Samhain reviewing thoughts

I didn't say enough about Lost Hearts last Christmas - the song itself predated the TV adaptation, but I wonder whether "The Musical Box" by Genesis was influenced by a misremembering / creative misinterpretation of the original story? It's still the apotheosis of a certain sort of prog Englishness, next to which everything that came after (and it has never really ceased to exist, ever more irrelevant and pointless with time) seems shrivelled and that many more generations removed from the source. It's vicious, not a hint of stultifying whimsy. It's that much closer to the source. Gabriel knew both the idylls and the evils, or at least their last knockings. He also knew Lost Hearts, I'm sure.

And that last scene of all, as the children set free from Mr Abney's evil dance off into some parallel world, some time alongside our own where they will never grow old as the rest of us grow old ... that must have influenced Cresswell and/or Cant because it's too proto-Moondial for words (and that has never seemed more resonant and voluminous, never more capable of making you believe that there is that other time, somewhere: I hope, like nothing else, that I am still here to rewatch it when it's as old as Quatermass is now and even beyond, because the first things that really change your life are the ones you have with you in your last hours).

How do we read the 70s and what followed?: two different worlds

I know I've always lived in one.

This - with a few isolated exceptions which are reflected directly in the foundations of this blog - is the other.

Let me begin by stating that I'm well aware I'm not a prog fan as such, I'm just someone who likes some music that could be considered part of it, just as I like large swathes of other music. I know entirely that this poll comes from a world other than mine, and that I'm not the man most qualified to comment on it. I know that my ideal poll would take a few cornerstones from this, redefine its criteria around art rock and genuine experimentation and Anglo-weirdness rather than prog (art rock inherently a more flexible genre because it's based around its own criteria of art, which anything can theoretically be, rather than someone else's idea of "progression"). But all the same, fuck it, and concentrating on British music alone so only touching the tip of the iceberg: the three most redundant and overexposed Floyd albums all in the Top 10 and no mention whatsoever of any of their 60s work or even Animals, the absolute heart of the 70s - cynicism over the machinations of business and the exhaustion of a crumbling elite tempered by genuine hope that an upsurge to overpower them is possible, the same bitter ennui we're living through today only now without that hope - and far and away their most satisfying, because most direct and least absorbed in the dead end of "hanging on in quiet desperation", post-weird work? More appearances for innumerable revivalists and pasticheurs than for Peter Hammill in any incarnation? No appearances whatsoever by Soft Machine or Matching Mole? A Genesis album from as late as 1980? Truly, even in an age when - as is commented on that thread - many of the old divisions (which were undoubtedly once necessary but in the end had become the death knell of ambition and an unintentionally conservative force) are no longer communicating themselves in the same way to the young, there are still two different worlds (one way of putting it - and certainly another way of expressing m the g's post in that thread - is that musically it's a little too Alan Freeman and not sufficiently John Peel, or in US radio terms too much what AOR radio became, with too few hints of its roots in freeform).

If Geir Hongro has served no other purpose, he provides a useful anti-me in terms of my assessment of almost any music - whatever he thinks was the peak I am likely to find desperately overplayed, canonical, pseudo-classical and drunk on notions of someone else's respectability rather than creating your own (in the case of prog), or pathetically deluded in dreams of mythical summers before you were born and justifying a certain leader's pseudo-politics rather than keeping an independent voice and capturing the tensions of your own time (in the case of 1990s British music), whatever I think is genuinely innovative, powerful, the epitome of all that is best about pop and that only pop can do, an expression of the actual Britain rather than his own heritage fantasy world he will consider to be "tuneless", degenerate, overtly "experimental", just plain worthless or, most worryingly, not even British at all. To say that he should simply not comment on hip-hop or latterday pop, and stick to the music he knows, would still be legitimising endless tedious anti-thoughts - he is the man who thinks King Crimson's best work was under Lake/Sinfield, that the "psych sound experiments" on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn should have been replaced with "more nursery rhymes", that Ummagumma is worse than A Momentary Lapse of Reason, and that the 1970s' greatest achievement - rather than, say, Red or Rock Bottom or anything from Germany (a country unsurprisingly wholly unrepresented) - was the entire territory of "symphonic rock", something that for all its occasional high points (the concert-hall hush of the second half of "The Cinema Show" does have something very special about it, the fields and farms of the shires huddling together and wishing the unions away, bonfires blazing in fear of coming socialist revolution) is ultimately a dead end, and could not have been anything else, because it was playing by someone else's rules.

