No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.15 - "Love Will Tear Us Apart " (Joy Division)

Roddy Woomble once said “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was Joy Division’s best single, if only because it’s the only one that captures the band’s live energy. I was four months when Ian Curtis killed himself, so I had to take Woomble’s word for it, but it certainly feels unusual – almost unique - within the band’s songs. This is one of those contrary takes wearying dickheads pretend are “unpopular”, or – heaven forfend! – “cancellable”, but I’ve never been able to get next to Joy Division. I don’t quibble with Peter Hook’s contention their music seemed to come from some other place. It just wasn’t a very enticing place, cold and distant and half-illuminated with polarised light. Extraordinary doesn’t have to mean engaging.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart”, together with equally late cuts “Atmosphere” and (so late Curtis was dead before it was recorded, and it came out as a New Order joint) “Ceremony”, represented the band moving into more interesting territory. Or, given the previous metaphor, perhaps I should say they represented a shift in how the band processed the territory they were already exploring. Songs about how it felt to traverse this strange, alien world, rather than terse reports about what it contained.

It’s not that this isn’t still minimalist (part of why it’s almost impossible to cover), though it wasn’t common to hear Curtis on guitar to free Sumner up for keys – the song is built around a D chord both because of its versatility and the ease with which Curtis could play it. But there’s an energy here that’s purposefully held back in the band’s two studio albums. A sense of release, as Curtis channels his disintegrating marriage, the stress of juggling new success and old commitments, and a recent epilepsy diagnosis into a piano-wire tight growl of exhausted desperation. The cliché contrast of how good/poor luck in life matters nothing compared to poor/good luck in love is rewritten to something much more interesting: “Everything is awful, but all that really matters is my marriage – which just so happens to 

also be fucked”.

There are all sorts of offensively self-centred ways to link Curtis’ last months with the quality of the song. All of them we shall ignore. No song is so good it is worth a human life, and no band is so good them losing one among their number is primarily sad because the music stops. Instead of inferences, then, let’s stick to the one certainty we have in this: “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is one of the greatest songs ever recorded. That should be - HAS to be - enough.

B-side:

End Of Year Progress Roundup

Another quiet year on the blog, and this time I don't even have the excuse of moving house, changing jobs, or having to keep grinding out content for Geek Syndicate. So what have I been doing?

The short and entirely unsatisfying answer is "not a lot".  My new work/living combination doesn't afford me quite the same amount of unclaimed time as I once enjoyed. Much of what spare time I've been able to claw back from domesticity/capitalism has gone into starting a book version of IDFC, something I assumed would be relatively painless until I remembered I hate everything I've ever written approximately six months after I write it. I'm almost done with the first three essays, with thirty more stretching out ahead of me in various stages of NOPE.

There's been a little progress on the painting front, at least. I do mean little, as well, but I've accelerated over the last few months, which is encouraging. My 'Nid army is now at around 4500 points, with these two lads rounding off a third Warrior Brood (as always, I've deliberately painted them in the same absurdly simple colour scheme I've been employing since my mid teens).

(Also pictured: a piece of battlefield detritus I painted during a D&D session, just to give my hands something to do).

I've also been chipping away at my Black Reach Orks, last seen here back in August. Since then, two more Boyz have dropped off the end of the assembly line.

The assembly line itself has moved on fractionally as well, with every Boy below precisely one step closer to completion than they were four months ago.

There is one exception, as the particularly attentive may observe - the lad at the front left has a head that's nothing more than undercoated. This is due to a savage, unpredented and deeply upsetting betrayal, in which two of my family members conspired against me. First, my cat knocked the miniature to the floor from where it sat on our kitchen table, whereupon my dog swallowed the head whole.

Which reminds me: we have a dog now. Here he is:

JUST LOOK AT HIM HE'S AWFUL. Except more canine-related excuses in the future, because this lad CANNOT BE TAMED. He makes Zoltran Hound of Dracula look like Lassie on general anesthetic. It's like living with a chaos god hiding inside a smelly rug. As with essentially every dog since the beginning of the domestication process, it's a good fucking job he's cute.

ANYWAY. Next up on my list of things to do is another No Apologies... post, this time on a song which a) I have no strong specific connection to and b) everyboday already knows their position on, so you won't want to miss that. Afterwards, maybe I'll do a bit more work towards finishing my critical tour of Mike Carey's Lucifer, given I have at least two more other Carey/Gross collaborations to bore you about. The next essay in the book is calling me too, though, so who can say?

Right. then Happy New Year for those as recognise it, and I'll be back with more musings in 2023.

D CDs #472: Things George Michael Has Gotta Have

Faith just isn't for me. I simply don't care what George Michael thinks about sex, or how George Michael wishes he were having more sex, or how getting more sex as George Michael can get complicated by the fact that George Michael is George Michael.  It's not Michael specifically; I'd put myself as a 9.8 at least on the horny/revenge scale of "Why make art"; horny songs just don't do it for me. It sounds like a cheap shot under the circumstances, but nevertheless, it all feels a little too much like listening to someone masturbating.

Michael's debut album isn't exclusively about sex, though after being bludgeoned by Michael's libido for fifteen solid minutes via "Father Figure" and "I Want Your Sex", it's hard to think about much else. There's a sense of vulnerability here which at least seasons the horndog panting. Which makes sense, given Michael a) had just torpedoed a band that had sold thirty million albums and - via a China tour - changed the international political landscape, and b) was trying to challenge Prince and Michael Jackson on territory they didn't so much own, as had sculpted from the planet's bedrock through sheer force of will. You can see why he'd be nervous - there must have been times while recording the album where Michael was wondering whether unseating Hu Yaobang would have been the easier job.

