Goodbyeeeee (sort of)

Yesterday I finally changed the @manfrommandm twitter account to remove traces of Mitch & Murray. After a year of trying to do something with the final tunes, my lack of money means that I can’t even get a microphone to do it properly. One day maybe, but there’s no point in hanging on. 

This will be the last blog post unless I do the recording. In which case there will be a diary.  Until then, you can keep up with me at the following.:

@manfrommandm continues to be my personal twitter account. 

@ugsmusic is the twitter feed for my noise project, making a horrible racket and keeping you up to date on our gigs and things. 

Www.facebook.com/ugsmusic is another place to get the Sam. 

Http://historyschipwrapper.wordpress.com is my blog where I write about philosophy, politics and other nonsense. 

 

And the usual Facebook sites continue to exist. 

 

Thanks for for being around since 2002. 

 

Benjamin

 

I am part of the problem: music and politics

I first saw Sleaford Mods last month at the Supersonic Festival in Brum.  On the one hand, it’s not the kind of place you’d expect a band like that to go down well.  On the other, it’s entirely the kind of place you’d expect a band like that to go down well.  Being working class will always be fetishized by boho kids and hipster types, as it always has been.  We forget that a huge chunk of the punk crowd were form quite well-to-do satellites of London and could afford to shop at a Kings Road boutique.  It slips our mind that Joe Strummer was the son of an ambassador who probably never saw the poverty that he sang of, except when he deliberately chose to live in a squat under the name “Woody” in homage to Mr Guthrie.  The Beatles and the Stones were a mixed bunch, but probably didn’t experience hard times like the blues and rock n roll singers they nicked their best ideas off.  And as I stood about two rows from the front and turned to the side to see how the crowd were reacting, I saw a wave of moustaches, big glasses, girls with lego haircuts, neck beards, ironic T-shirts and a slow rising heat of smugness bending the air.  That’s an inner city, underground, alternative-indie festival crowd for you.  It didn’t scream “Sleaford Mods”, but it did signal a possible tragic future.

At this point I think the band’s crowd could go one of two ways- and I don’t think they have much choice in this, to be honest.  On the one hand, they’ll have a brief moment in the spotlight but their crowd will remain a mixture of working class males and voyeuristic hipster kids (I stood next to one deeply middle class girl talking about uni and the “rilly-amayzing” time she’d been having screaming along to “Jobseeker” as if she’d ever been on that side of the desk).  On the other, the voyeurs will become the majority and they’ll be crushed under a wave of Devvo style backslapping irony enthusiasts.

There’s a danger in mixing politics (small p, real life and personal/social stuff) and music, whereas there really is none in mixing Politics (big P, theory and method, slogans and praxis).  What I mean is that talk of real life in the modern world draws in voyeurism and sells a deeper and dirtier, perhaps more supposedly meaningful, experience to listeners than standard pop music.  It’s why Joe Strummer wanted to be Woody Guthrie.  It’s why Mick Jagger tried so hard to be black.  Only people who don’t live that life can see it as romantic.  There’s an old true story about two great Simone’s in philosophy- de Beauvoir and Weil- discussing existentialism.  The bourgeois De Beauvoir claimed that the biggest crisis facing human beings was the terror of facing their own metaphysical freedom.  The working class Weil replied “you’ve obviously never been hungry”.  De Beauvoir and Sartre famously toyed with being working class heroes from the margins, always on the outside looking in.  Weil and Camus couldn’t see the romance of it because they were stuck inside.

I stayed away from writing political or Political music for years.  Political (big P) is always a bit laughable so there’s no danger to anyone, not even yourself.  Any band that writes a manifesto, gets a uniform, and nails its overall politics to the mast is bound to turn out to be hypocritical at worst and overly simplistic at best.  If you want to write a political tract then don’t write songs.  Imagine trying to explain fully why Scottish independence or a free Palestine would be better in three verses, four choruses and a middle eight.  This is why the Manics soon became boring after I hit 17.  There was no substance beyond a few tired insults in NME and the odd Orwell quote badly shoehorned into a Bon Jovi riff.  I could read Marx, Marcuse and Fanon for myself.  I didn’t need a potted guide to it squealed by a man in freshly ironed combat trousers.

People also lose real sight of the political importance music plays- or doesn’t play.  So many bands have been credited with being political revolutionaries and for “changing the world” and yet, what change happened?  After the punk explosion- followed by the Two Tone stuff-, we suffered another decade and a half of the Tories and then New Labour.  What political change happened there other than a continual shift towards and lingering within the right?  It changed music, but it changed nothing else.  I can’t see any evidence anywhere that anything we could dub popular music (from underground to mainstream, basically being anything other than traditional or classical music) actually having any significant impact upon actual real life politics.  If it did, I can’t see how it was a positive one, because politics has been shit for a very long time.

So, I stayed away from the “Political” as it was always fucking embarrassing.  I did flirt with the “political” but knew I couldn’t get away with it.  I grew up in a poor area, but we weren’t poor.  We weren’t rich.  Culturally, I’m middle class.  I was taught that books and education were vitally important, that the news is to be taken seriously and not treated like a comic, that you need stability but also creativity, and that diversity was a rich and valuable thing.  That’s something we see as middle class today, but my Mum (for example) was taught that same attitude from her father: a working class factory worker who lived in the Black Country.  In fact, I grew up around people who were desperately poor.  I had friends who would wear their school uniform at weekends because they couldn’t afford other clothes.  I knew kids who stank because they couldn’t get their clothes washed, or who depended entirely on what the school could hand out to them because they’d get fuck all at home.  The aspirations at my secondary school were low (so low that the fucking place got bulldozed).  Education was a waste of time because the dole office or the factory floor awaited.  I was lucky enough to have parents who wanted desperately to get me out of that future and who had the means to do it.  Others didn’t have that, either in terms of encouragement or financial support. Thanks to a pair of glasses frames I was bought for a Christmas gift and don’t have the money to replace- and the fact that I haven’t really changed my side-parted haircut since I was a small child- I know to outsiders I look much like one of these boho people.  I’d like to defend myself, but the Hipster card is self-defeating.  Defending yourself against being called a hipster is sooooo hipster.  Like being accused of being a paedophile- if you deny it you somehow look worse.

