#023
Excuse us, we’re British
Sempre fui fascinado pela música produzida nas ilhas britânicas. Posso ter crescido numa dieta sónica de crooners e música clássica mas desde o primeiro encontro com a “licença para matar” que a pop inglesa sempre demonstrou possuir que me rendi aos acordes e dedilhados dos sujeitos de sua Majestade. Acho que deve ter sido Maxwell’s Silver Hammer e I Want You, ambos no album Abbey Road que havia lá em casa. O lado fanfarresco de uma e o longo crescendo da outra fascinaram-me imediatamente e serviram possivelmente de blueprint para a minha apreciação mais virada para o dramatismo que a música pop consegue almejar em momentos de excelência.
Os ingleses sempre foram únicos na sua forma de estar. No entanto via-se sempre como lá estava escondido um enorme encanto with all things american de mãos dadas com a vontade de provar nesse mercado transatlântico quem mandava no universo da música popular. Dessa dualista forma de conviver com a obra e os charts internacionais (e com uma certa ajuda da imprensa especializada) a pop “bifa” foi fazendo várias “invasões” concertadas aos ouvidos de toda a gente por esse mundo fora.
Começo com um disco considerado menor na carreira de Joe Jackson mas que no meu entender é um tributo genuíno e bem conseguido à mestria boundary-breaking de Duke Ellington que sempre preferiu uma relação mais freewheeling com o seu material e daí a escolha de Perdido numa versão em língua portuguesa na voz de Lilian Vieira, cantora do colectivo Zuco 103.
E sigo logo para o menino de ouro Tom Misch, que tocava violino aos 4 anos para depois estudar tecnologia musical na Langley Park School for Boys e guitarra jazz na Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance em Greenwich mas de onde se foi embora ao fim de seis meses para se concentrar na sua arte. South of the River é do seu album Geography mas este ano já editou What Kinda Music em parceria com o baterista Yussef Dayes. Misch é um prodígio e sei que ainda me vai surpreender muito mais vezes na sua carreira que espero prolífica.
Continuando na senda do britfunk vou até 1980 para London Town dos Light of the World, colectivo que incorporava os Beggar & Co que tocavam metais no Chant No. 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On) dos Spandau Ballet seguindo para Stay a mais bamboleante música que o Thin White Duke gravou. A personagem que Bowie inventou para a sua fase “Philly Soul” que culmina em Young Americans e Station to Station desenvolveu-se circundada por muita controvérsia, com acusações de Bowie ser simpático à causa nazi com a imprensa a descreve-lo como um “emotionless Aryan aristocrat zombie”. Bowie por seu lado confessou em 1976 numa entrevista ao Daily Express que quando actuando na pele dos seus personagens “I’m Pierrot. I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is theatre, and only theatre… What you see on stage isn’t sinister. It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time on it. The white face, the baggy pants – they’re Pierrot, the eternal clown putting over the great sadness”.
Em 1993 David Sylvian gravava The First Day com Robert Fripp e eu mudava-me de armas e bagagens para Londres. Até então ia lá regularmente e fui sempre assistindo ao desenrolar desta agridoce transgressão que fazia a música inglesa tão especial num sedutor mix de coloquialismo pós-colonial (o butter pie invocado por Mccartney e sua Linda pode estar inscrito num single numero um nos charts da Billboard mas é expressão que só é entendida em Lancashire) e um sentido de redentora inovação, um moving forward towards whatever uncertain situation the future might bring us… Se parasse por um momento para comparar a funcionalidade da música hoje em dia, ouvida em forma de “papel de parede”, acedida facilmente em qualquer lugar e a qualquer hora e esses tempos poderia concluir que a pop era um affectionate punch que nos ligava à vida, ao quotidiano mas também à folia do intangível, num prognóstico em que o doutor já saiu de casa há muito tempo e está agora numa festa em Mile End a ouvir jungle sem perceber muito bem como se dança a coisa mas a deixar-se contagiar pelo ambiente jovial e endiabrado da situação.
