David Cross Band / David Jackson Cultuurpodium Boerderij 19 May 2017

May 22, 2017 //

David Cross and David Jackson

So I saw this gig announced a few months ago after I’d spent several weeks listening to almost the entire Van Der Graaf Generator catalogue. David Cross played violin on Starless and Bible Black and Larks’ Tongues In Aspic by King Crimson. Jackson played horns with VDGG for most of their run. So, yeah, two incredible musicians who had each been in the game for more than 45 years. It was a gig I didn’t want to miss. Especially given the recent resurgence of King Crimson, I was quite surprised that the gig was far from sold out. Fine, I’ll take middle front at this relatively small club. (When packed, Boerderij can hold an audience of 750 or so and my guess is there were about 300 there.) To open, Cross and Jackson came out alone and traded a little humour before taking on Starless Loops from the recent Cross/Robert Fripp album of improvisations on the Starless theme, Starless Starlight. After a few more pieces, they played another from Starless Starlight. There’s one ripple of chords from Starless that always gives me the shivers and did again when Cross played it Friday night. My friend Corniel, who joined me for the gig complained that it would have been better for him if they’d just played and not joked around so much. There’s some merit to that argument, as the joking detracted from their sheer expertise. Their duo work owed more to improvisational jazz than to the progressive rock they’re best known for. After a 30-minute set, they took a break before coming back with the full David Cross Band.

In the main set, the band played several numbers from the new (very good) album, The Sign of the Crow including Starfall, the title track, Rain Rain and The Pool. Current vocalist Jin Wilde has a very interesting voice (having come out of a dance music background, it seems) handles the new stuff quite well. His tenor is well suited to the music, generally. The band’s set includes (and if the 2008 live album I bought at the merch counter is anything to go by, has included for a long time) three King Crimson songs: Exiles (from Larks‘), Starless (from Red), and the encore 21st Century Schizoid Man (from In The Court of the Crimson King). The last of these featured Greg Lake on vocals, and the other two John Wetton. On these songs, Wilde doesn’t seem to take ownership. He seems to be trying to sing like Wetton, but his voice is too different. The band, however, quite made up for it. After Exiles, the band left the stage to drummer Craig Blundell who did an appropriately hair-raising solo. (Blundell has played with numerous folks including Steve Wilson.) The band returned playing George Martin’s Theme One (recorded in ’72 by Van Der Graaf Generator) before a slightly ragged Starless. Paul Clark and his Gibson Flying V are very very good and he doesn’t try to be Robert Fripp. After a quick moment back stage they closed with an appropriately wild Schizoid Man. I wasn’t expecting it and was well impressed. (Someone commented on Blundell’s facebook page that Crimson currently has three drummers and was impressed with how well he did his part solo.)

Overall a great evening with a couple of bona fide legends.

Tags David Cross, David Jackson, King Crimson, Sign of the Crow, Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, rock and roll

Eyes like cameras move their lenses

May 9, 2017 //

I don’t recall why I first bought The Age of Plastic by the Buggles. I might have heard Video Killed The Radio Star; it might have been because I knew the Yes connection, though I’m pretty sure I knew the album before the Drama tour (which my sister saw, but I did not). Al of that said, it had a huge impact on me. I played it quite a lot when I was 13 or 14. I’m quite sure I knew it well before we had MTV. Those eight songs were all mini movies in my head, the way the best pop is. (One track is indeed about a real movie studio, Elstree.) The fact that they’re all quite sci-fi as well appealed to my teenage literary tastes.

Much later I found the Bruce Woolley version. Woolley co-wrote it with Trevor Horne, and released a more guitar-heavy version with a crew called The Camera Club, which also featured a pre-Age of Wireless Thomas Dolby and Matthew Seligman. The most recent issue of Mojo (#283) has interviews with Woolley, Horne, and Geoff Downes who was the other half of the Buggles. At the close of the article, it’s mentioned that Woolley has recorded a new version with Polly Scattergood. It’s a very beautiful, slower, lower interpretation that reminds me of why the original excited me so much when I was a kid. (Keep an eye out in the vid for Thomas Dolby.)

After replacing Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman for one album (Drama) and ill-fated tour (Horne didn’t have Anderson’s range or vocal stamina and on the later dates especially, his voice was a liability), the Buggles released a second album, Adventures In Modern Recording, but had already gone their separate ways before its release.

Horne went on to produce a stack of classic albums (Welcome to the Pleasuredome, The Lexicon of Love, 90125, Seal, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, and Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise to name a few) and Downes founded Asia and took prog rock into that weird 80s pop direction. Asia’s a weird animal, too. Downes was the only consistent member (in fact there was one lineup of Asia that even he wasn’t in on) of almost 30 who have passed through, but at different times it was fronted by John Wetton and Greg Lake (both ex-King Crimson among many other bands).

