unpopular

2003

Jens Lekman - ‘Maple Leaves'

Jim Lambie - ‘Zobop' at Tate St Ives as part of Painting not Painting show

 

The old joke about the only musical instrument I’ve ever played being the record player is one that has been wheeled out more times than I care to remember. Indeed the only time I did ever dabble in the creation of ‘music’ was when, at the end of the nineties, I crafted some rudimentary sound collages. These were cobbled together using a cheap mixer/sampler and a four track tape deck borrowed from the school music department. They were not altogether successful.

 

I am not sure if this is also how Jens Lekman started, but there is certainly something of the sonic collagist at play in his early work, and certainly he was immeasurably more successful than me. Exponentially cooler too, but then Jens is Swedish so what can you expect?

 

Was Jens Lekman the start of what felt like some strange collective obsession with Swedish Pop in the noughties? Perhaps, perhaps not. Certainly the trails went far back via the likes of Red Sleeping Beauty and the Labrador crew but Jens’ singles for the Service label at the start of the new century were surely pivotal. Such exquisite reference points too. The Left Banke, Stylistics, Shangri-Las and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Beat Happening and even a brief burst of Belle & Sebastian. Sampling never sounded so sweet.

 

The ‘Maple Leaves’ EP first surfaced in 2003 as a ludicrously limited self-released 7” and then later in the same year as a CD by Service. It still sounds like a beautiful secret sketchbook whose pages are filled with eloquent ideas and melancholic embellishments. Every track is a gem, but it is the title cut that gets the nod here. With it’s deftly plundered loops of Glen Campbell and The Mamas And The Papas combined with a playful look at language it is a track that never fails to delight the senses. Jens kicks it all off by singing so sweetly about Autumn and the suburbs, of mishearing ‘make believe’ as ‘maple leaves’. An aura of naiveté falls on everything; Jen’s misunderstandings are the stuff of every haplessly romantic young man blundering through love and obsessions. This would be charming in itself but hardly enough to set it aside from any number of self-indulgent pseudo-sensitive ‘indie’ whingers. What sets ‘Maple Leaves’ apart then is that the song is also a meta-self-criticism; is a song in which Jens shines the light on himself and his ignorance, smiles wryly and acknowledges the bleak humour of the situation. Those lines about misinterpreting ‘her fall’ as being about the seasons and Mark E. Smith crack me up every time.

 

There have certainly been subsequent records where Jens’ songwriting is more mature and complete, but I admit that there is something about the ‘Maple Leaves’ EP that keeps drawing me back. It is perhaps analogous to the appeal of the sketchbook over the finished painting; the pleasure of seeing the overlapping joints of collaged material instead of the delicate layering of paint. Whatever makes you happy.

 

 

Perhaps, like me, you still cannot help but think of Jim Lambie primarily as being a member of The Boy Hairdressers, whose ‘Golden Shower’ single sprinkled some baroque infused indiepop magic on 1987. Personally I always want to make an apology for thinking this, for clearly it is but a momentary, tangential punctuation point in Lambie’s successful career as a visual artist. It is a career that has led to a shortlisting in the Turner Prize (whose audience I suspect to be somewhat larger than the number of people who have heard of 53rd & 3rd Records) and installations of his Zobop work in at least two of of the Tate galleries. 

 

Indeed it was in the Tate St Ives that I first came across ‘Zobop’ as part of the ‘Painting Not Painting’ exhibition of 2003. It was a dizzying, unexpected delight; a multi-coloured intervention taping and snaking up the staircase between the rotunda gallery and its balcony. I wanted to walk up and down it all day. I wanted the psychedelic Pure Pop sensation to never end.

