Too much apple pie

Kennedy - The Wedding Present

I was wondering what song I could use as a follow-up to the post about Sick Groove, and I started thinking about other insanely repetitive songs - maybe this blog should in fact have been called Repetition, because the more I think about it, the more repetition plays an important part in a lot of my most favourite music, whether it's The Fall's three R's ("repetition, repetition, repetition"), folk songs that I call "formula" songs where the same words are repeated over and over again with minor variations, or the american Minimalist composers like Glass and Reich.

When the all-new Wedding Present played at the Birmingham Academy 2 earlier this year, David Gedge said, after playing Kennedy at breakneck speed, "I never really liked that one, actually." And I can kind of understand that. I bet he loved it after it was first recorded, but like any other artist who has a couple of "big" songs that everyone calls out for at every gig, the attraction of it must have palled pretty quickly. I can't imagine he enjoys playing Dalliance very much either.

The album Kennedy is taken from was the second full-length Weds LP, Bizarro, which was re-released a little while back in glorious remastered form. If you're reading this as someone who bought the LP version, or the original issue CD (as I did) go and buy the reissue, immediately! Like the reissues of The Fall's back catalogue that Sanctuary are putting out at the moment, the improvements in the sound clarity are immeasurable, and I'm still hearing occasional little details that I've never heard before, even after 13 years of owning the album.

Conventional wisdom says that Bizarro was the swansong of The Wedding Present Phase One in many ways, and that only after that LP would the band achieve their "mature" sound; certainly, the influence of Steve Albini's production on the following LP, Seamonsters, was a lasting one, but there are plenty of hints at the direction the band's sound would take on Bizarro, especially in the droney chugging at the end of What Have I Said Now? and Bewitched. On these tracks, the jangly indie-pop sound of the debut LP, George Best, already seems like a thing of the past - its ghost is still lingering in the shadows, but its bloody corpse has been beaten into submission and generally given a good thrashing with a very heavy solid electric guitar (sorry, been watching too many zombie films this week).

Kennedy, at just under four and a half minutes, isn't quite as extreme as some of the songs on the album. After all, it was released as a single. Still, it conforms to that long-lost (and much-missed) late-80s/early-90s template of repeating a simple chord pattern over and over again for a good couple of minutes after the end of the song proper.

What Gedge and co. were great at, and which is often missed, I think, is that in amongst the thrashing rhythm guitar parts of the repetitive instrumentals there are almost always really strong lead guitar melodies. If they were higher up in the mix, they would probably be a little too saccharine, but squirrelled away as they are, they're just right. The same goes for Gedge's vocals in earlier Wedding Present - they're often buried in the mix to a point whereby you've no hope of picking up some of the lyrics unless you listen very carefully on headphones. It's a lovely, and very English, form of understatement, that in the midst of all this noise, the overall impression is one of having a quiet conversation in a pub.

Lost your love of life?
Too much apple pie
And now Harry's walked away with Johnny's wife

You've got to pick some people up
You've got to let some people go
And if Lee's name does come up
Oh well I really want to know
Because: everybody loves the TV show

Lee being Lee Harvey Oswald, of course, and the stuff about apple pies being to do with the theory (fact?) that the CIA went around poisoning people with apple pies. I love Gedge's broad delivery of these lines - I'm a big fan who sing naturally in their own accents, and can be found quite often shouting at the television because some snot-nosed boy band singer from Rotherham is snivelling along to some backing tracks in an awful fake-soul/"R & B" accent. No, sing in your own voice. It's not hard. A common perception in mainstream pop is that sounding English simply isn't "cool" - it's not the done thing, and it harks back to the time when English rock and roll bands wanted to emulate their American idols as far as possible. I find the Beatles guilty as charged (though funnily enough Harrison and Starr managed to keep a Scouse edge on their singing - no surprise then, that they were/are my favourite Beatles).

Anyway, I digress. David Lewis Gedge is living, walking, breathing proof that you can sing in a regional accent and sound very cool indeed. I've always wondered if the over-emphasised "Be-COZ" is just Gedge getting excited, or if it's a reference to everybody's favourite paper-mache headed comedian and all-round musical genius, Frank Sidebottom. We'll probably never know; I certainly wouldn't have the nerve to ask.

