(I don’t remember) Joe Brainard

The latest of Maxϊmo Park’s pop obit B sides is ‘(I remember) Joe Brainard’.  Predominantly an artist, Brainard wrote a long list of things he remembered, which in turn inspired Georges Perec to write Je me souviens, the reading of which led to me to invert the idea, and list things that I don’t remember.  I wrote it more than ten years ago now.  It comes complete with archaic, early-days-of-the-Web links, almost all of which are now redundant.  Funnily enough I do now remember some of the things I didn’t remember then; but the thought of how many more things I’d be forced to admit I don’t remember, were I to put my mind to it, is frightening.

11. James - Hymn from a village

from the Village fire EP, Factory FAC 138, 1985

Here’s where the divisions between the A and the B side break down.  James’ first three releases were two seven inches, Jimone (‘Folklore’, ‘What’s the world’ and ‘Fire so close’) and James II (‘Hymn from a village’ and ‘If things were perfect’, conceived as a double A pairing), then a twelve inch EP, Village fire, which gathered all five together and cast ‘What’s the world’ as lead.  My conclusion in Backed with terms is that I can take anyone of these five as my b/w pick.  But it’s almost impossible to chop away a single finger from this hand – they came to me as an indivisible whole in the form of Village fire and finally they are all now available again in that sequence on the double CD edition of Fresh as a daisy: the singles.  The compilation tracks James’ evolution from Factory fire to Eno-produced pop hits, passing through subdued releases for the Blanco y Negro-Sire coupling and Madchester festival anthems; a journey from which I jumped ship after seeing them live at the time of Gold mother’s release in 1990.

It was hard to begrudge them their success or the canny prevalence of the lower-case typography and daisy t-shirts which bloomed everywhere you looked, but the feeling remains that although they came close with the best moments on Stutter and Strip-mine, and the hits are respectable as hits, the Village fire songs are the height of their artistic achievement.

The tour programme for those performances in 1990 contains notes – written with critical freedom – by the likes of Dave Haslam, Dave Simpson, Les Inrockuptibles’ Jean-Daniel Beauvallet, and one Kevin Pearce, who said:

‘James have not held my interest. I am not a camp follower.  I lost James in the crowd, chancing upon them from time to time. … If James are accidentally caught up with any sociable movement where music is stripped of language and meaning, the irony should not be missed. James seemed awkward in company, and I liked that.  James had a way with words, and I liked that even more.  James should wilfully refuse to waste their natural resources.  They should supply cerebral stimulation. A chance to exercise the little grey cells as well.’

If things had been perfect, James would have recorded Stutter and Strip-Mine for Factory rather than Sire, and what LPs they would have been, if we judge using the formula x = vl(√t) (where v = Village fire, l = James’ live performances and t = Tony Wilson).  Evidence exists in the form of their set at WOMAD in 1985, where their sound has a breezy, swirling majesty and the possessed syncopation that typified the Village fire songs, from the weird and graceful jerkiness of a puppet on a string (‘If things were perfect’) to the physical ferocity of a pneumatic drill (‘Withdrawn’).  James live were perhaps the most psychologically intense meeting of heart and mind to be found at the midpoint of that dismal psychological decade.  As unconventional, insular, determined and bloody-minded as you could wish a group to be.  Swapping instruments after each song.  Tim Booth dancing the tarantella.  And singing:

‘Add a touch of mystique where the writing gets weak
Break up coherence with a cut-cut-cut-up technique
When you’ve got nothing to say
Shut up
Or show that you’re willing to play
With words that simply aren’t out of touch
With the genuine feelings which lead to their birth’
– ‘Folklore’

or

‘This language used is all worn out
A walking corpse that won’t play dead
Disease dragged on from bed to bed
Pay for your twist, pay for your shout
Wasn’t meant to be
Built on complacency
Open your eyes and see’
– ‘Hymn from a village’

How magnificently arrogant to launch yourself upon the (pop) world with this invective about it – an arrogance significantly more substantial and stylish than, say, the sunglassed kiss-my-arse swagger of the Stone Roses.  The forgivable arrogance of self-definition through opposition, through youthful certainty that you’re not like anybody else.