So it's not fair to call Faith one-note, though comparisons to Prince and Jackson do rather underline the album's lack of range. It's probably not helped by the fact Michael just completely, perfectly nails what he's aiming for on the opening track. "Faith" is glorious, as tight and bouncy a package as Michael's denim-sprayed arse in the accompanying video. A rollocking stab of lust and nervousness, set to a rhythm like the heartbeat of God. The vid even sees Michael sport a jacket emblazoned with the word "REVENGE" on the back, as though the guy gets what art should be after all. It's also the shortest song on the album by a minute and change.

Once you've heard it, though, do you really need the icky metaphors of "Father Figure", or the knackered randiness of "Hard Day", or, the fear Michael's own success is cock-blocking him in "Kissing A Fool", or etc. etc. Given Michael's later coming out of the closet, we can at least retrospectively cast "I Want Your Sex" as an attempt to literally sing the praises of gay sex, but even so - dude, it's nine minutes long.

The album works best when it moves into different themes. "Hand To Mouth", a pulsing condemnation of the failures of the American dream built around a skeletal, looping keyboard riff and Spanish guitar, offers a breather from the heavy breathing. "Monkey" is a superior example of 80s Gabriel-tinted synth-funk, a desperate plea to a a friend to kick the drugs, and huge fun both as written and when you doggedly insist on taking the lyrics literally. 

Neither are fit to buff "Faith"'s leather jacket, of course. Nothing else here is. Faith both proved Michael could write and sing with the best of them, and that there was no guarantee he necessarily would. So I says, anyway. What do I know? The album and its many singles did absolutely ludicrous numbers, and netted Michael critical acclaim and multiple awards. All the cold water I can muster thirty-five years later isn't going to make a difference to what caught fire here. Michael's Faith had paid off.

Six tentacles.

Lighthouse

 

                                                              i

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.14 - "Not Up To You" (Stereophonics)

Last time this band appeared in these essays, I talked a little about how you have to accept that the acts you love will change. Some will change more than others, though. Some will age better.

In hindsight, my love affair with Stereophonics was doomed from the start. Their first album remains one of my favourite debuts I've heard, but it relies on an alchemical process almost impossible to repeat. The recipe is simple enough - two parts classic rock delivered by a frontman whose tonsils have the density and range of quasars, one part muddled melancholy as you watch the tiny community which offered you nothing as you grew up in it continue to die by degrees. 

The first trick is in actually mixing those ingredients. Sad-gossip-garage-rock? Are you, like, entirely fucking sure? But it works. Or at least, it did in the context of the '90s, when British mainstream rock was crying out for a band that was willing to look past their own dicks. Or, for that matter, to not steal all their good riffs (including a Stereophonics one, actually.)

The second trick, though, is even tougher. The problem isn't in identifying or combining your ingredients; it's in finding them. The band took a while to hit, but when they did, it was with the force of a collapsing coalmine. Catapulted into a world of stadium gigs, Tom Jones collaborations, and backstage shenanigans with Noel Gallagher (which he presumably went into wired for sound), Stereophonics found themselves in a situation where bittersweet songs about backwater bar dramas might be tough to sell, and, more critically, were impossible to source. The lead single from Word Gets Around was about a homeless man who remembers his past just well enough to seek it out, but not well enough to remember where to find it. The lead single from Performance And Cocktails was about a sly deal between a bartender watching who gets most drunk, and a thief who steals from those identified as least likely to notice. The lead single from Just Enough Education To Perform? A tuneless whine about how the music press had been mean to the band. It's almost too perfect that "Mr Writer" was (at the time) by some distance not just the worst Stereophonics single, but their worst recorded song.

Maybe you have to have a certain amount of bombastic self-regard in order to play the kind of stages the band suddenly graduated to. How would I know? All I can tell you is that without that strange, bittersweet taste of nostalgia for something you'd always resented, you may as well be listening to fucking Oasis anyway (though Jones' riffs are still better than Gallagher's).

"Not Up To You" isn't the best song on Word Gets Around, but it's likely the strongest distillation of what makes the album work so well (It's not quite true that there are more truly great songs on Word Gets Around than on their subsequent eleven albums, but I did have to crunch the numbers to check). It's too melodic to be a dirge, (just) too high-tempo to be mopey, but the song's simple structure and heavy haze still recalls shoegaze, only - and this is critical - we're staring at the shoes of other people. Kelly Jones is one of those musicians whose lyrical quality is inversely proportional to his lyrical precision, and "Not Up To You" is a triumph of smudged thumbnail sketches of lives no-one else was in a position to even notice. 

Maybe it's just that simple The songs on Word Gets Around are always about other people, even if Jones' memories are our way in. An accused paedophile, a wedding barely holding itself together, two - maybe three - suicides, one drunk high-functioning, one very much not. And the characters in "Not Up To You" don't even reach those levels of local notoriety. Not even stories, just butts of cruel jokes in low lighting. All they're doing is living and lying and loving and lusting in a village that, save for Stereophonics, we probably would never have heard of. Even though there's an unknown village in all of us.

"Who's to know", indeed. "Who's to know; whatever".

B-Side

"And Bark, And Grunt, And Roar, And Burn"

(Image from Wakelet)

(Spoilers for up to Episode 100 of The Magnus Archives below).

"'Til The World Falls Down"

(Image from Wakelet)

Right. Now we’re talking. Now, things are kicking off.

(Spoilers for all five seasons of The Magnus Archives below.)