 

‘Zobop’ as an ongoing series of work has a deceptively straightforward concept: to ‘fill’ a space with rhythmic intervention whilst simultaneously leaving the space ‘empty’. Lambie accomplishes this aim with similarly deceptively straightforward means: the application of coloured tape to the the floor surface. What ‘Zobop’ achieves in doing this is the creation of often complex line and pattern; an articulation of the flat plane of floor (or in the case of the Tate St Ives, the parallel planes of a staircase) that can be seen to mimic abstract, non-figurative painting. ‘Zobop’ also playfully interacts with and questions notions of the sanctity of sculpture. When I think of ‘Zobop’ I cannot help but think also of other floor-based work with which we are forbidden from engaging physically. I mean, just imagine stepping onto Carl Andre’s 'Equivalent VIII’ (as I always want to do when I see it) or picking up a piece of a Richard Long slate circle (as the daughter of one of my friends once did). ‘Zobop’ however does not just encourage physical interaction, it insists upon it, and in doing so neatly inverses that tension between the desire to break rules and the security of adhering to them.

 

I have come across other iterations of ‘Zobop’ in the years since 2003 and always they have been both visually mesmerising and intellectually delightful. Always though my mind drifts back to the pleasure of that first time on the Tate St Ives stairs. Well, that and the Boy Hairdressers of course.

2002

Peter Fraser - ‘Red Bolt Solder’ from ‘Material'

The Clientele - ‘Emptily Through Holloway'

 

Peter Fraser may have made his ‘Material’ work in 2002 but I admit that I was not aware of it until seeing the terrific retrospective show of his photographs at Tate St Ives in 2013. That exhibition was one of those moments when you feel rather as though you are looking into a mirror. “This work”, you reflect, “could have been made by me.” Perhaps there appears to be a shared aesthetic. Perhaps an identification with a similar sense of purpose. The work falls on you like those “enormous yes”es that Larkin once wrote about.

 

And then you look closer. You reflect on the differences. Small, subtle, barely perceptible perhaps. And you realise that it’s not a mirror at all. You could not have made this work. You inhabit a lower plane.

 

This is okay though. A man’s got to know his limitations, as Callahan might have said.

 

So I felt I could/could not have made photographs like Peter Fraser. He makes it look so simple and yet therein lies the complexity. For it is only in stripping away and paring back to the essentials that you realise the difficulty there is in making simple photographs. The process requires belief and selfishness. Belief in an aesthetic purity, perhaps, and the selfishness to pursue that aesthetic. Such things are easy to write but difficult to put into practice.

 

Peter Fraser’s ‘Material’ work is certainly about the difference between looking and seeing; is the difference between taking and making a photograph. There is a lovely video accompanying the Tate exhibition where Fraser talks about making his photographs. He walks with his camera and looks at the world around him with an astonishingly careful eye. He talks about attaining a state of almost super-sensory awareness, of being somewhere on a higher plane perhaps. All very spiritual, but there is nothing wrong with that after all. Like meeting on Jonathan Richman’s Astral Plane, perhaps.

 

There is certainly something of a William Eggleston air about Frasers’ photographs and it is no surprise to learn that he spent several weeks working with Eggleston in 1984. Certainly there is a strong visual resonance between ‘Red Bolt Solder’ and Eggleston’s famous ‘red ceiling’ shot so beloved of Big Star fans. This resonance revolves of course around the poetic truth that might accompany the question “what is red?” yet it is also perhaps about the democracy of material, which is to say the democratic nature of our perception. Do the questions the photographs ask us about the relationship between inanimate objects and our hierarchical categorisation of them in terms of ‘importance’, ‘beauty’ and ‘value’ mirror the judgements we process about nature? About people? Perhaps, perhaps not.

 

Certainly there is something fascinating about seeing with newly opened eyes. The treasures we hide from ourselves in plain sight.

 

 

 

If Peter Fraser’s photography is about the difference between looking and seeing then perhaps the songs of The Clientele are a musical companion piece. For if any group’s collected output could be said to be truly cinematic and visually perceptive then it is that of The Clientele.

 

My friend Tim wrote about The Clientele for my Tangents website. In brief, evocative words he pulled together various threads in delicious manner, chief amongst them being the feeling that The Clientele do something in their words and in their melodies that worries away at ideas and words, continually re-working and re-defining meaning. This is a notion that connects to the process of repetition and of refinement in art. Of not continually seeking a new sound or a new direction. To reference the infamous Helsinki Bus Station Theory, it is about staying on the fucking bus.

