Uncommon People - Miranda Sawyer

 UNCOMMON PEOPLE -

BRITPOP AND BEYOND IN 20 SONGS -

MIRANDA SAWYER

There are some who say - and I've met them - the Nineties was the greatest ever decade for music. Can you imagine that? I won't deny there was indeed a lot of spine-tinglingly great music being made during that period but over and above any accolade such as 'greatest' I would say the Nineties was the decade when music finally left the planet, launched by a rocket and then jettisoned to become a satellite - another piece of space hardware - circling the Earth forever. The decade when music became an accoutrement. When any attributes such as music or specific bands being 'relevant' or 'political' came with a wink as if to say 'but not really'.

The Nineties was the decade when music considered to be 'outside' of the mainstream became the mainstream. It was the decade of the last hurrah when the music business thrived and partied for all its worth and that arguably, with the advent of streaming and social media it's been downhill ever since until plateauing at its current state of being just another cheap (and not so cheap) product for the consumer's head.

Miranda Sawyer used to write for Smash Hits and Select magazine, and was at the heart of what became labelled as 'Britpop'. I used to sometimes see someone around Bristol during the Nineties who looked like her but I presumed it was just a look-alike. It turns out it probably was her as in her chapter about Tricky in her book Uncommon People - Britpop And Beyond In 20 Songs, she says she had friends in Bristol who she would visit. 'I was always struck by how laid-back everything seemed, how little got done, how packed full it was of attractive hippy-tinged stoners knitting their own yoghurt, ho ho.' Ho, ho indeed.

But hang on a minute. What does Tricky have to do with Britpop? And what even is Britpop, anyway? According to Miranda, Britpop is a word. A feeling. A sensation of 'this is our time'. It is also, moreover, a search term. A category for retailers signifying UK indie-pop music of the mid-'90s, which means the net can be cast wide. And when you add 'And Beyond' to the word 'Britpop' which is what Miranda does in her subtitle to her book, then the sky's the limit.

Uncommon People is Miranda Sawyer's trawl through the 1990s and the bands and songs that (in her eyes - and ears) defined that era. It's a book that in many ways could almost have written itself, the difference being that Miranda was there, interviewing, dancing, witnessing and - though she never says so - I would hope, drug taking. I mean, it's a bit like that saying 'If you can remember the Sixties, then you weren't there', but rather 'If you weren't taking drugs in the Nineties, then you weren't there'. Remember, this was the last hurrah of the music business thriving. The decade when even Chumbawamba became massive.

All the usual suspects are here of course: Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Suede, Elastica, and also others such as PJ Harvey, Stereolab and The Prodigy. Twenty bands in total, and so twenty ways of reflecting on the 1990s. There aren't too many insights proffered, it must be said, but then this was a time when the music press was at its height and you could hardly move for the amount of music magazines and papers available - Select, Q, Smash Hits, NME, Melody Maker, Mixmag, DJ, Mojo, Vox, The Word - so pretty much everything was being covered.

Surprisingly, the most interesting insight Miranda gives is in regard to Oasis, a band you'd think everything there is to say about them has already been said a thousand times over. She tells us, however, exactly what made them so good and so successful, and what she says is pretty convincing.

One thing I'd forgotten about is that it was Miranda who'd conducted the interview with Noel where he said he hated Blur (or two members of Blur, to be precise) and that he hoped they would catch AIDS and die. It was a comment that went ballistic, causing a lot of upset - and rightly so. 

Miranda tells us that a few days later she saw Noel at the Q Awards and went over to him and said sorry 'though now I wonder what for'. It leaves me wondering why she would have done that as well. In hindsight, this was Noel's 'David Bowie giving a Nazi salute at Victoria Station' moment. Proof, if needed, that mixing a pop star's egotism with excessive cocaine use should be avoided.

