PANTHEON: Melody Maker 1988

Showing posts with label Melody Maker 1988. Show all posts

Friday, February 21, 2025

Paul Oldfield - The Wedding Present - Tommy - Melody Maker - June 16 1988

Starting a new series in which critics are rightfooted in real-time, making judgements that prove to be imperishably righteous

Nice bloke, Gedge, of course - but when has that ever mattered?

Friday, August 18, 2023

Paul Oldfield - James Taylor Quartet - January 23 1988 - Melody Maker

Monday, July 24, 2023

Paul Oldfield - the house / techno writing - Melody Maker, 1987-1990

Although the two of us once operated a not-very-successful deejay "company" back when we were students, I don't think Paul Oldfield ever spent much time in clubs. I'm pretty certain he never got anywhere near a rave. Still, for someone who never got "right on one, matey," it seems to me that Paul got deeper into the essence of acid house, techno, etc, than anyone else covering that beat at that time in the music papers, style press, and what then passed for dance magazines.

Below you will find near enough his complete Melody Maker works on house, techno, acieeed, New Beat, chill-out etc in approximately chronological sequence. I just wish he had stuck around at the Melody Maker long enough for the ardkore / darkcore / jungle years.

"All David Stubbs's metaphors" - Paul probably riffing off this recent review by Stubbsy

Back to the PO-verdose

Paul Oldfield, Royal House, Melody Maker, autumn 1988

A GUY CALLED GERALD

ULU, LONDON
Melody Maker, 1990

by Paul Oldfield

Put A Guy Called Gerald beside the beatmasters, radical rap and survivalist electrodub that make up the rest of tonight's acts, and you'll see that he's somewhere else. Their urgency and agency, their in-your-face imperatives are replaced by his new narcosis and lotus-eating, becalmed passivity. It's all embodied in Gerald himself. There's none of the "front" or danger of the crews that precede him, just a familiar, somnolent Mancunian accent and patient behind-the-scenes programming. If it weren't for his singer up front, and the crowd downstairs setting up an incongruous terrace chant for ''Voo-doo Ray", it'd be more ambience than act.

That's appropriate. Gerald and his northern satellites launched New Age", aka "ambient" house, the phenomenon that emphasises the trance in trance dance, and should reconcile House music with "head" rock. Both musics can offer the same fix, or rather un-fixing of consciousness. Both can free you from the co-ordinates of the here and now, and let you attain oneness with the world and peace.

Gerald translates House music from urban night-life to paradisial, pacific (often literally Pacific, with a capital P) scenes. Tonight there's "Eyes Of Sorrow", with its rainforest percussion and pipes; or 'Voodoo Ray", with its slow-scanning ritual limbo from the tropics; or, as an encore, Gerald's own reading of the halcyon surf of "Pacific State". While rock, rap, dub have kept faith in Africa's heartland, the place of origins and history, House has escaped to the southern hemisphere's soporific, out-of-time innocence and unworldly primitivism.

That shows in the minimalist fluctuations and meander of "Subtopia", a serenity you can lose yourself in. Gerald's visual effects confirm this mesmerising tranquility at the heart of House too. They look as if they're influenced by the new model for the natural sciences, chaos theory (very much a buzz concept in club culture): instead of predictable forces and counter-forces (the grammar of "techno" music), there's indeterminacy and turbulence, back-projections of vapour, clouds, shoals of fish, self-ordering but unpredictable organic forms that fascinate.

But Gerald doesn't celebrate just nature or an Edenic past (none of rock's third-world heritage industry here). He's an unrepentant futurist. Just hear "Automanic", his preview of the forthcoming album: all print-out chatter, split-second samples and arc—light strobes on stage. Or "FX", an ascent through a Lloyds-building ziggurat of glass and steel. Think Tokyo, think Ridley Scott. It doesn't contradict his Pacific states, though. He's found tomorrow's paradise, where hi-tech achieves voodoo's instantaneity of communication, and where cities dematerialise into flows of light and information (think Kraftwerk), a mosaic of signals as mesmerising as the time-lapse record of city life in the film "Kooanisquatsi", but without that film's technophobic undertones.

Gerald's performance is "plastic", as his music's often been called. Plastic in the original sense, of course: adapting to all kinds of shapes, a hypnotic, becalming changeability. Go with the flow.

Saturday, July 1, 2023

Paul Oldfield - Xymox live - Melody Maker - September 3 1988

Monday, June 26, 2023

Paul Oldfield - Halfway to Paradise Channel 4 TV series - October 8 1988 - Melody Maker

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

David Stubbs - Morrissey: Viva Hate - Melody Maker - March 19 1988

Morrissey

Viva Hate (HMV)

Melody Maker, March 19th 1988

by David Stubbs

For too long, a faction around here feels, the fey, blithe Morrissey has been allowed to saunter through pop history unchecked, fawned upon even — and it was about time some of the chaps got together to administer a tarring, a feathering, and deposit him in the nearest ditch.

Faced with the prospect of putting Viva Hate into critical perspective, the Windsor Davies in us all, bulging with choleric indignation at the antics of Mr La-De-Da Gunner Graham, welled to the surface of many a soul around here, as they sharpened their pencils and scraped their hooves in readiness to proffer a sound critical kicking to our erstwhile hero. But I've always been renowned for my sense of fair play and it was to me, lingering modestly at the back of the pack, that the task of reviewing the record was eventually assigned.

And I say that through musically thick and musically thin, swoops and (appalling) lapses, this is Morrissey, Morrissey, Morrissey, essentially and necessarily, even to the point of self-parody. But then with Morrissey, who is about an exaggerated, blunt-edged sense of self, it's probable that self-parody is, and always has been, the point.