 

It is probably true to say that The Clientele stayed on their particular bus throughout their career. Certainly one can line up their records and hear the supple development of a group carefully honing their aesthetic. 

 

‘Emptily Through Holloway’ is as good an example of that aesthetic as any of their recorded moments. It is a languid and seductive song; sonically molten and chilled in the same moment; deliciously oppressive and yet simultaneously spacious and breathy. Whispered nothings beneath exhaust tinged foliage. Regret and passion mingling in averted eyes. All terribly English and nothing wrong with that after all. Assuming, of course, we are sharing the same reference sheet and connect for the same reasons. So there is E.E. Cummings and Christopher Isherwood, perhaps. Margery Allingham and Ianthe Jerrold. Shena Mackay, again, and Jane Gardam. Some things the same but different; some things real but unreal.

 

The surreal has always been a thread in the sounds of The Clientele and there is certainly something of that to celebrate in ‘Emptily Through Holloway’. Yet it is far from the brazen (far from) strangeness of, say, Dali’s melting clocks, but rather the subtle juxtapositions of Joseph Cornell’s assemblages. And yes, of course The Clientele made this connection concrete with their song titled after the American artist, but really there are few more appropriate visual metaphors. For ‘Emptily Through Holloway’ does suggest daydreams of museum display cases housing tangentially connected memories. A paper bird here. There a map of the territory. Somewhere else a doll’s head with unblinking plastic eyes that see everything.

 

It is all in your head. All in my mind. Sounds, words, moments connecting and diverging. The treasures we hide from ourselves in plain sight.

unpop138

records handed down like tablets

Oh Wait It's Me Isn't It - The Prophet Hens (from 'The Wonderful Shapes of Back Door Keys' LP. Bandcamp)
Satin Doll - The Chills (from 'Kaleidoscope World' LP. Reissue)
Lost The Ghost - Chook Race (from 'Around The House' LP. Bandcamp)
The Curse In Reverse - The Tyde (from 'Darren 4' LP. Bandcamp)
Always Shines - Tape Waves (from 'Here To Fade' LP. Bandcamp)
Clandestine - Oh Well Goodbye (from 7" single. Bandcamp)
Vivienne - The Cannanes (from 'A Love Affair With Nature' LP. Bandcamp)
Sprinters of The World Unite - Naked (from Tenth Court label sampler. Bandcamp)
Pitch/Roll/Yaw - Lorraine (from 7" single. Bandcamp)
Keener - Ice Baths (digital single. Bandcamp)
Ten Years - Sleepy Township (from 'Deep Water' LP. Bandcamp)
My Legendary Childhood - The Wolfhounds (from 'Untied Kingdom (…or how to come to terms with your culture)' LP. Bandcamp)
My Broken Heart - Rocketship (from 'Constant and True - a tribute to the songs of Rose Melberg' LP. Bandcamp)
Dry Salt In Our Hair - Le SuperHomard (from 'MapleKey' LP. Bandcamp)
Lost in Love - Vulpine Choir (from 'In Your Pocket' LP. Bandcamp)
Bring My Walls Down - Bloods (digital single. Bandcamp)
Shut Up Kiss Me - Angel Olsen (from 'My Woman' LP. YouTube)
Again and Again - Nancy Sin (from 7" single. Bandcamp)
I Go Quiet - Personal Best (from 7" single. Bandcamp)
Neverfriend - Dayflower (digital single. Bandcamp)
My Kid - Something Anorak (from split 7" single. Bandcamp)
Sprague - The Wedding Present (from 'Going, Going...' LP. YouTube)

those are the breaks

2001

Animals That Swim - ‘All Your Stars Are Out'

Joel Sternfeld - 'Walking The High Line'

 

 

 

I have likely said it before and will no doubt say it again before the year is out, but making decisions on what artists not to include in the fifty available slots for this series has been a challenge. Musically, there are any number of artists and songs that I could have chosen. There could easily have been fifty songs for every year. Ponder what that playlist might sound like. Wow.

