Words and music from the off-world

Music has been a significant part of my life for the best part of 50 years, probably 55 years, perhaps even longer, because there was always music in the family home.

My parents were not especially musical, but records were played most weeks. I had a little silver transistor radio through which I could engage with the world of sound; I have a clear memory of being ten years old and spending a day waiting for The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ to be played so I could capture it on a reel-to-reel tape recorder (mission successful). Although I would have the opportunity to learn the basics of how music works at school, mostly I’ve just been engaged in this particular art form as an active – perhaps obsessive – listener.

Towards the end of the pandemic, however, two things happened: since 2019 I’ve been working on a new play with songs titled THE STORY OF THE OARS, and in a rather rash moment I decided to have a go at writing the music myself; and I formed Hell Herons, a spoken-word music collective. Thinking that it might be best to refresh my knowledge of music theory (whatever ‘knowledge’ I originally had), and did three music-theory lessons at the local conservatorium, and off I went. I’ll write more about OARS at a later date (though I can say that the project is progressing well, mostly due to the incredible Street Theatre in Canberra), but Hell Herons has proved to be an unexpectedly fascinating project.

Hell Herons, whose members are the award-winning poets Melinda Smith, CJ Bowerbird, Stuart Barnes and myself, fuses poetry through spoken-word with music. At times what emerges is atmospheric, sometimes it is a little noise; some songs almost have a pop sensibility. Although play, risk and adventure are very much the cornerstones of the project, there’s also a desire for accessibility, all the while ensuring the original text is preserved as the poet wrote it.

I won’t go on too much about form and process, but personally it’s been intriguing, because some of the text was written for the page and published as such – would this work in a recorded context, especially when music is involved? Other times, the music has come first and the text has then emerged.

Although we’re still at the demo stage, with the intention of having the final selection of songs professionally mixed and mastered later this year for an official release next year, we’re slowly releasing tracks via the Hell Herons’ SoundCloud.

The most recent release is ‘Off-World Ghazal’, which works with the incredible poem of the same name by Stuart and appears in his second collection, LIKE TO THE LARK, published recently by Upswell. It was wonderful, and a little daunting, to work with such an extraordinary – and lauded – poem of great depth and complexity. We’d love to know what you think of the track.

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Another release of note is ‘Scar and Star (don’t fall)’, which is based on a deeply moving unpublished fragment written by Melinda. The concept at the heart of this song is the idea of taking off no matter what. It’s perhaps the most epic – and noisiest – of the tracks we’ve written to date. As opposed to ‘Off-World Ghazal’, which currently features my reading of Stuart’s words, ‘Scar and Star (don’t fall)’ features Melinda. I recorded my reading of Stuart’s poem in my closet, while we recorded Melinda’s in her sitting room, so if you listen closely you can hear the call of the birds in her backyard. Hell Herons do like to incorporate ambient, by which I mean ad hoc, sounds, as well as mistakes.

As mentioned, if you have any thoughts about ‘Off-World Ghazal’ and ‘Scar and Star (don’t fall)’ please don’t hesitate to drop me a line, either in the comments or by message.

Thanks so much to Melinda, Stuart and CJ for being such generous and open-minded collaborators.

PS if you’re wondering about the name.

Reflections on a magnificently flawed masterpiece

Arcade Fire’s ‘Reflektor’: is this at last the perfect record for our beautifully fucked-up world?

How would it be to exist without music?

I for one would have no clue, and I don’t want to try imagining it, or even write much more along those lines.  But it is, perhaps, worth asking a related question: how would it be to exist without excellent music, or even very good music?  For me, this has been the question of the week.  And you can blame Arcade Fire for that.

I’ve been following this Montreal-based bunch since their highly acclaimed debut Funeral (2004).  Using the phrase ‘highly acclaimed’ in this context is hardly new or surprising – it seems that when Arcade Fire simply get out of bed in the morning there’s cause for rapturous excitement around the world, the sort of rapturous excitement that once greeted The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan (the crusty old shit that he’s become), David Bowie, Nirvana, and, erm, U-bloody-2.

But is Arcade Fire really that good?

There’s no doubt that when they’re fully charged they’re excellent.  Witness ‘Neighbourhood No. 2’ and ‘Wake Up’ from Funeral, ‘Intervention’ and ‘No Cars Go’ from Neon Bible (2007), and ‘The Suburbs’, ‘Ready to Start’, ‘Modern Man’ and ‘Suburban War’ from The Suburbs (2010).  One day Arcade Fire are going to put out a best-of that’s going to knock the socks off people and prove once and for all how great – and ‘great’ is the word – they can be.

However, and this is a big ‘however’: they can also be utterly infuriating.

Some Arcade Fire songs start brilliantly before burning out as though in the end they just didn’t know what to do with them but, hey, chuck it on the record anyway.  The band can pack too many ideas into each song (certainly Reflektor suffers from this in parts), and lyrically they can be as awfully obtuse as a Sixth Form poet inspired only by Google.  Throw into the mix the fact that they’re fueled by both anger and beauty, they appear to adore and detest modern life in equal measures, and they can be grand, dramatic, over-dramatic, over-blown even, but there’s also a deep vein of melancholia throughout.  A rich brew or a directionless mess?  They’re both, quite honestly.

So.  What to make of this latest record?

