Hello again.
If it seems like I have been away for an age, that is because I have been. The past few months grew more busy and more intense, so in the end something had to give, I guess.
What with working in school, working in the medical centre, working for AU magazine, I really had no free time - and that is not a "woe is me" exaggeration, it's absolutely true. Whenever you thrown in helping out Friday nights with Youth Club, and playing guitar in church on Sundays, my spare time quota diminished into almost minus figures.
In the past week, however, all that has kind of changed, mostly because I finished my contract in school. Yep, after around nine months of getting up early, going to bed late , being sleepy most of the time... my maternity cover in Belfast came to an end. The last day (or rather, my last day) was a rather bittersweet affair. Saying goodbye to all of my pupils tugged at the heartstrings just a little too much. I was even sad to leave those ones who had really got on my wick.
And pretty flattered to receive lots of cards and gifts - including a pretty snifty set of cufflinks.
So now I am looking for a new contract in a different school. Much as I would love to stay where I was, it just was never going to happen. The woman who I replaced is much too conscientious to give up the working life for a baby of all things, so it's back to looking for something else again.
That means filling in more application forms, going to more interviews (one tomorrow afternoon) and all the associated crap that goes with it.
Anyway, it's hard to believe that the year has gone so fast. There were times, I admit, where it seemed like the work was never-ending. For example, marking coursework for 3 weeks nearly drove me over the age - I swear I nearly had a panic attack at one point, which is unlike me. I was close to throwing the computer through the study window, which would have felt great for about five minutes, until I started to panic about a broken window, a broken computer, and potentially a broken bonnet of our car.
But the time has indeed passed. It's a weird thing to describe, but teaching is definitely a job that you take home with you. It really does get to you, so much so that I often found myself fretting about the welfare of more than a few of my pupils. This is coupled with the realisation that there really isn't a great deal that you can do to help them - you just have to do your job well and hope that's enough.
Anyway, I won't prattle on about this anymore, because a. you are no doubt bored b. if my ex-pupils find this, they will no doubt cut and paste this and stick it up on bebo to make me look like even more of a pillock.
The short answer is that I am still working my other jobs (and have started invigilating exams in another school), which is nice as otherwise I would end up a sad, bored and very edgy individual, stuck in my own flat, chewing the walls and waiting for Ali to come home from work.
The other thing is that yesterday, my health took a pretty severe turn downwards. I was invigilating an exam, so you have to understand that I could at no point leave the room. I was the only teacher there, and with nearly thirty boys sitting a GCSE Maths exam, it was up to me to ensure that there was no foul play going on.
This all went swimmingly until about an hour in (another hour and a half to go) when my stomach decided to play silly beggars and start churning like a concrete mixer full of mouldy bread and rotten-egg mayo. I told myself to calm down and let it pass, but pass it did not, and five minutes later I started panicking about how exactly I was going to cope for the next hour or so.
To cut a long and pretty unpleasant story short, there was much walking up and down the hall, a lot of gurgling from down below, gurning pained faces on my behalf, and even some gripping of the desk lest I should pass out. I was in a great amount of severe discomfort, and close to thinking that I was going to faint and clonk my skull off some unsuspecting fifth former.
Thankfully, another teacher finally came into the room to check if everything was okay, at which point I made my apologies, dashed past her in the direction of the nearest salle de bain.
This is all fairly unpleasant, so I shall cut this bit short...
Most of yesterday evening was roughly divided between the bedroom and the bathroom. It was not, as they say, the most fun.
But, I have begun to ramble again. I shall be posting more regularly from now on, so in the meantime, here are some of the things that I have written for AU since we last spoke. Feel free to read, skip or whatever...