This means that I run into the difficulty of being absolutely unable to talk about real life beyond my own sorry relationships and my day-to-day drudgery because I’m culturally middle class and people will call “hypocrite” on me if I say anything about how I see society.  We all hate Bono because he’s a millionaire who promotes himself and sucks the life blood of starving kids to promote his albums.  I’d hate to be a mini-Bono.  The day I say “the poor are suffering”, people will say “fuck you, you Guardian reading salad eater- you work in a college”.  Which I do.  I also did talks at my local library (and still do, every 2 months) because so many were being closed that I did all I could to make sure somebody who may not have been before might step through the door and keep the bastard thing open.  I’d never say I was poor.  I’d never say I suffered in that way.  I’d never say “I knew poor people” as if that gives me a right to speak for them, or as a defence like “some of my best friends are black”.  I just know that if I say that other people are poor and suffer, I’ll get shouted down for it.

What I’m saying is that people like me see social injustice and want to see more genuine voices within popular culture.  Sadly, politics in music is often occupied by the voyeurs who seep into the bodies of the working classes to borrow their anecdotes and sell them as their own, or by poseurs who write grand slogans because they think that music can actually start a revolution (a message only repeated in NME and T-shirts from Top Man).

The reason I like Sleaford Mods is that there is an authenticity to them.  Their message is one of anger (and humour, let’s not miss that) which actually does reflect the voice of a widely unheard section of society.  They’re smart enough to see the EDL crowd coming a mile off, and have countered that nicely in their lyrics (no accidental NF/Sham 69ing here).  I like the fact that they even rip the piss out of me and my kind in their music, and they’re fucking right to.  We’re part of the problem- but then according to Sleaford Mods, we all are.  What I also like is a lack of solution.  It’s not overtly nihilistic, nor is it pessimistic.  It’s honest and brutal, but it doesn’t overplay it.  There’s no romance in there.  But then it isn’t optimistic.  I’d hate their music if there was even just one line in there which suggested a serious call to arms, because that’s the naïve posturing of teens and adults who haven’t quite realised that “Generation Terrorists” wasn’t a good album.  I like the fact that I’m told something (not “told how it is” in a sassy Jeremy Kyle audience way) and told it plainly, then told how fucked up it is.  And when we- as a crowd- ask for answers, there isn’t one.  There’s just “this is how it is, and it’s fucked- and the attempts to deal with it are fucked”.  Hopefully what will happen is that enough people will reflect and go “fuck, I am angry! Jesus, why didn’t I notice?” and may actually engage with the world around them.  Sadly, most of them will just make their own version of Sleaford Mods and I’ll have to play gigs alongside them.  Some of them will write fanzine articles or join some god awful Anarchist association (still waiting to hear how the anarchists would organise the NHS and rail networks, by the way…keep me posted).  Some will be relatively comfortable but socially aware men in their 30s like me- who really don’t need any help and are trying to help others but don’t know quite what to do.

I don’t have any answers.  I guess I’m just worried that the first angry voice that isn’t some whiny heavy metal prick complaining about existential angst or not being a scary monster, is going to be drowned out by men with moustaches singing “Jolly Fucker” and pointing at themselves as they prepare to go and eat a tiny burger off a piece of wood and up-cycle something.

Dear God, please don’t let that happen.

Au Revoir Part 1: The decision

This isn’t goodbye so much as au revoir because this goodbye will be one that is dragged out over several months.  As of yesterday I decided to call it a day on Mitch & Murray.  There have been a few times when I’ve almost done it over the past few years and never had the heart to do so because this is my baby, my pet project, my raison d’etre and so on.  It’s hard to let it go, but it’s run the distance and I think it’s finally time to put it all to bed (and other cliches).

My plan is simple.  I still have a handful of Mitch & Murray tunes which never made it into a recorded format: Judas, Things I Really Don’t Need Right About Now, Front, Things Will Come To You (Not Good and Not Soon), Alluding to Something as well as a handful of songs I never played live or did so only once in a few “intimate” (i.e. badly attended) solo shows.  For those in attendance, and for the record, they are Perpetual Bridesmaids, Why I Forgot To Write Your Wedding Song, Little Hands, The Birds and Bring Out Your Dead. That’s a whopping 10 songs that I never did much with.  If I didn’t do something with them then I’d spend the next few years wondering why the hell I neglected to get them down into some sort of format just for posterity.  The plan will be simple enough.  Over the coming however long I’ll be trying to do some very very rough versions of these- probably little more than guitar, voice and a couple of overdubs- so that they can be whacked onto a free download only bundle through bandcamp.  This is just for my entertainment, amusement and pride.

So why am I giving it up?

I think it’s fairly obvious in many ways, and perhaps less obvious in others.  Let’s start with what should be evident.  I haven’t played live for a couple of years, I think- at least not with a band.  I did the odd solo show but it added up to nothing more than standing alone on a stage as a couple of people who’d seen me play countless times before (as friends usually) watched me try out new material and trot through a couple of old “hits”.  It was fairly evident that I wasn’t gigging much, my writing was OK but not flying in any new directions and (despite two albums and a national tour) I was hardly Mr Big Cheese.  I was as anonymous as ever and even I was boring of myself.  Around this time I started doing stuff with Ultimate Grand Supreme.  It’s not that my heart lies more there than with Mitch & Murray, but it was new and exciting- like starting an affair with someone who makes you forget the tired relationship you have at home and makes you remember why you used to fall in love so much when you were younger.  In short, no one was listening and buying, no one was booking me, I was getting tired and other projects offered greater inspiration.  But I still loved my baby.

A year or so since the initial thoughts and a semi-started, semi-aborted attempt at Mitch & Murray line-up #4 or 5, and I realised that it’s not just that doing this is hard.  To paraphrase Paul Simon- I was 21 years when I wrote these songs/I’m 32 now but I won’t be for long.  I’m an entirely different person to the lost alcoholic student who didn’t understand relationships, who fell in and out of love with ease, who did ridiculous irresponsible things and enjoyed revelling in the chaos of it all, despite living quite a mundane existence.  I’m just not that person any more.  It’s hard to write about stuff that you think you should write about or force your words into a format that you think best fits the person you were 10 years ago and still keep yourself interested, inspired or even with any shred of integrity.  If Mitch & Murray represented a particular side of myself, it was one that really isn’t around any more.  I recognise that person, but it’s not really me.