In a way it’s exactly what you’d expect.  This is, apparently, Arcade Fire’s dance collection and they enlisted LCD Soundsytem’s James Murphy to get their hips a-wigglin’.  Appropriately split over two discs, and inspired by the 1950 Brazilian classic Black Orpheus and its themes of death and isolation, Win Butler, wife Régine Chassagne, and the couple’s clever cohorts lead us from the superb ‘Reflektor’ – this is their ‘Atomic’ – through ‘You Already Know’, which sounds like what would happen if Butler fronted The Smiths and Queen, and the almost Clash-like ‘Joan of Arc’.

On the second disc the pairing of ‘Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)’ and ‘It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)’ shows just how close Arcade Fire is getting to John Lennon, in ambition if not execution.  ‘Porno’, the most James Murphy-esque track, is a fine slice of moody electro, and ‘Afterlife’ is one of those typically exasperating Arcade Fire songs: a gorgeous verse, a glorious chorus, it’s all ‘Can we work it out?/If we scream and shout till we work it out?/Can we just work it out?/If we scream and shout till we work it out?’, and then, and then – well, it just collapses under its own weight.

Referencing a bunch of great bands and singer/songwriters here is intentional, including The Smiths and The Clash.  Is Reflektor as good as the former’s The Queen is Dead or the latter’s London Calling?  No, it’s not.  But it’s dangerously close.  It has the scope, depth, audacity, and a burning desire to create something as timelessly artful as those albums.  In some ways it also feels like the best mix-tape you could ever possibly receive (the inclusion on the second disc of the test-sound once found on cassettes alludes to this) and, perhaps, in the age of iTunes, YouTube, and Spotify, Reflektor is as good as it gets.

A magnificently flawed masterpiece.  Yes, let’s call it that.

And I can’t stop listening to it.

In twenty years time let Polly Jean shake me still

A confession: I’ve got the hots for a chick, and have had so for quite time.  Of course, she doesn’t have flesh and bones, at least not to me; she’s a voice, a music, and what an extraordinary voice she has, and what extraordinary music she makes.  And her most recent album: well, it’s been a long time since I’ve adored an album as much as this, how I’ve learnt every song, as in I’ve become to understand it all, it’s seeped into me, getting beneath my skin.  You know when you’re young and you listen to an album so often that you start to become sick of it?  So you wisen up and get into the habit of drip-feeding albums that you’re loving.  Or you love an album immediately only to find that it doesn’t hold its own ground.  Or you don’t like an album immediately, but soon find yourself playing it over and over, loving it intensely, obsessively, until it’s all-consuming.

PJ Harvey’s most recent album Let England Shake is the sort of album that makes me remember the great records from my deep, dark past – Faith by The Cure, London Calling by The Clash, The Queen is Dead by The Smiths – and I do own this latest Harvey opus on record, as in on vinyl, because that’s how I like to listen to the best albums that come my way.

Despite being an age-old though not uncritical PJ Harvey fan, I’ve come a little late to Let England Shake.  It was recorded over a five-week period at a church in Dorset UK in April and May 2010 (when I was bunking down in Launceston Tasmania, I realise rather deliciously) and released later that year.  In 2011 Harvey won the coveted Mercury Prize for this record, making her the only musician to have bagged the honour twice; she’d previously won it for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea back in 2001.

What makes Harvey such an exciting, beguiling, and sometimes, let’s face it, frustrating singer-songwriter is her dogged refusal to repeat herself (Tim Winton should take notice, in more ways than one).  Her albums have covered such various terrain as riot-grrl grunge, folk, pop, electronica, sparse piano ballads (check out 2007’s White Chalk), and now she adds a dozen war songs to her, er, canon.

Harvey wrote Let England Shake over a two-and-a-half-year period, producing the lyrics first – she claims to be inspired by Harold Pinter and TS Elliot – before sitting down to set the lyrics to music.  Her mission, it’s clear, was to explore what it means to live in a country that’s at war.  However, this isn’t some table-thumping polemic; it’s intimate, it’s beautiful, it’s harsh, it’s haunting.  Her voice is higher than on previous records, and it’s complemented – more than appropriately – by the deep timbre of her long-time collaborators, John Parish, who Harvey has described as her music soul-mate, and Mick Harvey (no relation), who for many years has worked with Nick Cave.

Using instruments as diverse as autoharp, zither, piano, trombone and saxophone, as well as some cheeky and downright hilarious samples, Harvey has crafted an album that is as engaging as it is adventurous.  And it’s packed with tunes; it would almost be thigh-slapping good fun if it the subject matter wasn’t so serious.  Check out ‘The Last Living Rose’, the gut-wrenching ‘On Battleship Hill’ and ‘Written on the Forehead’ to experience the musical and emotional range of the album.

It’s true that PJ Harvey can be awkward company: I imagine that you’d have a delightful cup of tea with her, she’d smile, she’d talk sweetly but with brutal honesty, before she’d stand up, excuse herself, and go and play with her chooks or pot up some salvia.  And I haven’t always been faithful to her; in fact years have gone by when I’ve not had much to do with her.  But, despite the latest fixation on how ugly human beings can be to each other, how supremely violent for no real logical reason, we’re back together now.  And I feel that this time she’s with me for quite some time.  Even if she does a runner on me again, or I do a runner on her, I have no doubt that in twenty years time I’ll still be playing Let England Shake, and on vinyl, and loud, very very loud.