When John Wetton passed away, I flitted through a bunch of videos of ELP and Asia and King Crimson and came across a fantastic concert he and Downes performed in a church which featured a gorgeous arrangement of Elstree. (Track four on this video.)

But back to The Age of Plastic. Giving it another listen now (and it’s a pretty consistent part of my listening – I don’t think a year goes by that it doesn’t come up in the rotation), I’m both 13 again and trying (as I still do with the music I love) to get my friends to hear its brilliance, and the 50 year old wannabe rock historian. More often than not, my friends thought I was enthusing on The Bugaloos, anyway.

The music is almost entirely keyboard/synthesiser-based, but the arrangements are impeccable and multi-layered. Considering the new wave acts of the time, the arrangements put them more in the category of disco (when there were still live string sections) and the intricate productions of Joe Meek. Johnny On The Monorail has both a disco bassline an almost a surf-like hook, and a 70s folk guitar bridge.

Horne is quoted in the album’s wikipedia page as having wanted to make music like Elton John was doing, but didn’t feel he had the chops. He then heard Kraftwerk and learned ‘you didn’t even have to emote’ to make hit songs. That said, all of the musicians had been working for most of the decade (Downes, Horne, and Woolley all worked with a singer named Tina Charles who had several hits, for example), so it’s not a surprise that the album has so many facets. It still rates five stars with

Tags Asia, Bruce Woolley, Geoff Downes, King Crimson, Living In The Plastic Age, Tecnopop, Trevor Horne, Yes

Categories 70s, Music, Rock

99 Days

April 30, 2017 //

I haven’t written much about Trump, and nothing on this page. There’s a lot of pretty cogent (and a great deal more totally incoherent) writing about what Trump has done and where it’s all going (wrong, mostly). One thing that strikes me, and this isn’t really an original thought, is that the entire Trump administration is interested only in getting the most for its own. The other thing is that there’s just a vast amount of pure subversion of American ideals at work in the whole operation.

This post is a little jumbled – mostly written on flights between Hyderabad, India (not Pakistan), Dubai, and Amsterdam.

riding_the_bomb I’ve heard that George Bush Junior is getting some rehabilitation these days for speaking against Trump. I can appreciate that, even though there’s no love lost between me and Shrub, and no forgiveness for what he and Cheney and Rumsfeld did to the US. Remember, though, that we never felt from him that he didn’t have the interests of the US in mind. Even when he went to war, he did it with, I think, some thought as to what it meant. (I may be wrong.) When Trump opens his mouth, or does anything (again, not a new thought), it’s an expression of what he thinks in the moment. This may change the next time someone hands him some new information. Like when the PM of China recently schooled him on Korean history. (The problem here is that China’s opinion of Korea might be rather close to its opinion of Tibet – or Serbia’s opinion of Kosovo.) He doesn’t think that anyone else might know more than what he’s just learned. It’s strange – we thought we were the world’s laughing stock when Bush II was president. He seemed to depend so much on his advisors and so little on his own learned assessment of the world. This surprised no one, but at least his advisors, mostly from his father’s circles, had seen the world and served, many of them, as elected officials. Bush II had served more than one term as a state governor, for crying out loud. He wasn’t without experience, even if those of us on the left didn’t think it worth much. We criticised, rightly, how he didn’t even manage managing a baseball team very well, and didn’t get that job on his own merits either. It was just his dad pulling strings to keep the wayward son busy.

Everything we know about Trump from before the election (I won’t say his election – there’s no doubting the role of state-sanctioned election fraud and gerrymandering in Trump’s so-called victory – not to mention the continued evidence of Putinic interference) pointed to an inability to do anything honestly and a near pathological need to find himself capable even though he obviously never has been. At much of anything except self-promotion. I follow the news, but there’s not telling which direction events will take. Today’s news has indications of tension in North Korea. (In the early 90s, I recall tension, and friends who knew a great deal more of political affairs than I did wondering why the place was so vital after such a long period of relative diplomatic stability. For the last several years we’ve cried at Kim Jong-un’s disturbing assassinations, and at the state of things in N. Korea in general, but haven’t thought it to be an epicentre for the next major war. We being those of us who only casually keep up with the news. It’s possible that people far deeper in foreign policy than I’ve ever been have always known that Korea’s the epicentre of the hot version of WWIII. Or as I usually write, the next battlefield of WWI.

I don’t recall who posted recently that he (80% certain as to sex of the writer) never went to bed during the Obama administration fearing to wake up to the next world war. I felt that way in the 80s, mostly a product of late Atomic age overreaction, but I was 13 when Reagan took office and his sabre-rattling was in terrifying contrast to Carter’s pacifism. I didn’t realise then what the phrases about Eurasia and Eastsaia from 1984 meant. The Carter years, in retrospect, were a brief respite from the wars in SE Asia that had only been over a year or so when he took office.

