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A SPRAWLING KIND OF THING10 March 2006 A pleasant night slumbering in my cabin bunk has been had. Breakfast is done, the North Sea is still looking grey and there are still some hours before docking at Gothenburg. Those might have been the sounds that were going on in the cab but they were not the ones going on in my head. What was going on in my head was ... it took some time before I could work out what it was that was going on in my head. And even when I had worked it out it took some time to tell anybody else about it. It was a massive primeval choral masterpiece, sung by a massive primeval male voice choir. Now I have to call a halt to this text about the film and soundtrack here, go back a few years and start a new line of thought which, in time, will get back to the problem with the film soundtrack. After I had stopped being involved with the production of music back in 1992 I was asked on numerous occasions whether I missed making music and whether I’d be doing some more music at some time. The answer to both these questions was an emphatic ‘No’. But after a while I realised I was lying, or at least sort of lying. For many years, decades in fact, I have been drawn to choral music. Any sort, from anywhere in the world, from Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion to those women in Bulgaria, from some tribes people in New Guinea to the Red Army Choir. Before my voice broke I was in the school and church choirs, but what teenage lad wants to sing in a choir? As an adult it never crossed my mind to go back to it. Over the years I would hear bits of choral music and find myself instinctively drawn to it. It touched me in ways that the whole spectrum of pop music could never do. But it never entered my head to buy a record or CD of choral music. After I stopped being involved in music in 1992 the choral thing began to feature more and more in my thinking about music. I started to have fantasies about making choral music. It captured something of the soul of mankind, not just an individual man’s or woman’s. It involved no one ego, no me, me, me but something of the collective spirit. The thing was, I didn’t have a clue about how to go about doing this. I also knew it was typical of somebody who’d had a bit of pop success to think they can do whatever takes their fancy, become a racing car driver, compose symphonies, edit newspapers, save the world. Anything. I dealt with this by not letting on to anybody about my choral fantasies and telling myself that I would not attempt to do any of it until I was over 60. I hoped that at 60 I would be wise enough to know better or if not, everyone would have forgotten I had once been involved with pop music. This thinking but doing nothing about choral music ran in parallel with my frustrations with all recorded music. Neither thought process troubled the other much. It was in 2004, when it was the letter P that had come out of the bag, and I was listening to lots of Charlie Parker, Portishead and The Proclaimers, that I discovered the Estonian composer Avro Pärt. I fell in love with what he did, especially his choral stuff. Pärt is very much a living composer, had gone through the whole complex avant-garde thing in his younger years. Since the 1970s he has been making a far more stripped-back, less complex, choral music with a serious spiritual vibe to it. I loved it. Avro Pärt’s music in some way gave me confidence about doing choral music, or at least fed my fantasies about doing it. When I started playing guitar at 15 and could only play a couple of chords I started to have my first fantasy band. Maybe if I had had mates who played guitars and drums and stuff I could have formed a band with them but I didn’t so I had to make do with fantasy bands. I would make up names for these bands, sketch out logos for them, design album covers, conduct imaginary interviews with Rolling Stone magazine, write songs, even write out set lists and imagine what our concerts would be like. I would usually have two or three of these fantasy bands going on at the same time and they could be vastly different in sound and style. There could be one like The Incredible String Band, and another heavier and louder than Cream live at the Royal Albert Hall. The thing is, I carried on having these fantasy bands even once I was in real bands. We would be having number ones all over the world but when I went to bed at night I would enter into the world of fantasy bands. They were always so much better than the real one I was either in or working with. By the time I was in my 40s I seemed to have put fantasy bands behind me. I had finally become a proper man. But then by the late 90s I had started to have a fantasy choir that would perform choral music that I might one day compose. Right from its inception the choir in my head had a name: The17. I never questioned why it was called The17. It wasn’t until I started going public about this and people started to ask me what the significance was of it being called The17 that I felt the need to come up with a reason. When I was about 11 I heard that song on the radio, the one that has the line ‘She was just 17, you know what I mean’ I stood there looking at the radio thinking, ‘I don’t know what you mean? What do you mean?’ And I remember years later I knew exactly what he meant. By that time I had started to have this mental tick about the number 17. Nothing to do with numerology or anything superstitious, but any time I heard the number 17 used in a song lyric it would register in my brain and I would think, there’s another one. More than often I would hear the lyric wrong and imagine the number 17 was being sung and on a second hearing I would realise it was not. Then there is the age of 17. 16 is skitty and frivolous. All ‘sweet little sixteen’ sexy but not downright dirty. Can stay out late but not all night. Has no hidden depth. 18 is dull, heavy with the dawning of adult responsibilities. Old enough to vote. Old enough to join the army and kill people. Old enough to have a mortgage. Old enough to have a boring job for life. But 17 is this dark and mysterious age in-between. Well it was for me. An age when – if you are a lad anyway – you can get into the most dark and dreary music that is available for your generation. For me it was Van Der Graf Generator. For you it might have been Killing Joke, Sisters Of Mercy, Nirvana, Metallica, The Smiths, Korn or even some sort of weird minimal death techno from the Ukraine. But there may be another reason. There is a choir from Oxford, England. This choir specialises in singing what is now called early music, this being music from the 18th century or before. I’m a big fan of this choir. They are called The Sixteen. Maybe I was just subconsciously wanting to be like The Sixteen but trying to go one better. I mentioned above how I had discovered the work of Avro Part, I was not wanting to mimic what he had done. As much as I loved what Part did, he was from the classical tradition, where it was all still about perfect events, everything being meticulously played and sung. I didn’t want any of that in The17. If I ever tried to nail the sound that The17 made in my imagination, it was a sprawling kind of thing. There were big loud bits and long soft quiet bits. And there didn’t seem to be any words, or at least not words that I could hear. No nice melodies or fancy chords and definitely no instruments. There was something uncontrollable about it. With the music of The17 nothing would ever get resolved. There’d be lots of over tones and strange harmonics at times almost bordering on the out of tune. They would make a sound that came right from the heart of the collective human sub-consciousness. I got that pretentious but I didn’t care. So, back to the film of the Land Rover on the M62 and its soundtrack and what to do. What I heard when I was driving the Land Rover alone without the radio on was The17. I still do. They are singing along with the rumble of the engine, the rattle of the loose bits and the whistle of the wind through the wing mirrors. I wanted The17 to do the film soundtrack but how could I get this fantasy choir into a recording studio? And even if I dragged them out of my imagination into the recording booth what would be on the music sheets for them to sing? The gap seemed too wide. I phoned Kev Reverb in Leicester. If in doubt, phone Kev. Not that he has answers but phoning Kev is a good place to start. Kev Reverb has a small studio called Memphis in Leicester, just by the train station. It is a great place to try things out and Reverb is a good man to try things out with. We went and recorded the physical sounds inside the cab of the Land Rover as I drove it from Hull to Liverpool again. This time the radio was left off and there was no me singing along to anything, not even any talking, just 2 hours and 19 minutes of throbbing engine, rattling bits, wind through the wing mirror and the whoosh of the other motorway traffic. Kev had a couple of plate microphones for the job. Back in the studio I added a basic keyboard part to the 2 hours 19 minutes of the recording. This keyboard was just a drone, roughly in pitch with the engine. Compromises this early on in the game? I know, I know. It would be there as a guide for The17, whoever they may be, to pitch to. Then Kev Reverb, John Hirst, Rob Vom and myself got around a microphone in the booth. In our headphones we could hear the Land Rover and the keyboard. We started and it came without thinking. The sound of The17 started pouring out of our mouths as if it had been there all along waiting for the moment it could be released. We couldn’t do the whole 2 hours and 19 minutes in one take; we needed a few breaks for liquid refreshment, fag breaks and trips to the bog. What we did was to be a rough guide for whoever these 