THE PUDDING’S PROOF

Whatever you might think of U2, they do give good interview. And I’m not just talking about Bono, the dreamer with a fistful of facts. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. often sheds light on the inner workings of a group of people who like to pretend that they’re still the four muckers who started out together some 33 years ago. I recently remembered a U2 interview from 1997 when they were making the distinction between records that are truly great and ones that con you into thinking they’re great because they remind you of another great record. These words have been resonating with me while listening to Japanese composer Ryuchi Sakamoto’s aptly titled new release “Playing The Piano”.
Although Sakamoto’s slightly lackadaisical attack and ponderous rhythm jarred with me from the get-go, there was something familiar about the album I liked, and it wasn’t just the Spartan re-workings of Sakamoto favourites like his theme
to “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”, the 1983 war film in which he starred alongside David Bowie. The general atmosphere reminded me of one of my favourite jazz records, Bill Evans’ “Conversations With Myself” from 1963, an early experiment with multi-track recording that had the pianist layering his own playing track-by-track and revelling in his virtual interactions. What makes Evans’ musical shadow-boxing great and Sakamoto’s solo performances less so is the fact that “Conversations With Myself” was at the cutting edge of the then available recording technology and knew it while “Playing The Piano” surfs on a wave of nostalgic melancholy not supported by the playing.
It is a prime example of a record that only reminds you of a great record
rather than being one itself.

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

For a change, this post has nothing to do with music, as Swedish crime author Stieg Larsson doesn’t go in for the rock ’n’ roll name-dropping that so endears me to his Scottish colleague Ian Rankin. I’ve just finished reading Larsson’s book “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, the first part of his “Millennium Trilogy” and I found myself strangely moved by the book – despite my reservations both about the time Larsson takes to tell his story and the plethora of characters that inhabit it.
What got me about the novel besides the author’s strong stance against violence towards women (the Swedish title in fact means “Men Who Hate Women”) and his intricate depiction of a dysfunctional family of industrialists was the way that Larsson, himself a journalist, handles the media side of the story. “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” might turn out to be one of the last major crime novels written before the background of an intact newspaper industry, as many daily publications have either ceased to exist entirely or have retreated from the news-stand since the book came out in 2005.
What also moved me about the book was the camaraderie among the characters who work on the “Millennium” magazine that gives Larsson’s trilogy its name: as a freelance writer, I sorely miss the regular and friendly repartee with other colleagues in the field. But Larsson is in no way painting a rose-coloured picture of the press milieu. He also warns how easily journalists can be corrupted when personal matters infringe upon their work, and also demonstrates how people who might be crucial to a particular project often find themselves high and dry when a piece has been written up and published. Lisbeth Salander, the character who gives the novel its English title certainly discovers that to be true - at least at the end of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”. There are, after all, two other books in the trilogy that I have yet to read. By the way, I lied about this post not having anything to do with music: Mikael Blomkvist, the central figure in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is a big Elvis fan.

NOTHING’S NEW

Some time ago I promised to write more about musical discoveries I’d made. But at the time of that pledge, I’d temporarily forgotten how difficult it is to find bands that haven’t already been uncovered and written about by other media. Take for example Tinariwen, a Tuareg band from the Southern Sahara whose music sounds like a mixture of Ali Farka Touré's Mali blues crossed with the Wu-Tang Clan’s broken hip-Hop beats, albeit played on electric guitars and assorted percussion.
Their 2007 album “Aman Iman: Water Is Life” was nothing less than a revelation to me when I first heard it, and now that Tinariwen have released the follow-up “Imidiwan: Companions”, I’ve been quick to review it in glowing terms. In the course of my research, I discovered that the world music scene has been fawning over the band since a WOMAD appearance in 2001 and that Tinariwen have a history that spans more than two decades. So in fact I’m a late-comer to the fold. Still, that hasn’t deterred me from lauding Tinariwen for their virtues as instrumentalists and singers, as their music only gains in power and beauty on repeated listens. One can’t praise these records enough, even though many journalists have tried before me.

I CATCHER

Ironic as it may seem, it’s actually quite difficult to get music journalists to go out and see new bands or listen to albums by as-yet unknown artists. There’s a reason for that glaring contradiction, and that’s the fact that people who listen to music for a living would rather indulge their passion for artists they know and love than fill their already cramped cognitive space with sound they can neither digest comfortably nor derive fee-paying prose from.
I know we’re not the only professionals guilty of conservative crimes against the performing arts: In “Prick Up Your Ears”, his biography of Sixties playwright Joe Orton, John Lahr remarks that getting critics to attend premieres is a headache New York theatre producers have always had to contend with. The joy is all the greater when you encounter new music that instead of cluttering up your mind makes you feel richer for having stumbled upon it.
Such was the Case With “Balance Instars”, the debut album by London-based prog-metal band Of The I, who not only have a penchant for Californian avant-rock masters Tool, but also have the chops to match said band’s most complex work – plus the imagination to go beyond it, adding ambient and classical inflections to Tool’s intricate guitar lines, angular rhythms and darkly plaintive vocals.
That’s no mean feat, as Tool themselves did a near-revelatory reworking of the in itself virtuoso music of latter-day King Crimson in the Nineties. I really look forward to hearing what Of The I will do next, but it might be some time before I get to see them live. True to form and much to my shame, I managed to miss their gig in Zurich a month or two back.

