THREE LEAVES LEFT
1 December 2006

It’s December, so in my book it is winter, but with all this climate change going on it’s warm enough for me to be back out on the ledge. No ginger tom, but the sycamore is still tall and proud, but now it is standing naked and bare. Pot of tea at side, notebook on lap, pencil in hand and I’m off.

Last week in Huddersfield went almost well. Blake’s dark satanic mills looked all warm and golden in their spruced-up and gentrified retirement. The curry house in Market Street was a delight. But there were downsides – they were mainly in my head – about the direction this book is going and what it is about and what should be the title.

On the opening page I proclaimed it to be a book about The17 and as such I imagined it would be called The17 or maybe just 17. But now I’ve got it in my head that this should be a book about the future of music. A book about The17 seems to limit its vision, as though The17 is just my own personal way of exploring where we are at with music or even just where I am at with music. Much of the time I think The17 is irrelevant. I feel more like a John the Baptist – that my role in all of this is to be a signpost. I’m here to signal some great changes in the way we will be thinking about, making and consuming music over the next few decades, but not the one to deliver the new music. If I can speed the process up, I will have done my job.

At the beginning of the 20th century Picasso and Braque took apart all the accepted ways that Western artists saw and depicted the world. During the previous century, the 19th, Western painters of whatever discipline were trying to depict the world they saw (or imagined they saw) on the two-dimensional plane. Photography had been invented almost 70 years before Picasso and Braque met each other and hatched their plans and photography, like recording technology, was able to document a two-dimensional representation of reality. In some ways the invention and rapid spread of photography made much of the work of the artist redundant and in many ways gave them freedom. But for those 70 years artists still carried on using their canvases to depict faithfully a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional plane. In 1907 Picasso and Braque changed all that with the paintings they started to make and it was not long before those who decide these things decided that what Picasso and Braque had been up to would forever more be known as Cubism. They broke through an accepted way of seeing, if not the world, paintings. These paintings were ugly, not aesthetically pleasing, but they were a starting point for us Westerners to see painting and the visual arts in a hugely different way.

Their Cubist paintings made so much else possible.

No analogy is perfect and the one that I was almost trying to make about the role of photography and that of recording technology hardly works at all. But the point I want to hammer home yet again is that the invention, rise, spread and proliferation of recording technology has completely and utterly held in a vice-like grip the thinking about, making and consumption of music, all music from whatever part of the world. Much in the same way that photography held the way we thought we saw the world in a vice-like grip.

We are now at a stage when we need to break free of the constraints that recording technology has placed on music. Picasso and Braque started that process for the visual arts in 1907. Now, by no stretch of the imagination am I trying to equate myself with Picasso, who was the great genius of 20th-century Western art. He was only 26 in 1907. I will be turning 54 in 2007. I have no great vision, let alone the talent … all I am saying is that I seem to have accidentally stumbled through a door where I am now viewing the possibilities of music-making in a completely different way.

Picasso may have stumbled through an equivalent door in 1907 but he had the youth, vigour, vision, drive and genius to make great art out of what he saw. I don’t have that. There may be a 26-year-old young man or woman somewhere in the world right now who has stumbled through a similar door and who has the genius that it takes to make great music in ways we are yet to hear.

I know that what I have written in the past 20 minutes or so can be read as ultimate pretention, my head firmly up my own arse, but it’s what I think. Time to put down the pencil and pour another mug of tea from the pot.

As I do so, I notice the tree is not quite bare. There are three leaves left. Two less than Nick Drake had.