RIP Brian Case

My time at Melody Maker overlapped with the final year or so of Brian Case being on the staff. I don't think we exchanged more than a few words - he was pretty fed up by that point, barely in the office (the jazz section had been discontinued some years earlier, he was writing entirely about film for his last few years at MM). Soon he left to become the main writer about film - his other great passion aside from jazz - at Time Out.

I did not know then that prior to joining the Melody Maker he'd written for NME for several years, covering jazz with the occasional foray into rock etc.

A great critic - here's something I found just today where he caustically castigates a record I like (although in truth it's really "Jazz Is The Teacher (Funk Is The Preacher)", the inclusion on C81, that really lives with me - much of it I find nearly as battering and flailed as Case does, but not with the same kind of lifelong jazzbo antipathy, more a rocker's frustration).

I don't understand half the references but I enjoy the way his language moves.

 

Then in praise mode here's Case - and Richard Williams, the guy who lured him to MM -  paying tribute to Mingus.

Discernibly ambivalent about Ornette Coleman's journey into harmolodics (what sideman James 'Blood' Ulmer then pursued solo) 

And a nicely nasty swipe at Julie Burchill - who'd he encountered in his later years at NME - and here is scolded for her lack of movie knowledge. 

And then this droll piece, which is possibly off-color by today's standards- comically mixing up Kingston, Jamaica and Kingston-Upon-Thames

Some more light relief

And finally, here's Case praising, mostly, a record that I love - and that was the very first rock music  long-playing record I ever did buy, the week it came out. 

Ian Dury and the Blockheads

Do It Yourself

Melody Maker, May 19th 1979

by Brian Case

Uneasy lies the loaf that wears the titfer. Ian Dury's new album dispenses with the outsize characters of New Boots & Panties and moves bravely — since that cast of grotesques is clearly reproduceable, and bankable — into the autobiographically confessional. Of course, that needn't necessarily rate a round of applause — I would be desolate if Randy Newman broke cover — for, as Billy Wilder said of Marilyn Monroe, "there are certain wonderful rascals in this world, and one day they lie down on an analyst's couch and out comes a clenched, dreary thing."

The positive sensuality of 'Wake Up And Make Love With Me' has disappeared and so has the once-removed sexual violence of 'If I Was With A Woman'. Poles have been eroded, and what remains is infinitely true, infinitely troubled, and communicated through craft — and that is the name of the game. Dury distances pain through his love of words: he does not need the swaddlings of impersonation.

'Dance Of The Screamers', therefore, is a dance in the sense that Last Tango In Paris and Strindberg's Dance Of Death are a knees-up. Mother Black, and they draw their catheter of blood. 'Screamers' sets his on-stage kukka-burra brips and gibbon squeals in the context of total despair, algebra of need, visceral response, and is paralleled by what sounds like Davey Payne's overblown upper-register saxophone: a hip correlation. The lyrics are a blat of sexual rejection: "it's hard to be a hero when you've had your helmet cracked"; and the Black/Jewish wisdom in extremis of "some of us are witty, luv, it comes from facing up to facts." The number is too long, and the sarcastic "skies are blue" interjections are too obvious. It needed longer in the oven.

'Sink My Boats', on the other hand, is excellent. Germinating from the Woody Allen routine — "My wife was so immature she'd come into the bathroom without knocking and sink my boats" — the sketch that brought you "I didn't recognise my first wife with her wrists closed" and a lawsuit, Dury has constructed an internal monologue which precisely surfaces character. The closed circuit of "will you still love me when I'm over the hill is another stupid question" anatomises the endless bicker-and-rebuttal of a relationship on the skids, Where both parties bridle at the obverse of their ploys. Did I tell ya this is only rock 'n' roll? The tune is lovely, the arrangement harmonically complex, and the keyboard breaks — Mickey Gallagher? — inventive.

