30 – Scott Walker: Sleepwalkers’ Woman

Back at the turn of the Twentieth Century, the Russian composer Scriabin decided that musical keys had colours.  He wasn’t the first to do this (though he was certainly the first to assign F major a fruity palette of fuchsia pink); but his is perhaps the most (in)famous attempt to codify music’s potentially synaesthetic properties. Just reading about it on Wikipedia makes my eyes water a little: his never-completed magnum opus, Mysterium, was to have been ‘a grand week-long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the Himalayas Mountains that was somehow to bring about the dissolution of the world in bliss.’ Eat that, Maharishi.

True synaesthesia is, of course, pretty rare, but I’ve had a fair few bizarre epiphanies when music seems to leap beyond its limits and induce sensory overload. This overstimulation happens at live concerts especially. Two semi-staged operas at the Royal Festival Hall over the last couple of years gave my nerve endings such a workout that I was reduced to scratching my legs obsessively in the interval. The so-called tingle factor is a precious, precious thing, but it also seems to send histamine production into overdrive. Whoever thought Duke Bluebeard’s Castle could actually make you itch? Bloody Bartok and his genius!  Tristan und Isolde was just as devastating. Never mind Scriabin’s plans for the dissolution of the world in bliss. Wagner got there before him: the gesamtkunstwerk (complete work of art) really could bring about world peace, though in the wrong hands it could just as easily be an apocalypse.

You’ll notice that my examples here are classical. It’s not that pop music doesn’t provide this kind of hit, but even the best rock gigs don’t quite attain that level of multidimensionality. A crucial component of musical synaesthesia for me is the illusion that several plains are converging at once. It’s music a draughtsman might plot in a series of numbered figures: it has its own architectonics. It’s hard to achieve this with the usual pop/rock setup. Not impossible, but difficult. And the trouble is it often requires overblown visuals and overwrought production in order to realise itself. How on earth, then, does the music of Scott Walker manage to hit those buttons? That strange, unworldly, rich noise that isn’t classical, isn’t jazz, isn’t rock or pop, but remains sui generis to the many ears that have loved it?

Walker is a Scriabin for our times. On the release of Tilt in 1995, he urged listeners to imagine they were suffering from a heavy dose of flu as they worked their way through its opaque, elusive music. It sounds like one of Brian Eno’s oblique strategies cards, deployed for surreal inspiration in the studio: “play your guitar as though you were ironing a shirt!”, “sing your way through an electric fence”, that kind of thing. But it also showcases an artist committed to music’s fourth dimension. Tilt isn’t really an album at all; it’s a sort of bodily experience, lurching from ache to anaesthesia and back into bloodrush. String arrangements screech like dying flies, buzz into the cochlea (‘Patriot’); church organs announce the ‘scalper in the lampglow’ (‘Manhattan’); and all the while, that purple velvet voice ripples in and out of echo, spitting plosives, flinging fricatives, trying out words on the tongue for their mouth-feel. 2006’s The Drift takes it to a nightmarishly pathological level; forget the flu, it’s full-on psychosis. ‘Cue’ comes across like William Burroughs on a binge: deathly glissandos strangle the arcane imagery, the ‘stamps tongue-swabbed’ and the ‘semen clotting to paste’. It’s what the glare of hospital ward striplights sounds like, after the morphine’s worn off. Bloody terrifying.

Walker’s as infamous now for this dark avant-music as he was once famous for melting teens’ hearts. As rock transformations go, it’s pretty unique (I doubt Gary Barlow will ever loop the sound of meat being slapped into his power ballads). The long gaps between albums, the reclusive reputation, the months in a monastery spent studying Gregorian chant and infrequent sightings atop a bike around the streets of West London have all contributed to an archetypal myth of bonkers genius. Perhaps his closest parallel is Kate Bush, but at least you can imagine meeting her in a health-food shop by the kelp tablets. Walker, on the other hand, seems all the scarier for slipping amongst us unnoticed. Asked in 1984 what he’d been doing for six years (a relatively short period of inactivity judging by recent form), he gave a typically cryptic answer: sitting in the pub watching the men play darts. Next time you’re aiming for 180, just check there isn’t an intense, monkish man on the edge of your peripheral vision. It may just jinx your aim.

