TIM BURROWS

INTERVIEWED: Beth Jeans Houghton for The Stool Pigeon

2012-01-18T11:10:00.007Z

In which I talk to the young singer-songwriter from Newcastle about her boss new album, her synaesthesia, her LA infatuation, and palling around with a Chili Pepper.

INTERVIEWED: Snooker's Saviour Judd Trump for Telegraph Magazine

2012-01-16T15:07:00.009Z

It's not too often that I interview sportspeople, but after I was asked by Dazed & Confused to interview Judd Trump for its Covers project I became transfixed by the speed of his breaks, and the weird world of snooker in general. I ended up talking to Trump for the Telegraph Magazine, visiting him at the Grove Academy near Romford, and travelling to York to take in some of the UK Championship which Trump eventually won.

Last Writings of 2011

2012-01-04T12:23:00.006Z

INTERVIEWED: Jimmy Scott (pictured above) for the Telegraph Magazine

REVIEWED: Les Transmusicales festival in Rennes for The Stool Pigeon

REVIEWED: Matthew Herbert's One Pig Live for The Quietus

INTERVIEWED: Steve Reich & St Vincent for Tank

2011-11-21T17:13:00.013Z

I talked to both St Vincent aka the incredible Texan Annie Clark, and the truly great modern composer, Steve Reich, for the latest issue of Tank Magazine. Follow the corresponding link below to take a look at each piece.

St. Vincent interview

Steve Reich interview

INTERVIEWED: John Waters for Kilimanjaro

2011-11-18T17:01:00.006Z

The 'Pope of Trash' himself talked to me for the Roni Horn-dedicated edition of the beautiful art magazine/journal, Kilimanjaro: A Love Letter to Roni Horn. Waters is a good friend of the Harlem-born, Iceland-obsessed artist and an art lover in general. Read the resulting article below:

Band T-shirts for the Telegraph Magazine

2011-11-18T16:28:00.010Z

The band t-shirt has evolved from the preserve of the insular music geek desperate for some sort of affiliation, to the preserve of the papped LA sleb (see above, one Mr Davide Beckhame of 'Galaxy'; apparently he's a former cockney). Here's a short interview with the lovely Jude Rogers and Ian Wade, the creators of the guaranteed ROFL inducer, MyBandT-shirt.

INTERVIEWED: Erasure for The Stool Pigeon

2011-11-18T16:17:00.007Z

Erasure were incredible at Mute's Short Circuit festival in April, so I jumped at the chance to interview them for The Stool Pigeon. S'pose the subtext of the piece is the fact that, despite in excess of 25 million records sold, it feels like there has been a media blackout on the band for years. Interview here.

Human Rights Filmmaking for Dazed & Confused

2011-09-19T21:53:00.005+01:00

Bombs Should Fall Tonight but Probably Won't

2011-07-20T23:17:00.009+01:00

"...To understand London now one has to grasp the fact that in this city, as nowhere else in the world, World War II is still going on. The spivs are running delis and restaurants, and an occupying army of international bankers and platinum-card tourists has taken the place of the American servicemen. The people are stoical and underpaid, with a lower standard of living and tackier services than in any comparable western capital. The weary camaraderie of the Blitz holds everything together. Bombs should fall tonight but probably won't, but one senses that people would welcome them."

J.G. Ballard, Time Out, 1993

INTERVIEWED: Photographer Léonie Hampton

2011-07-14T10:38:00.011+01:00

Léonie Hampton is an incredible photographer who finds the uncanny in the everyday: a kind of (preter)naturalist, who lets her subjects get on with things while she weaves around, waiting for the moment when their unconscious self - or something purporting to be such a thing - comes out to play.

I interviewed her about her latest project, In The Shadow Of Things, which charts the clearing of the house of her mother Bron, who had "boxed out the world" due to her crippling OCD. You can read it on the arts charity website IdeasTap.

Also, if you fancy, take a look at the piece I wrote for Dazed on These New Puritans, with pictures shot on the windy marshes of Leigh on Sea by Leonie in November 2009.

Visit Léonie’s website

INTERVIEWED: Destroyer for The Stool Pigeon

2011-06-23T21:37:00.008+01:00

Not only did Destroyer slip such an effortless, sumptuous, bleeeding gorgeous album into the mix as Kaputt, but he went and made the title track the most gawddamn beautiful of all the songs on there, and ensured that the video was a dream-logic escape into the deep space of one's own mind's eye... see above to note that this statement is only a little hyperbolic.

I spoke to Mr Destroyer aka Dan Bejar and you can read it here.

N.B. Another pleasing saxophone-filled album, which isn't in the least bit cheesey. Proves my long-held theory that the sax is the most overlooked of all godlike instruments. If I had my way, 60% of guitarists would replace their axes with saxes.

REVIEWED: Pulp at Primavera Sound, Barcelona

2011-06-11T02:32:00.027+01:00

WEAR YOUR PINK GLOVE BABE >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>HE PUT IT ON THE WRONG WAY!

REVIEWED: Short Circuit for The Stool Pigeon

2011-05-18T22:28:00.009+01:00

Most enjoyable gig in ages; while it wasn't all perfect it had all the daring and daft sorts that you'd expect to encounter at a Mute event. You can read the review here.

REVIEWED: Hallucinating Superstars In The Coachella Valley: Ariel Pink Live (for The Quietus)

2011-05-16T08:41:00.011+01:00

In Indio in the Californian desert, I am jetlagged to the point of hallucination, freaked out by the shiny, happy hedge-fund hippies that surround me at the 2011 Coachella Festival. Musclemen and Daisy Dukes, who appear to me right now like body-fascistic proponents of the kind of psychotic power games dreamed up by Burroughs or Hunter S, so at home do they seem here in the green, palm-lined grounds of this exclusive polo club in the otherwise dusty Coachella Valley where the festival takes place each year.

As often is the case in America, though, I find it hard to fully see what is in front of me: jetlag depletes the senses and I wander around allowing sights and sounds to awaken memories formed from days and days of watching trashy TV, children’s comedies and low-grade Hollywood movies during the holidays in the 90s, which all seemed to emanate, stylistically at least, from America’s entertainment heart, the Golden State. Ciro, the kid receptionist at the shabby hotel that we stayed at near LAX airport the night before, had a bowl-and-sideburns haircut that I swear I had seen in an episode of Quantum Leap some years earlier; his not-quite-broken, squeaky speech took me back to a Simpsons episode I’d last seen 13 years ago. As a 1970s MOR station blared in the air conditioned hire car on the way to Indio next morning, all the Californian clichés had grabbed hold of me: the freeways that swooped through the sky like rare, focussed dreams on the way out of LA; the unending blue sky and heat, and the palm after palm after palm that flew by.

