Cloud-Busting

Enormous Yes yields to no man or woman in its love for Kate Bush. When the Yes was but a callow nipper making its way in a big bad world, her song Cloudbusting nestled and shone amid the drek like a tiara in a toilet.

"I still dream of Orgonon," she sang, and we wondered what on earth Orgonon might be, before being distracted by the mmmmmmm knowing something good is gonna happen bit.

So: what was it? And why were the Government interested?

Listen.....

Mindhacks

Tricks and tips for exploiting your brain

I need this. My brain has been exploiting me for too long.

The Rip | Portishead | Third

This is the only song I can listen to at the moment. I should stop, I’m going to wear it out. But I just can’t. It’s a beautiful and creaky guitar figure, a four-note arpeggio shape entwined around a lovely long chord structure; a similar hushed but hopeful vibe to the Out Of Season album. And then it’s insistent and electronic, synths erasing the guitar: but still those same ever-cycling notes; and over it all, and within it, like a ghost, Beth, keening, mournful. It's a wonderful song on an album full of wonders.

Worth the wait and then some.

The Brits: never again

The Brits. Honestly, why do I still watch this, when I could be doing something more spiritually nourishing, like punching myself in the face? It must be some notion that I still have, somewhere deep inside, that pop can still thrill, move, delight and transport. On the evidence of this parade of mediocrities, I must be wrong.

It’s been easy the last five years, since Australia doesn’t show the Brits. They have the ARIAs which, despite being on a much smaller scale and having a worrying tendency to give multiple awards to Missy Higgins, at least has no global aspirations. Every second of this year’s ceremony scream the organizers desperation to be cool and edgy. And then they tell us that the award for Best British Live Band has been voted for by listeners to Radio 2. Fine and rounded citizens though I’m sure they are, Radio 2 listeners perhaps aren’t representative of those gig-goers who’ll happily be doused in the guitarist’s coke-adulterated sweat just to catch a possibly seminal event, or at least a rousing one. Sure enough, Take That get the award. Fine. They’re not the problem.

Sharon Osbourne. Britain, why?

The Brits School. Half the winners gave shout-outs to the kids in the front rows, which were deservingly stuffed with current students. What is the Brits School? Is this the future of British music we have to look forward to? Seems the only achievement of note is its ability to teach its students the perfect glottal stop. And what’s with Adele? Her song is OK, pretty good even. But are we that desperate for more Amy that we’re going to canonize a singer who, on the evidence of her segment of the Mark Ronson medley, seemed to have wandered in off the street?

Talking of Winehouse, she was literally the only good bit. Happily, she got two bites at the cherry. She couldn’t stand still and looked hugely nervous, like it was her first time on stage: skirt hitching, hair-twiddling, hopping around like a kid. But the voice: like she’d been singing for a hundred years. There was something thrilling about “Valerie”, as she seemed to be stunt-singing her way around the melody, without ever looking like she was about to crash. Adele, Kate, Leona et al can only dream.

But it says something that the best bit of the evening was a medley of old songs. The only other good thing, apart from Amy and the end, was that I missed Mika opening the show with his “Grace Kelly”.

Gutted.

Henry Plainview | Jonny Greenwood, OST There Will Be Blood

This epic fragment occurs right at the beginning of There Will Be Blood, as the light comes up on hills that may or may not contain oil. It's a precise musical analogy for Plainview's single-mindedness, as all the strings discordantly make their way to the same piercing note. It's terrifyingly loud, truly hair-raising, and a reminder of what an original musical language can do for a film, akin to the moment our old TV almost freaked out when the mothership starts singing in Close Encounters. Also astonishing is "Open Spaces", with its long unworldly notes and ondes martenots. Just a shame the soundtrack doesn't have any fragments of dialogue: be great to have "I drink your milkshake! I drink it dry!". Make a great ringtone...

Radiohead : In Rainbows

I've been meaning to write about In Rainbows since its release a few months back. About how it's a record of a band on its best form. About how friends who previously would have rushed to get the measure of a new Radiohead record now seemed laissez-fare or outright hostile about In Rainbows, suspecting that it might continue where the unfinished sprawl of Hail To The Thief or the electro-jazzery of Kid A or Amnesiac left off. But also about how three or four of the songs on In Rainbows are the best the band have released. About how the record soundtracked my leaving of Australia.

But this guy said most of it, and said it better, so with apologies, read this instead:

"...all that mattered were 10 beautiful songs, some of the best of the band's career, that felt so expansive, so breathtaking, that Radiohead could've delivered them via USB wristband or some other such nonsense and I still would've gotten that scalp-tingle of joy that rushes through my head when art touches my heart.