THE SHINS
Words_Ross Thompson
A couple of years ago, James Mercer, frontman with Portland-based band The Shins, was landlocked in the doldrums. When he wasn’t spending endless weeks on tour where his bunk for the night amounted to an empty space on the floor of a stranger’s apartment, he was living next door to a crack house in a neighbourhood that even the most unscrupulous of estate agents would struggle to describe as desirable. Plus ça change then, as in recent days the band’s fortunes have surged up towards a much perkier realm. Mercer tells AU all about how it feels to finally be up and running…
You should probably know by now that the inclusion of ‘New Slang’ on the soundtrack to the film Garden State did wonders for The Shins’ indie credibility, as you can’t read an article on The Shins now without hearing how Natalie Portman’s character waxed lyrical about how that song will change your life. Evidently, being bigged up by Princess Leia works, as The Shins are currently playing sell-out shows across the States, where their excellent new album ‘Wincing The Night Away’ reached the dizzy heights of Number 2 on the Billboard charts.
“Any time I get asked about Garden State, I always say the same thing,” says Mercer, his voice full of the rattle of a late night followed by an early morning. “I am really grateful for the opportunity. Garden State was not a success right off the bat, but its popularity ballooned over a period of time. We saw our audiences grow over a course of a few months, as the colleges wanted us to start playing more and more shows. It re-established us with that scene, which is no bad thing.”
A simple rock equation dictates that a bigger venue times a bigger audience equals a better hotel for the band. Thankfully for Mercer and his cohorts, ‘New Slang’ did indeed change their lives. The Shins’ newfound success meant that they no longer had to slum it in the least salubrious of conditions.
“Touring can be exhausting. You do it to make money, but it is no fun when you all have to sleep in the same room, at the houses of friends or those of people you meet at parties. Where you have nothing for your pillow but a bag of Doritos. When you are eighteen that is tons of fun, but that is what breaks up a band when you are in your mid-thirties, especially when you are away from your family and loved ones. Fortunately, we get to stay in nice hotels now.”
If ‘Wincing The Night Away’ was a hotel, it would be The Overlook, the isolated cliff-top locale from The Shining where Jack Nicholson loses his mind. One listen to the album, and you are sucked into a fantastical scary-tale world. A kind of indie-rock Pan’s Labyrinth, if you will. You find yourself precariously padding through a forest where the moon is permanently half-obscured by dark clouds, and the trees look as if they might come to life, pull their gnarly roots out of the earth and march about. Here, whimsical gingerbread melodies and coruscating sounds abound. In a way, it is funny that the album has hit the big time in America, given that it doesn’t exactly fit into a neat little generic box. ‘Sea Legs’, built around sampled beats and loops acoustic guitars, veers into Radiohead territory, while ‘Red Rabbits’ sounds like a high school marching band playing at the bottom of a swimming pool. ‘Turn On Me’ flirts with Hawaiian surf guitar, while ‘Girl Sailor’ falls into the bracket of 1960s psychedelic pop.
“When I was writing the album, I didn’t have a clear idea for what I wanted it to sound like. I experimented a great deal with sounds. There was a lot of groping around in the dark to find things that worked. The thing about that is that it takes a long time, but you end up with pleasant surprises, and you discover new territory. For example, ‘Red Rabbits’ was originally along the lines of ‘Australia’. I wrote it on a guitar, but then I started working on it with the piano, and it became a lot darker. I messed around with it in the studio until I came up with that weird sound, which is actually a bass played through a lot of weird effects. I remember being in the studio, talking to the other guys about whether people would get it or not. I said I hoped that they would just hear the album and give it a second chance.”
You would like to think that second, third and fourth chances are on the cards. ‘Wincing The Night Away’ is one of those classic albums that bears the sweetest fruit with repeated listens. Riffs that will stick in your skin like fish-hooks are played out against lyrics that will have you reaching for the nearest dictionary. How many other records laconically toss out words and phrases like “unrepentant buzzards”, “polymorphing opinions” and “facing the dodo’s conundrum”? To quote the band’s website, it is a “collection of tales beyond the imagination”.
“You can blame our designer for that one. I don’t really know what that means,” laughs Mercer, self-effacingly. “I’ll be sure to tear that down tomorrow. Actually, I would say that lyrically I’m influenced by things rather than musically. I mean, just look at how literate Morrissey is. He has so many killer one-liners in his lyrics.”