Last year I wrote a slightly ranty article for The Quietus (file it under “Sure It’s Skewed But Didn’t It Get You Talking!”) that bemoaned the export of recycled lo-fi sensibilities emanating out of California that had resulted in hypnagogic pop, glo-fi and the like seizing the global indie zeitgeist without breathing much life into it. I singled out the scene’s apparent figurehead: “Ariel Pink enjoys a comparable position to the Velvet Underground in that he is, above all others, seen as the linchpin behind this disparate bedroom scene, but between the two there is a chasm in sentiment and quality. The Velvets used irony sparingly, as counterpoints to offset thrilling dirge, wild, cataclysmic noise and beauty. With Pink, it is laden so thick that these ears have trouble distinguishing it from parody.”

Sometimes, though, you have to go to the source to fully understand something and, wiping chips off my shoulders as if they were blocks of dandruff, I wandered dazed yet purposefully into the tent for Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. Star and band stood against the bolt-upright palms and mandatory blue sky behind the stage like dark-yet-hilarious suppressed thoughts that had suddenly manifested themselves into shapes and sounds. Songs that seemed at first to struggle to assert themselves wriggled into your head; a bit like Beefheart-style jamming with 1970s and 80s rock and pop as its starting point and not the blues. Without noticing I’d found my way to the front. It was mesmerising – music that I’d neglected to give a chance through not opening up to it had bitten me. Elements of belligerence, of refusal, in a festival so commercial it felt like it was taking place in an iPad. I swear I was tearful.

Coming out of my trance, I realised that the vibe around the tent was not quite as chill as I suddenly was. California had made Pink and now you felt, while not rejecting him, it was doing even worse: it was meh-ing him. Irritable indifference was the feeling that hung around us, enmeshed with the fragrant hint of weed (which I thought might be the sole vice of these latte-sipping festival-goers until later at Magnetic Man, when I saw a topless and gurning giant of a man stare into the end of his own wiggling fingers: he was lost in his makeshift glow-gloves, the more he wiggled his pinkies, the more beautiful secrets he would receive from some distant, unspeakable source).

“I know you hate me,” Pink, sensitive to crowd’s antipathy, spat at them with a chew-wasp face. “We’re not gonna play anymore. I’m sorry.” He fled behind the stage, ran around, jumping up and down with his fists clenched; he smoked his cigarette so hard he nearly ate it. He came back, though, fizzing and wild with an aggression that shook his diminutive frame, a rare danger in this respectful indie-rock setting (but perhaps only to himself and his band).

He barely sang for the rest of the set, just held strained positions, scowled at band members and occasionally joined in, stuck between affecting that he did not care in the face of the questioning eyes and ears in the audience, and the reality that he does care: he obviously cares about these songs and his woozy, reverb heavy approach which stem from an almost pathological artistic desire to keep on creating. He couldn't hide it, the same way some members of the crowd couldn't hide the fact that they could take or leave him.

Retromania, published by Faber in June, sees inky legend and Pink-fan Simon Reynolds (a recent émigré to LA from New York) question his faith in his hero and hauntological music in general, in terms of advancing music: “what exactly is this music’s contribution,” he posits. “Isn’t it sterile?” But is there any other choice within the enforced conditions of the internet, which in giving us everything at once has resulted in making us feel as if nothing will ever happen again? That’s the topic of discussion in the writer's latest essay for the new issue of Wire, which acts as an accompaniment to Retromania. It problematises the current malaise, looking at its main cause, the rise of digital culture. “Fanatical identification with an artist, scene or youth tribe has given way to drifting eclecticism and ‘partial allegiance’,” says Reynolds.

As Haunted Graffiti stopped playing for the final time in a stunted yet thrilling performance, there were vague shouts of “Arsehole” and similar from those around me that had stayed until the end, while Pink scrambled around the stage floor to collect up his things. But as the crowd thinned, some rushed to the front, with one or two arms stretched out: perhaps grasping to touch this mirage of a superstar, a miniature hero alive and unwell in front of their eyes. This bedraggled person behind the name that has twinkled on thousands of computer screens around the world: is that what a star looks like?

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti play The Quietus Village Mentality Stage at Field Day on August 6th
Read the original article here

REVIEWED: N-Dubz for the Telegraph

2011-05-09T17:20:00.017+01:00

An accurate, objective account of the O2 Arena show, in which I position Dappy within the silly-hat/naughty-boy continuum begun by my neighbour Brian Harvey.

REVIEWED: Coachella 2011 for the Daily Telegraph

2011-04-27T13:55:00.017+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I flew out to LA to review Coachella Festival for the Telegraph, as well as interview Scala & Kolacny Brothers (the Belgian girls choir which made its name through a viral ad for The Social Network which featured their version of Radiohead's 'Creep') for the paper (the piece will run next month sometime). Read my review for the Telegraph here

The festival - and the whole LA experience - completely changed my perspective on Ariel Pink. I suddenly got it, whereas before I couldn't see past an apparent veneer of parody that I'd let simplify my reaction to the music. Strangely for an artist that so depends on lo-fi recording techniques for his aesthetic, it was seeing his petulant performance in front of a pretty indifferent audience which swung it this time. I'm writing something for The Quietus about the trip which I'll post here when its up there in a week or so.

INTERVIEWED: Metronomy for Dazed & Confused

2011-04-08T10:22:00.004+01:00

REVIEWED: Foo Fighters at Wembley for the Daily Telegraph

2011-03-15T14:31:00.005Z

Nice guys don't finish last, they get 3/5. Originally published in the Daily Telegraph 28/2/11.

Reggae Revisited in the New Statesman

2011-02-15T09:31:00.006Z

To coincide with the current Reggae Britannia documentary being screened in two parts of BBC Four, my piece about the venues that fostered the music, particularly Hackney's Four Aces. It was originally to be printed in the 14 February edition of New Statesman, until happenings in Egypt bumped it online.

INTERVIEWED: Wire for The Quietus

2011-02-15T09:03:00.005Z

I talked to one of the all-time great guitar groups, Wire, for the Quietus. "I remember bumping into graham lewis once and he was gurning so hard, he looked like a camel," was the sole comment the resulting article provoked. Quality, not quantity.

REVIEWED: Shakira for the Daily Telegraph

2011-02-11T14:09:00.011Z

I visited the former 'Dome again in December. The O2 is nothing if not made for someone with lungs like Shakira. She affected the post-Jackson Pop MessiaH pose to a tee, with "real talent" (larynx, stomach muscles) to back it up. In this tent that is fast becoming the centre of Britain's 21st century Tin Pan Alley - hosting, as it does, the industry's before (X Factor) and after (Brit Awards) - this was a showcase of a global pop ideal which, naturally, felt a bit flat. Reviewed for the Daily Telegraph.