Still, more often than not, it’s the indescribable beauty of Scott’s music that catches you off-guard. Even in the early days of the Walker Brothers, no man had ever sung with such richness and depth. The first song I probably ever heard was ‘The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore’, that Spectorish wodge of wonder, so magnificently lonesome, so happy in its misery. It was years and years (a decade or more) before I encountered the early solo albums, with their forays into wet-boulevard Gauloiserie and strange tributes to Bergman films. You don’t need me to tell you that Scott 3 and Scott 4 are as essential as any Revolver or Highway 61 Revisited. ‘Rosemary’ and ‘On your own again’ practically define the term vignette. You open them up like little perfume bottles and get a whiff of concentrated ambience: cool attar of sixties rose. See – synaesthesia. Proust’s madeleines have nothing on those halting violas. From this period, ‘It’s raining today’ is the one that gives me that Bartok effect (you know, the itchy arms and legs). Listen to the strings – a gauze of sleet – and you hear Walker’s unique muse gradually unfurling, off and away far from the cabaret circuit and the TV special. Soon he’ll follow her out of the window, but for now he’ll watch from the inside, tracing the trails of damp down the glass with his fingers.

The seventies weren’t so kind. He’d attempted too much and his label got cold feet. Nite Flights, the Walker Brothers’ 1978 offering, was the next advance, and completely unexpected. Both influenced by and influential on Berlin-period Bowie, the title track (later covered by the Thin White Duke himself) can only be described as Scott-does-art-rock-disco-with-synths, and it’s a triumph. To this day, when I feel the pinch of winter approaching, I always let out an ‘it’s so COLD’ in tribute to Walker’s dramatic octave leap. It gets the blood flowing. But what really warms me up is ‘Sleepwalkers’ Woman’. It’s the fourth track on Scott’s sole 1980s offering, Climate of Hunter, an album of dizzy mystery and unclassifiable meditations on who knows what, where only the sinuous wobble of fretless bass and the occasional wash of synth betray the time of writing. ‘Sleepwalkers’ Woman’ doesn’t really exist in time. It’s a space; a vista. Beatless, bassless, (baseless), it floats through the speakers into the room: a ghost, a visitation.

When I first heard the song, I wondered who on earth this somnambulist could be. Is the song recounting her unconscious tread, or is she emerging from her stupor? ‘For the first time unwoken, I am returned’, sings Scott, like a melancholy widow in a folksong; it seems we’re on the brink of a reveille, as she’s called back to reality. While the music around the voice is still and slow, it courses with potential energy. The orchestra holds its breath, pushing air round the sorts of tone clusters you’re more likely to find in Penderecki or Ligeti; augmented intervals stretch the chords, reveal overtones usually hidden. There is tension everywhere, as if in readiness for what lies over on the other side of consciousness; perhaps waking is glorious, but it could equally be no match for this state, poised on the threshold between oblivion and knowledge. If I’m in the right mood, and I listen to it on headphones, I find myself un-bodied, weightless, space-walking. This music sucks you through the wires. You’re a snaggletooth, a saw, a sine-wave.

It would all be highly unsettling, were it not for Walker’s heartstopping vocal. At times he’s almost like a priest enraptured by his own sermon (hear how he relishes the sound of the word ‘confessions’), at others an oracle giving sage advice from some glimmering rock in the desert. He plots a strange course between the plush and the ascetic, bathed in siesta heat only to cool into a dusky coo. But all the while, that voice wraps its tendrils around you, keeping you safe. It has many  wonders to show you, some awe-inspiring, some petrifying, but one thing is certain: it will never leave your side. Even as the chords refuse to settle, gliding through enharmonics, false relations and near-dissonances, the command of Walker’s baritone, which could so easily be intimidating, just about keeps this otherworldly lament in the realm of the human.

