‘SO HAVE YOU BEEN INFLUENCED BY STOCKHAUSEN?’

2 July 2006

This was going to be the story that I had written in my head in bed on the first morning in Moscow but on sitting down to write on a Sunday morning in a Moscow café, a themed Spanish tapas bar one, one with MTV Base playing all this aspirational American r&b pumping out (the VJ is an English Afro-Caribbean) I realised that there was another story that I had to tell first.

A few weeks back an email arrived. It was from a Robert Barry, a student at Goldsmith’s College in London. Goldsmith’s is considered a bit of a prestigious college for the arts in the UK. This student was doing an MA in music philosophy or something. He had stumbled upon the The17 thing that I was doing and had some questions to ask me for his dissertation. His questions had barbs, or I perceived them to have barbs. His questions made me feel defensive. He was asking me about my influences and there was a list of names, most of whom I had never heard of. One was the now-ubiquitous Cornelius Cardew. What if all the other people he was name-checking had been doing the same thing as I had but 40 odd years earlier? I put off responding to the email. Then I did. After a couple more emails between us we agreed to meet and for me to try and answer some of his questions. We met last week. I told him the story so far. A condensed version of what you have read in this book so far. My defensive guard lowered. I didn’t feel I was being attacked for being a Johnny-come-lately chancer jumping on a new-music train that had come and gone decades ago.

Then he asked me, ‘So do you think you have been influenced by Stockhausen?’ I know very little about Stockhausen other than he is German, still alive and in the 1950s and 1960s has developed electronic contemporary classical music and without him the whole kraut rock thing would never have happened in the 1970s. Nothing that I understood Stockhausen to be about has had any direct influence on what I am trying to do now in any way. Then I remembered a number of consecutive incidents that I told this Robert Barry. What I told him sort of goes like this, with a couple of bits added that I forgot to tell him.

Corby is twinned with a German town called Velbert. Velbert is an industrial town in the Ruhr Valley, of a similar size to Corby. Our school was doing an exchange programme with pupils from a school in Velbert. Early summer 1967 this German lad came to stay with us. His name was Hans. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles had just come out. It was the first record released by The Beatles since ‘Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever’ in March. I bought it on the day of release. On first play I thought it was shit. It opened no doors in my head in the way that ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ had done. I persisted and within a week grew to love it, especially ‘Day In A Life’. This was obviously years before I realised that Sergeant Pepper was the worst thing that happened to music in the 20th century. Anyway, Hans came to stay. He was a couple of years older than me, was arrogant and wore a blonde wig. The wig was never mentioned.

Hans fell in love with Sergeant Pepper. He played it over and over again.
On the morning that he was leaving to go back to Krautland my mother suggested that I give him my copy of Sergeant Pepper. I didn’t like her idea. Then she said that if I gave it to him, she would buy me the next LP to be released by The Beatles.

I had a long wait by the standards of the day. The next one didn’t come out until near the end of November the following year (1968). It was the white one. My mother felt cheated on the deal as it was a double album and cost twice as much as Sergeant Pepper had. It too was shit on the first hearing. On repeated listening some of the tracks grew on me, but that ‘Revolution Number 9’ stayed in my ears as completely rubbish. It wasn’t even sodding music, just a load of noise and people talking, but over the years what that track represented has grown in my head and taken on significance. In a later chapter in this book I will want to go back to The Beatles but for now I want to go back to Corby being twinned with Velbert.

In the summer of 1968, a bunch of us from my school went over to spend a week in Velbert, to do the return visit. For some reason I didn’t to spend the time staying at Hans’ house, I was put with another lad’s family. He was the same age as me and we got on fine. But one evening I was asked over to Hans’ for supper. His folks seemed rich by our standards, with a large detached house in a wooded garden. In the house there was a large living room. In that living room stood a massive pair of cabinet speakers.
‘What are those?’
‘Stereo speakers.’
You have to imagine his German accent. Up until then I had never heard stereo. I sort of knew what it was in theory but I didn’t know anybody who had stereo.
‘Oh. They are big.’
‘Yes. My father invented stereo. He made these speakers.’
Now I don’t know if his father invented stereo or not but that’s what he told me.
‘Oh, that’s good.’
‘You like electronic music?’
‘I don’t know what electronic music is.’
‘You never heard of Stockhausen? He is the best.’
‘But I thought you thought The Beatles were the best.’
‘No. The Beatles are pop rubbish. Stockhausen is the best.’
I was beginning to resent the fact that my mother had pushed me into giving him my copy of Sergeant Pepper and as you will have read already in the summer of 1968 The Beatles were as yet to have a new LP. I felt like I was down on the deal.
‘Oh. So what does Stockhausen sound like?’
‘You listen. It will blow your mind.’
He put on the record. Nothing could have prepared me for the swirling monstrous unfathomable noise that came from this pair of huge speaker cabinets. My mind wasn’t blown but my eardrums almost were. He played it for about ten minutes.
‘It’s great, yes?’
I didn’t know what to say. I had never heard anything like it before. Didn’t know if I wanted to again.
Then he asked, ‘Do you like Little Richard?’
‘I don’t know. Does he make electronic music as well?’
‘No, don’t be stupid. Little Richard is a rock ‘n’ roller. Here, look at this.’
He hands me an LP. On the cover was a close-up portrait of a strange-looking black man with makeup on and a ludicrous bouffant hair-do. I think the title was ‘Little Richard Live in Berlin’. The subtitle was ‘All the hits by the most beautiful man in show business’.
‘You stand here between the speakers and listen.’
Hans put the record on, there was some muffled crowd noise, and then, from nowhere, the loudest, craziest, darkest, all-encompassing voice I had ever heard in my life.
‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop a-wop-boom-bang’
Or something.
Hans let the rest of what I later learned was called ‘Tutti Frutti’ come to an end before he lifted the needle off.
‘What do you think? Isn’t he the best?’
I can’t recall my reply. Or what I thought. Or if what I thought could be put into words, but definitely in my head another door had been opened. Hans didn’t tell me anything more about Little Richard. It was over the next year or so that I learnt where Little Richard stood in the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll greats. Up there with Elvis, Buddy, Chuck, Fats, Eddie and Jerry Lee.