REVIEWED: Suede at the O2 Arena for the Daily Telegraph

2010-12-20T11:09:00.005Z

Better late than never... Their biggest indoor gig to date, reviewed for the Daily Telegraph.

The Dark, Beating Heart of Francesca Woodman

2010-11-29T22:09:00.004Z

That the Victoria Miro Gallery is showing its third and largest Francesca Woodman exhibition in a decade is an indication of the growing reputation that the late American photographer holds around the world. Her work has struck a definite chord with a generation of art lovers, collectors and gallery-goers during the three decades that have followed her death in 1981, and has appeared in collections in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and MoMA in New York and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, amongst other institutions.

Constant is her nakedness, a series of black and white curves and soft focus shadows. Where her face is in clear view, her expression is one that is lost, yet focused – possessed, even. Viewed posthumously, as only they can be, they hint at her suicide, a grim finality that put a stop to her working life at the age of 22.

More commonly, though, these are images that depict abstract, quasi-humanoid forms that are often blurred beyond recognition: split reconstructions of self, obscured by crumbling detritus in the dusty, abandoned locations she favoured. Torso and limbs hug a doorframe in an untitled photograph taken in New York. Old, peeling wallpaper frames a navel in one shot from the Space2 series taken on Providence Island, and covers all but her arms and the sides of her crouching form in Then At One Point I Did Not Need To Translate The Notes; They Went Directly To My Hands.

The latter title could have been taken from a Kafka fragment, as indeed could the image itself be used to illustrate the Prague writer’s most famous tale, The Metamorphosis, poised, as Woodman appears to be, between transformation and annihilation. They are pictures that could be described as surrealist, but that have a dark, beating heart that make them a more universal prospect, making her work comparable to that of David Lynch. The American director, who ploughs a lone furrow as Hollywood’s only gothic absurdist, described Kafka as “the one artist that I feel could be my brother”. He never mentioned anything about a sister.

Francesca Woodman runs at the Victoria Miro Gallery until 22 January 2011. This article was first published at AnOthermag.com

REVIEWED: Strategies Against Architecture IV by Einstürzende Neubauten for The Quietus

2010-11-16T16:26:00.007Z

I reviewed the new (perhaps final) instalment in the German industrial pop band's Strategies series. It was for the ever-wonderful Quietus, one of only two UK pulications seemingly eager to feature this incredible group. The other was Dazed, which I interviewed Blixa Bargeld for - will post that interview in a bit. For now, read the review of the album on The Quietus.

INTERVIEWED: Poet/Funnyman, Tim Key for the Daily Telegraph

2010-11-16T16:15:00.009Z

Tim Key is a very funny man who has made a comedy record that is out on Angular/Invisible Dot. Go and see a show during his tour in February, you will laugh a lot. In the meantime, read this short interview for the Daily Telegraph, and then buy the vinyl record, which should prompt you to laugh a lot also, or your money back (I think).

REVIEWED: TEDx Aldeburgh for New Statesman

2010-11-15T17:39:00.010Z

I recently went to Snape Maltings near Aldeburgh in Suffolk to attend the TEDx Aldeburgh conference; it is a hushed place with an abandoned-like quality that seems almost custom built for musical contemplation. Read my review for the New Statesman here.

INTERVIEWED: Edwyn Collins for The Daily Telegraph

2010-10-29T11:21:00.013+01:00

Edwyn Collins has a honking great laugh that is impossible to convey fully on the page. To try and describe it — like a cross between an ecstatic seal, say, and an unruly bicycle horn — is to do it an injustice.

Luckily, Collins has plenty to laugh about. Miraculously, he is about to embark on a European tour, five years after a stroke led to two brain haemorrhages that nearly killed him and left him in hospital for six months. In September, he released his seventh solo album, Losing Sleep, his first collection of new songs since the ordeal.

The record is a joyful ride, his most pop-sounding in over a decade. He attributes the directness of his new material to his struggle with language, due to dysphasia, a product of his stroke. “Before my stroke, on my last album Home Again, I was clever-clever,” he explains, sitting on a sofa in the studio that he shares with Seb Lewsley, his best friend and producer. “Now my songs are direct and clear enough to focus on what the struggle of life is about. I can get to the root of things.”

It plugs straight back into the rich vein of warm, slightly wobbly pop and fresh, soulful sensibility which has been his trademark since the group that he made his name with, Orange Juice, released its first single, Falling and Laughing, in 1980.

The subject of a soon-to-be-released major retrospective box set, Orange Juice were at the vanguard of bands who sprang out of post-punk Glasgow. They came armed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop – mixing up the jangling guitars of the Byrds, the disco of Chic and the bite of punk — as well as an array of secondhand overcoats and, most importantly, bagfuls of wit. Yet, aside from the squelching disco hit Rip It Up, which reached number 8 in 1983, Orange Juice never quite scaled the heights of imitators like Haircut 100, who took the Orange Juice template of guitars, funk beats and sweaters and ran with it.

Though Collins later won some solo recognition with the global 1994 smash A Girl Like You, pop stradom eluded Orange Juice and they were dropped by Polydor in 1984 after they failed to repeat Rip It Up's sales, leading to the band splitting. But for Collins, their lack of success has turned out to be a blessing.

“I suppose otherwise you would be like ABC are now, on tour with that Here & Now show,” laughs Grace Maxwell, his wife, a fellow southern Scot and his manager for nearly three decades. “Stop it, Grace. Martin Fry is my good friend,” replies Edwyn, in a moment of quick-fire banter that has become the pair’s trademark following his stroke, since which his wife has been an omnipresent figure by his side: in the hospital as he embarked on a long recovery, at his many therapy sessions, and in the majority of interviews since.

Collins instead became a figurehead for the DIY underground music scene, a fact that was made clear to him when, before his stroke, he was confronted by three men in north London. “You’re that Edwyn Collins, aren’t you?” one said in a broad Manchester accent. “You invented indie.”

If he is an indie figurehead, he is a reluctant one. As the Eighties progressed, Collins increasingly distanced himself from the many fey indie bands who revered Orange Juice. “When Edwyn started, indie just meant his records had been independently distributed, with no majors involved, everything on the cheap,” says Maxwell. “By the mid-Eighties, it had become a genre, with an affected tweeness about it that we hated.”

While Orange Juice have enjoyed a resurgence among a generation of vintage-clothed vinyl completists, Collins is quick to quell the band’s importance, to him at least. “OJ means a lot to me, but it is in the past. I’ve got to look to the future. Back then, I was experimenting. We weren’t quite ready.”

Many of his devotees might disagree, such as the young musicians who turn up on his latest album, including the Cribs’ Ryan Jarman, Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos and Brooklyn band The Drums, who co-wrote the stunning In Your Eyes, a song filled with a twin sense of loss and hope.