‘Sleepwalkers’ Woman’ is a splinter of sunshine on the wing mirror; a break in the cloud on a desolate moor; a hunch, an inkling, a déjà vu. The first time I heard it somehow didn’t seem so;  I felt as if I knew it, and it knew me. Instant shivers. Like the Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Scott Walker sees past, present and future all together in the one moment: he’s already been here, and he always will be. As the lyrics stress, it’s not that he will return, or that he has returned: he is returned. He is eternal return. As my sentences begin to tilt towards the drift, I shall return too, to the song itself. Writing is a poor substitute for synaesthesia. In its most ideal forms, music is the only true confluence of the senses, the elusive gesamtkunstwerk; and Scott Walker is perhaps the only man in popular music who makes that ideal real. 

29 – Dusty Springfield: I just don’t know what to do with myself

Henley on Thames is a funny old place. It’s just about the most kempt town in England. Spick pavements advertise their immaculate surfaces; Pedigree Chum advert dogs keep obediently on the leash. The river beckons you to pootle, to call up the spirit of Ratty and mess around in boats, though the scene is so perfect it’s even impossible to imagine a disruptive Toad toot-tooting his way up the High Street. Gosh, no; these are roads designed for four-by-four weekend Sloanery and open-top sports-car displays of headscarf and diamonds. Henley. Antonym: Middlesbrough. An easy-living, Bolly-swallowing, Spectator-subscribing, pastel-shirt and chino-togged embodiment of much that is piss-awful about this country.

Well, on some levels, yes. I’ve had to bite my lip sometimes in this simulacrum of aristo privilege, and break on through my class hang-ups to the other side (not least because the rambling country round the Hambleden Valley and the nearby Chiltern woods is so life-affirming and glorious). Henley has also been the site of some unlikely musical experiences. Perhaps the most bizarre was the 80s Rewind Festival in 2009. It was lovely to see and hear so many second-rate stars of yesteryear (erm, Howard Jones, Go West, Carol Decker) as well as some genuine pop legends (Bananarama, ABC, Gloria Gaynor), but my overriding memory of the festival is the mind-boggling descent of deely-boppered fortysomethings onto unflappable Henley, hysteria rubbing up against hauteur. The weekend was one long nightmarish stag and hen party; the air reeked of sunburnt flesh and spilt Carlsberg. And it was sort of gleeful. I found myself contemplating what the millionaires over the river must be thinking, and also what the popstars on stage were going through. I imagined the lead singer of China Crisis surveying the hillside mansions, thinking “this could have been mine. I could have been George Harrison!” Never has a music festival caused me to reflect so much on the haves and have nots. How very eighties indeed.

But Henley’s lasting musical connection for me is altogether more profound, spiritual even. I never visit the town without a little pilgrimage to the parish church of St Mary to pay my respects to a certain someone. For here lies a legend. Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife (or at least from the braying county vowels) a little gravestone marks out an unassuming woman with an unmistakeable, unmatched gift.

Dusty Springfield was a very English pop star, which is a funny thing to say about an Irish Catholic soul singer who whiled away a good deal of her life in California. Or perhaps it’s not a funny thing at all; her very unlikeliness was part of the deal. Where Aretha and Etta nursed their instruments in the gospel church, Dusty found hers in the convent school and on the BBC. Those early black and white variety shows for the Beeb are so part of the iconography of the English sixties – cappuccino chrome and beehives – that it’s easy to mistake them for cosy Carnaby-lite. To do so would be a gross oversight. Not only do they contain some of the most spine-tingling musical footage of the era; they also offer a priceless glimpse into the art and life of the singer. Dusty chose the material herself, and often had a hand in inviting particular guests (a quick internet search will yield clips of Woody Allen and Jimi Hendrix on her show, amongst others). She used her influence to introduce the British to the sounds of Stax, Motown and Atlantic, and proffered her own fantastic cover versions into the bargain. Check out her jubilant take on Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ ‘Nowhere to run’: it’s such wondrous release, and epitomises just why the bubbling pop culture of the 1960s was so important to England, offering a way out into America, and a way in to the soul.