Mercer’s Anglophilic tendencies stretch further than a passing familiarity with The Smiths. The shimmering guitars on ‘Australia’ recall Johnny Marr’s most excellent fretwork, and ‘Phantom Limb’ is fuzzier than The Jesus And Mary Chain playing with several boxes of fuzzy felt.
“I went to high school in England, so I spent my formative years there. I first got into music there too, Rhythm And Blues stuff from the 1960s like The Rolling Stones. Even early Led Zeppelin is R & B, I guess. I got into so much brilliant music when I was going through that period, falling in love with girls and all that crap, though it doesn’t seem like a load of crap when you are sixteen years old.”
At first, it is hard to imagine a surly teenager listening to The Shins - and yes, that is a compliment. The production on is so pristine, the melodies so and blithely cheery that it would have your average lank-haired troubled youth within earshot stuffing their black wristbands into their ears. But while a typical Shins song is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on the surface, the lyrics tell a different story. Three quarters of the way through ‘Wincing The Night Away’, and Mercer has already sung about gouging out eyes, evisceration, spilling blood out onto the floor, and cutting off his own face. Clearly, The Shins will not be contending for Eurovision any time soon.
“I know, what the heck is wrong with me? Maybe there is just a part of my personality that gravitates towards that darkness. There was a lot of angst there that I needed to vent, and writing songs is a good way of dealing with that.”
By “angst”, Mercer is not referring to the torment that had Jordan Catalano off My So-Called Life (Google it if you don’t know) pinching the bridge of his nose and sighing deeply. He is talking about the kind of actual, real-life problems that send us lily-livered wusses here at AU Towers go scuttling off behind the sofa and the CD racks.
“One of the worst things about recording this album was when we started I was going through a really stressful time. Important relationships were falling apart as a result of being away on tour for a long, long time. But the funny thing was when we were finishing the record I had dealt with all of that stuff and I was happy, so the idea of going back down to the dungeon and digging through the dirt again was not pleasant.”
Then there was the small matter of living next door to a crack house. When you read about that sort of dangerous neighbourhood in Jack Kerouac novels, it sounds incredibly bohemian, but in reality it must be something of a downer.
“I had earned some money, but the part of town which I could afford to live in was best described as a gentrified ghetto. Put it this way: when I went to see the place at 10.30 in the morning, the neighbours were pretty good at hiding the fact that they were dealing drugs. After I moved in though, things went south pretty quickly. My neighbours were busted, and they blamed me for calling the cops. So I thought, “Screw it! If they are going to blame me for calling the cops and getting them busted, I might as well have the pleasure of calling the cops and get them busted.” After that, they started shooting at my house.”
It must have been a relief when The Shins’ burgeoning popularity allowed Mercer to move out of the area only previously seen on America’s Most Wanted. Not everybody owns the stones to live in cribs more befitting the shadier members of Snoop Dogg’s entourage. Music fans, however, can be quite unforgiving, as some folks are pretty cynical about an indie rock band making it big and “selling out”.
“I can understand that attitude. I can see the kid who is really into a band and then goes into to school and gets his ass kicked by one of the jocks, and later finds out that the guy who kicked his ass likes that band too. I can see how that would piss that kid off.”
Not that Mercer should be too worried. It is hard to be concerned when you are playing shows to packed-out crowds of fans who sing along with every word of your songs.
“I’m really, really happy. I’m married, and the band is working out really well. I’m far happier in my thirties than I was in my twenties, actually. I think of people in their twenties as kids now. I mean, I was a kid in my twenties.”
However popular The Shins may have become, Mercer is acutely aware of how fickle fame and hype can be. “Hopefully,” he intones, “Your popularity is in some way based on the strength of your songwriting.” If that is the case, Mercer need not be too worried, as ‘Wincing The Night Away’ marks The Shins are at the peak of their creative powers. The question is: now that the band have made it, now that their lives have been changed for the better, what is Mercer’s hope for the future?