CELEBRITY-PROOF

It can be funny to be partially sighted at times. Quite apart from the fact that life regularly treats you to both legal and free psychedelic flashbacks, it also makes you immune to celebrity. I was reminded of this last week when I interviewed British band Muse, whose upcoming album “The Resistance” incidentally contains three of the best songs they’ve ever written as well as a three part symphony. After the final interview (the band insists that journalists meet all three members to take the media focus off front man and songwriter Matthew Bellamy), I checked my recordings and set off across the outdoor terrace of the Dolder hotel perched above Zurich. On my way to the exit I encountered a man with garish sunglasses and a light blue top who seemed to be circling me with a quizzical expression on his face. I’d almost passed him by the time I realised that he was Matthew Bellamy who I’d interviewed only ten minutes before, so I proffered my hand to redress my fauxpas. It must have been quite unusual for Mr. Bellamy to be so unmemorable as to have his face forgotten so quickly, but as I’d told him about my poor eyesight at the beginning of our conversation, he reacted with grace and humour. I then managed to get lost in the dimly light corridors of the Dolder, and that’s the down-side of being partially sighted: You might be celebrity-proof, but any alien architecture is likely to make you question your sense of direction and reality in general.

ISLAND OF REASON

Quite some time has passed since my last post, and there are many reasons or excuses for my silence. Oodles of work for daily papers here in Switzerland, a move to a new home as well as recording sessions with Gretel in Ireland. Posts should follow more regularly from now on, as befits a blog, but please accept my pre-emptive apologies for any future interruptions in communication.
The professional highlight of the past few months was an interview with Chris Blackwell, famed founder of Island Records, the label responsible for launching Bob Marley and U2 as well as giving the world such wonderful anomalies as Roxy Music, Grace Jones and the B-52’s and saving Marianne Faithfull and Tom Waits from descents into obscurity. It was an honour to meet Mr. Blackwell, but also a sharp reminder of my job as a journalist. “I was always much more focused on press than on radio,” he told me, back in London for Island’s 50th birthday bash. “Because the roles of radio and press are vastly different: Radio always wants you to stay tuned to a station and not switch channels while it’s the press’s role to introduce you to new things.”
In the last few years, even the broadsheets have fallen prey to the allure of mainly reporting on the renowned and respected, and I myself plead guilty to that particular crime. Mr. Blackwell’s reminder of my journalistic duty seems even more poignant two months after our meeting as the Swiss album and singles charts are currently clogged up with Michael Jackson re-issues. So much so, in fact, that they make up about 60% percent of the respective Top Tens – and that’s not even counting USA For Africa’s “We Are The World”. Not that I’m averse to Jackson’s music, it’s just that I think the true proof of his pop prowess remains hidden from the general public. If you can still get your hands on the Special Editions of the “Off The Wall” and “Thriller” albums released back in 2003, you’ll find the demo versions of “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and “Billie Jean” Jackson recorded at home with members of his family. Listening to these first captures of future hits, you realise that contrary to popular belief, he had these songs down well before taking them to producer Quincy Jones. But now I’m falling into the same trap of writing about a major star rather than uncovering the obscure or forgotten. I promise to mend my ways.

CONCEPT? WHAT CONCEPT?

You might be wondering why I don’t write about Swiss music much considering the fact that I’m a music journalist living and working in Switzerland. I think this blind spot has something to do with the fact that although I appreciate the high level of musicianship abundant in the scene, I miss the grand ideas behind the hard graft: Only very rarely do I sense the bands’ artistic, political or absurdist reasons for doing what they do. The glaring exception to the rule is The Bianca Story from Basel, a self-proclaimed art collective in best Roxy Music/Pulp/Franz Ferdinand tradition that not only plays angular pop songs but also directs and produces its own videos and installations. My beef with the band is that I think The Bianca Story should put more time and effort into the music and less into the extra- curricular activities and generally show more conceptual consistency. Consider the following: After having been assigned to write a concert preview I ordered the new mini-album “Unique copy” from the band’s agent. Only after reading the relevant press release did I realise that the album could not in fact be ordered as the unique copy of the title would be mounted in a multi-media artefact that weighed half a ton an was due to be auctioned off with a starting price of 10 000 francs. Apparently, the idea was to raise the question of the value of music in a time of digital over-availability – a little like Radiohead with their name-your-own-price download album “In Rainbows” back in 2007. I then wrote an embarrassed e-mail to the agent apologizing for demanding the conceptually impossible. A day later I received a call from The Bianca Story’s publicist, asking whether I needed any additional information about the project, pointing out that all five tracks off the album were available via the band’s Myspace page. He also offered to send me the music on CD if I liked – which to my mind defeated the object of the enterprise. The album arrived the very next day and since then I’ve been wondering how many other people have unique copies of “Unique Copy” sitting on their shelves.