I never went and bought any Little Richard records. Maybe I instinctively knew nothing could ever touch the effect that hearing those first two opening bars of ‘Tutti Frutti’ had on me. Hans’s mother then came into the room. Supper was ready. They had a thing where we had to stick bits of meat on thin metal rods and cook them in a pot in the middle of the table. It seemed pretty crap to me that you ask somebody round for supper and then expect them to cook it for themselves.

To get back to Robert Barry, the student from Goldsmith’s – I told him about hearing Stockhausen this time in 1968, but I didn’t tell him about Little Richard or my first and only brush with fondue cooking. I told him I didn’t think Stockhausen had any direct influence on me and The17. I did acknowledge that I knew he was a huge influence on early Kraftwerk before they cut their hair and went all showroom dummies on us, and that when that happened and they became the godfathers of electro-pop they had a huge influence on me. So indirectly, yes, he had. But in that sense he had an influence on everybody who has been involved in making pop music in the last 30 years.
‘I didn’t mean an influence in that sense. I meant like this.’
He produced from his bag a small slim volume. It was a paperback, cheaply produced, badly bound and falling to bits. The cover was a dull blue with some black print. In the bottom right-hand corner of the cover in pencil was the price, 7/6d. That is seven shillings and sixpence in pre-1970s sterling. The text on the front cover read, and I know this because I wrote it down in my diary that I am now copying it from:
Stockhausen NR 26
From The Seven Days
Composed in May 1968
Universal Edition UE 14790 E
I was running late for picking up my children from school so I only had a chance for a quick flick through.

What I saw was a number of scores all written using words as opposed to being notated on staves. From this flick through I could see at a glance that they were closely related in style and attitude to what I had been attempting to do with the SCORES for The17.

That evening I went on to Google to try and track down these scores so I could read them in full, take them in and let them have their full impact on me. Although I found numerous mentions of them within biographical blurbs on Stockhausen, I didn’t find the actual SCORES.

Not mentioning the Little Richard thing to Robert Barry meant I also failed to mention something else. What I wrote about my experience of hearing Stockhausen for the first time was almost dismissive but what I did experience listening to both Little Richard and Stockhausen was nothing to do with the surface of the noise on offer or their separate and vastly different iconic statuses that I was later to learn they had. It was to do with something somewhere in the heart of the noise being made. Something beyond rhythm and words, melody or harmony. Something beyond intellectual theory or show-business craft; something I am unable to hear in the r&b tracks being pumped out of the TV on the wall in this fake Spanish tapas bar down a side street in Moscow. Why does modern r&b sound so sterile to my ears when for 30-odd years the music of black America was the music that I could always rely on to have what I needed? It is undeniably the most technically advanced pop music in the world and I understand it to be the biggest grossing, but to my ears it sounds like the most boring music to be involved with making. I know I am missing something. Even when I see Beyoncé shake her arse on her latest video, it leaves me cold. But before I get too carried away on this topic and start to give you my thoughts on the collected works of the Neptune production team I will stop and tell you that the window by my table is open and outside is a tree and this tree is full of chirping and squabbling sparrows. Contained within the sounds made by these sparrows is what I need. They have what was in both Stockhausen and Little Richard when I first heard them back in 1968. There are numerous other times when I have heard this, and yes it is what I am after in The17. And yes I do believe it is there each and every time The17 have performed the score AGE.

Certain themes in this story have been touched on before and will be revisited over the months before this book is done. But enough has been said now for me to try and start writing the story I was writing in my head in bed this morning.