Memories In Future Tense

London Fields # 64
First published Inpress, Melbourne on 29 April 2009
NB: Each column has a name, but these do not appear in print; printed versions may differ slightly to those displayed here

When was the last time you walked on St Kilda Pier? Or took a stroll through the Botanical Gardens, or a gander at Cook’s Cottage? When you live in a place, you tend to take the local attractions as part of the background. There’s no imperative to see them, as they’ll always be there (as perhaps may you). So you get on with your life, tied up in the patterns of the daily commute, where to get lunch, and what housework probably needs doing but you can put off for just one more day. lf both life and work are based in suburbia, you can become so absorbed in all that entails that you lose sight of where you actually are.

This is true of adopted homes too. On a glorious autumn day last week, I travelled down to Brighton to catch Ultravox on their Return To Eden tour, which sees the commercially successful line-up of the band playing together for the first time since Live Aid some 23 years ago. Getting out of London can prove difficult, and once you do it’s still a long way to any beach, but seeing the sea made me wonder why I didn’t more often. While Brighton did have a pretty dingy period of faded glamour in the nineties, now its myriad streets of small and varied shops seems a world away from the recession-hit capital where the only new outlets seem to be bookies, pawn brokers and money lenders – some taking over the abandoned offices of real estate agents. Yet prices are steep down on the Suffolk coast – even a simple round of drinks was more than I’ve ever paid in London.

I had temporarily forgotten it was St George’s Day, until a labourer-philosopher on a nearby table in the pub started to lecture his mates on the subject (this just after his lengthy diatribe on the particularly outstanding qualities of the breasts of that day’s Page 3 girl). Now every English pub will have one or more of these chaps, and today’s outrage centred on how he wasn’t allowed to celebrate being English; especially as all these foreigners got their special religious holidays (obviously he’d momentarily forgotten that four-day Easter weekend a few weeks back). So here he was, wanting to celebrate a Roman soldier born in Turkey who may never even have existed. And while England should have a national holiday to match Ireland, Scotland and Wales, some nasty racist factions have appropriated this flag as England for the English, so it’ll be a difficult balancing act to get right. Maybe April 23 should be celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday instead?

I’m glad to say Ultravox weren’t a disappointment; Midge’s voice is still outstanding, and it was joyous to see onstage the one reformation I feared would never happen. I still remembered every lyric, and was glad I was in a place and time I could see this limited reformation. Recently it’s been hard to know what decade this we’re living in here. The reformed Spandau Ballet are appearing on chat shows, ABC just played the entire Lexicon Of Love album with an orchestra, and lame Life On Mars sequel Ashes To Ashes has returned for a second series, set in a imagined 1982. Meanwhile, highbrow digital television station BBC Four commemorated the 25^th anniversary of the miners’ strike with a series of documentaries. The heavy-handed response by the police at some of those pickets is still shocking today, and while you’d hope such things are remnants of a dark past, the kettling tactics and assaults on some people in the vicinity of the G20 protests is a sad reminder that the world has not progressed as much as you’d hoped it had.

Anyway, so the train pulled into London Bridge from Brighton late at night and I had about twenty minutes to make the connection to Liverpool Street, which involved crossing the river that really divides the city in two. The Thames is not a sedate meanderer like the Yarra; it’s wide, turbulent, fast, and unpredictable; it’s unlikely you’d survive if you fell in. To my right I saw Tower Bridge for the first time in a few years, and it struck me that I was living in a place I had seen nightly on TV programmes on the ABC as I grew up. Unreal city indeed. Off to the left the huge dome of St Paul’s was still dominating the skyline as it has for hundreds of years. With so much despair around, it can be difficult to see the simple beauty that surrounds us. This floodlit colourful vision snapped me out of my reverie and left me vaguely awestruck, a feeling which as clung to me for several days. As the late Grant McLennan once sang, “If you spend your life looking behind you, you don't see what's up front”.

