The Formula

No easy answers indeed…

The other day I was having a most pleasant time browsing in a record shop in Camberwell that specialises chiefly in dub records. The staff thought I was a clever boy as I’d recognised that they were playing Yellowman in the background – not really that clever, since I know of only one albino toasting about the size of his penis…

One of the fellows behind the counter recommended a record to me. It was the Swimmer One album “The Regional Variations” and I was excited to see a staff written note praising the record as a cross between The Divine Comedy and Boards of Canada. Now I’m a massive fan of Neil Hannon – simply one of the archest and cleverest men working in pop today, and a loyal listener of Boards of Canada – they do uncomfortable ambience very well, and I’d just that day been listening to their remix of cLOUDDEAD’s “Dead Dogs Two” – a peculiar Sergeant Pepperish tale for the noughties that I recommend. Anyway, two groups I adore. Crossed, mixed, multiplied - whatever. So I bought the record.

I was most disappointed. Whilst indisputably sounding like The Divine Comedy and Boards of Canada, and lots of other things besides – shades of Pulp, Belle and Sebastian, The Associates, the Pet Shop Boys were all present – it sounded by far their lesser. I’m not going to review the album in any kind of depth, since frankly it bored me and would bore me thusly to review it – suffice to say I find there to be a curious lack of melody that sticks in the brain and the production does it little favours (“You listen to music on such crap speakers!” “Ah, but if it’s any good it will transcend such material concerns” “Shut up Ben”). I will listen again in a while of course – everyone gets things wrong – but I think I’ve made my mind up on this one sadly.

This all got me thinking. The conclusion of such dangerous cogitation was the realisation that there isn’t a formula for good music. Of perhaps all the mediums, music most ratifies the subjective within me – I respond so passionately and occasionally vehemently that I treat it almost objectively. This is both brilliant, but in many ways highly annoying. I long for the formula. Why can’t a x b = ab ever truly work? There seems to be no guarantee that I will enjoy ab.

And yet so often I do enjoy ab. What are The Divine Comedy but a knowing reference to so many of the greats of our time: Bowie, Brel, Coward, Merritt and Walker (now there’s a festival line-up I would actually be interested in seeing!) and the great devices they employ – comedy, nostalgia, strings, vibrato, wit et al? The process is even referenced in the wonderful "Perfect Lovesong" offof (a brilliant word I've picked up from Alan Warner's "Morvern Callar" but I think Paul Magrs may have used it first) "Regeneration", nevermind the numerous cover versions of the songs of the above. Boards of Canada have raided the archive of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, watched late-night Open University programmes, Protect and Survive prophecies of doom – all the stuff that spooks me but fascinates me - with frightening but delightful results. Top tip for those as sad as me/have a clue what I’m on about: watch the 70s BBC training video “Barry Letts demonstrates CSO” with “Music has the right to children” on in the background. Terrifying. If I ever remake “The Stone Tape” I know who I’ll get in touch to do the incidental music…

All this thought of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop means I’ll have to dematerialise and go and listen to some. Maybe Delia Derbyshire will appear to me in a dream and explain the formula – she studied Music and Maths at Girton don’t you know? She used to appear in my dreams in a terrifying period in early 2003, operating tape reels bigger and hotter than the sun. Frightening but then so’s this why-how-music-works stuff. Not science but alchemy.

Can't Buy Me Love...

A recent find has been the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. I owe this discovery to my friend Maya who sang some of his pieces excellently at her concert at the West London Synagogue in December. I’d been a fan of Henry, Purcell, Benjamin Britten and English vocal music in general for a number of years (the joint result of listening to “The Wicker Man” soundtrack and the Norton Anthology of English Literature cd too much as a youth) so quite how he had passed me by I don’t know, but thanks Maya…

What attracts me to Vaughan Williams so much is his ability to seamlessly match interesting words – often those written by other great talents such as Shakespeare, Whitman and Housman – with interesting but above all else, apposite music. It is highly contestable to call him one of this country’s great pop talents, but I am a contestable kind of chap and as he set so many folk pieces to music – folk being to my mind at least, pop before the age of mass everything. – so brilliantly, a pop talent is what I’m going to call him.

But this is not to say that folk and pop are wholly easy bedfellows. Indeed, listening to Vaughan Williams, I find for all the similarities, one marked difference. To peruse this further, one should consult a Traditional piece such as “The Lawyer”. A city lawyer encounters a pretty maid heading off to work in the meadows, where her father mows. Struck by her pulchritude, he offers to take her to “London town and all such lovely places” as well as “a silken gown, Gold rings and gold chains and laces.” Now interestingly, the maid rejects everything he offers, the result being:

And now she is a poor man’s wife,
Her husband dearly loves her;
She lives a sweet and contented life,
There’s no lady in town above her.

“The Lawyer” establishes itself as a realist song – people work, have family to support, money matters – but then ends on such an idealistic note. But then why do I consider it so idealistic? Because it is so markedly different from what one encounters in the realist pop of more recent years (i.e. none of that “I will always love you” type nonsense). Lucy Jordan resorts to dreaming in “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” to escape the drab, humdrum realities of her life, with the memorable central wish of driving through Paris “in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair…”. Those fine chroniclers of South London metro-boulot-dodo, Difford and Tilbrook use Vanity Fair as a kind of ideal that the unnamed girl returns to throughout her working life of factories, butchers and pubs in the Squeeze song of the same name. In “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” – one of the best pop songs of the eighties – Marc Almond bemoans his current situation, but who is he fooling when he states that he’s going to find himself: “A nice little housewife who’ll give me a steady life, And won’t keep going off the rails”? And why is he seeing a woman anyway? I’m well aware that there are exceptions to the rule, but they kind of tend to be drowned out amid our more material fetishes – for every “Can’t Buy Me Love” in the canon of The Beatles, there’s a “Baby You Can Drive My Car” – cheerful star-fucking inanity if ever I came across it…

Love in the modern realist pop song seems to have deleterious consequences unless moored up against a six figure income. While I’m not saying that every realist pop song should end a la “The Lawyer” in some perfect romance played out amidst the bucolic idyll, surely there are plenty of happy people in love with one another, with not much money? You may even have been one of them at some point. If I could take this thought on pop music any further, it would be to examine when this sea change occurred. The lazy pop historian in me would suggest it’s a product of post war (i.e. World War Two) materialism and egocentricity; a corollary of the “me” generation. But then I’m well aware of songs such as Irving Berlin’s 1929 “Putting on the Ritz” in which love is somehow better if you’re dressed in fancy clothes. Shockingly, I kind of think that’s true. Pop music eh? No easy answers…