However, I realised that what I couldn’t let go of was writing songs and especially writing lyrics.  Mitch & Murray was just the vehicle for that, so I now intend to start from scratch.  I’ll probably just do it for recording rather than consider playing live (unless I suddenly change my mind and wish to go through the particular drudgery and horror of finding musicians, rehearsing for ages and then having to play gigs to empty rooms of talking people).  I can get my live fix from Ultimate Grand Supreme, but that doesn’t offer the songwriting aspect that I feel I need from time to time.  So, there will be a new project with a style and sound I haven’t yet decided upon.  New songs, new direction and so on.

So, you’ll be updated on the progress with the recordings and with the new project.

Until then.

Thanks everyone.

Cover-a-month challenge: December. Low “If You Were Born Today”.

Low: Producers of the best Christmas album since Phil Spector.

Merry (belated) Christmas and a pending happy new year!  This marks the end of my year long trawl through a series of covers- from “let’s see if I can do this” experiments (like the a capella Daniel Johnston tune and acoustic My Bloody Valentine) to “What on earth am I doing this for?” (Like my ill advised attempt at PiL’s “Poptones”).  Either way, I’ve enjoyed it.  For the last cover I wanted to do something special: something seasonal and something by one of my favourite bands as a final send off.  The first band that sprung to mind was Low, especially as they produced my favourite Christmas tune of all time- the delicious Just Like Christmas.  However, a quick search on youtube will show you countless streams of footage of guys with guitars sat in bedrooms recording their own versions on their webcams, so I decided not to join the throng.  Instead I picked another tune from the same album that can also be found on the truly mesmerising One More Reason To Forget live recording- a delightful tune called If You Were Born Today. 

I’ve been trying to remember how I got into Low, but it’s a bit of a blur.  I know I’d heard some of their stuff on the Shanti Project CD they did alongside Mark Kozelek and some other bands.  Then I remember picking up Things We Lost In The Fire in a sale somewhere, just because I thought I’d give it a go.  That album was probably most responsible for making me work harmonies into the Mitch & Murray live sound and develop the dense walls of vocals on some of the recordings.  I used to stay up late listening to music and drinking myself stupid on my own and would often find myself finding new vocal lines to add to the perfect Sparhawk/Parker/Sally three-parters that ran through that record. 

The obsession didn’t kick in until I saw them live at Civic Hall in Wolverhampton when they released The Great Destroyer.  I been bought it as a present a week before and already had tickets for the show but certainly didn’t know the back catalogue.  After the gig (I mean literally, from the merch stand) I bought as much as I could.  I know I got Secret Name and Trust, as well as A Lifetime of Temporary Relief.  I went onto e-bay and picked up the rest- from albums to whatever singles I could find.  And believe me, it’s hard to find.  If you type in “Low” to e-bay, you get 1000s of copies of the Bowie album, followed by “low price CD” and “low price vinyl” etc.  I had to track down a discography and type everything in record-by-record.  

This all had a huge impact on the direction of the band from 10 years ago to today.  The earliest incarnation of the band found form because we knew we could create beautiful and well sculpted songs with just a guitarist and a drummer (Peter was often away at university so we couldn’t always rely upon him for weekly rehearsals).  The later versions of the band lost the ambience, the minimalism and empty space but built up the harmonies in a way I’d always dreamed of.  Charlotte, Nathan and Lydia (and even Steve where possible) added layer after layer of sound- but even that didn’t come close to what Low could do with one or two voices. 

Now that the big line up of the band has crumbled, I’m thinking of returning to the small three/four piece version of M&M so I can get back to creating something more Low, more Red House Painters, more me really.  Just cracking out a song like Words, Shame or Laser Beam can show how much can be done with so little.  A fine way to finish the year.

Here’s to 2013 and all who sail in her.

Update: a where-are-they-now (for post #50!)

It’s blog post number 50 so it’s about time we had some kind of celebration!  It’s not much but I’ve decided to let you know what’s happening in Mitch & Murray world, especially all of the quasi-exciting things that are happening to the various members/ex-members of the band.

As you may or may not know, line up #19283 of Mitch & Murray sadly passed away some time before the summer.  Hectic personal lives and other commitments had been holding us back for a long time and the band sadly folded earlier this year.  Plans to record a full album featuring the songs from the live shows were shelved, despite the possibility of a release on Regular Beat Recording Co. and we all went our separate ways.  However, there are plans for an acoustic recording of a handful of songs I’ve been writing and trying out at solo gigs, if we can get the equipment together.  There is also a slim possibility that we will reform and do a single day of recording to stick down four songs (Things I Really Don’t Need Right About Now, Things Will Come To You (Not Good and Not Soon), Front and Judas) just to show what we achieved in the 18 months that we were together.

I’m also attempting to put a new line-up together.  While I was very excited by the bigger poppier sound we managed to produce in what is the best Mitch & Murray so far, it was hard to mix in the minimalist and sparse sound that I hadn’t finished experimenting with and developing.  In fact, live gigs as a full band were few and far between before the bigger line-up, so exploring the emptiness I’d been pushing before went by the wayside.  As such, I’m trying to get together a mere handful of musicians to return to the reverb laden, minimal, harmony filled sounds that started and ended with A Sad Day for British Wrestling.  Interested?  Get in touch.

But what of the other guys?  Nathan Shwalbe (guitars, vocals) is continuing his work with Movement and his new project Damrai Vent along with members of Chairmaker, Alderaan and Pemelas.  They’ve rocketed off and recorded some stuff for First Fold (available here) and landed gigs with the likes of Bardo Pond already.  The big reference points are the likes of Harmonia, Boards of Canada, Brian Eno and Autechre- all glitchy beats, electronic drones and sweet sweet harmony.  If you don’t download this stuff then you’re a prick.  The reviews are awesome so far, so get your indie snobbery on and say “I liked them before they even released the first album”.