For anyone with an interest in 'Britpop and beyond', Uncommon People is a pleasurable enough read though to be honest, it doesn't really leave you with anything at the end. The reason for this is not because it's badly written or anything but more to do with who it seems to have been written for, meaning it seems to be aimed at those who weren't actually there in the 1990s. Those who weren't even born then. For example, why else would an explanation in brackets be given of who Valerie Solonas was when she's mentioned? Or an explanation in brackets be given of who the riot grrrl bands were when mentioned? Or even when saying about how The Prodigy learnt their craft of how to get a crowd going by playing live over and over again, adding in brackets 'It's how The Beatles learnt'. I mean, really?

The most insightful comment, however, comes from Irvine Welsh when he's quoted as saying: 'Britpop was a celebration of British culture, everything you'd seen before all rehashed again, but also like a requiem for British culture. Like: all this is gonna go, from Teds to ravers and everything in between, it's all gonna be sold off to the internet to the global market place and sold back to us in chintzy Instagram influencers. There's gonna be a fire sale of youth culture. The party's over.'

And though I don't totally agree with that, I do tend to sympaphize with it quite a bit.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      John Serpico

Weird Fucks - Lynne Tillman

WEIRD FUCKS - LYNNE TILLMAN

It's like, if I was a bookseller I'd put this one out on the shelves of my bookshop and wait to see who brings it up to the till to buy, just to see what kind of person they are. And it's like, when you're reading it, it should probably be done in public such as on a train and be held up at face-level so that everyone can see the title.

Well, I'm the kind of person who would buy a book like this and the bookseller didn't seem surprised in the least, giving me a look of 'I might have known it would be you who would buy this one'. And when reading it on the train, nobody commented or moved away or even seemed to bat an eyelid. It was a bit disappointing, really, as I thought it might at least strike up some kind of conversation at least, even if it was an uncomfortable one. 

Weird Fucks by Lynne Tillman is a novella from (as it says on the back cover) a 'legendary figure in American fiction' and actually it's an important point because knowing who Lynne Tillman is lends the book some gravitas. It changes the book from being merely some notes on the author's shagging career to an exploration of her sexual odyssey through America, Greece and The Netherlands during the 1970s.

So who is Lynne Tillman? According to Wikipedia she's a novelist, short story writer and cultural critic who in the 1970s squatted in London with Heathcote Williams. If you know who Heathcote Williams is (and I would hope everyone does) then it gives you a good idea of where she's coming from culturally and therefore posits a clue as to what Weird Fucks might be like.

According to Stewart Home, 'Weird Fucks is better than sex, it's a literacy mindfuck, it blew me away'. I wouldn't really go that far in praising it, however, and in fact I'd say it's actually a very light read and not half as rude as the title suggests. Lynne Tillman was obviously a liberated woman during the Seventies but not over-liberated, as they say. Her inhibitions, naivety and self doubts are on full display but more importantly than this, when it comes to the men she writes about, they're there in all their glory - and it's not a pretty sight.

For example: 'In the morning Scott tells me he's into being macho. "How do you mean?" I ask. "Well," he says "it's sort of feminism for men."

Or this: 'Tim's stupidity was dangerous. When finally we were fucking, he was given to calling out "That's some cunt. That's some cunt." His love-talk became absurd exaggeration. "I'd like to kill you with my cock." I drew back from his embrace and looked at his eyes which had narrowed. "That's horrible," I said.'

Oh, the embarrassment. I suspect some of the names in the book have been changed and that some of these men might well now be pretty famous - or cult famous, at least?  I wonder if they're still the same when it comes to women? I very much hope not. 'The past is a different country, they do things differently there', as LP Hartley once said and if this is the case then the 1970s is a whole other planet with Weird Fucks being images of it beamed back to Earth from the literary equivalent of a Voyager space probe whilst it's commander Lynne Tillman sits back at NASA Control having the last laugh.