It came about after Edwyn and Grace’s son William met the band at a gig. “Orange Juice made these perfect pop songs,” explains Drums frontman Jonathan Pierce, who sings with Collins on the track. “They feel so fragile, like they could fall apart at any time. There is something really human about that.”

Collins is still quite obviously impaired. Paralysed on his right side, he no longer plays guitar, but he has, incredibly, retrained himself to be able to draw with his left hand — the birds on the cover of Losing Sleep were all sketched during his recovery. Each month sees a new milestone reached.

The previous weekend was the first time he had been left overnight at home in his house in over five years as Grace travelled to her home town in North Lanarkshire to give a reading of her autobiography Falling and Laughing (named after Orange Juice’s first single), which charts Edwyn’s recovery.

Above all else, Losing Sleep is a testament to the healing qualities of music, and its profound mystery. Two days before he was due to leave hospital in 2005, the only phrases he could say were “Yes”, “No”, “Grace Maxwell” and “the possibilities are endless”, which he repeated like a mantra as part of his therapy.

Then, from nowhere, sprang a melody and lyrics — a song. That song, the acoustic ballad I’m Searching For The Truth, closes the album. “Some sweet day, we’ll get there in the end,” Collins sings in a high-pitched variant of his familiar, trembling croon. Today, you might suggest that he already has.

The Orange Juice box set 'Coals To Newcastle’ is out on Domino on Nov 8. Edwyn Collins starts his European tour at the Komedia in Brighton on Nov 4.
First published in The Daily Telegraph

RIP ARI UP

2010-10-29T11:07:00.009+01:00

Dazed asked me to write something about Ari Up following her death last week - I interviewed her a couple of times over the past few years, once for Dazed. She was wonderful, kind and, most of all, a force. The picture above was taken during last year's Slits tour with Wetdog, and features Wetdog drummer Sarah Datblygu.

No matter how many times it has been printed, it is still jarring when you read that when Ari Up joined the Slits she was just 14-years-old. That she took on an already spent punk rock form and dragged it to where she and her fellow Slits wished it to be before she was even old enough to buy a packet of cigarettes, will always remain at the heart of why she was so unique. Fuck me, 14 is even young for an X Factor contestant. How we fawned over the bravery of Cher Lloyd during her ultimately transformative audition. By her age, Ari had already squatted down and urinated on the stage of the Music Machine, now Koko, in Camden.

All of which sounds very punk, and it was. Yet, the Slits have always seemed apart from the vision of the time depicted in those reductive documentaries that tell the story of how a thing called punk somehow came along to destroy a thing called rock. And it wasn’t as if Ari Up sprang out of nowhere: she had been entrenched in the music business since she was a toddler. In an interview for Dazed, she told of being serenaded by Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, of Jimi Hendrix hanging around the house, of John Anderson of Yes becoming her Godfather due to the fact that her mother Nora, who later married John Lydon, was a big music promoter in Munich, where she grew up.

After her mother moved to London to be closer to the party, the pair went to gigs together: Up met Palmolive at a Clash gig in 1976, holding the first Slits rehearsal in a London squat the next day. Thrust into the centre of an unhinged punk scene, she remained strong, refusing to succumb to the drug cliche that tends to affect children who try and grow up too fast. She escaped London after the Slits split in the early 1980s, moving to New York and Belize, India and Jamaica. Through the years she floated in and out of the listener's conciousness, whether with Adrian Sherwood's New Age Steppers, her own Baby Ari or Madusa projects, or the reformed Slits.

She was nomadic, but not rootless, never losing her sense of Bavarian identity. “For Bavarian people it is an insult to be called German,” she said. "I am not patriotic or nationalistic. I never say I am from any country or anything. I am into culture and roots." It was attitude that pissed all over Oi! and the rest of the negative by-products of the era, much as she had that old Camden stage.

First published at Dazed Digital

REVIEWED: 'North' by Darkstar for The Quietus

2010-10-20T22:50:00.008+01:00

The question whether music can still be concerned with place in an internet age that has, to some extent, devoured both, is one that has triggered much debate in articles such as this one by fellow Quietus scribe Hazel Sheffield. As locally-specific scenes lose their importance, is geography now becoming a defunct term in the musical lexicon? Or is place, conversely, more important than ever in understanding music, its melancholic forms, its potency? I'm sticking with the latter. Because, while bedrooms are vital to the planning and execution of the majority of today's more interesting music, one needs to take a look outside to have a chance of creating something as pure and definite as North by Darkstar.

It is the product of toil by displaced northern Englishmen, Cheshire-born James Young and Yorkshire-born Aiden Whalley, the duo behind Darkstar's breakthrough song, last year's romantic, glitchy 2-step dancefloor number 'Aidy's Girl Is A Computer'. At the start of the year, the pair scrapped a whole album of similar fare, enlisted singer James Buttery, and created a series of slow burning, nocturnal odes to love, loss and the problem of place. It has to go down as one of the most successful musical about-turns in recent years.

After the slow building fanfare track that is 'In The Wings', the album is kick-started by the wide-eyed opening bars of 'Gold', their cover of the Human League obscurity 'You Remind Me Of Gold', a B side to 'Fascination'. Locking into a beat, it is noticeably slower – there's less champagne and coke about, less glitz and glamour. It is a plaintive rendition, but no less faithful; if anything it scrapes away the period pomp to unearth a centre of pure melancholy which was already there.

The title track, 'North', is a memory march, an unrepentant evocation of the industrial north, whose last remnants were blasted away during the 1980s, a period which influences much of this album, when the area was awash with synth bands such as the 'League and OMD. But it isn't the only influence. There's Radiohead here, woozy science fiction and Lynchian soundtracks, a whole host of UK dance, industrial and post-rock signifiers. And of course, the Hyperdub tradition, not least Burial. Here, as with that formerly anonymous, nocturnal trailblazer, absence is a presence – but it isn't quite the drowned subcultural world as in Burial's schizoid soundscape. There are boundaries, albeit a complex weave, set by tradition and scaled through blind conquest.

The album belongs in London as much as it does in the north: perhaps even more so, in this capital, toward which musicians and artists – and dreaded 'creatives' – are pulled like iron filings are to a magnet. This metropolis, where all around are men and women in deceptively slack trousers and angled stances, proclaiming abandoned basements and lofts, stairwells and rooftops as “great space...amazing space".

The album's very being reflects the centralisation of culture in the UK: the London Polarisation, you're either there or you're not. Darkstar need to be close to it to survive but, in a way, they have made a devil pact, forsaking their neglected North for north London, friends and customs for fumbling through Clapton, a decade passing like sand through fingers. But in doing so they have avoided the parochial, the specifically local that makes the album not about keeping up with infantilised scenes, but about feelings and musings on alienation and the notion of home.