Our wonderful backing singers and multi-instrumentalists, Lydia Pickering and Charlotte Rose have continued their stunning vocal work together in a minimalist electronic project featuring some swirling harmonies, called 55 BPM.  It’s early days but they’re recording some new stuff at the moment, so keep dropping into the soundcloud page to hear what they’re up to.

Steve Hazel, our bass player during this period, is now off in South Korea teaching English.  I can’t give links to any musical projects as I have no idea if he’s doing one over there, but we’d all like to wish him well and can’t wait to see him if he comes back for a visit any time soon.  Steve played with us at a final gig this summer when he joined myself and a young man called Will for a three piece show.  It was a fine send off for the lad.

Daniel Page and me (Benjamin Jones) have started a three piece collaboration with a fine young Staffordshire lad called Dave Johnson, entitled Ultimate Grand Supreme.  The sound is entirely different to that of M&M as it mostly involves sheets of noise, electronic bass, thundering drums and a lot of improvisation.  All sets are instrumental and semi-improvised, working around loose arrangements and without us particularly knowing where we’re going.  We have lots of plans of things we intend to do in the future beyond the world of gigs, so keep ’em peeled.  We’re psyching ourselves up for gigs in the near future, which we intend to be as loud as Mitch & Murray is quiet. Keep em peeled!

Ta ta for now.

Cover a month challenge: October. Horn by Nick Drake.

 

I can’t even remember when it was that I started listening to Nick Drake.  I know I was in college because I talked about him at length with a lecturer there.  We also watched a documentary about him in one lesson and I already knew who he was at the time.  I know that friends and family were fans, but I can’t remember who introduced me to him or how it happened.  All I know is that one day I took the Fruit Tree box set from my brother’s CD collection and listened to it back-to-back in one sitting.  I own that box myself now, lucky enough to grab a copy from a shop before it was deleted.  It’s probably one of the boxes I return to most, spending periods of my life going back over it as if it were brand new and always discovering something I’d forgotten or that I’d never held in as high regard as the classics.  

Nick Drake is one of those artists where I can probably say “there wouldn’t be a Mitch & Murray without him”.  There are a couple more.  Sparklehorse is one.  Red House Painters are another.  Others have helped form the sound of the band (Low, Kepler, Mogwai) but they’re not the reasons behind the actual recordings starting in the first place.  Nick Drake probably was. Unlike many other artists that gave me an “I can do that” feeling, I knew I’d never come close to producing something as bewitching and finger-bending as Drake’s guitar work or as delicate as his vocal style.  I’m quiet, but not with that willo-the-wisp mistiness that he carries off in his tenderest moments, nor with the easy soul that he trots out almost out of nowhere on a song like Saturday Sun. 

Pink Moon is undoubtedly a favourite of mine.  Not just my favourite album of his, but of all time.  It clocks in at under 30 minutes.  Some of the songs only just sneak past the one minute mark, yet every piece of music on there is a gem.  The mood is generally dark (dragged down by Drake’s depression which led to his suicide shortly after the album was completed) but with brief bursts of levity and near sunshine- single shafts of light through the clouds.  From The Morning is still a song that can bring me to tears and I’ve never fully understand why. After the heaviness of a song like Parasite and the undercurrent of despair and drudgery, it chimes like a final smile amidst it all.  It sounds like a momentary escape all too sadly before his final moments.  

And that says nothing of his playing.  Listening to some of his songs is like listening to three guitarists at once.  The bass lines go beyond a simple pedal between two strings and incorporate leaps up and down, with flicks of a spare finger to extend the run.  Chords chug in the middle and the highest strings skip melodies between the rest.  River Man has a deep chugging 5/4 drive to it which still seems ethereal, perhaps aided by the lulling string section in the background (easily the best arrangement on any of the first two albums).  The strings, piano and brass disappear on Pink Moon, peaking to the point of intrusion on Bryter Layter- an imperfect album that is still better than most of what anyone else can produce.  Even in his more dated moments, you can still pick out the gentle genius that’s being shrouded by over eager producers attempting to make his work more palatable for the audience.  The exception for me is Danny Thompson, whose bass lines make any recording of anything 1000 times better.

Yet when he’s stripped down to a guitar and voice- as on Pink Moon or many of the demo versions of songs available on various CDs- it’s more perfect than any orchestra could manage.  Black Eyed Dog, Rider on the Wheel, Which Will, Know, the demo version of Fly (which is one of the most painfully beautiful songs he recorded) all stand apart from a majority of modern recordings because of the sheer glory of what they are.  It reminds you that today’s popular folk artists are the likes of Jack Johnson, Newton Faulkner, Ed Sheeran and Paulo Nutini.  Maybe we won’t see the likes of him again….

I chose to cover Horn because it’s the only one I felt I could do anything with.  The original is less than 2 minutes long (mine is 4), and played on a single guitar without vocals (mine has four guitars).  I admit that it’s partly inspired by the Woven Music recordings by Shinji Masuko (if you’ve not heard it, go buy it) but the main thought was there: to use a single instrumental guitar line as the basis for something bigger.  Rather than writing a whole arrangement around it I simply improvised.  The original track is made up of a looped distorted guitar with the main melody line picked out without a time signature- trying to capture that relaxed style that Drake has on that track.  It’s almost as if he’s just making it up as he goes, jotting down an idea mentally and seeing what appears for a minute or so.  I then overdubbed a “bass” (a guitar through a microsynth with lots of sub-octave to replicate Danny Thompson’s double bass sound, though not his style), another drone track that I manipulated through a Koma BD101, and a delayed guitar providing some improvised guitar chords (nothing special, just three chords that fitted underneath that I moved between as the sections of the melody changed, but not trying to ground it).  I wanted the whole song to fall apart as if disconnected, but also get them to gel together as a consistent whole.  This occurs when the bass (the only bit played to a fixed time) pulls the delayed guitar and melody together, despite the two being recorded independently without any common time frame.  Keeping it weaving, making sure things only join by coincidence, was deliberate in order to capture something of Drake’s music.  Something like a river.  Something autumnal.  Something sewn together in patchwork but creating a unique pattern of its own. 