17 members of The17 might be. Things were getting real. I phoned the choirmaster for Leicester Cathedral, told him I was a film maker and that we were putting the soundtrack for a movie together in Leicester and would his choir be up for some session work? He didn’t sound too impressed, instead he started asking questions about score sheets and parts and I told him it didn’t work like that and that if his lads came down the studio of an evening, we could work things out. He said that his choir was very busy with their commitments at the cathedral but he would give it some thought and call back to let me know. I never heard from him again. I felt defeated, four weeks passed, I was for jacking it in, then Kev Reverb called. He was all excited. It seemed he had been talking about this film soundtrack thing and The17 at some of the recording sessions he had been doing with local bands, in his studio. That most of these bands had wanted to hear what it sounded like, and when Kev played them a bit they had wanted to get involved and add their voices to the sound track. Bit by bit over the month since we had done the original guide, Kev had built up 17 voices doing it over the whole 2 hours 19 minutes. According to Kev, it was sounding brilliant and he wanted us all to get together, all 17 of us, and do it all the way through in one take. A couple of weeks later we did, 17 of us, all these blokes from various Leicester bands and myself. We had a couple of beers and bottles of Jacob’s Creek handed around while we were at this epic. The lights were down; almost pitch black except for the orange glow of the monitor lights. It was fantastic. One of the best nights I have ever had. The17 sounded better in reality than in any of my fantasies. The music was dark and foreboding, at times almost frightening, not in a Wagnerian camp sort of way, something far more primeval than Wagner could ever have dreamed of. It would have put the shits up the Valkyrie. It was as if we had automatically tuned into the deepest part of our being and it was more male than the roar of a football crowd. This was the music that I had longed to hear. The drive down the M1 that night heading for home from was one of joy. I even picked up a further three points for speeding which took my total to over 12 for which I then got a six month ban. I lay in bed that night making plans for what a performance by The17 would be like; what the choir members should wear, what sort of places we would play. By the next morning I had changed my mind about some things. For a start I didn’t want to hear the recording we had made. However good it sounded, it could never compete with what I had experienced the previous evening. The whole notion of this being a soundtrack to a film got ditched. As it happens the film has never been finished. Ever since, it has seemed irrelevant compared to the sound of The17. Another thing that had changed was who made up The17. The night before, on my drive down the motorway I had imagined The17 to be made up of the 17 of us in Leicester dressed up in black military fatigues, blasting out what we had been doing through a massive PA, loads of bottom end, to wildly ecstatic audiences around the globe. Pissing all over Finland’s Shouting Men, that Polyphonic Spree thing and any other vocal ensemble that might exist in the modern world. Who I now decided The17 should be is any 17 people who wanted to come together and perform. The17 would be an idea not a marketable brand made up of a stable line-up of blokes. Anybody around the globe could use the idea of The17 and do it. Then I wrote down the following instructions that could be performed by any of these would-be 17s. Choose a journey. After this was written I decided it was a musical score. And as a score, it should be published in the same way as the Penkiln Burn posters that I do, are published. It was then that I wrote those words that you may have read earlier. The17 is a choir. So although The17 was becoming a reality, the fantasy version of it was getting bigger than ever. Once all previous forms of music and music making had been dispensed with, The17 would be there to start music again all fresh and pure and unsullied, like Pol Pot’s new Cambodia was going to be. When Pol Pot was doing his worst in Cambodia in the 1970s I was horrified but fascinated by his whole approach. In one sense he was the worst dictator that had ever existed but there was something shockingly refreshing about his approach in attempting to destroy all culture and start again. Of course it was easy for me to indulge in these thoughts on the other side of the world in a society where every form of safety net exists for me, should I ever decide to fall. A few weeks after the recording in Leicester, some time in October 2004, I had an exhibition and series of performance lectures at a gallery in North London. It was to be the How To Be An Artist show, the one that the film