A more diffuse despair can be found on 'Mischief' and 'This Is What We Find'. Both utilise a catalogue of unfortunate happenings to fictitious characters, but move into sharper focus. 'Mischief' lists various naughtinesses — "Barry breaks the windows of his broken home — 'ave a guess — his tiny mind's been scarred" — and subverts these ineffectual rebellions still further with inconsequential documentation — "his dad's a shipping clerk." Behind the pathetic hell-raising lies the old cockney routine of local hero-worship — 'ee ONLY shaved a cart'orse's ankles and flogged it to The Filfth — tasty but inadequate — and the number ends in infantile apologies and pleas for mercy. It's very good indeed, and will get better on the road, as 'Quiet', 'Sink My Boats' and 'This Is What We Find' have refined against a sounding-board.

'This Is What We Find' — the outstanding piece here — is an Edward Gorey amusing mausoleum of catastrophe, and Dury takes transparent refuge in the sacerdotal pipes to reflect upon its burden — i.e.: the flesh is grass. A beautifully balanced piece, in which gabble prepares for thematic repetition, and one laughs at the indignities of the human condition: "A sense of humour is required amongst the bacon rind."

There's plenty of the familiar suburban self-improver in the vocabulary — and elsewhere, "blandishment" in 'Sink My Boats', "the wherewithal" in 'Dance' — as a mockery of the orotund in the face of such humiliation, and an Art School survival in the term "jubblified." There is a jolly pump and Wurlitzer bounce to the backing, and fun in the misfit of words to music.

'Don't Ask Me' and 'Inbetweenies' deal with the early stages of romance. "Here I stand with a doughnut for a brain," sings the suitor in 'Don't Ask Me', and goes on to list his virtues like a street-trader: "On my life, I believe we're tailor-made." The Blockheads complement the voice with nicely varied interjections, and there's a good guitar solo. All very Aldgate, and effective.

'Inbetweenies' is more complex. "A body likes to be near the bone" and "I die when I'm alone" indicate the desperation in this pitch, which settles for friendship with "at least you've put me on the team." There's a beautifully placed ambulance siren in the backing, and some good jazz piano.

'Quiet' contrasts three manners, the polite, the authoritarian and junior rudery. Based on an old schoolmaster of his, Dury's lyrics catch precisely the tone of posturing officialese — "quiet, persistent louts and clowns," "quiet, or else there will be measures" — and subverts it with a chorus of "plop-plops" and "big jobs." The guitar break, spitting like a cat in a bag, is very impressive.

'Uneasy Sunny Day Hotsy Totsy' and 'Waiting For Your Taxi' are slight, the latter mingling taped conversation and traffic noises like Mingus and Kirk, and launching an upper-register screamer from Davey Payne. Here is a deep, pneumatic whump to the vocal, a catchy chant like 'Rhythm Stick'.

Finally, 'Lullaby For Francis/Frances' — a sort of bookend to 'Wake Up' — opens with a fanfare before ducking into reggae. Dury's voice here is beautifully tender, deep, husky — for a change — cleanly recorded. I missed some of the words elsewhere in the mix. Melody and treatment are charming, and Charley Charles's beat — centipede with a wooden leg — is lithe and living. In the context of the album, a lullaby — "safe and sound, that's a promise" and "it's time to impose a curfew" — registers like the all-clear after a psychic air-raid.

Do It Yourself stands in the same relation to New Boots & Panties as Joseph Heller's second novel, Something Happened, does to Catch-22. Both artists kept us waiting, and finally delivered a less fevered dimension which nonetheless bears the authentic trademark.

Whether any of the new numbers will adapt as singalong material in live performance is conjectural. The important thing is that Ian Dury's creativity is still functioning at peak, and will move you from tears to laughter.

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I think Case is wrong about "Dance of the Screamers", it's exactly as long as it should be, and one of Dury's greatest moments (Davey Payne's too). 

I also don't understand why he and the other reviewers in the weeklies all rated "Sink My Boats" so highly - is it really just because they recognised the Woody Allen reference? 

music press adverts

I am obsessed with the advertisements in the old music papers - the New Wave era is particularly rich for the semiotician and lover of graphic design trends, but then so is the Old Wave era.  For a historian, it's almost as rich material to draw on as the actual journalism.