Nick Drake is nearly perfect.  I’ll never reach those levels, so I’m glad someone else has.

Interview: No More Page 3

Below is a full transcript of an interview Benjamin gave to Amy Ashenden for The Student Journals on the current No More Page 3 campaign.  There’s a link to the article at the bottom or here. The full article contains an interview with Lucy Holmes, the organiser of the campaign, and brief chat with Benjamin at the end.  This is just to let you see the other stuff I had to say, but make sure you check out the article itself to get the full story on what’s going on.

 

Replacing news since 1970, Page 3 means The Sun is assuming its entire readership is male and heterosexual and/or happy to consume degrading images of young women. I spoke to band Mitch & Murray, currently led by frontman Benjamin Jones, about his lack of passion for Page 3 and why it concerns men too.

Amy Ashenden: How long have you been a band? Are you signed?

 

Benjamin: Mitch & Murray is an on-going project I started in about 2002. It began as just me with a couple of friends who helped out with some recordings I was doing at home. From there I’ve had two line-ups of musicians who have helped me. These days it’s back to solo performance, but I’ve still got people who help me out. We were signed to Regular Beat Recording Co for a long time and managed to put out two albums and a couple of split singles. We got a bit of national radio exposure and a tour with some other signed artists, but we didn’t quite set the world on fire during that period.

 

Amy Ashenden: How would you describe your music?

 

Benjamin: It really finds its roots in the sadcore bands of the 1990s (Red House Painters, Low, American Music Club, Galaxie 500) but with bits of other stuff thrown in. Minimalist, sparse, plenty of atmospherics. There are nods to Angelo Badalamenti (the guy who works with David Lynch a lot), bits of doo-wap, and shoegaze. The last line-up of the band helped me to expand into bigger arrangements and more up-tempo stuff, a lot more like Yo La Tengo. I’m hoping to record those songs soon, as well as some of the ultra-minimalist solo stuff. I’ve also started a side project called Ultimate Grand Supreme. It’s early days, but it’s pretty much three guys in a room improvising noise guitar over loud drum beats. Depending on your taste, that’s either a lot better or a lot worse than Mitch & Murray.

 

Amy Ashenden: Why are you supporting No More Page 3?

 

Benjamin: For me, this is part of a much wider issue. Page 3 is not a stand-alone problem but part of a wider objectification of women in our society and we all have to start somewhere. Page 3 really stands as a sort of bastion of British culture, something that really is one of our traditions, so it’s an ideal target to make people question how women are thought of. And men should be offended by it too. Even if you’re not concerned about the objectification of women, do they realise what an idiot your average newspaper editor must think they are to be unable to pay attention to something without an 18 year old girl with her breasts out endorsing it? I’m a big believer in individual conscience as an important motor for social change. I don’t believe that a single petition will change anything- but this has managed to get people talking and reconsidering their relationship with the barrage of sexual imagery we’re hit with every day. It’s not about prudishness. It’s about the fact that porn doesn’t belong in newspapers and the overall effects of its presence are more than titillation. It helps cement the idea that women are objects to be possessed by men, and that’s something we should be over by now.

 

Amy Ashenden: What newspapers do you and your band read?

 

Benjamin: I tend to read the Guardian, which will immediately make people grumble “ugh, wishy-washy liberal politically correct do-gooder”. I do so because it provides me with more than breasts and gossip. No paper is perfect, but it’s a start.

 

Amy Ashenden: Is the campaign’s message similar to that of your music?

 

Benjamin: Not explicitly. My song writing has never been overtly political, although I always have been as an individual. I tried to keep music and politics apart because I never thought I could address a complex issue in three minutes. If I want to convince someone of a point then I’d be better off writing an essay than a melody. However, my songs are directly about my day-to-day business, which involves growing up in the Black Country, living in a working class part of the country, and having to find a place in the modern world. I realised I was writing more and more about the guy in the flat below me who would beat up his girlfriend and how I reacted to it; what it was like to go on strike and have members of the public shout abuse at you. I guess the songs have become political with a small p. They’re about how we experience political and social issues more than directly engaging with them. As pretentious as that sounds, it’s true.

 

Amy Ashenden: What are your plans for writing a song for the campaign?

 

Benjamin: I don’t plan to write one as such because, as I said, I think this is an issue that is more complex than a song could allow but I’m promoting the campaign through twitter and engaging with people about it on the band blog. I did write a song last year called Front which I hope to have on the new album. It was about a lock-up we used to share with a heavy metal band, all in their early 20s or late teens, who used to post pictures of naked girls from Front magazine on the wall until it created what we called “the wall of tits”. At first it was shocking (especially as we had two girls in the band) and then it gradually became depressing. Eventually I numbed to it and forgot it was there. I could scan my eyes over these girls who were suggestively presenting themselves to me and not even bat an eyelid. It was that moment that really made me understand what objectification is and why it becomes so dangerous: these women became nothing but dead objects without ideas or thoughts or ambitions, purely because I’d become complacent. It’s not that I had to actively think “corrrr, look at that slag”. It was the opposite. I just had to be made to think little more of them than their presence as a physical body. That’s what objectification means: the removal of subjectivity. So that’s what the song’s about, so I hope it could help explain to men why joining in such a campaign is important. That was a depressing world I inhabited for that short while.

 

Amy Ashenden: Will there be a YouTube video?

 

Benjamin: I hope so. I’m always on the lookout for artists to work with for videos, backdrops, album covers and design, so hopefully when I get the new album recorded I could make a video for it. Both bands are also interested in collaborating on art projects too, so maybe if anyone is interested we could work together to do something for the campaign- or just to push the ideas behind it further.

 

Amy Ashenden: Aside from music, and as a lecturer, what responsibility do you feel the campaign has to future newspaper readers?