The excitement of witnessing a great band hit a peak is a timeless thrill. To hear the strummed, magnificent hook of "Bodysnatchers" flapping like a seagull in flight as Thom Yorke screams to the world, "It is the 21st century! It is the 21st century!" is as awesome an experience as watching Kurt Cobain leap into a drum kit or Joanna Newsom's fingers drift across a harp. The trebled, drunken breakbeat that kicks off "15 Step" sounds so lo-fi that at first you think, "Oh, great, this download sounds like shit. I paid $22 for this?" But it's a ruse: When Colin Greenwood's hard, dub-heavy bass powers in alongside Jonny Greenwood's loopy guitar line, the song expands, the beat becomes tethered, and speculation on the what of In Rainbows seems as unanswerable as the why of this here vista.

The best songs on In Rainbows travel many melodic roads simultaneously: Big basslines skulk alongside meandering harmonies, drifting piano tones, and deep, unassuming ambient rumbles that subtly steer you along like a rudder on an ocean liner. Point A will no doubt lead to Point B in a Radiohead song—this isn't the Fiery Furnaces we're talking about—but the pleasure is in hearing how these five dudes who've been playing together for 20 years get there. On "Reckoner," the band stays tight for most of the song as though squeezed into a cubicle, but then—boom—the walls collapse, and we're in the great, wide open with an eerie, pastoral string section.

Granted, most of the time I have no idea what Thom Yorke is talking about: Usually it's a variation on "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up." No lyrics he's ever written have floored me like, say, the first statement-of-purpose couplet on P.J. Harvey's White Chalk: "As soon as I'm left alone/The devil wanders into my soul." In most of Yorke's lyrics, lines dangle, drift, are abandoned. Is the "elephant in the room" of "Faust Arp"—the one that's "tumbling, tumbling, tumbling in duplicate and triplicate"—the same creature that a few lines later is "dead from the neck up"? How can a single elephant tumble in duplicate and triplicate? Or is this lyrical cubism? And I can't imagine another lyricist getting away with opening a song on one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the year with the line "Wakey wakey, rise and shine." The only Rainbows lyric that really tracks is "I have no idea what I am talking about," and it's best to take Yorke at his word and appreciate the beauty of his voice, which sustains itself like a patient bow drawn slowly across a cello. Regardless of what he's saying, Yorke conveys a profound sense of wonder and love.

Love. My friend Paul B. Davis, part of the art collective Beige, has posited that the relationship between humans and data is evolving, and that real-world emotions now figure into once-clinical computer interactions. He calls this movement Post-Data, and its aesthetic goal, he writes, is "gaining suffrage for microprocessors . . . data, in its cold and inherently meaningless incarnation, is over. Post-Data is all about feelings, and unconditional love for the bits. The Post-Data artist has an emotional attachment to the data process so strong that it's not right to just call it 'data' anymore . . . Post-Data gives you the faith to sit down, take a look at your computer, and say, 'I love you.' "

Maybe that's what In Rainbows made us feel—a rush of unexplainable emotion, a digital crush, a confirmation that things aren't like they used to be, that 2007 was a watershed that'd been building for the past decade but had yet to manifest itself fully. It felt to me like what Sam Phillips captured so eloquently in the first of Peter Guralnick's Elvis Presley biographies, Last Train to Memphis: "I was shooting for that damn row that hadn't been plowed," he explained of his quest for the King. Radiohead's 2007 felt like a similar shot: some sort of convergence that you just knew was coming, but exactly how it would arrive was still fuzzy. Now, some semblance of clarity has emerged—right?—and hearing the bundle sing from trunk-lid speakers, my head filled to the brim with Yorke's "Videotape" benediction ("No matter what happens now/You shouldn't be afraid/Because I know today has been the most perfect day I've ever seen") while a campfire spread analog warmth on my analog face, the future felt remarkably like the past: intense, full of mystery and meaning, thrilling, lovely."

Burial - 'Archangel'

I've returned from some five years in the wilderness (Australia since you ask), fetching up in the sunlit uplands of the UK. After travelling for a couple of months in China and Japan, we arrived in London in the middle of the one the coldest snaps I can remember (or maybe it's always been that cold in Winter, and I had somehow forgotten).

Since then, I've been working in Paddington, walking the streets, a grimy mixture of dirty main roads and gleaming canal-side developments. And this Burial track, which I'm sure has been written about to death elsewhere, has been the perfect accompaniment. It's an urban masterpiece, the sound of disembodiment, of ghosts howling in the machine.

Home....

So, after wondering the globe for the last five years, I've returned to the sunlit uplands of the UK, where all is bright and marvellous, oh yes!