The key albums in that poll undoubtedly are The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Rock Bottom and Red (gratifying that that is so high, not so gratifying that its two predecessors and USA aren't there). They have more in common than all being from 1974 and all being invoked here: all, in their wildly opposing ways, capture the feeling of a moment when everything seemed up for grabs, and thus have something to tell us about our own time, when everything should be but seems dispiritingly as though it isn't, and that a discredited elite will merely retake power through the most cynical and dishonest of means. They all show us, as little else before or since, that something else could have happened (something like Station to Station, which is at least as good as all of them and may be better than any of them, doesn't work in quite the same way, so internalised beyond the rest of the world is its very construct). The first of those albums is to me the most complete answer to the post-imperial dilemma of a certain class, and perversely weaves a wholly personalised art out of a state of desperate confusion so well that I'm not sure whether any of those involved, or the vast majority of their caste, should have tried again (unfortunately they would, on all fronts), the second - amid its many other dissolvings of sound, its unashamed loss of self (all you can do when half your self is gone, something which - I know from bitter experience - may equally apply when that loss is mental rather than physical) contains my favourite song of all time. But I think, if I wanted to take any part (I know now why I must not) I might well vote for the third. Because it rages within and without itself like precious little rock music before or since, because it desperately fights its own impotence and somehow manages to create its own fraught self-justification (which was all I could have in my own life, before edging tentatively closer to what Wyatt somehow managed to find for himself), because it's a band, and a world, on the brink of imploding for good. And because of Wimborne Minster, and the private armies, and the plots that lurked behind the Hallowe'en wall. All prog comes back to that in the end, maybe, even the bad stuff. But this, without question, was the good.

(and - I must now add - the poll went pretty well, and thankfully anti-Hongro)

The most easy-to-carmodise band in the world?

It took me a long time to overcome the circumstances in which I departed ILM. Certainly my brief return was possibly the worst of many idiotic decisions I have made on the internet (which are still not quite as unjustifiable as some I have made off it, or before it). But after a long absence I now read it regularly again, and from that position of isolation I can appreciate it for what it is, and understand that it will never be the natural place for someone with my own aesthetics and worldview.

I'm never tempted even to join in the many recent threads about Genesis, precisely because of the fact that they are surely the band who fit most perfectly into my own much-mocked vision of recent British history. Consider:

mid-1960s - Otis Redding amid shafts of light on dormitory walls from a world you are locked outside; national hopes of classless-utopian future; everything has its roots here

late 1960s - Jonathan King attempts to apply old boy network to pop; gets nowhere (at first)

1970 - tentative folkiness amid decade's ruins

1971 - imagined past and mutant science can still just about work together, it seems, and they mostly do

1972 - unresolved tensions coming to a head; New Towns turned from dream to nightmare; entire genre reaches its apotheosis and epitome from which there is no etc etc; final peak sets out "New Jerusalem", but is that the post-war state, whose achievements are being so profoundly neglected and underestimated by those who are their direct beneficiaries, or some mythical, never-come world which may exist beyond it, or even some pre-capitalist, quasi-feudal old-elite utopia? crucially, nothing is ever explained, and all we are left with is a memory of movements. No apocalypse yet, but the intensity is such that you know it is coming.

1973 - nation at war with itself; conflicts of capitalism and the emotional glue of history become unbearable; mood is caught brilliantly with succession of storms interspersed with barely-fooling brief moments of calm. Class war for ownership of future; past now is a desperate burden rather than Carnaby Street commodity; everything culminates in final confession to the supermarkets who are quietly growing and growing as everyone else organises their safe tribal war. You've got to turn out, somewhere ...

1974 - apocalypse, final reckoning, last internal conflict after which anyone must crack, etc. Hermetic universe finally blown open, power and internal insanity of Britain's owners finally confronted; opening songs are a vicious stream of consciousness in which Gabriel's every conflict is thrown in; elsewhere it merges with the old world - "a harvest feast (is) lit by candlelight" in NYC? - but this merely confirms that the whole thing is, at heart, a survey of a nation's riven loyalties. It cannot sustain its own ambition, of course, and by the end it is flailing, but it remains a lacerating experience. But this is precisely what Rutherford and Banks don't want; they only really feel comfortable with received notions of Quality ('The Little Prince', for heaven's sake), not the Hammill-level fuckedupness of, ahem, "In the Cage" or "Back in NYC", and the centre cannot hold. As Jagger is impotently mocked to the fade, you know you won't hear this again.