But it wasn’t just the words, or Tim’s increasingly frantic wail as ‘Hymn a from a village’ careered to its close.   It was the guitar pealing like cathedral bells, the buoyancy of the bass, and drums which released the whirling dervish inside the body of anyone (Morrissey included) who knew that these songs were the equal of any on Hatful of hollow.  There was magic to raise up a seventeen year old heart, and the mind which floated, a little disconnected, somewhere above it.

10. The Fall - Fantastic life

/ Lie dream of a Casino soul, Kamera, 1981

It was something of a shock to hear that Mark E. Smith was celebrating his fiftieth birthday earlier this year.  Only fifty!  He’s been standing at the centre of the tornado that is the Fall for thirty years, has released more albums than everyone else in Manchester put together, and even in a dim light you’d have to say he looks ready for his pension.  But there it is – someone I’d always idly imagined to be a generation ahead of me is in fact only a decade or so older.

We have a pretty shrewd idea why Mark bears the signs of age, but to what do we attribute this remarkable creative longevity?  A lifelong need to express himself bred from an early age, Mark having graduated more or less straight from school into a band?  A particularly strong genetic disposition towards stubbornness?  Seeing it as a job, and finding that he would rather work than relax?  These possibilities account for the longevity, but not necessarily for the Fall hitting the mark more often than they have missed it.  The hiring and firing must be a key element – Mark has rarely allowed the backing group to go stale.  He can irritate the hell out of you one year, then delight you the next, but regardless of punch-ups or intra-band domestic bliss, on he goes.  Only with recent albums have you had to question whether his verbal dexterity has been shot by the drink – he certainly seems to be a man of fewer words – but as a band-leader he rivals Duke or Miles.

The mass of Mark E.’s output is astonishing by any standards.  A six-disc box set is about as far as you can get from a solitary slice of 7 inch vinyl, but gathered together, the twenty-four Peel sessions between 1978 and 2004 give the best possible account of the journey taken by the Fall.  Their progress and setbacks are both historically and artistically fascinating.  Raw and skewed wiry blasts and rockabilly romps and 95 stretched-out theses nailed to the door of Piccadilly Records.  The unlikely but successful blending of Mark and Brix – rancour and glamour – into a unified, glorious noise.  Collaborations with dance troupes and cut’n’paste producers.  More recently, garage- and krautrock-inspired rebirths.

Like its A side, ‘Fantastic life’ is an early forerunner of The wonderful and frightening… era Fall; there are intriguing spaces where Brix’s sun-kissed garage pop sensibility would later be.  The characteristic Mark E. line- and word-ending ‘uh’s are in full effect, Craig Scanlan’s guitar scratches out a skeletal melody, the drums pound, Marc Riley’s organ keeps up a drone throughout, and the song motors (motoriks) along like a vanload of Manc musicians taking the gospel to the badlands down south.

How to settle on one B side from a choice of 40-odd Fall singles?  As is seemingly the case with Mark’s subject matter, I picked one at random.  ‘Fantastic Life,’ Mark says on the sleeve, ‘relates itself’.  Yes, of course, all Fall songs are self-explanatory, and who could be so obtuse as to be unable to work out the meaning of a line like ‘Siberian mushroom Santa was in fact Rasputin’s brother’ either in the context of the song or out of it?  For what it’s worth, my guess is that the subject under Smith-style discussion is espionage.  Fantastic lies.  When some veteran Fall-follower comes to publish the complete lyrics of Mark E. Smith not many years from now, the book will need annotations as copious as those for an edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, such is the breadth of MES’ cultural and linguistic reference.

It’s hard to overestimate just how singular Mark E. Smith seemed in the eighties, even alongside other unusual flora and fauna on the Peel show.  Might it have been better if the Fall’s recording career had been brought to an abrupt halt in, say, 1991, or even 1985, before or after This nation’s saving grace?  The enigma deepened rather than seen slowly to become almost commonplace?  Maybe.  For anyone whose whole life is not the Fall, there are after all only so many Fall albums you need.  Although I no longer go out of my way to assess Mark E.’s latest work, it’s oddly reassuring to know he’s still out there plugging away, creeping up behind his musicians and interfering with their instruments.

Belated happy fiftieth, Mark.  There can be few who have led a more fantastic musical life than you.