Kennedy is a bit like a steamroller at the end, gaining more and more momentum, sweeping you ever onwards and upwards as you listen. The way the layers of guitars pile up on top of one another owes as much to Phil Spector as it does to My Bloody Valentine. If you're not moved by these climactic final couple of minutes, then, I'm sorry, there's no hope for you. Turn it up louder and try again. If that doesn't work, turn it up louder and try again. And again. Gedge has never bettered this, and probably never will. Maybe in another 20 years' time he'll admit as much.

I've a special affection for this song in particular because of a spectacularly bad gig my second band played when we were still at school. We finished with a terrible version of Kennedy; our drummer, being an orchestral percussionist, hadn't really got the feel of it. I couldn't really sing back then, certainly not without monitor speakers. My old (and very bad 1970s) electric guitar was completely out of tune, and our rhythm guitarist was so bad that we'd turned him down so that he was almost inaudible. We were truly awful, and the audience was pretty restless by the time we played Kennedy. At some point early in the song some bright spark decided it would be a good idea to turn the lights of the drama studio out, and put a strobe light on. Cue one very inept band fighting to keep control of said musical juggernaut. Frankly, the song, and the darkness, won, and we lost. Badly. I still have a tape of this terrible, terrible performance somewhere. I intend never to listen to it again!

Off and on, off and on

Sick Groove - Ill Ease




I was first introduced to Ill Ease by an American friend who came to stay with me in either 1998 or 1999. He had come over from the States armed with a load of CDs of obscure lo-fi Americana, intending to visit BBC Maida Vale and give them to the late John Peel - this was before Peel de-camped his show to Peel Acres. He never got the chance, and decided that he was going to give one CD to each friend he visited while over here - he suggested I might like something else (I forget what), but instead I plumped for Live at the Gate, the first full-length Ill Ease album. Ill Ease is the recording pseudonym of Elizabeth Sharp, and the first thing I heard of hers was the magnificent "Walking Pneumonia", with its uncomfortable production and hilarious refrain of "fuck everyone" which gets applied to just about every State in the Union in turn:

Hello
could you connect me to
long-distance information
I'd really like to talk to someone
who'll fuck with my good mood
fuck everyone in California
fuck everyone in Florida
got the walking pneumonia
and I can't sit still
fuck everyone fuck everyone
fuck everyone fuck everyo-ho-ho-hone
fuck everyone fuck everyone
fuck everyone fuck everyo-ho-ho-hone
[...]
fuck everyone in Oregon
fuck everyone in Nevada
fuck everyone in Illinois
fuck everyone in Virginia
fuck everyone in Maryland
fuck everyone in D.C.
[etc...]

The way I've typed out "everyo-ho-ho-hone" doesn't do her delivery justice at all, of course - it's performed as if she were momentarily possessed by the disenchanted spirit of a generic 60s Merseybeat singer.

Sharp's vocal delivery is adenoidal, imprecise, and dead-pan, almost to the point of sounding completely detached and disinterested. Her detachment is what makes this song, and most of her output, so irresistible. Not for her the teenage angst of a Rage Against The Machine style fuck you I won't do what you tell me (or fuck you I won't tidy my bedroom as it's none-too-affectionately rendered around these parts), but something altogether more knowing and if not always tongue-in-cheek then certainly aware of the inherent absurdity of the things she writes about. But the predominance of the "fuck everyone" refrain is such that by the time you've finished laughing at and with it, the title and nominal subject of the song - an unspecified drug withdrawal of some sort - is long forgotten. Ingenious stuff, utterly relentless, and proof that swearing can indeed be big and clever.

Musically, Walking Pneumonia is completely representative - obsessive little figures worked out over and over again, odd instrumentation (no bass - picked guitar, tonally unrelated guitar harmonics, and glockenspiel only, with an out-of-tune piano added in the repeated fuck everyone sections) lopsided drum patterns (she's a particularly fine drummer) and completely non-diatonic harmony. Sharp claims to have a neurological disorder similar to synaesthesia, but rather than associating sound and colour she associates sound and physical pleasure. There's no knowing whether or not this is simply a bit of self-mythologising but her harmonic and rhythmic identity are both so strong and so unusual that I'm inclined to believe her.