of the Land Rover was to be part of. Instead of showing the film I thought The17 should give a performance at the gallery during one of my talks. The members of this 17 were people who responded to an article in a local paper where I had invited men with voices who wanted to use them in some sort of primitive music-making to get in touch. The first 17 blokes to respond were chosen to be the next incarnation of The17. Kev Reverb came down and recorded another journey in the Land Rover. This one was only 11 minutes long, from one bit of north London to where the exhibition was in the Artsdepot, North Finchley. We did one rehearsal, 17 men who had never met each other. All sorts, City slickers, dolees, doctors, road diggers. The lot. And it worked, they all got it. I was convinced I was on to a winner and that The17 being any 17 men willing to sing and follow the score would work. Some of these men had been members of the local choral societies, some singers in local bands; others were just up for having a go. As for it being men, in my head when I’m driving the Land Rover, the choir I hear is all male voices. Maybe when you are driving, you hear a different blend of voices singing to the sound of the engine and the wind in your wing mirror. If so, you interpret the score in any way that rings true to you. A week or so later we did it for real in front of the audience at one of the How To Be An Artist things, but this time it definitely didn’t work. It was something else altogether. Having an audience changed the dynamics completely. It changed from being a purely communal thing where the joy was in opening our mouths and bringing forth sound to becoming some form of entertainment where audience satisfaction has to be taken into consideration. I was standing there with my mouth open making this noise, looking at members of the audience in front of me, and in my head all I’m thinking is ‘What the fuck must they be thinking of this racket?’ On the drive home that night I got pulled over by the police for having a faulty backlight. They then arrested me for driving while banned. The rest of the night was spent in the cells at Hemel Hempstead police station. While lying on the bench in the cell I came to the firm decision that not only should The17 never be recorded for posterity, have no fixed line-up, but that also The17 should never do any kind of a performance for any kind of audience. For The17 to have any relevance and potency it should stand outside of all known recorded music and it should never be a mere entertainment for others to gawp at. Maybe The17 was evolving into something I could use to explore some of my frustrations with music as a whole. Maybe even the systems I had evolved for listening to music, even getting rid of your favourite piece of music in the world could all be part of this same thing. They could exist as scores to be performed by would-be members of The17 anywhere. The job of The17 was not to make great music or even totally original music but to make music as if no other music had ever existed before. An impossibility maybe. But to make music that was not about selling petty rebellion, teenage aspirations to cool, the confessional outpourings of the sensitive, or even the one-time contender still desperately trying to cut it, seemed like a very exciting thing to me. That this music could in some way exist so that other music could follow it in directions as yet unknown would be the ultimate achievement. I was let out at dawn. The next week I went to court. My brief warned me I could get a six-month jail sentence for driving while on a ban so I went to court prepared. In my bag I had a toothbrush, a pair of pyjamas and a copy of Moby Dick. I got let off with 60 hours’ community service. We moved house, Christmas came and went. Community service was digging ditches on the Norfolk Broads. It was a bunch of drug dealers, muggers, housebreakers and repeat-offending petty criminals and me. Not quite working on a chain gang like Cool Hand Luke but pretty cool anyway as it was January and the snow fell and the wind blew. The thing is though, I loved it. Good honest hard work. Digging ditches is just what you need to get you fit and your head clear for some serious thinking. So I thought all these thoughts as I swung my pickaxe. Ideas started to develop about the nature of music; about where it’s at and where it’s going. I revelled in the romanticism of it all like I was some Delta bluesman back in the 1920s working on Parchment Farm inventing the blues or something. On scraps of paper I would scribble ideas for other scores I wanted to do. I know that must sound like some desperate attempt at myth building but hey, these are the facts. Me and Robert Johnson. Come the middle of February my community service was done. The plan was to turn all those thoughts I had been having into a book along with the 17 scores I had brewing for The17 to perform. Gwilly