and a three year hiatus travelling the world’s trouble spots garnering yet more authenticity stars ( he’s also been in jail!) like the terminally danger loving, big-balled badass he is (“Fuck you man! Keep your PHD. I’ve smoked opium through the barrel of a rusty AK 47 in Afghanistan!”) initially grates for precisely this reason. It’s a bit too sixth form Beat in its “here is the mighty uncontainable wildness of my soul”, a bit too tokenistically (some may say insultingly) self-important in it’s attempt to comment on the lives of the wretched of the earth. The hard bitten guy propping up the bar in Painsville, telling you how you don’t know how to live and you ‘aint seen nothing.

Good job I kept that other foot limber for another old crush? Not quite. The trouble with “The Golden Hour” is that it’s so good, so ebullient, so swaggeringly on point and rich in rhythmic and melodic invention, cooking up Bhangra, Klezmer, Rai and Christ-knows-what into a richly spiced salsa of madly infectious grooves, soul swelling chants and killer choruses, that after the third or fourth listen all your objections melt away. So, Todd’s a bit of an egotistical old fucker, frankly I forgive him. He’s just far too charming. Cocky, smug, no-doubt an intolerable pain in the arse but also a brilliant seducer away of all my perfectly well-founded objections. Panache trumps pedantry. Which is precisely how he wants it to be, innit?

Bastard!

You can hear the whole thing online here.

*Pope’s formula for wit, “what oft was thought, but ne're so well expressed” might actually be rendered as “what oft was expressed, but ne're so well employed”


** Interestingly it occurs to me that he’s also name checked Bukowski in a lyric as have Cave and David Thomas. “My friends are bad Bukowski/and I’m a bad joke that’s repeated at parties/ don’t carve it in stone unless it’s an epitaph / these things are worth one laugh” his own riff rather superbly runs, while Thomas’ is “All the men that hang around they are prayin they are free/ all the women that hang around are lookin for a Bukowski/ but the rails have turned to rust, and I see you laughin at the sea. E pluribus unum, honey - the dust will set us free.” Cave's is, “ Bukowski was a jerk!”

*** There was a truly gullet-savaging chat show hosted by Ruby Wax several years ago in which arch Narcissists Bret Easton Ellis, Elizabeth Wurzel, and Carrie Fisher tried to outdo each other in Fuckedness, one’s inability to accept the hideousness of (privileged) American life being directly correlated to the elevated artistry of your soul, presumably. Wurzel: “I was hallucinating and fucking everything I came across, man or woman, and swallowing three, four bottles of pills a day while I was writing “Prozac Nation.” Ellis “ I was so high during American Psycho that I actually can’t remember writing ninety percent of the book.” Fisher “ I died twice during “Postcards From the Edge” and finished the book in a filthy lunatic asylum in Mexico, on a morphine drip, pecking out the words with my toes having temporarily lost the use of both arms…” No doubt a teenage James Frey was furiously taking notes.