Anyway - enough background. Walking Pneumonia isn't the song that I want to talk about, because, much as I love it, I don't love it nearly as much as Sick Groove. I first heard this song on the "Greatest Tits" 10" compilation of material from the first three albums on Strange Fruit records, but have finally - after years of trying - managed to get hold of a copy of the Circle Line Tours CD from 1999. It's wonderful.

Sick Groove is one of those really special, one-of-a-kind recordings. It eats into your brain, and you'll never, ever forget it. It opens with an angular bass riff, and the drum riff that unites its whole glorious nine and a half minutes. Depending on how you hear it, this riff is either two bars of 5/8 time or a single bar of 5/4 time. The groove it establishes really lives up to its name, too; my brain only grudgingly accepts its regular irregularity, even though it feels beautifully circular - it's the sort of thing I imagine Philip Glass would have produced if he had been a lo-fi alternative-rock type.

I'm caught in a sick groove
On a Tuesday afternoon
In the summer the walls have heartbeats
And the windows shake like skin
In the winter nothing moves
It's all locked into a sick groove
I remember last fall with its targets and sityes
I was mesmerised by the sound of things slowing down
Now I'm caught in a sick groove
On a Tuesday afternoon...

Musically it's so well-constructed it's hard to think of it as mere pop music. And if that sounds pretentious, well, tough. It's constructed as an extended collage of related and unrelated cells of brief melodic lines and chord patterns. I forget who once compared Mike Oldfield to Messiaen but it's a comparison that holds true with Sharp as well; she creates a selection of blocks of sound, and then keeps recontextualising them to see how they fit together in different ways. Of course, Messiaen was also a synaesthete, and composed in terms of harmonic colours - which is possibly another reason to lend some credence to Sharp's accounts of her neurological disorder.

Things to listen for in the first few minutes:

It opens with bass outlining a riff that is based on the "devil's interval", the diminished 5th (G --> Db in this case) with guitar and that drum pattern - notice that throughout the whole song there's not a single drum fill; it's completely rigid and metronomic. A shaker appears stereo left at around the 0:42 mark, followed by the electric piano at about 1:04. At 1:13 the harmonic feel settles down with the bass playing single repeated notes, but the regularity of that is undermined by the chromatic figures played by the electric piano - which are also played as cross rhythms that don't conform to the quintuple rhythms.

All of that breaks down at around 1:55 leaving the bass alone with a new figure... but that's soon gone when the bass starts playing harmonics duting a really dischordant passage at about 2:05; it's connected with the previous section by the chromatic electric piano figures; the tambourine replaces the shaker... and a distorted guitar pattern creeps in at 2:25 that becopmes more and more significant later on.

At 2:45 there's the first musical resolution of sorts when the acoustic piano first comes in with that gorgeous luminous quality to the way she's recorded it - we've got a couple of repeated diatonic chords (G and G with an added second) although even at this point the harmony is destabilised by isolated bass E notes in the piano's left hand making it fleetingly feel like E minor!

At 3:50 there's a real feeling of relief as the bass comes back in to anchor everything back together... it's a beautifully well-judged moment. But then the bass immediately begins to shift while the piano part stays the same. There's a lot to be said for this kind of arrangement though - battering out a major chord on top of changing bass notes can be tremendously effective. It's as though the whole point of Sick Groove is that nothing can be allowed to be too comforting.

Even when it does settle down properly at around the 6 minute mark to a very Velvet Underground two-chord feel, we've got that distorted guitar pattern back to make a mess of the harmony, and completely rhythmically and harmonically unrelated electric piano patterns come in soon enough.

It's tempting to say that I wish it could go on forever, but I actually think it's just right. Sick Groove is so involving that it's very temporally disorientating. When you listen to it you have no idea whether it's taken four minutes or forty because it seems to make time stand still. Just lovely.

Circle Line Tours is, as I said, long out of print, so I can't encourage you to go out and buy a copy, but if Sharp's 2004 album The Exorcist is as good as her previous output, and I haven't heard it yet, it'll be well worth hearing. Buy it!

Buy The Exorcist