Edmondes, who is a lecturer in composition for MA students at Newcastle University, had got wind of what I was up to. I had met Gwilly once before when I was doing How To Be An Artist at Leeds City Art Gallery. He wanted me to come up and work with his students in Newcastle to explore some of this 17 stuff. From there the idea of it working as a public exhibition at the Newcastle University’s art gallery, The Hatton, was hatched. I would be able to use the exhibition space as a workshop. Members of the public could come along and take part. Through the rest of February and March I was spending every weekday in Norwich City Library. Norwich was where we had moved to as a family. The pencil scrawled thousands of words across blank pages. The plan was that I write half a book, then do The17 in Newcastle and then write the other half. Then personal shit hit a fan of my own making when my partner and mother of my three youngest children decided it was over and I felt like Roy Orbison sang those songs for me alone. Devastated and heartbroken, my concerns about where we are with music dwindled to nothing compared to the mountain of self-pity I was lumbering around with. The writing ground to a halt as did nearly everything else. The Newcastle thing had to be postponed. Months passed, life goes on, my concerns about music started to gather force again. An email arrived from a place called Fylkingen in Stockholm. The people there had also got wind of what I was doing. They wanted to invite me over to do The17. I did some Google research and learnt that Fylkingen was a music society that had been going since 1933. Its reason for existing is to promote what we once might have called avant-garde music, but we are now happier to call new music. It seemed all the big names, including Stockhausen and Cage, had done time there. I was flattered by the invite, if Fylkingen was good enough for them; it was good enough for The17. The scores started to take shape, constantly being reworked, some getting dropped to be replaced by others. The cut-off point was last week when all 17 had to be printed and sent off to the framers as did the two NOTICEposters that almost act as manifestos for the whole thing. I got the two text paintings done, or redone; as with most of the text paintings I do they get painted and repainted numerous times. With some research done by my colleague, John Hirst, some recording hardware was bought as well as software, microphones, stands, a small PA, cables, bits and bobs. After the DRIVE score was fully realised, the next to come was the one that I wanted to do in the Curfew Tower in Cushendall, Northern Ireland. If you want to know what and why the Curfew Tower is and what it is to me, you can read about it elsewhere. All you need to know for the purpose of this text is that it has five floors, a room on each floor. That it is built at the crossroads of the small but beautifully formed village of Cushendall. That the pentatonic scale has five notes in it and that the pentatonic scale is used in all ancient Celtic and Oriental music. It is the natural scale for pathos and longing. The plan is to do this score at the Cushendall festival this year (2006) These are the words for this score as they are at the moment. They will probably evolve with time: AGE On the first floor gather 17 people aged between 45 and 69. On the second floor gather 17 people aged between 21 and 44. On the third floor gather 17 people aged between 13 and 20. On the fourth floor gather 17 people aged 12 and under. Gather the above 85 members of The17 in one place. Delete all recordings. It was when I was writing this score that I had to start confronting the major flaws in my whole plan. There’s me wanting a year zero for music, a chance to wipe the slate clean and start again and here I was writing scores that could be only acted upon by somebody who already had a fundamental knowledge of music and worse still, used things like scales that had evolved over thousands of years. I decided to try and ignore these contradictions and just get on with the job in hand. I’m sure Pol Pot had many flaws in his year zero plan for Cambodia. The other scores followed. Apart from the ones based on the actions that I had already taken regarding my enforced listening habits they are all pretty theoretical and I am sure that once I put them into practice they will evolve, change or even be dumped, to be replaced by other one that may work. The ones done in a prison, up a mountain, to celebrate a new born baby, a public declaration of love, a life completed were all more about the concept than what they might sound like. All forced to fit the theory. It won’t be until they have been performed for real that they will really begin to take shape. This is not an apology for their inclusion, just a statement of fact It’s time to stop writing and go up on deck to stare at the North Sea. Inspiration from the elements and all that. |