“Geography is destiny," as James Ellroy said. And while this destiny might not be exactly be what Messrs Whalley and Young once dreamed of, it has become the catalyst for this gorgeous, emotionally rich, unique album. “I won't forget you," repeats Buttery at the close of the album's final track, 'When It's Gone'. His synthetic, multilayered vocal, which has stuttered under the strain of transmission throughout, is unequivocal.

First published at TheQuietus

REVIEWED: Grinderman in Hammersmith for the Daily Telegraph

2010-10-05T17:01:00.007+01:00

Violent ambiguity in Hammersmith, reviewed for the Daily Telegraph.

INTERVIEWED: Blixa Bargeld for Dazed

2010-09-29T11:33:00.008+01:00

I travelled to Berlin by air in August to eat, drink and talk with Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten. A naturally arrogant, kind, alternately gruff and giving man, Bargeld has presided over Neubauten, this greatest of European pop groups, for thirty years. He translated the menu for me in this Mitte restaurant. Demanded eye contact (you gave it to him); told me of setting fire to his school in protest against the redundant democratic practices of the school council, of his unsurprisingly fraught encounter with Bono and The Edge, and why the forthcoming European tour might be the last time we hear from Neubauten for a while.

You can read the resulting feature in the October issue of Dazed & Confused, on t'shelves now.

Fütter mein Ego!
Fütter mein Ego!
Fütter mein Ego!

INTERVIEWED: Michael Yonkers in this month's Dazed & Confused

2010-08-27T11:32:00.008+01:00

In this month's Dazed you can read my Cult VIP piece on guitar experimentalist and forgotten noise icon, Michael Yonkers.

I first heard of Yonkers in 2004, when I was running a low-grade indie night in a basement in Cornwall, where I was at college - the Michael Yonkers Band song 'Kill the Enemy' was on a Sub Pop compilation that I used to fall back on when I'd run out of up-tempo Fall numbers, and it was too early for Blondie.

The album Microminiature Love had been rereleased by the label, 35 years after Sire records had pulled out of releasing it in 1968. To me it was the sound of something totally new, unearthed; a kind of garage avant-rock that straddled time, made by a hitherto ignored king of distorted songs. To since learn that this monstrous, battle-weary baritone wasn't from some Vietnam vet singing the blues but a 21 year old from Minneapolis was mindblowing. And to talk to him a few months back was like fulfilling some dream that started back in that cellar club.

Despite a near paralysing back injury in the early 1970s he has recorded hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of unreleased music since then; he told me how he recorded songs from a motorised hospital bed he had installed in his basement appartment, and of mysterious 1980s electro projects made when he was in too much pain to play guitar, so switched to synth. One later album, Lovely Gold, came out on Chicago label Drag City earlier this year, but there is much still hidden away in his flat in boxes, and in an out of town storage lock up, waiting to be heard. He's currently in his Minneapolis appartment sifting through it all, one tape at a time.

SUMMER 2010: OLYMPIC BOROUGH WALKS

2010-08-20T12:43:00.009+01:00

This summer, commissioned by Robin Turner's ROAM project, I undertook a walk of each east London Olympic borough: Walthamstow, Hackney, Newham & Tower Hamlets (grouped together to make one walk), and Greenwich.

Seeing as the bicycle utopia that many self-consciously subversive Londoners have been trying to will into being has become a Barclays-sponsored commuter-friendly enterprise under His Royal Blondeness, Boris, it seems the only decent mode of travel a refusenik has left these days is to walk. However, to say that you are going to walk a fair distance - across a borough, say - draws desperate scrambling from certain company, who fling their Oyster Cards at you, try and lend you their bikes, reel off endless bus routes, train stations, and taxi company numbers in an effort to save you from being exposed to the monotony of London's endless concrete jungle.

Yet it is in traversing these streets by foot that one experiences London's layers; in London Fields, Hackney, for example, it is difficult to meditate on the Death Factory, former home of industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle that still stands today, when you are powering past it on two wheels, following the commuter flow in or out of the centre. Slowing down the process allows you to better absorb London's life, and its remnants.

INTERVIEWED: The Drums

2010-07-13T15:04:00.006+01:00

Thought I should start posting again. Sorry it has been a while - have been having too much "outside time" recently. Back indoors now, so here goes.

First, an interview with this year's indie-boy pop entity, The Drums, published in the Daily Telegraph in June...

THE PRISONER; My visit to Swakopmund, Namibia

2010-04-26T10:43:00.006+01:00

There have been inevitable criticisms of ITV's remake of 'The Prisoner', the main question being;'Why remake it at all?' It is a fair point - we live in a world in which the fear of putting serious money behind original ideas has crippled much mainstream filmmaking. The original series was a surrealist enigma, an open-ended puzzle - a Lynchian premonition - open to interpretation like a Kafka novel. But, watching the series, and knowing the ambition behind it,I think it wrong to write it off without a fair hearing.

I visited the set in September 2008 while the series was being filmed in Swakopmund, Namibia, talking to actors such as Ian McKellen, Jim Caviezel and Ruth Wilson. Wilson told me how the writer Bill Gallagher instructed the cast to read John Gray's book, Straw Dogs. Will Self wrote that Gray’s greatest feat was to highlight the human race’s ‘unwillingness – inability even – to appreciate not simply that we are the kin of the other animals, but that like them we are ultimately powerless over both our individual and collective destinies, which leads to our nonsensical faith in progress.’ A progress that leads leaders of men like Two to sadistic acts in the the name of furthering the human race.

While filming began in Swakopmund a story ran in national newspaper The Namibian. 47 skulls of local tribesmen were being stored at the Medical History Museum within the Charité Hospital in Berlin and had been requested to be returned to Swakopmund. They had been taken to Germany from Namibia around a hundred years ago to ‘prove the superiority of the white race’, following an ‘extermination order’ from General Lothar von Trotha in 1904: German troops surrounded thousands of members of the Herero tribe; men, women and children perished under machine gun fire. Many survivors were reportedly sent to concentration camps in Swakopmund and Luderitz Bay to the south.

My piece, which ran in the Telegraph Magazine on 17 April, can be read here.

"IMMATURITY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING": These New Puritans interviewed

2010-04-14T11:56:00.022+01:00

A 40-minute high-speed train ride away from London is Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, the place that the four members of These New Puritans call home. Today, twin brothers Jack and George Barnett, Thomas Hein and Sophie Sleigh Johnson bound and stumble on the grass-padded patches of marshland that rise out of the mud-flats. Distinct in uniform black against dull greys, greens and browns, they walk without talking, as a violent, biting wind terrorises them, animating Sophie’s hair into a frenzy, the Thames flowing calmly behind.