Those were Dusty’s horizons – the beckoning Atlantic and the bruised heart. It was this inside-outside duality that made her into a truly singular musician, gifting her a dynamic range far beyond that of many of her contemporaries. Listening to a classic Springfield record is like watching a fragile star in her dressing room talking herself into performance, then emerging from the wings into the glaring light. We’re given the privilege of eavesdropping on her transformation. It’s not something that happens as regularly as you might think in soul music; Aretha could certainly show vulnerability, but the sheer throttle of her voice always underscored it, whereas Dusty worked up to the climax, rather than down from it. ‘I close my eyes and count to ten’ is a perfect example of this. We hear her move from apprehensive understudy to smoky chanteuse to tragic Motown queen; with any other singer, it would seem like donning masks or flitting between roles, but with Dusty every single voice is the real deal, and entirely consistent with the others. And in every song she’s living what it is to be an English soul diva; to conquer an inbuilt reticence or self-consciousness, to discover that there can be strength in holding back before holding forth.

This can be tremulously sensual. As the redoubtable Greil Marcus put it, Dusty in Memphis is ‘a cool, smart, sexually distracted’ album, and it certainly resituates the loins somewhere near the ears. ‘Son of a preacher man’ is quite possibly the sexiest three minutes ever committed to disc by a British female singer. Aretha’s later version is technically perfect but considerably inferior; she keeps her coat on while Dusty’s unbuttoning her blouse. So many of the other tracks are just pinnacles of interpretation: from the overflowing country-soul of ‘So much love’ to the post-coital, mussed-up, lip-smudged ‘Breakfast in bed’ and the pre-coital anticipation of ‘Just a little lovin’’, this is an album that never falls below bed temperature. It’s all even more miraculous when you think that Dusty couldn’t bear to sing a note at the original Memphis sessions and had to be overdubbed in New York afterwards. Ego is utterly absent: it’s almost a cliché to talk of a singer losing themselves in a song, but Dusty really did, and we are all the better for it.

It’s very hard for me to choose a track in this instance. The first line of ‘I’d rather leave while I’m in love’ is one of the greatest five seconds in pop music (though the song suffers from a windy sax solo); Dusty’s live TV version of ‘A house is not a home’ could have made the cut, but this blog’s about the recorded track, not the song. And so I’ve gone back to the first one that ever melted my spine to liquid. ‘I just don’t know what to do with myself’ is one of those fabulous sixties recordings in which all the disparate threads of the era are woven into one seamless strand. The cleverest of songwriters, Burt Bacharach, bumps into Dusty. They take each others’ hands and walk straight up to the Wall of Sound, only to discover that together they can vault clean over it and leap into pop Elysium. The timpani boom, the violins swirl, and Dusty’s soul is all but consumed in the heat of the rising melody.

‘I just don’t know what to do with myself’ makes me deliriously happy, which seems ill-fitting; it’s a song of nail-biting, almost self-harming sadness (and it’s difficult not to factor what we know of Springfield’s own life into this). But whenever Dusty takes on a Bacharach and David song, the listening experience for me is unmatchable; it’s like Janet Baker’s Purcell or Regine Crespin’s Berlioz. There simply is no other way to do it. I can’t listen to Dionne Warwick slinking through ‘The look of love’ or Gene Pitney caterwauling through ‘Twenty four hours from Tulsa’ (or, for that matter, Cilla Black crooning ‘Anyone who had a heart’). These songs are only Dusty songs. There is no such thing as a ‘version’ in her universe. Song and singer are the same.

As the end of ‘I just don’t know’ makes apparent, she simply didn’t know what else to do. It was natural that such a shy girl should make that amazing sound once the orchestra crescendo took flight; it was, perhaps, the only thing that truly made sense in her life. Everything else seems like a dream – her instrumental role in getting Led Zeppelin to sign to Atlantic, her legendary reputation for food fights, her refusal to sing to a segregated audience in apartheid South Africa. Even that little grave in Henley is a phantasmic vision; a trick of the light in a town of smooth veneers. Close your eyes, though, and the reality of musical perfection drowns out the unreality of the cars and pushchairs and pleasure boats. Dig down deep, and there is soul in the soil.