The incompetent war mongering is one aspect of what passes for policy in the current administration. The threats this week to pull out of/renegotiate NAFTA have us playing the fool on the stage of world economics. Trump seems to find any trade deficit disadvantageous to the US, an argument not supported by experts in world trade (according to Reuters – 28 April 2017). It’s another example of Trump taking a knee-jerk approach to a situation and calling it policy. Much like healthcare (‘No one knew healthcare was so hard’), the policies that define a country’s position in the world are difficult to determine, rely on history, expertise, institutional knowledge, and diplomacy. The idea that a person can learn these things (as a great rabbi discussed) standing on one foot is patently ridiculous. The corollary to the idea that one can’t learn Talmud while standing one foot is ‘Do no harm – the rest is commentary. If the current administration (and the US congress!) could take that tack for the next few years, people would be satisfied. (Alas, as rapper Ice-T once said, ‘Shit ain’t like that.’)

Tags George W. Bush, Trump

Categories Politics, United States

Handmaiden – 9 March 2017 Kijkhuis, Leiden

March 12, 2017 //

Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, set in Victorian England, tells of an illiterate girl, raised with an Oliver Twist-like band of criminals, who is hired out as a maid to an orphaned Japanese heiress in the care of her uncle. There are some truly Dickensian plot twists including an involuntary commission to a madhouse. Central to the plot is the love that develops between the young thief (Sue) and the young lady (Maud).

Chan Wook-Park’s Handmaiden is a Korean adaptation set in World War II-era occupied Korea. While there are obviously some dynamics between the Korean and the Japanese characters that might be lost on a Western audience, there are only a few indications of the period. Japanese soldiers on a ferry, for example. A note at the beginning of the film lets us know that subtitles in white indicate Korean, while subtitles in yellow indicate Japanese. That said, the film mostly takes place on a wooded country estate. (Occasional music cues indicate a debt the filmmakers feel they owe to Downton Abbey.)

Arranged in three parts, the first details the story from the perspective of the thief (Sook-Hee). She arrives, plays her part, which is to make the heiress (Lady Hideko) fall in love with he Fagin character (Count Fujiwara – a Korean who can play a convincing Japanese aristocrat) so that he can have her committed. It concludes with the three going off to celebrate the marriage and the honeymoon. Hideko’s role is to play a somewhat head-sick ingenue.

The second part goes back earlier in the story to when Fujiwara conspires with Hideko’s uncle (Kouzuki) and guardian to take the girl away so that her inheritance will devolve back to the uncle. Kouzuki, we learn, is a collector of pornography. Lady Hideko has been trained from a young age to give dramatic readings of this material to selected guests. She’s not the naïf we thought we’d met in part one. These readings are some of the most intense scenes in film. With everyone in the room fully dressed, they’re more sensual than the actual sex that the film portrays.

In the third we learn of the double-cross planned by Hideko and Fujiwara. I don’t want to give anything away to folks who’ve neither read the novel nor seen the movie, but the film gives very little time to the madhouse sequence which was one of the more unexpectedly harrowing pieces of writing I’d ever come across. The fact that Sook-Hee is illiterate makes for some amusing moments early in the movie, but these moments are used to contrast only Hideko’s dramatic readings. The contrast is far more disturbing and used to much greater effect in the novel.

Kouzuki and Fujiwara both receive an interesting (and somewhat horrific) comeuppance.

I’ve become rather prudish in my old age and found some of the sex rather gratuitous. Beautiful, but distracting from the power of the rest of the film. I knock off a star for the combination of that and the missed opportunity of the madhouse. Otherwise, Handmaiden is beautiful, intriguing, and very well crafted.

Tags fingersmith, japan, korea, movies, wwii

Categories EU, movies

AVDGAD – 15 – Do Not Disturb

February 23, 2017 //

And last year’s fine effort brings the Van Der Graaf Generator saga to a close. Clocking in at just under an hour, Do Not Disturb is a curious effort. They three remaining members only worked together on the music for about two weeks (according to the wikibox), but it sounds much like another well-oiled VDG machine.

vdgg-dnd (Oh No I Must Have Said) Yes seems to be a response to the various failings of the electorate in the past year, though the recording was complete before, for example, the Brexit referendum…

But let’s not talk about the old days
except to say the consequences run,
to be plain, what’s over isn’t done
and you thought you were only having fun.

As always, most of the songs seem to contain epics within them, slow movements calmly orchestrated still go measure to measure with slamming drums, weirdly overlaid vocals, and histrionic keyboards, but if they didn’t, we’d question whether we were listening to the right band.

It’s definitely good stuff, but not the gut-grabbing musical assault that we were once used to.

I realised there’s another live recording: Live at Maida Vale, recorded at the BBC in 2010 and released in 2012. It’s not on the band’s Wikipedia discography, but it’s up on Spotify. I’ll probably give that a listen next week.

Tags Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, rock and roll