RIP ARI UP

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

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

Violent ambiguity in Hammersmith, reviewed for the Daily Telegraph.

INTERVIEWED: Blixa Bargeld for Dazed

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

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

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

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...