28 – Wire: Map Ref 41N, 93W

Red lines, blue lines; keys and legends; tumulus, barrow, bridge. Maps are charms; maps are mantras; maps are magic.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve read maps like novels: like poetry, in fact.  Hours on the backseat poring over AA road atlases and gazetteers, matching the pages’ hieroglyphs to the world both blank and familiar beyond the Volvo window. Weekends scribbling on discarded rolls of wallpaper, ridged with rivers in crayon and settlements nuclear and dispersed; family haunts warped into parallel universes; alternative ordnances of bedrooms and gardens. The escapist stuff of children’s literature, stories about losing your way only to discover opportune shortcuts and alternative routes.

But it wasn’t just about adventure for its own sake. You sense early that mapping is an agenda, a politics. Imagining new space is often about finding the unmapped, that territory that has eluded the cartographer, somehow slipped through the nets of human knowledge. But it’s also about the very opposite, about plotting the course, about making a plot of the earth, in all senses: carving it up in order to give it narrative significance. Our group of school sad-sacks fantasised about lands colonised by other misfits; it was nothing less than a burning desire to rewrite history, to evacuate the winners from mapped space and fill the grid-squares with the losers. We learn these things early; learn how physical space is carved up, bounded and walled, used and abused according to the exigencies of power. Playtime is all passwords and border control. Don’t step on that line or you turn into a statue. Step over the line and you transgress; step onto the railings and you’re granted immunity. Valuable social lessons all: what else is being a citizen than observing limits for the greater good, what else is being a subject than knowing your place?

Yes, it’s all lines. You learn that queuing is important, though you do everything you can to hang a little off-margin and upset the regime. History, of course, happens in lines too; as Alan Bennett put it, ‘it’s just one bloody thing after another’. In English, you end up scanning them; in maths, drawing them.  And all of it in ruled exercise books, which says it all really. Lines are indeed the rule. And if you break the rules, what do you get? Lines, lines, lines! According to Simone de Beauvoir, lines are patriarchal. They’re projections; the pointless protrusions of male pomp, like antlers and erections. Men are always thrusting, looking outside of themselves for meaning. I’ll draw a line under that; this is not a forum for my thoughts on early first-wave feminism. But I see it now. Maps as patriarchal instruments, as premises for war: the coloured territories that so fascinate the young Marlow in Heart of Darkness (and look where they led him). Who would have thought there’d be a song about this very subject, and what’s more, a song that flags the dangers of trundling the surveyor’s wheel, while revelling in the pleasures and mysteries of mapping? It could only have been by Wire, really. Wire, the great obscurantist art-punks, with their abstractions, their equations and taxonomies.

Wire have regrouped sporadically over the last three decades, and produced fine music on it, but their first and greatest period of activity lasted only three years, over three albums (Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154). 1977-80 was a time of staggering invention across British pop music, but Wire might just have been the most inventive of them all, and on release as a single in late 1979, their final 45 ‘Map Ref’ brought to an end the fascinating process of deconstruction and reconstruction that they set in motion with Pink Flag. Flag was their first album, a collection of un-songs, splinters of sound that made the verse-chorus structures peddled by their contemporaries seem very traditional indeed. It was as if Wire were saying the only way to be a punk was to be a post-punk; to be avant is to be après (a bit of pseudo-Derrida for you there). Only by smashing the pop song into shards could Wire begin to find their own way to piece it back together. To carry through the map metaphor, this was terra incognita; the ground virgin, the waters uncharted. Many of the lyrics on 1978’s Chairs Missing seem to acknowledge this obliquely. There’s the spine-chilling ‘Marooned’, in which ‘an unwilling sailor’ has come adrift from his vessel; ‘I’m standing alone, still getting a thrill / while the ship is afloat’, sings Colin Newman, tensed up with the power that comes of total erasure or whiteout. It’s taken further in the magnificent ‘Being sucked in again’, driven by frissons of cold guitar and neuralgic synthesizer, rife with imagery of dorsal fins and fishwives’ dreams. Where on earth do we find this strange land, populated by outdoor miners and flies in the ointment? No other musicians make late seventies England sound so Daliesque.