Musically, Viva Hate is mixed. What Simon Reynolds referred to recently as Stephen Street's "producer's sensibility" makes for some gorgeously appropriate settings, but also one or two deferential lapses into mere accompaniment. Best are the likes of 'Alsatian Cousin', in which Morrissey finds himself wheeling in and out of gullish guitars and frantic, airborne effects all pitched at a high level of anxiety, and the brief 'Little Man, What Now?' in which Vini Reilly's wavering, crystalline, almost unbearably poignant guitars open up vistas, and not only this once, for Morrissey's aghast reminiscences.

But then, 'Angel, Angel, Down We Go Together' is… um, a bit 'Eleanor Rigby'. I assume that the infamous strings are a signifier for a damp, abiding "Englishness". They may be an ennobling gesture — as Eldritch self-effacingly put it, "No guitars — that means it's an important song." The effect can be, as on 'Every Day Is Like Sunday', perilously close to those fatal nods at MOR sensibility that Pat Kane is so fond of. But of course, it is rescued.

For 'Everyday Is Like Sunday' is Morrissey, Morrissey, mordant, blunt, impetuous and incorrigibly nostalgic. We shall address presently this matter of Morrissey's fixation upon a period in his life which he appears to despise. "Trudging slowly over wet sand/Back to the bench/Where your clothes were stolen/This is the coastal town/ That they forgot to close down/Armageddon! — Come, Armageddon!" This is Alan Bennett in Southport.

Not all the songs, however, are so clearly about the recent past — both 'Alsatian Cousin' and 'Suedehead' snoop about the topics of infatuation shame, possibly squalor. But clearly, if there is an autobiographical, narrative line to Morrissey's lyrical career then we have reached the late Sixties (the forgotten star on What's My Line?, staring up from a teenage annual. Who can it be? Bobby Crush? Freddy "Parrot Face" Davies?) and then, the early Seventies, with 'Late Night, Maudlin Street' and 'Bengali In Platforms'.

Yes, the appalling 'Bengali In Platforms', quintessentially Morrissey, Morrissey, the Diana Ross-despising Morrissey, the unreconstructed maker of statements Morrissey, the champion of honest content over the vile and synthetic Morrissey, the bad critic Morrissey. This is just the kind of dumb song Morrissey would write, and the opening warble of "Bengali…/Bengali…/Bengali…/Bengali" is quite the most embarrassing… well, it's like your neo-Mannerist Dandy chum from university comes to visit you in the hols, you go down your local pub — sturdy, working-class pub — and in a loud voice in the middle of the tap room complains about the fusty odour before ordering Martini and sausage rolls. The song is a caring call to the sartorially inept Asian to "shelve your Western plans" and eschew that ghastly tank-top. It's not malicious, but it's appallingly patronising and deals with an outmoded stereotype. Much more appropriate, in 1988, to write from the snappily-dressed Punjabi's point of view about inept media attempts to get to grips with Banghra culture, and how they get it wrong. But that wouldn't be Morrissey. It would be too clever. For the essence of Morrissey is a certain clumsy audacity, an ill-advised boldness, impetuousity and indiscretion, to say nothing of a fine disregard for the new complexities of this particular generation.

If Simon Reynolds attempted pop lyrics, they would be impossibly qualified and opaque. Morrissey isn't quite that smart, so Morrissey is Morrissey. Hence the risible 'The Ordinary Boys': "Ordinary boys, happy knowing nothing/Happy being no-one, but themselves/ Ordinary girls, supermarket clothes/ Who think it's very clever to be cruel to you/ For you were so different/ You stood all alone/ And you knew/ That it had to be so." Aaargh! Of course, your first instinct is to stamp your feet and sing rugby songs to drown out this bilge but… somebody had to say it!

These lapses are marks of adolescence — like the nuclear bomb on the seaside resort in 'Sunday', like 'Hang The DJ' in the past, like the heavy-handed sarcasm of 'Dial A Cliché' and the soon to be infamous 'Margaret On The Guillotine' they work as "heavy" gestures, honest, self-pitying, self-seeking. They are Morrissey's essence-in-excess, the necessary flaws of stardom. As the lines go in 'Break Up The Family' — "The strange logic of your clumsiest line/Stayed emblazoned on my mind." But such rude moments are only occasional. Far and away the best, the key track on Viva Hate, is 'Late Night, Maudlin Street', profoundly retrospective, spoken through an abiding shuffle of monotonous rhythms, like endless doors or staircases, it refers back, in bitter-sweet, open vein, to 1972, the power-cuts, the oblivious contemparies, the Byronically exaggerated pain of the pariah.

It's all here, in measured terms, rising to a valedictory note of double-edged nostalgia. For the silent assertion here, and in all of Morrissey's work is that, grey and repressive as this lost world was, the inchoate, colourific entropy of the Eighties is worse. At least then you stood out, if only to be beaten up. For the Eighties, Morrissey reserves not perception but the radical impatience of 'Margaret On The Guillotine'. Detached from the general drift of the album and delivered in a scabrous tone, it's the kind of foolish, epic gesture that Morrissey is there to make.

It's tempting to say that we don't need Morrissey any more, that his ghostly, grey presence in the relentlessly gaudy pop terrain has faded as it has persisted. But Morrissey is needed, not as an ombudsman, or a figure of the Eighties but as a horrified figure against the Eighties, who has turned his back on the march of pop time as the last keeper of the sanctuary of self-pity, apartness, exile (today, the "extraordinary boys" are grey and listless, the "ordinary" boys are colourful, dynamic, chromium-plated).

And Viva Hate, a further act of simple faithlessness, is, its lapses withal, another great album by our last star, our last idiot.