However that is not my subject today - my subject today is advertisements for the music press. 

I'm going to start looking for the ink-and-paper versions, which I suspect are clueless in the extreme.

 But for now here are TV commercials for weekly music papers, going from the early '80s to the 2000s.

These were posted by someone at ILM. 

I wonder to what extent they were actually showed on TV. Perhaps some were used as cinema ads.

I  remember a radio advert for Melody Maker during my early years of being there that was a really irritating jingle and the chorus went something "Read music, read Melody Maker" in a sing-song sort of matey voice. Or was it "love music, read Melody Maker"? Can't recall but the jingle is lodged in my brain like an indestructible tapeworm.

There was also a T-shirt floating around that said something like "Melody Maker - Tomorrow's Music Today". 

In the actual music papers, you would get adverts for other music magazines sometimes - The Face advertised in NME regularly. 

Monitor actually bought some micro-ads to run in the NME and also The Face, I think. We had come into some funding. 

I can feel this post already extending itself towards future posts, including 1/ music journalists on television and 2/ fictionalized depictions of the rock press on television and in film. 

There's quite a lot of the former - as a taster, I give you this ruddy marvellous clip of the Stud Brothers being callously anti-humanist in 1989

Into Bataille with the Express of New Music

 

This is what I grew up reading, kids! Page 3 of the NME! Or maybe Page 5! At any rate, right up front, not tucked away in some ghetto section like Books, but considered as newsworthy and relevant to the readers's interests as hotshit new band Shillelagh Sisters or whatever other Bad Music Era offering featured in that week's issue. (This is September 1984).

NME literally throwing "filth at our pop kids" to use an oft jokily used phrase of the time (originally a tabloid newspaper headline complaining about the Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy).

That said, I don't remember actually reading this Boy Georges paean at the time. 

I think I found my way to Bataille independently - or possibly it was via some quote or namedrop in a piece on a band (quite likely the dropper in question would have been Barney Hoskyns)

There being this thing called the Internet, you can find traces of documentation about the Visible Silence event at the Bloomsbury Theatre..

Here's Cosey Fanni Tutti talking about GB. And her performance was videotaped and sold. 

Here's a preview in another publication (City Limits?)

Here's Marc Almond's contribution to the event. 

Green + Green

The first clip is from these centre pages in the New Musical Express that you were meant to pull-out and turn into a booklet to go with your C81 cassette - it was called the NME / Rough Trade C81 Owner's Manual. 

Except that even folded very very tight, it was too thick to shove into the cassette shell and still be able to close it properly.

Each band on the compilation had a small cubicle of space in which to put some information or a graphic or clues about their aesthetic. 

And here Scritti, or Green, to be precise - wield an unattributed chunk from Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse.  

For years this passage  - in particular this sentence about "a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning" - was a thought-bomb lodged in my brain... 

So imagine the shiver when I'm reading A Lover's Discourse in the late '80s and there it is: the source revealed. (Full passage at the end of this post)

The second para is Scritti themselves,  I think...

Re. challenging "the sensual / sensory primacy of the body", to reveal its textuality...  romance as a code, as signwork...  and, further still, questioning the "sensual primacy" of music! There was this thing then that was very trendy,  "there's nothing outside the text" I think was the formulation...  Bunk, of course, but .... influential bunk. Mind-shaping bunk. Era-defining bunk, even.

That reference to foot-binding - next to footsie - was an unsettling idea to roll around your mind... but perhaps ahead of its time in terms of academic trendiness ... Wandering around the neighbourhood here a few years ago, checking out the Little Libraries, which are usually crammed only with self-help books and dog-eared mysteries and those cruddy-paper-stock, hideous-cover schoolkids editions of literary classics... I was surprised to find an academic study of foot-binding, which argued against Western ethnocentric distaste for such practices...  the arrogance of our simply believing that it was mutilation and patriarchy-inflicted incapacitation. 

What next, I thought, a post-colonial feminist argument in favor of clitoral circumcision? 