Sandwiched between the fractured melodies of Chairs Missing and the dark sweetnesses of 154, the single ‘A Question of Degree’ asks a big question over music of pitch-bending weirdness: ‘Can I really manage to survive outside? Can I? Can I?’ This is the height of meta, a Naked Lunch on the end of the fork moment. Is it possible to be in pop and yet marginal or external to it? Do you stay inside the lines or play in the unlimited field? Do you accept the binaries and work with them or submit yourself to the ecstasy of jouissance? This is absolutely a question of degree. And it’s one that ‘Map Ref’ answers in part, as Newman, Gilbert et al climb into their little chartered plane to survey the lie of the land. No more fish in freezing waters; here, Wire soar.

‘Map Ref’ is driven by an almost Krautrock beat, constant, rigid, measured. It’s a beat that walks great, unrelenting distances over endless fields or long tracts of prairie (the grid reference in the title actually points to Des Moines, Iowa, but this fact is a red herring, maybe even a prank). Yet this is not the coiled Wire of old. The cables have been untangled, the current is flowing. The sangfroid thaws, the blood runs warmer, and a pin-sharp sun is guiding the ‘cartologist’ towards the rocks and rivers which he must plot. These features are listed – the ‘crystal palaces for floral kings’, the ‘flat lowland landscape’ – but the song’s real excitement is reserved for the rendering of the material as abstract, the representation of territory as lines and squiggles much like those on the cover of the album. Its wondrously beautiful refrain (indicated with a typically pomo declaration of ‘chorus’) sings the praises of ‘longitude and latitude’ in stacked four or five-part harmony – it’s so harmonised I can’t actually tell – and registers a deep contentment in refashioning the world as a page of symbols and keys. I’m willing to argue that this is self-referential, the sound of a band standing outside of themselves and surveying their own progress, taking stock of how they have reconditioned pop by making it recondite.

Perhaps it’s a plateau, then; but there are always more distant ranges, some of them disappearing into cloud. The misty synths introduced at 2:29  are ominous, and the lyrics even more so. From this vantage, ‘Map Ref’ seems to be about the dangers of claiming land, of politicising it; even a pink flag planted in the underbrush of punk is a potential emblem of power, a power that can easily be abused. The opening lines take a punning, intellectual line on this: ‘An unseen ruler defines with geometry / An unruleable expanse of geography’. Are the cartographer and his ruler more powerful than the ‘rulers’ who use his maps to suppress communities and nations, and prosecute wars? The imagery becomes more suggestive towards the end. As Newman urges us to ‘witness the sinking of the sun’, he then admits that ‘a deep breath of submission has begun’. Is this some coded reference to the British Empire, on which the sun supposedly never set? What is this submission? Is it a people giving in to subordination? Or might it, more intriguingly, express a resignation at the end of empire, a submission to the final sunset?

Of the many things I love about ‘Map Ref’, this irresolute mystery is foremost. It’s a song beguiled, fascinated by mapmaking, but also one which confronts anxieties about the political implications and applications of cartography. And it’s a perfect metonym for Wire themselves: a band drawn in by the sweet charms of pop, only to be forever restrained by their scepticisms. In their time, they seemed off the map, but now we can see that they redrew the boundaries, just so that they could then sit within them. You have to work within the system to change it, but knowing you’ve changed it means you’re forever indebted to it for meaning. Paradox, aporia, deadlock. Vertices, grids, intersections. Wire’s music maps the puzzles of living. Read it, follow it, use it.

27 – Madness: Our House

This week I’ve been rereading Howards End. It’s one of my very favourite novels, and now I’m getting to teach it for the first time. I don’t love it uncritically; the class issues cause me problems just as they have other readers, and I still fail to see what the Wilcoxes really have going for them. But E.M. Forster is such an avuncular writer, so well-meaning in tone, so ready to sweeten his criticism with a restatement of faith, that it’s impossible not to love him. He’s one of the great English liberal humanists, and a minor hero of mine.