I’m here, you’re there
I’m here, here’s your share
Take your share
Just in case… just in case
Os meus amigos mais antigos em Londres eram o posse da PPQ. Neo-mods, uma série deles originários da Isle of Wight, o antigo reino de Wihtwara que até 1995 teve um Governador em representação da Coroa Inglesa. Organizavam umas noites fantásticas, onde os Sixties e a electrónica encontravam-se os dois à esquina a tocar concertina e dançar o solidó. A cereja no topo do bolo foi mesmo quando conseguiram ficar com a Sexta-feira num clube off-Regent Street que conseguiram reabrir depois de ter estado fechado desde o “caso” Profumo. Aí assisti ao primeiro concerto em Londres dos Moloko e aí dancei que nem um louco a noite que melhor retratava a velha Albion da altura. Deles é o tema Time 3 sob o nick de St. Jude. Ainda comunico hoje com um deles, a quem envio religiosamente esta minha M4we e a quem tenho só a dizer: Godspeed.
A música estava em pleno processo de renovação, muito mais instrumental quer nos desígnios quer na literal ausência de voz, Fila Brazillia e Boards of Canada estão ambos incluídos nesta selecção.
Posto à venda na semana passada o album homónimo de Billy Nomates, aka artístico escolhido por Tor Maries, serve para ilustrar um dos estados emergentes da actual pop inglesa. Gravado em Bristol com ajuda de Geoff Barrow dos Portishead não é por acaso que escolho a canção No logo a seguir de Jolly Fucker dos Sleaford Mods. Foi ao sair de uma depressão que Maries foi a um concerto do duo de Nottingham e se sentiu inspirada a voltar a escrever canções.
E canções inspiradas é o que não falta nesta escolha. Seja o segundo single de Damon Albarn em modo Gorillaz ou Parachute dos The Pretty Things, um obscure underground classic nas palavras de Stephen Holden da Rolling Stone. Deixei de fora (fica para a próxima M4we) os Prefab Sprout e tenho que admitir que num leque de 40 alguma boa gente tem que ficar de fora. Mas incluí coisas que só podiam ter mesmo acontecido nesta situação insular: John Baker da BBC Radiophonic Workshop criada por Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe a tocar The Invasion Muzak, BSO para a Marmite televisiva que é a série Doctor Who, um aquired taste só para ingleses; Sophia Loren e Peter Sellers no dueto cómico Goodness Gracious Me de uma senhora italiana que confronta o médico indiano com os seus “calores”; o actor Peter Wyngarde a “dizer” It’s When I Touch You ou Jake Thackray com a história de Old Molly Metcalf e a sua forma yan tan tether mether pip de contar ovelhas. Tudo pantominices que só poderiam ter aparecido nessa Inglaterra.
Quantas Panto natalícias me fizeram as delicias quando vivia em Londres. A pantomima deriva etimológicamente do grego para “imitar tudo” mas para os ingleses é um verdadeiro oxímoro já que nem sequer é mudo, antes pelo contrario requer mesmo uma mestria da língua que Shakespeare lhes deixou. Sedimentado na tradição do burlesco o expoente encontra-se na minha escolha para o final desta semana com Douglas Byng, o mais risqué dos performers cómicos da linha “cowardiana”.
Sem Byng, inúmeras vezes censurado pela beeb, possivelmente não tínhamos tido um Julian Clary ou uma Dame Edna Everedge (este ultimo uma importação australiana mas que fez carreira no Reino Unido).
A escolha de I’m One Of The Queens Of England é justa porque demonstra bem a riqueza dos innuendos sexuais e double entendres que cravejavam como uma coroa real as suas canções.
O seu epitáfio foi escrito por ele mesmo ainda em vida:
So here you are, old Douglas, a derelict at last.
Before your eyes what visions rise of your vermilion past.
Mad revelry beneath the stars, hot clasping by the lake.
You need not sigh, you can’t deny, you’ve had your bit of cake.
Morreu a 24 de Agosto de 1987 com 94 anos e as suas cinzas foram dispersas no exterior da sua antiga casa em Brighton, onde ainda hoje há um autocarro com o seu nome.
Que o vosso fim de semana seja pontuado pela originalidade e vontade de mudança.