 

Benjamin: The campaign has one responsibility and that is to be ethical. Aside from that, future newspaper readers have a responsibility to make their own informed choices. And let’s be honest- it’s the newspapers we want to see taking responsible: do they want to be porn mags that give the news, or do they want to be reporters of fact? The campaign has to let people know that Page 3 isn’t this innocuous bit of cheeky entertainment in a newspaper no one takes seriously. These papers have huge distributions and a wide readership. They partially (and only partially, I accept that) help to create the view of women and men that we have in our culture. The campaign needs to keep the dialogue open, ignore the trolls and not give up. That’s what it owes to the readers. The rest has to come from the readers themselves.

 

Just as an additional point, my own personal solution to this has been to say that Page 3 shouldn’t be banned as such. It can continue but it has to accept its place alongside lads mags and pornography on the top shelf. This doesn’t censor the paper at all, but tells it that if it wants to print soft pornography then it will have to be treated like soft pornography. The result would be that editors would have to make a decision about the future of their paper. From a tactical point of view, this would help us reconsider what we’re reading. Newspapers would probably realise that fewer people would be willing to casually take a paper from next to Penthouse and then leave it in plain sight of their children. It would also make people think “how much can a porn magazine tell me about the world?” and maybe get a real paper. The logistics would also play a role: you can’t fit newspapers onto the top shelf of a news stand without them falling off because they don’t have a hard spine, and there isn’t enough room for the sheer volume they’d usually sell. Papers would have to remove the breasts in order to get the sales back up. None of this is unfair- it’s a genuine choice- do you want to sell porn or papers?

To read the full article on the No More Page 3 campaign, click here, or see: http://amyashenden.wordpress.com/

Cover a month challenge: September- “Shatner” by The Wedding Present.

Have you heard the Wedding Present? They’re really good! Click on the picture to jump to our cover.

At some point during every awkward teenage indie boy’s life he has to accept that Morrissey isn’t the lyrical be-all-and-end-all.  This point is probably the first time you listen to the Smiths after you’ve had sex for the first time.  Until then you’ve lived with illusion that somehow you’re different to everyone else and can transcend the flesh to live in an asexual world of poetry and platonic friendships with girls where you do nothing but wander around graveyard trying to out do each others pretentiousness.  I’m not saying this isn’t important.  I still love The Smiths, but there was always more aspiration in their fan base than genuine recognition.  While it was easy to think that you were like Morrissey, you just weren’t.  You got drunk and wanked and tried to cop off with girls.  You were a teeanger but you wore a slightly baggier shirt than everyone else.  This was a true in the 90s when I was a teenager as it was then and is now.  People had to try hard to pretend they were a bedroom poet.  It’s not natural to anyone.

It’s about that time that you lose your virginity that you’re ready to make the bold step into young adulthood and start listening to The Wedding Present.  It’s too easy to compare two bands from the north who write about humdrum daily life and love- but I do so only to point out that Gedge & Co are what you should be listening to once you move out of puberty and into the politics, confusion and delight of a sexual relationship.  As I write this I’m listening to Seamonsters, their 1991 album made with Steve Albini and I’m rediscovering a plethora of classics I’d forgotten about by rotating George Best and Bizarro.  David Gedge’s lyrics are about real love affairs for better or worse.  Everything is covered: the dizzy early moments of discovery, the confusing moments of jealousy and disagreement, blind rages and pure elation, breakups, more jealousy, the unrequited (in both directions) and violence.  It’s all wrapped in a haze of slightly too much drink, a wall of rapid fire guitars, and an impassioned earnesty.  If you’re still trying to be Morrissey once you’ve entered the real world then you need to take a hard look at yourself.  Gedge is trying to tell you what’s probably happening in your life as you live it.
I first got into The Wedding Present when I was about 20.  A girlfriend had likened by old band to them, which I had no idea about.  We didn’t sound like them at all, but it gave me the inspiration to go to Swordfish Records and buy the Registry box set, which contained George Best and some other stuff.  The music was great, but the lyrics were like a kick to the nuts.  Like Aiden Moffat or Mark Eitzel, there’s a straight delivery; no metaphor or skirting around the issue.  You’re given a direct account of a situation, perhaps a conversation, and what unfolds is something more universal.  The specifics unfold the truth we’ve all experienced at some point, monadically almost.

My choice to play the whole of Shatner on mandolin (that’s 4 mandolin tracks and one vocal) is to try and capture that trademark guitar sound from the early records (if you don’t know it, go buy them).  For some reason I always think those albums would sound great on ukulele.

Anyway, as usual- enjoy. And if you’re in the band, don’t sue.  Please.

Cover-a-month challenge July: Poptones by Public Image Ltd.

For a twee indie-folk starlet, I listen to a lot of post-punk.  For me it was one of the most exciting periods of British music that I’m too young to remember (I was a baby at the time, maybe even little more than semen).  Many great bands emerged from that era: Wire, The Fall, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, Public Image Ltd, Birthday Party, OMD, The Pop Group, Joy Division/New Order,The Au Pairs, Gang of Four- the list goes on.  I don’t even class bands like Siouxie and the Banshees as a punk group as they always had a sound more akin to the bands that followed than their contemporaries (what Zizek calls “plagiarising the future”).  Either way, the energy of punk was transplanted into a new art form.  Sometimes it was genuinely experimental and deconstructive (Pop Group, Wire, XTC), other times it merged unashamedly with other musical styles (Gang of Four, Au Pairs, Orange Juice), sometimes it was just taking off from where punk ended (The Cure, Joy Division) but it always ended up somewhere good.

I fell in love with post-punk when I was in college and I was introduced to a whole bunch of bands that I only remembered from dire late 80s output, only to discover that the indie snob mantra of “I prefer the early stuff” is there for a reason.  Even Simple Minds released four or five excellent albums in the early days before they turned into stadium sized poodle rockers.  U2 had a couple of good tunes back in the day, and I’ve already explained my feelings about OMD on a number of blog posts.  (NB. The Police have always been shit, so don’t bring them up).  Public Image Ltd were someone I came to a little later, perhaps in my very early 20s and regretted not listening sooner.  My playing changed immediately.  I was playing bass in a band at the time and I suddenly felt a need to create either grooves in the background that underpinned everything or something fragmented and syncopated that disjointed and jarred what was going above (if anyone was a 35 Seconds fan, think of the bass line to Grown Ups as an example).  It’s rare that a band has such an impact upon me so quickly.