 

Rules is rules, however, and in reality there was never any doubt that Animals That Swim would make the cut for they are one of those groups whose body of work never fails to thrill me whenever I might choose to dip back in. They left us a clutch of glorious singles and a trilogy of near perfect albums. Every one of them still sounds rich with sound and lyrical vision, and I admit that when I think about it I oscillate wildly between wishing they had made many more records and cherishing these unblemished relics they left behind.

 

Their 2001 ‘Happiness Is A Distant Star’ set might have turned out to be their swan song, but naturally it is never less than exquisite, where our definition of exquisite is very much couched in notions of kitchen sink drama. In my head I have always fitted Animals That Swim’s songs into the same universe inhabited by Shena Mackay’s early novels, like ‘Music Upstairs’ or the oddly surreal ‘An Advent Calendar’. Perhaps others can see the connections. Perhaps not. Certainly the ‘All Your Stars Are Out’ single still sounds if not novelistic then at least as a short story and there are few better short story writers than Mackay.

 

‘All Your Stars Are Out’ is folk music that isn’t Folk; is country music that isn’t Country; is urban music that isn’t Urban. It’s a song that perhaps says there is nothing wrong with moving out to the suburbs, for we take our daydreams with us and make them what we want them to be. The sound of the suburbs need not be a deathly toll. Instead those sounds might be as sublime as those made by Animals That Swim. 

 

So ‘All Your Stars Are Out’ is classic Animals That Swim. In other words it is a song of words, where words paint the pictures and the pictures are polaroids of all the delicious details of the things you love. It’s what the song is about after all: Fantasy and reality; celebration and the faint tint of regret and melancholy. If only. It can be. It could be. It won’t be. Love in a time of poverty when we never knew we were poor. Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Trust your heart. Something like this.

 

Everything will be okay.

 

I have not been to New York for many years but if I should have opportunity to return I would very much like to visit the High Line park. From the photographs I have seen it certainly looks like a fascinating example of urban regeneration. And yet… and yet… I admit that there is a significant part of me too that rather wishes that the High Line had been left as it was when Joel Sternfeld took the photographs that were collected in his 2001 collection ‘Walking The High Line’. Comparing these with contemporary photographs of the park space is startling and forces us to ask all kinds of awkward questions about the beauty of neglect and the aesthetic of abandonment versus practical re-purposement. The paradox that says to save something you love you must irrevocably change it. Is it better to let something you love die or to continue its life yet risk losing the very values you loved in the first place? When we are talking about urban structures of course this naturally too leads to issues of regeneration cloaked as gentrification; corporate investment and directives versus community co-operation and equity. These are complex issues and difficult questions which perhaps have no easy answers. Or at least no answers that can be universally agreed upon. But then again, can anything?

 

Perhaps though we can agree that Sternfeld’s collection of photographs of the High Line is one to cherish; one whose images are individually beautiful and collectively cohesive. Sternfeld’s photographs are landscapes whose success depends as much on the built environment as on natural forms and whose structure is imposed largely by the boundaries of the disused elevated railroad. At times, most notably when the photographs capture the growth of Summer’s height or the buttercup blooms of Spring, the photographs can summon notions of post-apocalyptic cinema. Yet there is always the human element that cannot be ignored: Nature may be taking over here but it is still hemmed in by the human hand.

 

If it is this ebb and flow between natural growth and imposed structure that makes Sternfeld’s photographs so successful then perhaps too this is what makes the environment he captured in 2001 so much more appealing visually (and intellectually?) than the regenerated 2016 High Line. In 2016 has the structure of the human hand finally suppressed nature’s sprawl? Or is it just another temporary cessation of hostilities? Perhaps one hundred years from now the High Line will once again be a forgotten space, discovered and celebrated as a secret garden. Perhaps not. 