#staysafe #musicfortheweekend
##############################
I’ve always been fascinated by the music produced in the British Isles. I may have grown up on a sonic diet of crooners and classical music but since my first encounter with that “license to kill” demonstrated by the English pop I have surrendered to the chords and strumming of Her Majesty’s subjects. I think it must have been Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and I Want You, both on the Abbey Road album found one day at home. The fanfaresque side of one and the long crescendo of the other caught me immediately and possibly served as a blueprint for my appreciation more focused on the dramatic effect that pop music can aim for in it’s moments of excellence.
The English have always been unique in their way of being. However, there was always a huge charmed attraction towards all things American hidden there, hand in hand with the desire to excel in this transatlantic market as to prove who was in charge in the world of popular music. In this dualistic way of living with the ethos of an art and the international charts (and with some help from the specialized press), the “beefeater” pop made several “invasions” concerted in converting everyone around the world to the gospel according to britpop.
I start with an album considered as minor in Joe Jackson’s career but which, in my opinion, is a genuine and successful tribute to Duke Ellington’s boundary-breaking mastery who always preferred a more freewheeling relationship with his material and hence the choice of Perdido in a portuguese version voiced by Lilian Vieira, singer of the Zuco 103 collective.
And then I move on to the golden boy Tom Misch, who played the violin from the age of 4 and then studied music technology at Langley Park School for Boys and jazz guitar at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in Greenwich but from where he left after six months to focus on his art. South of the River is from his Geography album but this year he has already published What Kinda Music in partnership with drummer Yussef Dayes. Misch is a prodigy and I know he will surprise me a lot more in his career that I hope to be prolific.
Continuing on the britfunk path, I teleport to 1980 with London Town by Light of the World, a collective that incorporated Beggar & Co that played brass in Spandau Ballet’s Chant No. 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On), moving on to Stay, the most wobbly song ever recorded by the Thin White Duke. The character Bowie invented for his “Philly Soul” phase that culminates in Young Americans and Station to Station evolved amid much controversy, with accusations that Bowie was sympathetic to the Nazi cause with the press describing him as “emotionless” Aryan aristocrat zombie ”. Bowie for his part confessed in an interview to the Daily Express in 1976 that when acting as one of his characters “I’m Pierrot. I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is theater, and only theater … What you see on stage isn’t sinister. It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time on it. The white face, the baggy pants – they’re Pierrot, the eternal clown putting over the great sadness ”.
In 1993 David Sylvian recorded The First Day with Robert Fripp and I moved to London as we say in Portugal “with weapons and luggage”. Until then, I went there regularly and was always watching and listening attentively to this bittersweet transgression that made English music so special in a seductive mix of post-colonial colloquialism (the butter pie invoked by Mccartney and his Linda may be enrolled in a number one 7” on the Billboard charts but it’s an expression only understood in Lancashire) and a sense of redemptive innovation, a moving forward towards whatever uncertain situation the future might bring us… If I stop for a moment to compare the functionality of music today, heard as a sound “wallpaper”, easily accessed anywhere and anytime and those times I could conclude that pop was an affectionate punch that linked us to life, to everyday life but also to the revelry of the intangible, in a prognosis in which the doctor has already left the building a long time ago and is now at a party in Mile End listening to jungle music without really understanding how to dance “this mess around” but letting himself be infected by the jovial environment and the puckishness of said situation.
I’m here, you’re there
I’m here, here’s your share
Take your share
Just in case… just in case
My oldest friends in London were the PPQ posse. Neo-mods, some of them original from the Isle of Wight, the ancient kingdom of Wihtwara that until 1995 had a Governor representing the English Crown. They organized fantastic evenings, where the Sixties and electronics came hand in hand. But the cherry on top of the cake was when they managed to get the Friday night at an off-Regent Street club that they managed to reopen after being closed since the “Profumo affair”. There I attended the first Moloko concert in London and danced like crazy the night that best portrayed the old Albion at the time. Theirs is the Time 3 theme under the nick St. Jude. I still communicate today with one of them, to whom I send my M4we religiously and to whom I only have one thing to say: Godspeed.
Music was in a constant process of renewal, much more instrumental both in design and in the literal absence of vocals, Fila Brazillia and Boards of Canada are both included in this selection.