Pil always hover in the background for me.  I go through phases of voraciously devouring as much of their stuff as I can fit into a day before purging myself and listening to something else for a few months or even years.  Most recently I’ve been going back to Metal Box/Second Edition.  I was on my way to a gig last week (more on that soon) and stuck the album on in the car.  I’d forgotten how intense it is in places, how utterly creepy it is in others and how much I loved every moment of it.  OK, Albatross goes on a bit long, but the rest of the album is near perfect.  Any album that contains Death Disco, Poptones, Careering and Chant has to be up there in the list of greats.  

I chose Poptones to cover because it’s the most coverable: identifiable bass hook, spiralling guitar line, almost a vocal melody in there somewhere.  It also gave me the challenge of figuring out how to record it.  I learned all the parts on the right instruments and then sacked them off in favour of a casio keyboard I have plugged into my effects pedals.  What I love about the song is the sheer eeriness of it.  The dub bass line carries these dark vocal turns and sinister music box guitars, which all tell the story of a kidnap (I know this because of the inlay to Plastic Box).  I guess I wanted to emphasise the creepiness rather than move away from it (which helped with my terrible mixing as I’m still no expert when it comes to working my recorder).  The bass line was split up over the organ sounds and the guitar was turned into the twinkly notes stuck over the top of the distorted rhythm setting (aptly called “pops”).  

Doing the vocals was the worst bit.  There was no point in out-lydoning Lydon by doing his machine gun rattle and squeal.  Instead I tried to sing it as a monotonous “melody” with deliberately off key harmonies.  I wanted to give the impression that a bit of tweaking would make them nice and complimentary but everything was just out of sorts.  The story of the song contains a haunting detail: the girl locked in the boot of the car was able to identify her kidnappers by a strange sounding tape that they were listening to while she was being kidnapped.  I guess I wanted to capture that: pop music, pop melody, but disturbingly distorted.  Rather than making it noisy or violent, I wanted it to be slightly off in places.  Odd bits that become disjointed and slip out of place; harmonies that don’t quite blend so they create a painful discord after they pass through a possible moment of congruence.  (I do think about this shit, you know).

The original itself is something you should track down.  The Peel session of it is stunningly good, and the album version is awesome too.  My version doesn’t come close to being as good, but it’s my nod to Pil, to post-punk and all who sail in her.

Blog: Generations (and why punk is probably dead).

Back whenCome On Die Youngcame out, there was a big thing in the NME about how Mogwai claimed that they were punk rock.  The band even called one of the tracks on the album “Punk Rock” and used a sample of Iggy Pop talking about what punk is/was over the top of it.  Ironically, Iggy Pop is now the spokesperson for an insurance company and thus kind of undermines the original point being made, but I will continue anyway.  Their point was that punk was always about attitude and not music, therefore they are the most punk rock band around despite not playing punk at all.  I think there’s a fair point there.  There was an element of punk in the acid house scene, in the grunge movement in America, in plenty of metal bands and so on.  The middle finger that Mogwai were raising to the dominant culture at the time (the fucking awful Britpop scene) was one of true rebellion.  Why not play a 20 minute instrumental of white noise?  Why not make most of your music instrumental?  Why not play incredibly quietly or incredibly loud regardless of what your audience wants to hear?  There was a wonderful contempt to it all that hadn’t been around for a while.

Picture life in 90s Britain.  It’s hard because there’s really nothing to say.  It’s a true lost generation here because it’s an easy period to forget when you’re thinking about culture.  In Britain, everything turned into one continual backslap: we had New British Artists who spent their time writing names of people who’d poo-fingered them in a Shoreditch public loo on the back of a bus ticket.  We had a bowel opening of indie bands who I now believe were “alright at the time” because we had nothing else, all of whom either celebrated their Englishness, Welshness or Scottishness (the Irish didn’t really get a look in during this period).  Generally, Britpop was about being English or about asserting your Welshness/Scottishness in response to that, but in a non-aggressive and delightfully competitive way.  TV drama had a renaissance but only if you liked seeing people moping around council houses and complaining about planning permission. 

During this period I was going through high school.  There was nothing to be angry about up until I was at uni and Blair took us into Iraq and Afghanistan, but even then the scary days of the Tories were long behind us.  I went to one of the worst schools in the area (now demolished), but made a smooth transition from school to college and into university with minimal debt.  A lot of kids I went to school with ended up in work.  Unemployment wasn’t a big issue really.  Any caught shouting “no future” would just come across as pig headed.  They’d obviously chosen not to have a future.  I wouldn’t say that this was actually the case, but it was the feeling of the time.  An awfully inappropriate blitz spirit had appeared out of nowhere, largely prompted by the fact that American music had been superior to British output for about 5 years and we’d started to need something genuinely UK rather than USA.  Everyone liked Nirvana and no one liked Boo Radleys. 

Listening back to the records of that era, it’s hard not to feel as highly alienated as a lot of us kind of felt back then.  There were distinct camps of “alternative” music back then.  There were bands who were just singing without a message- or with a message which adds up to little more than “yay”.  Oasis and Dodgy spring to mind, even though they stand at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of obviousness.  Behind the dirge of the plod-rocking Oasis stands the same message as the insipid bounce pop of Dodgy: “have it large”, a phrase only uttered by cunt spawn.  Next was the middle class home counties suburbanites who didn’t really sing about anything anyone cared about.  If Blur were in their 20s now, planning on recording The Great Escape, they’d be writing songs about the expenses scandal and the fact that a new Ipad seems to come out every five minutes.  The lyrical equivalent of a Radio 4 panel show with Andy fucking Hamilton.  Finally, there were bands who talked about a world that none of us really had access to: drugs, sex with strangers, gender bending, the red light district.  All of them had floppy partings, dyed black and finished off with a thick layer of oil.  Suede stood at the front of this and managed to sing about a world that most kids didn’t know, but probably wanted to.  The words either lacked direction, sang about stuff you didn’t care about or something completely alien.