© James McGalliard 2009

Future Retro

London Fields # 60
First published Inpress, Melbourne on 6 January 2009
NB: Each column has a name, but these do not appear in print; printed versions may differ slightly to those displayed here

Sometimes you need to look into the past to see the future. I was trying to predict trends in the UK music scene for the next year, but realised it would be rather pointless to simply write about acts that are going to be bigged-up or fawned over by the broadsheets or music press. Concentrating on personal favourites who may never even get around to releasing a single song commercially would perhaps be even worse. Yet a great deal of what’s happening here now comes from two places – the early eighties and the mid nineties.

For in the early eighties, synthesizers became affordable, and these cheaper keyboards opened a door to music, like an after echo of the DIY manifesto of punk. Today the sound of those old analogue instruments is ever more sort after, and some of the groundbreaking artists of this era are receiving recognition by a generation who weren’t born when these records were first made. In the mid nineties, the current eighties revival first began - The Human League toured on Octopus, Heaven 17 played live for the first time and Martin Fry put on the gold lame suit again, embracing his past with ABC.

Last month saw The Steel City Tour, when all three of these Sheffield acts played together for the first time. And not cabaret-style with a house band – this was three fully independent groups. It was a great idea on paper, but I’ve seen all perform better in the last decade; it was also hugely disappointing that Martyn Ware and Phil Oakey didn’t collaborate. December also saw Simple Minds on a 30th anniversary tour, which involved them playing the entire New Gold Dream in the middle of their set, while 2007 saw Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark taking Architecture and Morality around the country.

But is the live arena the place to replicate music designed to be listened to at home, specifically by playing a ‘seminal’ album in its entirety? When Gang Of Four brought their Entertainment LP to Don’t Look Back, they pretty much kept to the same set of songs as at other shows on their reunion tour; I’m not sure if every track was actually played. As curator of the Meltdown festival, Patti Smith organised a showcase of the entire Horses album, in order. Yet in the excitement of performance, she forgot a track, which she later slotted into the encore. Now these were seated gigs, in formal concert venues, with an audience there for one act only. Yet when you take this concept to the festivals, it becomes more questionable, for it breaks the cardinal rule about playing known songs to seduce music goers who have never seen you live before. Yet at Primavera Sound in Barcelona the other year, there was Sonic Youth announcing “And now here’s side two, track 2”, as they track listed their way through Daydream Nation. Following a record’s running order slavishly not only takes away the spontaneity of the live environment, but it also ignores that a totally different sequence of tracks may be needed to keep a audience’s attention than is right for the passive listening of a studio recording.

There are other pitfalls of this too. At the same festival, Dirty Three had a valid complaint about performing Ocean Songs - “How are we meant to play an album that lasts over an hour in a forty minute slot?” asked Warren Ellis quite reasonably. Now I’m not necessarily against these things – I’ve paid to see a quite a few of them myself. But do we risk tainting our memories, and do bands risk ruining their reputations? Sometimes these events involve bands reforming, and that raises the tricky question of whether to write and perform new material? James are one of the more successful examples of this, but their 2008 album Hey Ma failed to capture the magic of the live rehearsals that took place during its recording. When they do work, it can be very special. The Blue Aeroplanes launched their deluxe re-release of the brilliant Swagger by playing the album in order, including tracks that had never been played live before.

So why the backward glance? Well, one look at the BBC Sound Of 2009 longlist is enough to make you despair for the future. It was only a few years back that The Bravery won; this year we have White Lies, who sound like The Bravery performing The Teardrop Explodes in the style of The Killers. Other ‘hopes’ also seem to be pillaging the past, and it looks as if there’s going to be a belated attempt to break some Electro into the UK mainstream.

It’s hard to see where 2009 will actually go. There are yet more eighties acts on the way - Blancmange is quietly working together again, and April will see the hit-making version of Ultravox bringing their arpeggios and flanged notes back on stage for the first time since Live Aid. But while the acts of the past were innovators, innovation seems largely absent today. Personally I can see two things – a new wave of C86 influenced acts from the USA, and this ceaseless digging bringing forth a BritPop revival. You have been warned.


© James McGalliard 2009