Publish Post

The trouble with science 1

Actually that should be the trouble with scientists. The more one is able to see the patterns and themes that make the universe work, the more one hates to rely on interpretations, anything that might smack of the artistic.

So while I love the work of the Evolutionary Psychologists, their tendency to rubbish Freud at every turn seems a little like tunnel vision.

Fortunately we have Adam Phillips to mount a typically paradoxical defence: Freud?

Underworld: Oblivion Ball

I owe Underworld a great deal. If it hadn't've been for Dubnobasswithmyheadman taking residence on my stereo and in my head during my first year of Uni, I'd probably still be listening to... well, I shudder to think. Maybe I'd be of the opinion that Kaiser Chiefs represented British rock at its mercurial best? Or that James Blunt was a sensitive and engaging artiste with a voice like old honey, rather than an unutterable ballsak with a voice like gagging on sick. Who's to say? I do know that, before Underworld, and with only a few honorary precursors (The Shamen, The Orb), the music I liked had to have choruses, guitars, drums; the indie litany, all present and correct.

But Dubnosbass was a passport to a quite different sonic dimension (having already turned down The Prodigy's earlier and (then) less appealing promise to take my brain to said other dimension): not only was it a thunderous and beguiling album in its own right, it was as if someone had just turned the colour on. Suddenly, I got the point of beats, could see the possibilities of 4/4; realised that I'd be listening to music like this from then on.

So when we learned we could combine our trip to Japan with a chance to see Underworld, Andrew Weatherall, Simian Mobile Disco and a couple of locals acts, we were cock-a-hoop (which turned to ecstasy-on-toast when we managed to get tickets to see Daft Punk in Kobe). On the other hand, their most recent album, Oblivion With Bells, sounded a bit vanilla on the few, admittedly not close, listens I8d given it. Were the band finally reaching the end of their productive span after the better part of 20 years?

Tish and nonsense. On the evidence of last night's gig in the cavernous Makuhari Messe in Tokyo (easily sold-out), Underworld are, if anything, at the peak of their powers. They played a truly mammoth set of crowd-pleasers, roof-raisers and floor-shakers and had the crowd of 20,000 staggeringly stylish Japanese and two not-quite-so stylish-thank-you-very-much westerners reaching a state the Buddhists call satori but I call ohmygodthatwasAMAZING. Samurai dancing, beat bushido: whatever it was, we were going off. A song like Rowla, for instance, became a frightening acid squall; a frankly barbaric King Of Snake was divine, unending; even the new songs seemed little short of perfect. From

They hit us with the ever-circling beat-storm of Pearl's Girl, and followed it with a euphoric Two Months Off. Ahh those synths. I wanted it all to stop. I never wanted it to stop. They finished with Moaner, a song I'd never really come to terms with in the past; and yet, in the context, it was spell-binding, Karl Hyde throwing Elvis poses in his glittering silver jacket, ranting in the purple spotlight like the scary but lovable cockney loon we know him to be. Toss in a towering Cowgirl and a delirious Born Slippy, and you've got the mother and father of all live shows. Shock and awe doesn't cover it.

They play an encore of Jumbo, the blissful synths and gaseous pads a relief from the frenzy of the last two+ hours, and we walked (!) back to our hotel to some dubstep from Weatherall, before losing consciousness at around 4am.

There's no WAY that Daft Punk can top that. Right?

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Apologies for having been away so very long. Since we've A) packed up our entire lives and left Australia, B) spent a rather crazed month traveling in China and C) found ourselves in the middle of Japan, updating this blog has been both tricky AND hard. As the ad very nearly says, Impossible Is Something.

Oh yes, and D). I lost my iPod. 80gbs worth of music down the wazoo, just like that. So, apart from Radiohead's album, I've had very little new music to listen to. And yet, apart from the embarrassment and anger of losing such a valuable piece of hardware (and a birthday present to boot), I don't feel too bad. It means I can start all over again. I will only upload albums that I WILL listen to.

This is my pledge, and I will keep it. Definitely.

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The man Barrie on McCarthy's frighteningly good The Road. Nothing to add really, except to say that Blood Meridian is in my top five books EVAH ("What are the others?" I'm not telling**), not least because I could reliably freak Shana out by reading aloud from its blood-soaked pages (not literally blood-soaked, I hope you understand. That would be weird), especially the first Indian attack, the poor horse bitten on the face by a snake, and the final hallucinatory scenes with the Judge and the Kid.

*Though, to be fair, I only got hold of it in my last couple of weeks in Australia, when finding time to give albums the Deep Listen was far from easy.

** " Cos you don't know", etc.