The alternative was Pulp who actually managed to write great songs about the humdrum nature of life by referring back to their own youths.  There was a sense in which you felt at home; people singing about the fact that when they were your age they had the exact same problems.  Things just weren’t that interesting and never are except for a small cluster of people who get to appear as talking heads on nostalgia shows and retrospective documentaries on BBC4.  Even Pulp did the decent thing and left that behind after A Differnt Class.  Been there, done that, moved on to do something new. 

It’s not the music was bad.  There are still some great albums and the odd single from that era that stands out.  A few weeks back I got drunk with my girlfriend and flicked nostalgically through youtube and my record collection to find out forgetten classics or the floor fillers of the day.  As much as the songs were good, there just wasn’t anything to sing about.  Or maybe people just weren’t singing about it.  I remember our big political concerns were focussed more on other countries: what we were doing to various countries that wandered blindly out of former Soviet states, and generally mumbling about Europe.  No one was looking at social decay because the most we could say was “it’s all a bit dull, except for Suede who appear to be blowing heroin up a transexual’s arse”. 

Ironically, it was about this time that I got into punk.  As a 14 year old I was fascinated by the energy of it, the aggression, the malice, the nihilism.  I loved it despite the fact that it was alien.  It didn’t speak to me very much because I wasn’t part of a blank generation, many of us had a future (so we assumed) and the Royal family were largely seen as a benign growth rather than a malignant tumour.  What it gave me was a surrogate source of energy that was missing the music I was being forced to listen to.  Even modern punk was limp and lifeless: mostly American kids in big shorts doing ironic covers of other songs or singing about going to school and hating jocks.  Somewhere in the British punk scene was a rage that had died that I wished I understood, but that I could feed off.  It was then easy to take an extra step into post-punk and start exploring a whole new world of exciting sounds I’d not come across before. 

What I really enjoyed was the attitude that I (thought I) understood to be at the heart of it all: there are no rules.  It actually meant that I could be myself, and quite genuinely.  As a teenager I didn’t have any particular style or image.  I had a side parting, a range of band T-shirts and some army boots.  I wore those every day and never felt compelled to do anything different.  I couldn’t grasp how clothes could express anything or how image somehow said who you were.  Whenever I saw a kid with green hair who said that it was “who they were”, I never got it.  You either have to be intensely shallow to be able to express yourself via shoes, or you have seriously compromise who you are in order to fit into a predetermined fashion or set of items available.  Just because you got the shirt from an underground market in Camden it doesn’t mean that it’s any less mass produced.  All of sudden, I didn’t have to worry about that.  If someone said “You don’t look very punk” I could reply “do I have to?  Your concern isn’t very punk”. 

But then no one agreed with me.  My biggest problem throughout my youth and then on into my 20s was that at a first glance I’m nothing but an incredibly boring man.  In my teens I’d hang around with friends-of-friends who’d turn their noses up at me because I didn’t dye my hair, have piercings or wear make-up.  The amount of times I had to introduce myself to some of these people escapes me, even though I’d meet them week after week in some park or on some street corner.  I didn’t fully get them either: we were all from the same town, did the same things, went the same places, but they were convinced that the world was there to destroy.  They’d smash phoneboxes or spray paint walls, and I never understood why.  This was our town and, as much as it was a shit hole, it hadn’t really done anything bad to us.  They’d bought into an image and taken in the rhetoric of punk from the 1970s without the social and political background.  It was cultural laziness.

It happened everywhere.  If I went to indie clubs as a student I was never really indie enough.  My hair didn’t have a floppy enough fringe, enough bits randomly shaved out of it, and I didn’t keep up with what everyone was wearing.  I didn’t feel a need to.  I thought we were part of a generation that had become post-ideological, end of history and all that shit.  We’d realised that all subculture was empty fashion and that nothing much really mattered.  We were just trying to enjoy ourselves in a drearily comfortable world.  But no.  A new group of friends were around to ignore me or forget who I was, except this time they liked Urusei Yatsura.

Punk has to be dropped.  It can’t be a point of reference because it is either empty sloganeering or lazy cultural pillaging.  Punk is not an attitude that came out of nowhere as such; nihilism is as old as the hills, rebellion is a historical mainstay, youthful rebellion is now part of the furniture.  What itwaswas something central to a time and place that we can refer to, think about and be influenced by (and enjoy, god damn it) without wishing to repeat it or, god forbid, attempting to.  The current generation of kids are facing a time of mass unemployment, dwindling prospects and a return of the “no future” slogan.  We’re all facing unemployment and destitution.  The anger we lost is coming back, but it won’t come back as punk because punk was then and this is no.  The whole global situtation is different, Britiain is different (ironically as a result of punk as much as anything else.  The establishment today were there in 77).  I’m excited to see what they come up with, if they can defeat the apathy created by my generation.

That’s the sad fact.  My generation created apathy as part of a youth movement.  The punk’s aggression and the 80s indie scenes poetic nihilism, coupled with grunge’s existential angst, led to something more positive: a celebration of us.  But this celebration ended in nothingness.  The party ended and there was nothing around to think about, to rage against or even to find interesting.  There was no despair, there was just no point in getting your hopes up.  There was no resentment, just the slight annoyance of missing the last bus to Shoreditch (or wherever the indie-schmindie set were headed tonight).  Nowadays we judge individual generations more than ever before.  It seems like the 20th century was easy to carve up into 10 year chunks- not just because of the events within it.  Of course, technological progress and rapid social change were factors, but I also think the self-referential attitude of sociology, psychology, philosophy and history meant that these subjects became aware of what they were and thus started to theorise more intensely, constantly trying to grasp at what it is that defines each and every thing that occurs.  The result is a century that starts in 1914 and tries to capture what each generation is from then on; post-1918, between wars, WWII, babby boomers, rock and roll, hippies, punks, Thatcher’s lost generation, acid house….and then what?  Us.  Nothing really.  15 years of pretty much nothing.  In a century that defines you by your generation, it’s hard not to feel alienated, lost and bitter when your own was so non-descript; when there is no name for what you were.  A blank comes up.  There’s nothing to say, like a missing chapter from a book that doesn’t really need to be there.

And all that’s left behind for people to remember you by is the first Marion album.