“I don’t think about the future. I don’t even hope. The success on this album has been perfect. What else could I possibly want?”
ARCADE FIRE
Words_Ross Thompson
In the relatively short period of time since Arcade Fire released their eponymous debut record, their popularity has spread outwards, moving as quickly and unceasingly as a bush blaze. Here, AU investigates how a supposedly niche group can make the transition from an underground scene in Montreal to the front cover of Time magazine…
We live in strange times, musically speaking. Years ago, this writer’s school playground echoed with the catcalls of two neatly polarised groups of kids: those who were into Wham, and those who were into Duran Duran. An occasional lunchtime highlight was when a rammy broke out between the two, the aim of which was to discern who was the greatest, the day-glo pop funsters, or the cravat-wearing New Romantics. Some time later, the sixth form centre was equally divided: on one side sat the Goths, listening to The Sisters Of Mercy on their brick-sized walkmans and trying not to smile, and on the other were the Rugby team, whose idea of edgy music was The Shamen performing ‘Ebenezer Goode’ on Top Of The Pops. In the past few years, however, we have seen a paradigm shift in the way in which music is viewed. What was once considered as “underground” has cross-pollinated the mainstream to the point that the two terms have all but disappeared, like side of the road markers buried after a heavy snowfall. In a previous, darker age, the genre-bending likes of The Klaxons, The Automatic and The Arctic Monkeys would never have made it anywhere near the hit parade, but now they speed towards the top spot with only the minimum of fuss.
But who could have foreseen that Arcade Fire would become such a stone-cold hit? At this point, your Pitchforks and your Stereogums and the rest of your trendy bloggers will mew that they were posting about the surrounding buzz yonks before anybody else had even breathed the band’s name. But seriously, could anyone have predicted that Arcade Fire would span the globe with such consummate ease? “In the states the difference between the majors and the indies is a chasm,” claims frontman Win Butler. “You need this big business in order to break things. Whereas in Britain – the NME like it, Radio 1 will play it, you’re a celebrity now.” You know what? He’s exactly right. If the trail blazed by an oddball outfit like Gnarls Barkley proved anything, it was that the Berlin Wall that used to separate indie rock from more respectable pop has been torn down; the outposts previously manned by the likes of Gary Davies and Bruno Brookes have been demilitarised. Top Of The Pops, once deemed required viewing of every Thursday evening, and the conversation topic of every Friday first period, has fallen foul of a mercy killing. In our current fast-moving climate, the notion of a children’s television presenter being “wacky” and struggling to read an autocue is completely redundant.
So permeable is our music scene that a band like Arcade Fire can attract such interest and nobody bats a deftly mascara-ed eyelid. Their sound is the aural equivalent of what groovy young chefs would call “fusion food”, a cauldron brimming over with snatches of Talking Heads, Leonard Cohen, Echo And The Bunnymen, The Velvet Underground, Hungarian Folk, Gospel and Chamber Music. They play violins, accordions, cellos, French horns, mandolins, trombones and a hurdy-gurdy. Meanwhile, their lyrics are awash with references to post 9/11 politics, portentous Biblical imagery and Haitian mythology. In short, they’re not exactly The Kaiser Chiefs.
In spite of their somewhat leftfield nature, Arcade Fire have played to audiences numbering in the thousands in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. They have supported U2 on major tours, and can count the Davids Byrne and Bowie as major fans – they have even performed onstage with the latter. With no sense of hyperbole, Chris Martin went as far as to hail them as… dramatic drum roll… the best band in history. The question is: how the douche did such an unassuming, somewhat unfashionable band from Quebec turn out to be such big business? Is it really all to do with the changing face of the music scene, or is it something else entirely?