One of the chief glories of the novel is its wisdom on matters of English domesticity: the extraordinary spiritual attachment people have to their houses. I’m not sure it’s something that exists so markedly in the fictions of other cultures. Much classic American writing is fixated with planting roots and building walls, but even the most sentimental of homebodies always has one eye on the speedometer or a suppressed yearning for the interstate. Great German novels are often pervaded by the romantic outsider; classic French and Russian fiction also seems to abound in the adrift and the rebellious. But ask a lover of great English writing and the chances are they will remember bricks and mortar as much as flesh: Pemberley, Thornfield, Manderley, Brideshead, 22b Baker Street. And it’s not just the high-class residences. Switch to TV, and the humble terrace takes on timeless resonances. If Granada decided to move with the times and demolish Coronation Street – and let’s face it, how can it still be standing, now in 2012? – the public outcry would be nothing less than murder. Windows are eyes; letterboxes are mouths; fireplaces are beating hearts.  An Englishman’s home is his castle. It’s still a powerful trope. Some pillocks take it literally of course, and invoice taxpayers for their moats; clearly there are bastilles to be stormed. But in this house-obsessed nation of ours, your armchair is your throne.

In the early 1980s, the Conservative government presided over a mass sell-off of public housing. “Property-owning democracy” was the buzz-phrase of the day. My grandparents were part of that vanguard. Liberated by Thatcher, they exercised the right to buy from Sunderland City Council, and upgraded their redbrick semi with rickety extensions and breakfast bars.  Mrs T certainly knew how much people fetishised their four walls. I imagine you’ve seen that clip of her pruning the roses outside her Home Counties pile, while Denis mows the lawn; that was her initial shtick, you see – the national economy as household debit and credit. Some of this came through in the recent Iron Lady movie, which had its moments (even for this old leftie); but what I couldn’t countenance was the trailer. There, in full cinema surround, was Madness’s divine ‘Our House’, accompanying images of Thatcher’s heels shuffling down the parliamentary corridor. The period was right, at least, but was this a rather forced pun on Commons and Lords?

It’s not the first time that Madness have been politicised against their own grain. Their early ska-based material, not to mention their DMs and Ben Sherman combos, excited the interest of racist skinheads.  I’ve always wondered how on earth a band with such a love of black music could be co-opted for bigotry, but then, I wasn’t alive in those times and am baffled by lots of these seemingly bizarre social contradictions. What I do love is their rejoinder. ‘Embarrassment’ is quite simply one of the finest singles by a British band, ever. The saxophonist’s sister becomes pregnant with a mixed-race child; her family disowns her, declaring her to be ‘a disgrace to the human race’. The irony of their comments is lost on them, but there is an irony more delicious for the listener, as the track is animated by a propulsive Motown swing. By the end, you realise that the final line, ‘You’re an embarrassment’, is directed at the family; they are the disgrace, and the groove has been used to judge them.

Madness aren’t really known for serious social commentary, though. For many, they’re all about silly videos, that formation street-walk, and ‘one step beyond’ party mixes. I guess these things are irritating to some people; I can’t think why. You never get a sense of cynicism from those early singles and their attendant videos. In fact, it’s really all joy, the fearlessness of youth, the sound of kids in the sweetshop: welcome to the house of fun indeed. Some of it is giddy in a too-much-squash sort of way, and yet a proper listen to their run of singles reveals a remarkable degree of musical fluency and intelligence. Mike Barson knows all about the power of the piano octave run and the tinkling arpeggio. Their grin-inducing cover of ‘It must be love’, and the early highlight ‘My girl’ (can I hear a bit of wonky proto-‘Ashes to Ashes’ in there?) are buoyed and bounced by Barson’s keys; joanna in excelsis. There are some surprising little vanguardist flecks in unlikely quarters too. Disentangle ‘Driving in my car’ from its Kwik-Fit fitter pasticherie, and it doesn’t half sound like Prokofiev. Honestly.

Out of all the British pop groups to come out of the late seventies New Wave, only Ian Dury’s Blockheads could match Madness for versatility, polish and joie-de-vivre. It’s something to do with them being a kind of family, rather than a band. Yes, I know they all fell out sometime in 1984, but while they were on top of their game, you really could imagine them all living together in a Camden terrace, zigzagging their way down to the caff for a full English, and writing song lyrics on the back of HP-sauce-blotched paper napkins. This is how I like to imagine ‘Our House’ was composed; their magnum opus, hatched out over rindless back bacon and sweet builders’ tea. Suggs, can you help me out?