2000

Martin Parr - ‘Babbacombe’ from ‘Think of England’

Broadcast - ‘Come On Let’s Go'

 

In our entry for 1999 we saw John Virtue suggest that colour should be seen as “an unnecessary distraction”. Such an opinion, one suspects, would not be shared by Martin Parr. Certainly there are few more celebrated artists in terms of those who have championed colour photography in the late 20th Century and, indeed, in the 21st. As such he is up there in my own little pantheon of greats alongside the likes of Eggleston and Gruyeart. 

 

If Parr is certainly a photographer from the top drawer then perhaps his ‘Think of England’ collection (published in 2000) is his most widely recognised body of work. We often use it in school to explore themes of cultural identity and artistic intention within our GCSE photography course and it a remarkably useful learning tool. What is surprising (or perhaps not) is how astutely many teenagers pick up on some of Parr’s threads such as the humour, the irony and the genuine warmth and affection in the photographs. And this without prior knowledge or access to research.

 

Many of the photographs in ‘Think of England’ address notions of class within English society yet the way in which Parr does this often sits uneasily with traditional perspectives. For whilst Parr observes and documents, often with a wry eye and a raised eyebrow, he does not appear to take sides. Through his photographs he reminds us that such things are rarely if ever as black and white (as it were) as some might suggest. Rich, poor, privileged or poverty-struck; people are people with similar fears, loves and mishaps. We all of us who live here make up the rich tapestry of English society (and this body of work of course very much IS about England and not ‘Great Britain’) for better or for worse.

 

Naturally Parr uses the notion of stereotypes liberally, and gleefully, in ‘Think of England’. Again, he does not take sides. Again he does not make judgement about the value of such things. He places them before us and presents them with a knowing glint in his eye as if to say “I know this is cheesy and obvious, but doesn’t it make you smile?” And it does. It certainly does. Never more so than in this glorious shot of cream tea scones in Babbacombe.

 

Let me say right away that I have had a soft spot for Babbacombe ever since I read William Golding’s ‘The Pyramid’ and if you do not understand that reference then I can only suggest you read the novel. It is certainly my favourite of Golding’s novels and there is a neat spot of synchronicity at work here for of course one of the themes of ‘The Pyramid’ is class distinction and boundaries. And of course there was always something of a class issue behind Babbacombe’s most infamous moment in history; that of John “Babbacombe” Lee, convicted on flimsy evidence of the 1884 murder of Emma Keyse in Babbacombe Bay. Celebrated as “the man they couldn’t hang”, Lee survived three attempts at execution in Exeter prison before being released in 1907. Fairport Convention of course related the tale in song back in 1971.

 

These days Babbacombe is perhaps little more than a passed-by punctuation mark on the road into or out of Torquay, but it has a delightful little cliff funicular railway and of course one can always track down a cream tea. One would rather hope, however, that it would not be served in the same way as Parr’s was. For the connoisseur of cream teas would immediately identify that the scones in Parr’s photographs have been decorated in the Cornish manner, which is to say jam first and cream on top. The true Devononian manner is cream first, and I rather like to think that Martin Parr was conscious of this when taking his photograph. A subtle subversion of the stereotype. That glint in the eye again, wondering who will get the joke.

 

Even without knowing the distinctions between Cornish and Devonian cream tea customs however, the photograph rewards careful consideration. The artful angling of the plate’s design against that of the tablecloth; the sympathetic colour combination of green and blue; the starkness of the contrasting red smear of jam. Then there is the rather paltry amount of jam on the scone and the texture of the cream. Surely not clotted, it looks instead artificial, perhaps (heaven forbid) squirted from an aerosol. Which leads us inevitably back to notions of class and quality. For better or for worse.

 

 

 

There have been some notable losses in the world of music in recent years. Such is the fundamental nature of loss that none are sadder than any other, yet perhaps the most unexpected was the death in 2011 of Trish Keenan from the group Broadcast. Many of the musical losses we have mourned have inevitably felt like opportunities to remember and reflect on bodies of work, yet with with Keenan’s passing we also felt very keenly the loss of what might still have been created. Which is not to say that Broadcast had not already left us a staggeringly coherent and impressive catalogue of course.