‘Funeral’, Arcade Fire’s full-length debut from 2004, is partly to blame. Heralded by most publications as the album of the year, this collection of songs, most of which appeared to share the name ‘Neighbourhood’, puts the fun into all things… hmm… funereal. Inspired by the deaths of several close relatives of the band, it took weighty subjects of loss and bereavement and transformed them into something transcendent. Even now, ‘Funeral’ sounds fantastic: its pounding drums, church bells, chaotic guitars and Win Butler’s pained yelping become more and more hypnotic as the album progresses through its track-list. The result is a piece of work that saw the band being fêted by critics, fans and fellow musicians alike.
Around the time of the release of ‘Funeral’, the hype surrounding Arcade Fire was so excitable that you could almost see the words in a review jittering about on the page. Live, the band is a total force of nature, a whirlwind of noise: the multiple musicians get into a groove with such ease that they appear to be communicating telepathically. The salvo of classic and modern instruments is unbelievably intense and loud, Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound as played by The Salvation Army. As Win Butler says, “Music is the most immediate language. You can say a lot less and communicate more in a shorter space.” You only need to glance at the audience at an Arcade Fire show to see how profound this level of communication can be. There is a carpet of arms thrust up towards the rafters, and heads tilted backwards with eyes closed. The ensuing rapture flowing through the crowd borders on religious, which is fitting given the big themes of God, the Christian Church and political hypocrisy that filter through the band’s songs. The subject material is a quantum leap away from having the same jeans on for four days, being a punk rocker with flowers in one’s hair, or whatever it is that Girls Aloud sing about. Disposable pop the Arcade Fire are not.
It is astounding that Arcade Fire has the ability to not only pack out auditoriums, but also to cast this spell on their listeners from the very first bar of the show. Particularly when you take into account that the band refuse to do the necessary courting dance with the media, in most occasions refusing to appear on television or in print at all. Perhaps this has only served to make them all the more alluring - their enigmatic, old-worldly quality has been enhanced by their relative silence. Whatever the reason, it is relatively unheard of that such a band so early on in their career has the pulling power to turn down the weeklies and the monthlies yet still shift a tonne of records and appear near to the top of the bill of a festival like Coachella, attended by 15,000 eager punters.
This phenomenon carries on with the recent release of second album ‘Neon Bible’, which has already shifted enough copies to prove that Arcade Fire were not victims of beginner’s luck first time around. It is just as confident as ‘Funeral’, but it is a much darker affair, if you can comprehend that. Whereas ‘Funeral’ was a cataclysmic release of angst, frustration and fury, ‘Neon Bible’ is all about restraint: its emotions are permanently boiling beneath the surface, ready to spew upwards like a geyser. The approaching thunder that introduces ‘Black Mirror’, the opening track that deliberately wavers in and out of tune, recurs throughout ‘Neon Bible’. The noise is a metaphor for the approaching doom mentioned in the lyrics: the crashing planes, blazing television screens and falling buildings. At points, the rumbling sounds as if it is rising up from the bowels of the earth, threatening to cleave the world in two. But it does not. The result is the feeling that something awful is about to happen without it actually happening. The listener is made to stand on the edge of the cliff, but is never permitted to fall. The experience is discomfiting, but exciting at the same time.
Then there is the album’s sound. It is just as cacophonous as ‘Funeral’, though the crisper production means that the darkness has much sharper edges. The gothic church organ that pumps through tracks like ‘Intervention’ and ‘My Body Is A Cage’ adds to the feeling that this is the sort of music that Davy Jones, with his tentacles, pipe and rheumy eyes, likes to unwind to after a hard day’s killing and pillaging. ‘Neon Bible’ becomes a ship lost at sea, set adrift across a stormy ocean, in search of the lighthouse mentioned in the title of one of the songs. Add that sense of motion sickness to lyrical allusions to starving children, black waves and heretical prayers of defiance, and this is the most un-pop pop album of the year.
“It’s really hard making a record,” says Butler. “Because certain songs will never be better than the first time you recorded them. But some songs will take months, or years, to work out all the details. In some ways that’s why this record has taken so long: you need to save space for songs that have been refined and refined, and some that are a live band recording.”