1975 - the future is almost rewritten

1976 - conscious assertion of normality, albeit in lavishly elegant form which a 15-year-old aristocrat poised for the entrapment of a gilded cage from which the only escape is death will instinctively connect to; Rutherford/Banks vision of High Art clearly in control, all internal turmoil and unease over their nation's post-war position pushed aside; "if we can help you, we will"; uneasy calm of post-referendum, pre-IMF stasis perfectly captured, precisely because it is such a blank canvas; on opening track, Collins insistently repeats (though he did not yet write) the line "better start doing it right", surely not only a statement of determination to push aside Gabriel's mutations of language and sound but also a call to think the unthinkable, to question every certainty of the post-war settlement as Charterhouse has so long wished

1977 - much the same vein: aristocrats gone to seed; "daddy, you promised, you promised"; their class's balance of desperate panic and blind internal fantasy intensifies

1978 - all pretence at ambition finally dissipates; panic over apparent prole assertion takes form of retreat into the already-encroaching cosiness; Labour lead in polls and despite where Rutherford and Banks came from it almost fits; "just one single tear through each passing year" marks their passing on into the world which it appears may still just follow, where detente may reach its logical conclusion; in doing so elite power would of course be seriously weakened, but for a moment it seems as though none of that matters and everything can work; David Morton comes of age to it, although his spirit is already almost dead

1980 - world hinted at in those final echoes-to-the-woods has been cancelled; they become arch-exponents of "creative destruction", the sort of capitalism which relies on the abolition of everything before it for its very existence; "all I need is a TV show - that, and a radio"; they are now wholly owned by, and a lucrative plaything of, the forces working to destroy both socialism and Tory paternalism

1981-83 - consolidation of same

1986 - total immersion in the drained Atlantic; survey of entire international situation which postulates that everything is horrible now because the leaders are Too Old and everything will be OK when the Blair Generation takes control, and is charting as Macmillan leaves the earth; early songs still performed, but in medleys where they are no longer any kind of art-Englishness but commodified heritage, exactly like the newish English Heritage itself; album becomes a surrogate Elgar to the Bullingdon Club, the next generation of the same official vision, merely repackaged and (more importantly) far nastier and less tolerant

1991 - much the same as above, only now with ostentatious sheen of "care" and hideous epic about the construction (at the height of Britain's industrial bucaneering) of the very same railway system for whose final carve-up and removal from the public sphere - back to what it originally was, naked capitalism as it was before Wiener said It All Went Wrong - the ideology for which they have been messengers is now setting the stage

1995/6 - deafening silence. "everyone" thinks they've been defeated forever just as "everyone" thinks NuLab is a force for the equality of opportunity. "everyone" is proved bitterly wrong.

1997 - two Tim Henmans recruit an Andy Murray to desperately revive the formula at height of ostentatiously pseudo-classless Blairmania; needless to say, it fails and falls apart amid rumours of class-based hostility

2007 - Blair's final curtain; 1980s trio reunites and milks the triumph of Rutherford and Banks' caste in all circles as return to power in politics to match new-found pop dominance (for which their later work - though only their later work - can now be seen as having laid the groundwork)

None of this, of course, necessarily makes them great (at their best, they are, but only on comparatively limited and insular terms, and I cannot stop myself thinking this is by accident rather than design, and then I put Tago Mago on so ... well, you know ...) but it does make them fascinating, though in the later years obviously only in the sense that you are gruesomely compelled by the cultural detritus. Can anyone - on this front alone - beat them?

The most important sense in which 1977 was a turning point

When Peter Hitchens (a man I have actually debated with once, and who confirmed his reputation as someone who simply chooses not to respond to any points that may significantly challenge his, and who cannot even remember the full details and implications of what he has written, so completely that I need happily never bother a second time) proclaimed that he was "just old enough" to have "seen with (his) own eyes ... the very last years of an older Britain" (by which he clearly meant the late 1950s and early 1960s) he was saying so in an entirely different tone, and with utterly oppositional implications, to those we would hear from any of British pop/rock's iconic figures if they used similar language.  For Hitchens, who has built his entire career on what is more or less a false memory syndrome - rose-tinted yearnings for a world of which he himself witnessed only the dying embers (once pathetically moaning that he "thought" he could "just remember" Children's Hour) - it is the sadness of his life than he cannot remember the days when Britain Ruled The Waves, or Stood Alone, or whatever.  For the first true rock generation in Britain (whether they stuck with left-wing views or whether, as happened much more often, they gleefully jumped on the bandwagon of Thatcherism's adaptation of rock culture's privatisation of the mind) it is a repressive memory that they are glad to have escaped and which, when they are not desperately trying to forget they ever lived through it, exists only as the mental source of everything they congratulate themselves for having kicked against (when not congratulating themselves on having laid the groundwork for the privatisation of Iraq's oilfields).