Well, that Scritbit does mention circumcision...   Derrida, in Archive Fever, has a whole cloudy riff about the Bris... God's Law inscribed upon the body of the chosen people, or the male half of them anyway.... such that the people become a living archive.

As best as I could make out the argument, anyway!

As for the second bit o' Greenery -  this is from a Guardian article where they got musicians to talk about over-rated bands. 

Precision aspersions acerbically cast by Mr. Gartside...  ratifying my own aversion for Arcade Fire. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Wish he would hurry up and finish that autobiography! 

Actually, it's listed here as due for publication in 2026, with the title Green on Green. 

But

a/ I would take that with a grain of salt 

and 

b/ he's already had at least half-a-decade to do it.

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More from the C81 Owner's Manual 

Not all the bands came up with stuff for their small rectangle in the booklet. Presumably that's why with the Postcard groups, the NME personnel have this cute running joke, pegging each band - Josef K, Orange Juice, Aztec Camera - to a different era of Velvet Underground.

                                      

All lost on me, though -  aged 17 in early 1981, not only had I never heard the Velvet Underground, I'd hardly heard of them. Stray references to them in NME conjured something forbiddingly abstract and ear-punitive... 

So it was a bit of a surprise, a few years later, to buy the first album and tape the third album off someone and be confronted with all these beautiful, poignant songs. Even the "noisy" stuff wasn't as extreme as I'd been given to believe. 

Funnily enough, the C81 compilation documents - among various other sounds and styles - the birth of indie of the very sort that Green castigates in his Arcade Fire swipe. 

What those Postcard-y parts of C81 captured then becomes consolidated with C86. 

The Barthes bit

“When my finger accidentally…”

 contacts / contacts

The figure refers to any interior discourse provoked by a furtive contact with the body (and more precisely the skin) of the desired being.

 Accidentally, Werther's finger touches Charlotte's, their feet, under the table, happen to brush against each other. Werther might be engrossed by the meaning of these accidents; he might concentrate physically on these slight zones of contact and delight in this fragment of inert finger or foot, fetishistically, without concern for the response (like God-as the etymology of the word tells us-the Fetish does not reply). But in fact Werther is not perverse, he is in love: he creates meaning, always and everywhere, out of nothing, and it is meaning which thrills him: he is in the crucible of meaning. Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply

 A squeeze of the hand - enormous documentation - a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn't move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other's head gradually comes to rest - this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.

Charlus takes the narrator's chin and slides his magnetized fingers up to the ears " like a barber's fingers." This trivial gesture, which I begin, is continued by another part of myself; without anything interrupting it physically, it branches off, shifts from a simple function to a dazzling meaning, that of the demand for love. Meaning (destiny) electrifies my hand; I am about to tear open the other's opaque body, oblige the other (whether there is a response, a withdrawal, or mere acceptance) to enter into the interplay of meaning : I am about to make the other speak. In the lover's realm, there is no acting out: no propulsion, perhaps even no pleasure-nothing but signs, a frenzied activity of language : to institute, on each furtive occasion, the system (the paradigm) of demand and response. 

^^^^^^

Hey hey - this passage in A Lover's Discourse looks like the secret source of "A Little Knowledge" and its opening lines:  Now I know to love you /  Is not to know you

To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth. It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever : a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.

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Ah, re. the textulity >  "the sensual / sensory primacy of the body" / "sensual primacy" of music idea, here is Barney Hoskyns actually challenging that idea in a feature  (October 1981) that otherwise celebrates Scritti Mk2's switch to pop with "The 'Sweetest Girl'" and "Faithless"

RIP Paul Rambali

 

I was really saddened to learn last week of the death of Paul Rambali, one of the main writers at New Musical Express during its postpunk heyday, and later an editor at The Face. 