‘Neon Bible’ is one of those albums that takes a few listens for the listener to work out its details. A song like ‘(Antichrist Television Blues)’ will not make sense on its first outing. It gradually reveals itself, opens its pages, so you can decipher its codes.
Yet baroque as ‘Neon Bible’ is, come December it is guaranteed to be in the top five of every single one of this years best-of lists. That is not an impressive prediction. As we have already established, Arcade Fire exist in an age where music operates by much different rules than it did in the Dark Ages of the 1980s. Or even the 1990s. The ridiculous terms used to pigeonhole bands back then (‘Grebo’, anyone?) just don’t cut the mustard anymore. For evidence of that fact, check the relative failure of the term ‘Nu Rave’ to enter our lexicon. And really, there’s no need for that kind of lazy journalism right now. The thing about Arcade Fire, and perhaps the real answer to the question at the beginning of this article, is that they make brilliant music. Which, when you cut through all the other chaff, is what really matters.
HISTORY LESSONS: BEN FOLDS
Words_Ross Thompson
Ebony and ivory, as Messrs Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder once pithily observed, go together in perfect harmony. The world, it seemed, wasn’t listening, for piano players were not always viewed as the coolest of cool dudes. In days gone by the only people who would have been caught dead behind a Steinway included Liberace, Billy Joel and Dudley Moore. Nowadays though, you can’t turn around without tripping over a sensitive indie band with a piano-playing frontman. Keane, Coldplay, Morning Runner, Guillemots and even happy go lucky Thom Yorke… they are all joining the ivory tickler brigade. But before any of these bedwetting milksops (Yorke excepted) arrived on the scene, someone else was doing his damnedest to bring the piano back into fashion.
In 1994, whilst playing a weekly residency at Sin-é, the same café in New York where Jeff Buckley cut his gigging teeth, college dropout Benjamin Scott Folds befriended bass-player Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee. Brought together by a mutual love of both lounge jazz and 80s Hair Metal, the trio vowed to start playing “punk rock for sissies”. Less than a year later, Ben Folds Five got signed and released their self-titled debut album. It launched the classic single ‘Underground’, which affectionately parodied Jesus Christ Superstar, and spoke of teenage disaffection more pointedly than anything by the welter of soundalike Grunge bands of this era. It had a jaunty singalong chorus to boot.
On the strength of their first record, the band embarked on a series of mammoth tours up and down and across the States. Live shows were raucous affairs where audience participation was encouraged, and impromptu cover versions were frequent. In a novel twist on the ritual of a rock band trashing the stage, they regularly ended with Folds standing atop a baby grand, dropping a piano stool onto the keys.
Thanks to their between-song banter, Ben Folds Five became known for an edgy sense of humour, a quality that was brought to the fore on their second record, ‘Whatever And Ever Amen’. Tracks such as ‘One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces’ and ‘Battle Of Who Could Care Less’ featured comedy swearing and smartly sarcastic one-liners. Yet at the same time Folds was writing elegiac lyrics that, amidst all the effing and jeffing, indicated that the band were not just about having a good time all of the time. The deceptively benign single ‘Brick’ is a case in point. While the verse-chorus-verse structure rose and fell in all the right places, the words told the story of a couple breaking up over an unwanted pregnancy. Not the stuff of your typical pop song.
Another album followed, the confusing but hugely underrated slow-burner ‘The Unauthorised Biography Of Reinhold Messner’, but the band had already started to fragment. The Five, in reality a three, were reduced to just one, as Folds went it alone, releasing a string of solo albums and EPs of elevating quality, which witnessed him further honing his craft. Folds still bangs the Joanna with the same galumphing dexterity as before, but he does it more sensitively, as evidenced by his elegant second solo work ‘Songs For Silverman’. But ‘Whatever And Ever Amen’ remains his finest moment to date. Released a decade ago, it is both melancholic and laugh-out-loud funny, where each obstreperous up yours is followed by a sophisticated ballad, which in turn is followed by a joke about cellulite. Imperfect harmony, if you will, but compulsive listening nonetheless.
Labels: Being Ill, Music Journalism., School