On sale last week, the first album by Billy Nomates, artistic aka chosen by Tor Maries, serves to illustrate one of the emerging states of the current English pop. Recorded in Bristol with the help of Geoff Barrow from Portishead it is not by accident that I chose the song No just after Jolly Fucker by the Sleaford Mods. It was out of a depression that Maries went to a concert by the Nottingham duo and felt inspired to return to writing songs.
Inspired songs are not lacking in this selection. Be it Damon Albarn’s second single in Gorillaz mode or Parachute by The Pretty Things, “an obscure underground classic” in the words of Stephen Holden from Rolling Stone magazine. I left out Prefab Sprout (maybe in the coming M4we) and I have to admit that within a range of 40 some good people had to stay out. But I included things that could only have happened in this island: John Baker of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop created by Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe playing The Invasion Muzak, OST for the televised Marmite that is the Doctor Who series, an aquired taste almost only understood by English folks; Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers in the comic duet Goodness Gracious Me telling an Italian lady who confronts an Indian doctor with her “heat”; actor Peter Wyngarde “saying” It’s When I Touch You or Jake Thackray with the story of Old Molly Metcalf and her yan tan tether mether pip of counting sheep. All in all a good crop of panto that could only have appeared in England.
How many Christmas Pantos delighted me when I lived in London. Pantomime is derived etymologically from Greek to “imitate everything” but for the English it is a true oxymoron since it is not even mute, on the contrary it requires a mastery of the language that Shakespeare left them. Based on the tradition of burlesque, it’s possible maximum exponent is my choice for this week’s final with Douglas Byng, the most risqué of the comic “cowardesque” performers.
Without Byng, countless times censored by the beeb, we might not have had a Julian Clary or a Dame Edna Everedge (the latter an Australian import but who made a career in the UK).
The choice of I’m One Of The Queens Of England is pretty fair because it demonstrates well the richness of sexual innuendos and double entendres that studded his songs like a royal crown.
His epitaph was written by himself while still alive:
So here you are, old Douglas, a derelict at last.
Before your eyes what visions rise of your vermilion past.
Mad revelry beneath the stars, hot clasping by the lake.
You need not sigh, you can’t deny, you’ve had your bit of cake.
He died on August 24, 1987 at the age of 94 and his ashes were scattered outside his former home in Brighton, where there is still a bus named after him.
May your weekend be punctuated by originality and a strong willingness to change.
#staysafe #musicfortheweekend
Joe Jackson – Perdido / Satin Doll
Tom Misch – South of the River
Light Of The World – London Town
David Bowie – Stay
David Sylvian And Robert Fripp – Jean The Birdman
Paul & Linda McCartney – Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey
The Associates – The Affectionate Punch
Fila Brazillia – It’s A Knockout
Haircut One Hundred – Calling Captain Autumn (Special Extended Version)
T-Coy – Cariño
Gorillaz – 19-2000
Haysi Fantayzee – Shiny Shiny
Sleaford Mods – Jolly Fucker
Billy Nomates – No
Genesis – Harold The Barrel
Boards of Canada – Aquarius
ABC – Date Stamp
Brenda Ray – D’Ya Hear Me!
The Kane Gang – Closest Thing to Heaven
Jake Thackray – Old Molly Metcalf
Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers – Goodness Gracious Me
Funkapolitan – If Only
Moloko – Where is the What if the What is in Why
The Ting Tings – We Walk
Quando Quango – Love Tempo (Benelux Edit)
Magazine – My Tulpa
PJ Harvey – Down By The Water
Ian Dury & The Blockheads – Dance Of The Screamers
Peter Wyngarde – It’s When I Touch You
St. Jude – Time 3
The Evasions – Wikka Wrap
Go Home Productions – Boogie Removal Machine
Shirley Bassey – Diamonds Are Forever
Spoken Word – Cha Cha Cha Course Intro
The Pretty Things – Parachute
Craig Armstrong – Let’s Go Out Tonight
Terry Hall & Mushtaq – The Hour Of Two Lights
John Baker – The Invasion Muzak
Petula Clark – A Foggy Day
Douglas Byng – I’m One Of The Queens Of England