John Serpico

Sound Within Sound - Kate Molleson

SOUND WITHIN SOUND -

A HISTORY OF RADICAL TWENTIETH CENTURY COMPOSERS -

KATE MOLLESON

Take a look at the photo on the cover. It's of a woman by the name of Annea Lockwood, taken on Chelsea Embankment in 1968 showing her standing in front of a burning piano. Inside the piano are microphones wrapped in asbestos so they might withstand the flames. The microphones are wired-up to a reel-to-reel tape machine that's recording the sounds of the piano burning. Strings twanging, wood creaking, glues and varnishes melting. Elsewhere in that same year, Keith Moon was exploding his drum kit and Jimi Hendrix was burning his guitar but that was essentially performance art, with the accent on the visual. In the burning of the piano, Annea Lockwood's focus - and the whole point of the exercise - was on the sound created.

Another sonic sculpture she created that involved pianos was a piece called 'Southern Exposure' where she placed a piano on a beach at the high tide line and left it there for the sea to lap against its legs, the process creating notes from the piano as if played by the sea itself. It conjures up images, of course, of Jane Campion's 'The Piano' film when Holly Hunter's piano is left behind on the beach when she arrives in New Zealand.

Another connection to The Piano is that Michael Nyman who scored the soundtrack was an early admirer of Lockwood's work, particularly her 'glass concerts' held at Middle Earth, the hippy haven in London where Pink Floyd would often play. These 'glass concerts' involved the nightclub being plunged into darkness whilst onstage Lockwood smashed panes of glass. 

Another piano piece she did, going by the name 'Piano Garden', involved her placing (or 'planting') three pianos in a garden in a village in Essex and leaving them to the elements, the flowers and the creepers. The sounds from the pianos weren't recorded but the intention was that the pianos would 'play' forever. Interestingly, this was the same village where Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher of Crass were living (and still to this day do, at Dial House). Lockwood also took part along with various other artists such as Rimbaud and Vaucher in the legendary ICES 72 Festival held at The Roundhouse in 1972.

Annea Lockwood is just one of ten composers featured in Kate Molleson's book, Sound Within Sound - A History Of Radical Twentieth Century Composers. It's a potted history, of sorts, of radical composers who have been barely mentioned when it comes to the mainstream history of music. Ten names that I've never heard of before, for sure, and so subsequently have never heard their music. Nowadays, however, we have YouTube, so there's really no excuse. 

We have a choice: stick to what we know or what is promoted by the music industry and its algorithms, or venture out beyond our safety zones and into the wilds. And I'll tell you right now, some of the stuff mentioned by Molleson is totally out in the wilds. For example, 'Poem For Tables, Chairs Benches' by La Monte Young. It's there on YouTube. Take a listen, I dare you. In comparison, Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music' is but a lullaby.

Kate Molleson is a journalist and broadcaster, and a leading commentator on contemporary classical music, and it's this classical music area that she's coming from. Pop music isn't her forte but there are crossovers everywhere, like an aural Venn diagram. Pop music can cross into classical, classical into pop music, and both can enter the avant-garde and experimental - out on the perimeter. 

Or as Molleson puts it when writing about Mexican composer Julian Carrillo: 'Sonido 13 (Carrillo's most well-known composition) works like a gateway, a filmic warp screen, a portal to a place where senses become less presumptive and more receptive'. Or as mentioned when writing about French composer Eliane Radigue when she's commissioned to make a sound 'like the silence of the stars'. Which is all very much like as Jim Morrison once intoned: 'Out here on the perimeter there are no stars. Out here we is stoned. Immaculate.'

If you're interested in music then you should probably read Kate Molleson's book and by that I don't mean if you just happen to like a bit of Lady Gaga, or if you think classical music starts with Vivaldi and ends with Nigel Kennedy. I mean if you're interested in sound or even more so, if you're interested in sound within sound. If you're interested in experimentalism and the avant-garde. If you're interested in the beyond. The metaphysical. The transcendent. If you're interested in - as John Coltrane put it - a love supreme. Yes, read this book. The key, I might add, being to read it whilst armed with YouTube so you may at the same time listen to what Molleson is writing about. And I guarantee you, your mind will be opened as well as your ears.

John Serpico