Leigh-on-Sea is a commuter dreamscape, a pleasant mix of suburban stillness, gorgeous landscape and real history (the town was listed in the Domesday Book). Around the turn of the millennium, Leigh became the unofficial home of the hairdresser – coiffeurs Lee Stafford and Adee Phelan ended up on docusoaps and the town, in a way, followed suit, as bars, restaurants, and fitted kitchens were transformed into hives of gossip.

The 22-year-old Barnetts went to a Catholic boys’ comprehensive school, where they met bandmate Hein. Jack had already learned guitar and cello and he put his brother George to work on drums, and taught Hein the bass. He began to imagine bands in his head, and gave them various names. “University Trashcans was the first one we actually formed,” remembers George. “I don’t know why I came up with that name,” Jack adds. “I didn’t know what a university was.” Other projects followed – China Pig, Mexico City, then finally, These New Puritans.

For TNP, Jack wrote songs that attacked the ersatz and tapped into his passion for psychogeography, magick and symbolism. The Barnetts’ cousin Sleigh-Johnson was installed on keyboards and the band slowly graduated from local pub function rooms to the London cicuit. Soon enough, they were commissioned to soundtrack Hedi Slimane’s Dior Homme spring/summer catwalk show in Paris 2007, kickstarting George’s sideline career as a high-end male model. The band quickly signed a shared deal with two of the most respected labels in the UK, Domino and Angular. Did they think they had made it? “I just remember hating the venues, and hating everything about playing,” recalls Jack. “I don’t know why we even carried on. Probably because we wanted to record something that is really good, which has only really happened now.”

The band’s new album, Hidden, is a defining LP for a new decade – a purge and a renewal that embodies the spirit of inquiry of great British artists past, contorting stolen forms to convey a unique aesthetic. Co-produced by Graham Sutton of post-rock project Bark Psychosis, and mixed by Stones Throw’s Dave Cooley, it features vocals by Heather Marlatt of US wyrd-pop makers Salem, the massive

sound of Japanese Taiko drums, a 13-piece brass and woodwind ensemble from Prague, and a school children’s choir from London.

Their 2008 debut Beat Pyramid was packaged as a puzzle, and brought together Jack’s disparate passions, such as numerology and J Dilla’s hip hop production. It worked well, but the more you listened the more you began to wonder whether the enigma was enhanced by the fact that it was a disjointed document in a lot of ways – a fusing together of the different styles that Jack had assigned to the band.

A label marked “pretentious” was routinely slapped on to them, which unending editorials that described the band in terms such as “fiercely intellectual”, as well as the incorrect accusation that the band all went to public school, did much to promote. Yet, while at times deserved – this is, after all, a group whose singer claimed he liked to fall asleep on stage during gigs for 30 minutes at a time – such a label essentially lionises mediocrity and punishes ambition, safeguarding tame, ironic consensus-culture in the process. It did not sit well with the band and, this time around, they believe that they have made music that people can engage with. “I think this album will have much wider appeal because it is more interesting emotionally,” says Barnett. “Before, we had really pinned down themes – infinity, secularity, that kind of thing – and one kind of tone. This time, there is a lot more scope for people to get involved.” But don’t mistake it for a new-found sophistication. “Maturity to me is the same thing as being boring. There are ridiculously immature things on this album, like a full children’s choir singing, ‘This is Attack Music!’ I think immaturity is the most important thing in music.”

Hidden began with a plan to merge the violence of dancehall artists such as Vybz Kartel with Steve Reich, and underpin it with melancholic 16th-century British renaissance composers such as William Byrd. But an obsession was forming in Barnett, with two unlikely bedfellows – English composer Benjamin Britten and Britney Spears. “I had this fantasy of wanting to combine the post-Timbaland pop sound of Blackout – one of the great classics of our time – with Benjamin Britten,” he says. “To make music that has the complexity of a Britten opera but that sounds like Britney Spears. And that is kind of what we ended up with.”

Barnett recognises much of Britten’s ideals in the way he wants to work. “He deliberately rejected the European avant-garde,” he explains. “He said it was the same as a totalitarian dictatorship and by doing that, his music was more interesting.” Britten found inspiration in his home of Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast when composing the tragic 1945 opera about a fisherman put on trial for abusing his young male assistants, Peter Grimes. Barnett has moved back to Leigh on Sea recently from east London, and the album reflects the part of the Thames Estuary where it was written. Single “We Want War” best displays this new found romanticism for their home. Lyrics such as “And that the Thames flows beneath the grass... sea breeze, sea breeze...” explore the grim and the celestial in the sometimes bleak, sometimes beauty-filled landscape. A shimmering, ecstatic choir reflects the silver of the sea. It is underpinned by a deep-rooted directness that might be traced back to savage local bluesmen Dr Feelgood. Being a seven-minute fusion of operatic brass and grim dancehall beats it is, potentially, commercial suicide. Yet it is also breathtaking.

Barnett’s next project might be a Britten-style song cycle inspired by the 12 islands of Essex. He is thinking of living on one of them – Foulness, just north of Leigh and Southend. For nearly a century it has been used by the MOD, who blast an arsenal of weaponry into mud-flats, the boom audible for miles around. Despite the controlled warzone that surrounds them, around 150 people live in the village. There are rarely any visitors, the yearly bike race is your only chance to get on the island. Last year, Barnett entered.“It was so funny,” he relays. “I was just slowly going along, taking pictures of everything. You can walk right up to the guns. It’s crazy. You are in this tiny village when suddenly, looming over you, there’s this sign that reads STATE OF HIGH ALERT.”

A move to Foulness would be a kind of homecoming – the Barnett brothers’ grandfather used to play organ on the island. It is an outpost, a dreamworld, where Jack can be alone to create. Yet it is not the outside world that is the problem. “I am the most stoical person in the world away from music,” he says. “Nothing bothers me that I can’t change. But when you are making music, you can change everything. It’s terrifying.”

First published in the February 2010 edition of Dazed & Confused magazine. Photography by Leonie Purchas

REVIEWED: Various Artists: Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics Vol. 1

2010-04-14T11:12:00.008+01:00

Chris Petit's remarkable new film Content, a companion piece to his late 1970s road movie Radio On, positions the director driving away from a past that is gaining on him, as he narrates over footage of car journeys, road after road. He offers up the internet - the way it ensures an ever-present past, how it detaches each of us from one another - as a reason for 21st century sorrow.

It might be the reason that the songs of Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics Vol. 1, an album of songs by little known European acts - with one American and one Canadian thrown in for good measure - sound so prescient. Unearthed by Angular's Joe Daniel and Pieter Schoolwerth of Brooklyn label Wierd, the majority of these tracks were recorded on the edges; songs that came into being isolated in European suburbs between 1980 and 1986, away from the media invented glamour and glitz of the city. Today they sound like future echoes of current feelings of a similar disconnect, caused by the dominance of technological communication which increases with each tweet.