I met Paul some years ago in Paris, where he'd moved and continued to work in the media. I was there to promote Retromania, I think - at any rate after whatever it was we were doing together (a radio thing?) we had a lovely chat over lunch, during which he told me interesting stuff about how the music press worked back in those days and just how widely read the papers were, thanks to their phenomenal pass-on rate (many eyes looking at each copy). Some years later, I quoted him from memory in this tribute to the music papers I did for Pitchfork (have a look here, but hurry before it disappears behind a paywall,)

When I was a boy reading the NME every week, I used to have a handful of heroes whose by-lines I'd look out for and who I'd read virtually every single thing by. And then there were the other writers, the bedrock of the paper, who I'd read when they wrote about something I liked or was intrigued by. But when I returned to the music papers for Rip It Up and read through years and years of NME, Sounds, Melody Maker, and some of the monthly magazines too, I found myself more impressed by the work of the writers who weren't attention-seeking show-offs. At NME, writers like Angus Mackinnon, Paul Du Noyer, Dave Hill, Lynn Hanna, Andy Gill, Paul Tickell, Cynthia Rose, Graham Lock, Richard Grabel, many others....  and Paul Rambali. I appreciated the intelligence, clarity, and directness of what they did. It's not that they lacked for passion or incisive opinions or ideas - not at all. But they tended to also do the journalistic work of finding out the facts, telling the story. Which I probably took for granted at the time, but now - as someone undertaking the second draft of history as it were -  I found incredibly valuable. (The same went for their equivalents on Melody Maker and Sounds). 

Rambali in particular did some fantastic work on groups like Pere Ubu and The Pop Group, amongst many other key bands of that time. 

You can find the motherlode of Rambali's punk and postpunk era writing here at Rock's Back Pages

An interview with Joy Division 

Text of that interview here

Here's his review of The Pop Group's Y. 

And here is a famous cover story he did with Captain Beefheart (with famous shots by Anton Corbijn)

When I have a bit more time I will try to dig up some other pieces by Paul. 

resinking the Titanic (for good?)

Champing at the bit from the sidelines, I made some impatient and precocious Titanic-style "state of the nation" addresses myself.  In the third issue of Monitor, "What's Missing?" had the hand-wringing tone (it was 1985, Bad Music Era nadir) but only faint inklings of a forward path. A couple of issues later, in very early  '86,  "Against Health and Efficiency" sketched a new kind of oppositionality, fastening on currents within underground rock that seemed to constitute a refusal of optimism and self-optimization, breaking the link between "youth" and the idea of fun or fulfillment. 

But the essay that really slots into the Titanic lineage is "1976/86", from the final issue of Monitor, #6, which came out in the summer of 1986. 

Talk about handwringing! The papers were full of  tenth anniversary of punk talk - commemorative pieces and nostalgic flashbacks whose unifying  tone was "What happened to the revolution? Where did it all go wrong?” "Where oh where did that us-against-them feeling go?!"

1986 also saw Dave Rimmer’s Like Punk Never Happened, a book about Culture Club and New Pop.  Scanning the landscape of U.K. music, to me it seemed like the utter opposite was actually the case: practically everywhere you looked there was ample evidence that punk had happened, to a stifling degree in fact. 

New Pop itself had been a stage in the punk / postpunk dialectic.  I knew that from living through it in real-time. But for issue 4 of Monitor I decided to retrace the dialectic, visiting the Bodleian Library and ordering up back copies of the music papers between 1976 and 1982. That resulted in the essay "New Pop" - not an example of "Titanic" discourse so much as "Titanic-ology", a Foucault-informed analysis of the rock discourse.  

Researching the piece certainly reconfirmed my view that the current music scene was massively over-determined by punk and set me up for what proved to be my final Monitor statement.

Punk was incessant: that was precisely the problem. So "1976/86” calls for a new direction. The idea of music as "opposition" itself is up for retirement. I write about washing "the punk notion of threat out of our blood". Much as I loved then and will always love Bollocks, Buzzcocks, Germfree Adolescents, et al, the potential in punk seemed utterly played out.  

Members of Monitor would continue this polemic at Melody Maker, arguing that the scene urgently needed unpunking and fastening on any musical developments that promised to hasten this . 

I was 22 when I wrote that!

Ian Penman - Tim Buckley 'Greetings from L.A.' reissue - NME - 1981?