 

One of my very favourite Broadcast records then was their ‘The Noise Made By People’ set from 2000. History will tell you it was their debut album and yet it does not feel at all like a debut album. Perhaps this is because their earlier singles had already been gathered onto the ‘Work, Non Work’ release and perhaps because in those singles they already sounded like a remarkably mature group. Never did they sound like a group searching for their sound. 

 

Listened to again now ‘The Noise Made By People’ still sounds like a perfectly accomplished record. This is not meant as a pejorative statement. Rather it as way to saying that ‘The Noise Made By People’ sounds exactly as it ought: A record filled with a myriad of influences and references and that yet manages to craft these together to create something that sounds unique and cooly beguiling. It is never better than on ‘Come On Let’s Go’.

 

In a typically tangential piece for my old website Kevin Pearce once wrote about ‘The Noise Made By People’, mentioning the "Scepter Wand soul sound”. I am not sure I quite grasped what he meant at the time and yet listening to ‘Come On Let’s Go’ again in 2016 it makes perfect sense. Imagine the song as an instrumental and it becomes  startlingly clear. And yet, naturally, Broadcast cloak this soul sound with other nods and references, transforming things into something that sounds simultaneously like a host of other groups and like no other group imaginable.

 

Much like Martin Parr, who famously has an astonishingly broad and detailed collection of photography books, Broadcast were a group excited by the history of their chosen art-form. And like Parr, who continues to both embraces and simultaneously ignore that stored knowledge and frame of reference, Broadcast were certainly a group of Pop pioneers. Keenan’s passing means we have been deprived of more deliciously diverting and educational entries into the canon of work, but we should certainly celebrate all that she and the group have left us. ‘Come On Let’s Go’ is as fine a place to start that celebration as any.

unpop137

Oh no! Another school day...

Attack Of The Glam Soul Cheerleaders (parts 1 & 2) - Ette (from 'Homemade Lemonade' LP. Bandcamp)
Kate Moss With A Moustache - Rainbow Reservoir (from 'Coco Sleeps Around' 7", Bandcamp)
Precarious (The Supermarket Song) - Martha (from 'Blisters In The Pit Of My heart' LP. Bandcamp)
Supermarket Scene - Failed Flowers (from 'Failed Flowers' LP. Bandcamp)
Feel Nothing Fail Nothing - HOLI (digital single. Bandcamp)
Please Before You Go - Justine Never Knew The Rules (from 'Anticipating Nowhere, A Homage To The Telescopes' LP. Bandcamp)
Another School Day - Hello (YouTube)
Eyes On The Feet - Whitebelt (from 7" single. Bandcamp)
European Summer - Deerful (from 'Without Borders' single. Bandcamp)
Key Largo - Arbes (from 'Swimmer' EP. Bandcamp)
For a while - The Skinner Group (from 'Watertoun' LP. Bandcamp)
Someone Somewhere (In Summertime) [Edit] - Simple Minds (from 'new Gold Dream' reissue boxset)
Factory - BIM (YouTube)
Bim Bam Boum - Lizzy Mercier Descloux (from 'Mambo Nassau' LP)
Beneath The Blue Sky - The Go-Go's (from 'Talk Show' LP)
Lucky Like St Sebastian - Momus (available on 'Pubic Intellectual An Anthology 1986-2016' retrospective)
I Don't Remember Your Name - BOYS FOREVER (from 'Boys Forever' LP. Bandcamp)
Been Hiding - The Primitives (from 'The Wild Angels' compilation. Bandcamp)
Puzzle Pieces - Tangible Excitement! (from 7" single. Bandcamp)
Uncle Greg - Terry (from 'Terry HQ' LP. Bandcamp)
Telephone - The Goon Sax (from 'Up To Anything' LP. Bandcamp)
angel, honey (demo) - kate epps (Bandcamp)
Morning (We Are in the Fields) - Ralegh Long (from 'We Are In The Fields' EP. Bandcamp)
La Maison Du Garde - Darren Hayman (from 'Trains' LP. Bandcamp)

I'm gonna finish what I started