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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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
Tim Burrows is an author and journalist who writes about popular culture, music, art and place - often at the same time - for a number of publications including the Guardian, Vice, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Quietus, The Stool Pigeon, Dazed and Tank.
timburrows84@gmail.com