Nonetheless, pretty much all the best British rock music between the mid-'60s and the coming of punk was, to a greater or lesser extent, defined by its shadow of the dying Old World in which its protagonists had grown up.  "Penny Lane" combined rose-tint and an obtuse sense that things were not quite as they seemed.  Hidden almost inaudibly in "Revolution No. 9" (which, incidentally, has an almost exact counterpart for a much later generation in Mordant Music's "We Are the Mean") was an exhumation of memories arguably more powerful than Lennon's later confessionals.  Syd Barrett reimagined his early childhood as a starting point for his creation, in the brief moment before the new world proved too much for him, a parallel universe far richer and stranger than anything that ever actually was either before or after the Big Changes, and in his final moment with Floyd, "Jugband Blues", his use of a Salvation Army band, lost amid the sound of a fading mind, brings on a potent feeling of a '50s universe audibly collapsing and curdling ("I'll get my loving in the winter": the winter of his own life that would only end with death, but also Britain's long winter as Murdoch crept in and the enabling state crumbled).  Even the Rolling Stones, at first, existed overwhelmingly in the shadow of the old order - its very non-acknowledgement in their music only served to hide how much they were about fleeing from it, eventually ending up as the epitome of the corporate institutionalisation of rock which proved to be the real future.  And those are only the canonical "greats" - I could go on almost infinitely if I went on to the (rightly, in most cases - apart from the below) critical "untouchables" of pure prog, or the more credible Canterbury school, or (especially) folk-rock.  I could even return to the Larry Parnes generation, raised entirely amid the old order, and how they relate to the aftermath of Suez (every bit as crucial to early British pop as the death of John Smith and its aftereffects to Britpop).

When Peter Gabriel quotes Del Shannon in the song that gave this blog its URL (though not, importantly, its actual title), he's trying desperately to reconcile the vast range of his post-imperial experiences - growing up amid the wonderfully elegant, utterly useless and played-out detritus of the gently declining upper middle class, and hearing "Runaway" through the fuzz of Luxembourg, and trying to work out which of the two held more emotional sway over his life - and somehow hoping that he can work it all out on the most public stage of the post-imperial world.  The power of that one line, to me, is almost indescribable - an epic battle between Greece and Rome in one man's mind, between his own inheritance and what he must have subliminally known, even in 1961, would be everyone's future. It's far more powerful to me than a great deal of music which I know to be objectively far superior.  And yet in the end, like all the compulsive introspection of the British '70s, it was a dead end.  The generation that supplanted Genesis knew nothing and cared less of these battles.  All they knew was that all certainties were dying.

As I've listened constantly to Metal Box interspersed with the first two Pink Floyd albums for the last couple of days, it's occured to me that this is probably the most profound sense in which 1977 and the years immediately following it were a turning point - it was the first time when the bands coming through were made up of people who had no meaningful recollection of pre-1963 Britain.  The aftermath of punk was also, even more importantly, the first time when the children of those who emigrated to Britain between 1948 and the restriction of Commonwealth immigration in 1962 were old enough in sufficient numbers to be playing a genuinely important role in British music.  So even if you think (as I tend to, on the whole) that 1977-as-year-zero did enough long-term aesthetic harm to outweigh its immense and vital short-term good, you cannot dispute its vast importance - both in terms of what was happening at that specific time (slow death of Butskellism, etc) but in terms of the slow-burning impact of the most important change in Britain within the Butskellite period, the time when we wrongly thought we'd overcome the psychological ramifications of searching for a post-imperial role by sheer pop-cultural celebration.  As was blatantly obvious by the early '70s, we hadn't. Essentially we still haven't.

naming conventions

The title / URL conflict of this blog is twofold: firstly, it's the battle of parallel 1974s, between Robert Wyatt's socialist emotion ("Sea Song" itself is still what I want to leave this world to) and Genesis's lapsed-Tory self-absorption.  I know I shouldn't love both, but I do.  Also, I've seen the English Channel with my own eyes almost every day of the second half of my life (and in some ways I wish I hadn't, because I hate its power of symbolic division) and I'm still living large swathes of my life in some kind of cage, removed from regular human relationships in the exact same way that public school alumni have historically been (which is why Asperger's Syndrome somehow feels both a very posh condition and a very prog one).  You note I define the latter in terms of "In the Cage", not 'The Wall'.  That's deliberate.  In terms of self-absorption even I have limits.

Am I displaying more emotion than I did on the old blogs?  If I am, or if I'm not, tell me.