Day 15
On some level I always suspected I was a victim of Rolling Stone Magazine’s own personal interpretation of the history of pop music, the one that said ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ was the greatest album of all time. It always seemed more “nice and convenient” than actually true, like those rom-coms where the guy promises at the end not to be a dishonest wanker anymore and they confirm this by flashing forward to the couple dying serenely a hundred years in the future, presumably while the 1% are fleeing the flooded earth in their space-ships while drinking tea from cups moulded out of the teeth of our protagonists. As much as I love Dylan and Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen it always irked me somewhat to see them topping the best album of the year lists that RS did up in the 21st Century.
I started to question my susceptibility to this version of reality around the time I moved into my new gaff last August. Having installed my record player in the sitting room I presented my record collection in its little crate to my new housemate for some sort of validation. She flicked through them, eventually coming to ‘Songs In The Key Of Life’, then pushed them all back in the crate, in that little pivoted shuffle you get when you’ve definitely finished checking a stack of records, and said “Well, you’ve got all the classics anyway”.
That felt like a shot across the bows. All the classics? It was the first time I realised owning ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and ‘Abbey Road’ and ‘What’s Going On?’ and ‘London Calling’ didn’t really mean I had a record collection, it was more like those sticker books you have when you’re a kid and you keep buying packets of stickers or trading with your mates until you had them all, and you could sit back and go “there, now that’s finished. Now what’ll I collect? Coins? Rocks? Crisps that cast an Enda Kenny-shaped shadow on the wall if you hold them up to the sun at noon on Winter Solstice?” Ticking off Rolling Stone’s top 50 albums was me having my taste dictated to me the way listening to Spin FM is dictating Bruno Mars to twelve-year old hunzos.
Said housemate fairly proved her music credentials by letting me listen to her copy of Daniel Lanois’ ‘Belladonna’. Now there was a revelation. Daniel Lanois I kind of knew from U2 and from Dylan talking about him in Chronicles: Vol. 1 as trying to bury the vocal or whatever he was doing with ‘Oh Mercy’, but here now was a solo album of pure instrumental tracks from 2005 and it’s probably the most perfect hangover album ever released. The fact that it came out in 2005 naturally implying it doesn’t come anywhere near Rolling Stone’s top 500. Magically I managed to enjoy it anyway.
My housemate also mentioned that she owned the soundtrack to Berberian Sound Studio, which was a film I had seen but not one for which the music had made an impression on me. But alas if ‘A Musical Discovery’ has taught me anything it’s that until two weeks ago I wasn’t actually listening for music, particularly not in films. I never got to listen to that album and housemate moved out but I lodged the idea of that record in my brain for future investigation.
Yesterday as I was ignoring the existence of Valentine’s Day by browsing through the social media accounts of a few Irish record labels (yes, that’s what I was really doing), I came upon a tweet by Delphi’s Deaf Joe:
https://mobile.twitter.com/deaf_joe/statuses/434084139680022528
The quote was from an article in which a member of the group The Eccentronic Research Council listed a bunch of his favourite records and the particular record in question here was ‘The Noise Made By People’ by a group called Broadcast. The point he was making was about record stores stacking shelves with the kinds of artists whose place in the annals of music history is secure already to the detriment of less known, more modern, but equally brilliant artists. And what else do you think Broadcast made? If you didn’t say the “Berberian Sound Studio Soundtrack” then you haven’t been following this series at all, have you?
How unknown are Broadcast? In some circles, very, in others, like The Eccentronic Research Council’s… while they’re not quite The Beatles, it’s hard to think of another act in popular music who made a lasting impression in 2000 that is in any way comparable to what Broadcast did to those who heard them. On a first listen to ‘The Noise Made By People’ it’s not even hard to understand why they didn’t make a bigger impression. Lead singer Trish Keenan sang with a kind of ’60s psychedelic calm that is pure pop, but she’s surrounded by these strange electronic sounds. And if there’s one thing any true music lover in 2000 knew for a fact it’s that electronic music is shit.
The album is a mix of these great pop numbers and some strange tonal interludes, but none of it’s too out there to be considered unlistenable. The music is very stand-offish and up in the air, it doesn’t present itself with any kind of immediacy. It’s oneiric and mystical but wonderfully original and catchy at the same time, though what really draws you in and keeps you on your toes as a listener is Keenan’s voice. She’ll sing a line one way, but when the line comes back around again in the progression of the song she’ll end up singing it differently, going a note lower than you’re expecting. It makes for addictive listening and shows how important a great singer is to an act, because as good as the electronica of the album is you don’t really believe it would work without her.
That’s the great tragedy of Broadcast. In 2011 Trish Keenan died aged forty-two of pneumonia having contracted swine flu in Australia, only eleven years after the band’s first album. They spent their entire careers recording music in flats and hotel rooms, really great music, but because it wasn’t commercial and danceable like Sisqo or Shaggy it didn’t get played on popular radio, and because it wasn’t guitar and vocal stuff that easily dates back to Springsteen or Journey it didn’t make it onto alternative radio. They merely existed somewhere in the ether in those dark years. And now, in the internet age, it’s too late.
Now Trish Keenan’s “partner in life and music” James Cargill, is the sole force behind the band, but the soul has already departed. As for the personal tragedy of this band there’s nothing we can do except feel the injustice that if it wasn’t for X or Y things would have been different, but the fact is that music and society are both democratic, which means if you don’t have money, or can’t convince someone with money that you can make them more money, then no-one will ever know who you are.
Of course it’s our duty as citizens of a democratic society to vote for politicians and then push them relentlessly to enact the kinds of legislation we want them to, realistically this doesn’t happen. We say “Nah, I’m not gonna vote, all politicians are cunts” which is exactly what happens in music. Everyone says “Nah, I’m not buying music anymore cos all the music is shit”, so you go and download anything you want to listen to, or bunk in with the alternative crowd who tell you “Nick Drake is the good music, nobody makes good music nowadays”. Of course it’s not true that nobody makes good music nowadays, what is true is that barely anyone promotes good music anymore. But how much more convenient it is to opt out and believe what we’re being sold.
It’s the age old battle between being a cog in the machine and being an individual, with most of us existing somewhere in the middle, thinking we’re individuals while we rotate obliviously for the machine and all its nefarious goals. And all this isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with liking Bruce Springsteen, who is and has been consistently great his entire career, but there is something wrong with saying Springsteen is great but nobody new is great. It’s a bullshit assumption based on the idea that they (the Justin Biebers and Flo Ridas) are useless (which they are, objectively, God told me) so this great music, which all happens to be great and was popular in its day is the only great music that exists.
All of this is hardly a great revelation. Everyone assumes something like this to be true but chooses to ignore it. For me, the discovery of Broadcast is actually a cause for optimism. It lets me know that great music is out there, no matter how difficult it is to find, and while without the traditional mainstream or alternative stations there to support it it will continue to be very hard to find, at least it does exist. Music has never been more democratised than it is today. The issue now is getting the general populace, so used to being spoon-fed their personalities (a hint of Super Dry Jpn, a dash of Paul’s Boutique), to stake a claim in it.