'Polaroid/Roman/Photo' by the French group Ruth is the song most imbued with this sense of melancholy. The whirr and click of a Polaroid camera in action begins the song and a beautiful, slightly sombre trumpet and flute harmony closes it. The beat plods along steadily, with unforgiving purpose. It is a mindless, robotic slump boogie, a club-friendly riff on technology-as-crushing benefactor, which anticipates a future where the act of pose-as-performance, once the preserve of a modelling elite, has segued into the everyday. Where the camera has become an ubiquitous companion, the wall-posted photograph a consistent reminder of a very recent past.

Despite the icy, clinical connotations of the term cold wave, translated from the French la vague froid, this is a profoundly human album. Laden with brass these are organic creations that act as a kind of reappraisal for analogue synths and drum machines over digital music software. French group OTO's 'Anyway' careers deranged like an electronic freakbeat outfit willed on by a sax-less James Chance. Manu Moan, singer in Swiss band the Vyllies, wails about the devil over metronomic beat and troubling keyboards on 'Babylon'. Italy's Jeuneusse d'Ivoire's 'A Gift of Tears' begins like a fragile Joy Division dancefloor filler re-imagined by Neu! before soaring along a dream-like freeway.

"Radio On," Chris Petit said recently, "ended with a car 'stalled on the edge of the future', which we didn't know then would be Thatcherism." The irresistible melancholia that pulses through the Xeroxed saxophones and cold-steel synths of Cold Waves... feels like a European reaction to the unstoppable rise of consumerism, as well as a music made in anticipation of the walled-in existence that technology has since brought into our lives. We have made suburbs of ourselves and the only road out is on the dancefloor.

Originally published at TheQuietus.com

MUSOHISTORICAL #3, #4, #5, #6

2010-04-07T10:29:00.004+01:00

Sorry for the break in transmission... my history of SOHO gay nightclubbing, first published in the Daily Note, is here...

Camden from UFO to Britpop via the Lurch Scene here.

New Cross and Deptford here.

And finally, my trudge through the Olympic site and Newham.

REVIEWED: John Cale at Royal Festival Hall

2010-03-08T22:27:00.004Z

Because wise men at their end know dark is right: the Welshman's visit to the South Bank, as reviewed for the Daily Telegraph.

REVIEWED: Hole at Shepherds Bush Empire

2010-02-19T08:54:00.004Z

Courtney's Hole comeback after a 11 year live hiatus, reviewed for the Daily Telegraph here.

MUSOHISTORICAL #2: HACKNEY

2010-02-19T08:38:00.004Z

The second in the series is set in Hackney; quick getaways, revelations, music and murder featuring the likes of Genesis P-Orridge, Four Aces' Newton Dunbar, and Jack the Hat McVitie. It featured in last Friday's edition of RBMA paper Daily Note (today's edition features Soho) but you can view the online edition here.

REVIEWED: An English Journey: Re-Imagined

2010-02-16T10:22:00.004Z

By train and bus we journeyed to Aldeburgh, Suffolk to view the first performance in this series of psychogeographical meanderings put together by Paul Smith, Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore and others. Was potent stuff. Read my review in this week's New Statesman, or here.

MUSOHISTORICAL #1: SOUTHWARK

2010-02-09T15:37:00.003Z

I'm writing a series of London music histories, published each Friday in The Daily Note, the free newspaper of the Red Bull Music Academy, currently taking place in London.

RBMA's base is in Southwark, the subject of the first history. Take a look at this PDF if you didn't catch it on paper last Friday.

These New Puritans, Bush Hall, 25/1/10

2010-02-09T11:34:00.004Z

Video never really captures what happens on a stage. The nuances of emotion, the physicality of the sound, are lost. But I've embedded this anyway as it is a satisfactory enough document of These New Puritans' gig at Bush Hall, Shepherds Bush, which happened 25 January 2010. It gives you an idea of what went on, and what might come next.

REVIEWED: Todd Rundgren at Hammersmith Apollo

2010-02-08T13:33:00.003Z

If only he came out like this. Read the review here.

INTERVIEWED: These New Puritans in Dazed

2010-02-01T23:18:00.006Z

Essex quartet These New Puritans made Hidden last year, a brilliant, meticulously crafted record featuring darkness, lightness, magick, the Thames Estuary, hard graft and disparate influences: Britten, Britney, Byrd, Bjork, Burial; The Beyond...
Read my interview with Jack and George - along with interviews with other UK artists pushing matters Factory Floor and Dave. i.d. and featuring amazing photography by Leonie Purchas - in this month's physical, not digital, Dazed & Confused.

REVIEWED: The Velvet Underground: a New York Art by Johan Kugelberg

2010-01-29T12:14:00.004Z

In this week's (Feb 1) issue of New Statesman. Online version here.

'I WAS GOBSMACKED BY MIDDLESBROUGH.' An interview with Iain Sinclair.

2010-01-27T12:11:00.004Z

My interview with author, filmmaker, poet, human Iain Sinclair is here. We talk burning bears, wet coats and Middlesbrough as the old East Germany.

GIGS HAPPENED IN DECEMBER AND I WAS AT FOUR OF THEM

2010-01-08T21:33:00.018Z

Florence and the Machine, Brixton Academy Sunday 13 December
Daily Telegraph

Miley Cyrus, O2 Arena, Saturday 19 December
Daily Telegraph

Them Crooked Vultures, Hammersmith Apollo, Thursday 17 December
Daily Telegraph

Public Image Ltd, Brixton Academy, Monday 21 December
Daily Telegraph

Resolution

2010-01-08T21:21:00.002Z

POST

SORGANCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2009-12-03T17:04:00.006Z

Six Organs of Admittance play Bush Hall up west tomorrow night (Friday 4th) and Ben Chasny is sure to make some beautiful searching noise up on that dog gone stage. Go see, ya hear? And read my review of their last album, posted on The Quietus a bit ago... damn, need to post more on here.

Six Organs Of Admittance
Luminous Night Tim Burrows , August 20th, 2009 08:20

The last record put out by Six Organs of Admittance, Shelter From the Ash, was an ominous, powerful, sprawling LP which took hold of the listener following repeated listens. It buffed up Ben Chasny's noise-folk style — too much for some people's liking. Pitchfork, in particular, smelt a rat: 'Here, Six Organs is doing for psychedelic folk what Jackson Browne and the Eagles did for pop-reared folk-rock,' wrote Grayson Currin, 'hybridizing polished, perfected takes on touchstones into a safe-for-anyone alloy.'

If that was polished, then eleventh album Luminous Night is a widescreen epic complete with surround sound. Inspired by Kurosawa soundtacks, it has an expansive cinematic feel, as Ben Chasny carries on the project started with the last album.

On Shelter, Chasny's weary tones were perfectly offset by his partner Elisa Ambrogio of Magik Markers; this combination was one of the album's highlights. Yet, aside for a credit on the artwork, Ambrogio is absent here. While their partnership worked well, breaking away has helped give this record focus; there were times during the last that they seemed lost in a confusing expanse — indeed that was part of the appeal. Here, though, there is a balance between highs and lows that plots a more extreme and satisfying trajectory.

The most optimistic track, 'Cover Your Wounds With The Sky' — a freeform, minimalist dirge based around the noise a four-track cassette makes after it had been buried in sodden earth in Seattle — is followed by 'Ursa Minor', a song that spins 180 degrees toward sheer desperation. 'We took a train last week,' Chasny intones, 'but the trains don't run no more'. The situation becomes terminal as the song progresses: people are dying, there is only a month's worth of food left; he 'thought about tomorrow and locked the door'.

The song evokes Cormac McCarthy's too-close-for comfort prediction of a desolate future, The Road. The ash motif in the last album follows this same logic, as do the videos that accompanied 'Goodnight' and the eponymous track from Shelter from the Ash which could have been made to accompany the book.

If Chasny is a follower of 'Cormac McCarthyism' — as Oprah Winfrey put it — it is the stillness of form, the divinity in simplicity, that connects them. McCarthy famously eschews punctuation aside from the full stop and colon, preferring to let the words do the work. You could see the Six Organs method to making music in a similar way: methodical, studious, but never cold or cynical. It is an approach born out of humanity, a fascination with the big questions. One sentence in The Road, referred to by Oprah, sums up McCarthy's style best: 'If he is not the word of God God never spoke.' That line could easily be slotted into most of the songs on Luminous Night.

There is, of course, some fantastic guitar-work at the heart of this album but, intriguingly, is it's no longer the focal point. Chasny recently hinted a move away from guitar, to avoid the inevitable ego-masturbation that comes with concentrating on one's axe. It means his creations can grow, become whole.

The flutes of Hans Teuber and tabla played by Tor Dietrichson contemplate Eastern promise on 'Bar Nasha', and it's in that direction that Chasny often ventures for inspiration. The album's title is borrowed from the Kuwaiti spiritual scholar A.H. Almaas's autobiographical study of Being, Luminous Night's Journey. In the same way, Chasny used the title of Henry Corbin's meditation on the sacred in Islam for the title of the opening track on the previous LP, 'Alone With the Alone'. He is a seeker by nature, searching for answers, clues to the human condition.

That Chasny is always studying in this way is what makes Six Organs tick. It has resulted in his most clear-eyed, metaphysical exploration yet, as well as — thanks also to wonder-producer Randall Dunn — some of the best noise released this year. This is music for our age: playful yet serious, and not afraid of exploring Big Ideas, or presenting grim outcomes, in a way people can understand.

TRAILER TRASH TRACYS

2009-10-22T18:16:00.007+01:00

AGONY & ECSTASY: TRAILER TRASH TRACYS

Dazed & Confused, October 2009

Ever got the bus through south London’s notorious Elephant and Castle at night? As you swoop past the intermittent lights that shine out of greying estates earmarked for demolition, you cannot help but marvel at the scale of this very public heartbreak. Jimmy Lee, one half of duo Trailer Trash Tracys, resides in the area – in the shittest council flat you are likely to see,” he says. “But it means I get a three-bedroom flat to myself for £200 a month.”

TTT make songs that seem like epic siren calls in this doomed night. At the root of them is the yearning 80s balladry of bands such as Berlin and Cocteau Twins. Swedish émigré Suzanne Aztoria’s vocals float and crackle like static ghosts over gorgeous songs that quiver under the weight of reverb. New Single “Candy Girl” articulates, among other things, the wooziness of coming down; the failure of modernism; the pain of leaving. Yet it is no miserable anthem. Above all, the song is soaked in the possibility of beauty rising out of desolation.

The pair started working together when they were both in a manufactured pop band. “We were in the indie version of Girls Aloud,” says Susanne. “We were in the middle of a contradiction,” adds Jimmy. “Sounding like the Jesus & Mary Chain, but having these pop songs to play. Needless to say, it didn’t work out.”

Something of the JMC stuck though – the nocturnal lushness that ignited the shoegaze scene, as well as Bobby Gillespie’s “boom, boom-boom, bap” drum style, pinched in turn off Phil Spector. “We can see why people would call it shoegaze, as we use a lot of reverb and other effects,” says Susanne. “But I don’t think it is as simple as that. It is really important for us that they are good songs.”

To say that their music is a passion for both might be to underplay it. “We do meet up a lot to write, record and rehearse,” Susanne attests. “We are kind of perfectionists, so a song has to be completely right for us to be happy with it.”

Yet obsession often leads to pain, and going over and over songs in his south London flat might be getting to Jimmy. “Since starting this band, I have been caught talking to myself,” he confesses. “That’s no bullshit, I don’t even realise.”

A postman wrote

2009-10-20T15:37:00.003+01:00

With his scarred face, languorous delivery and fondness for booze, the late German-American writer Charles Bukowski perfected a template for the skid-row lowlife. Some might consider him a Beat poet, but he doesn't quite fit with the expansive joie de vivre of it all. While Kerouac went out on the road to seek enlightenment, Bukowski left home because there was no place else to go.

He stayed in motels and flophouses. Drank alone with the blinds pulled down, while Beethoven and Brahms blasted out of a transistor radio. In Philadelphia, he spent two-and-a-half years in a bar, fighting the landlord and running errands in exchange for free beer. Yet, with a bit of help from John Fante, the novelist who gave him his plain talkin' style, he defined the American underclass in his novels and poems, as he set about putting his experiences down on paper.

Bukowski's Los Angeles could be seen as the inverse companion of David Lynch's. While the movies are surreal explorations of the darkness behind the scenes of LA's rich, Bukowski breathed beer-stained life into autobiographical stories about the nobodies who posted their mail and packaged their meat in warehouses. Yet during the '80s he befriended the Hollywood elite, hanging out with Sean Penn and Madonna and writing a book based on his experiences: Hollywood. He had contempt for the fakes, once telling the future Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, that he was 'a piece of shit'.

He was flawed: he womanised; he gambled; he drank - a lot. His fondness for the bottle came, he said, to avoid committing suicide. Throughout his life the abiding influence on his writing was the incredible cruelty he suffered as a child: his father converted the bathroom into a torture chamber in which he would belt him until welts and bruises covered the young Bukowski's body, his mother looking on. Consequently his writing embodied his disgust with hollow men who, like his father, exerted power over those below them simply because they could.

Inflated pride thrives on cheap brutality, and Bukowski knew it. But for all his nihilism, he was never cruel, just honest. Today, in London streets that reek of LA ersatz-ness, we could all do with a bit more of that.