‘Our house’ bagged Madness an Ivor Novello award in 1983 for best song, and to my mind it’s the perfect English pop symphony. Behind each anonymous door, on each identikit brick-built row of nondescript houses, lie lifetimes of quiet disappointment and rueful nostalgia. Yet there might, just might, be the possibility of stability, satisfaction and love too. It’s never one thing or the other; living as a family is a constant state of unknowing. The song celebrates this dichotomy. You get affirmations of familial excitement – there’s always something happening and it’s usually quite loud – but then there’s also the nagging feeling that in the past “everything was true” and “nothing could come between us, two dreamers”. It’s the worry that life is speeding up, the choices are closing down, and the dangers of rosy-tintage are looming behind the couch. This is universal stuff, of course; even America loved it (it remains Madness’s only top ten hit over there). But it’s also unmistakeably working-class English. Its message is that this may only be two-up two-down and no garden but it’s home. It’s where we fill in the pools on a Saturday. Where we argue with our parents over long-haired rebels on Top of the Pops.  Where we return to on a Friday night after a skinful at the Jolly Potter. Where we rustle up a cheese and onion toastie after said skinful. Where we sleep and dream and wake up with a stinking hangover (and a noise in our heads not unlike the whirling Blackpool organs of ‘House of fun’). ‘Our house’ is a celebration of that whole life, but it also seems to be questioning how long it has left to run. Those lush Tchaikovsky-esque strings remind us that normal English houses can be dramatic too. They’re not all stasis and boredom. But there’s a real ache to them; it’s those minor chords that slot so easily and sweepingly into the irresistible chord sequence. Is this actually a lament for blue-collar Britain? I do wonder. Suggs as Morrissey? Well, not quite, but this is ambiguous writing.

Still, despite these traces, the overriding thrust of ‘Our House’ is affirmative, and the sparky brilliance of the arrangement and the production see it wrestle its demons and beat them hands down. For me, it really is a kind of home, in so many ways. We used to sing the song at primary school in the playground, reworking the words to fit a silly little formula: “our house, in the middle of our street, in the middle of our town, in the middle of the country, in the middle of the Earth, in the middle of the Galaxy, in the middle of my fridge, in the middle of our…” – you get the drift. Many years later, when I was in a band myself, we played the Dublin Castle in Camden. I was rather nervous, as I sometimes was (remedied too often by an extra pint before the set), but then happened to see a poster of Madness on the wall. At the time, I had no idea that the pub had been their base back in the early days; that it’s the backdrop of the ‘My Girl’ video, no less. Now, I feel rather cheered that we were part of a little continuity there, however small. I sometimes wish we’d covered a Madness number (one of the lovely album tracks from  The Rise and Fall perhaps). You see, just like E.M. Forster, the magnificent seven are minor heroes of mine. Perhaps I might even get to teach my students about the joys of nutty boy dancing one day; and if not, next time I’m in the Dublin Castle I’ll be raising a glass and setting the jukebox to those sweeping strings and singalong choruses.

26 – Donna Summer: I Feel Love

Olivia had a smiley face on her pencil case. ‘It’s the acid house sign’, she said proudly. Thank God she was out of Miss Hennigan’s earshot.

None of us really knew what it meant. We knew it had something to do with drugs, but we weren’t even sure what they were. Naturally, as children of the eighties we’d been warned about the dangers of glue-sniffing (well, not the specifics, but enough to know that ambulance sirens ensued). But all the other stuff was just words. We associated drugs with sex and horror movies – something our parents routinely sidestepped or censured, something made glamorous by being outside of conversational limits. Understandably, then, Olivia’s pencil case was a talking point. It was on the fringe of something dangerous – Alice peeping into the garden; Lucy clambering through the wardrobe. Soon enough, Olivia taught us the acid dance. This involved singing D Mob’s ‘We Call it Acieed’ while getting changed for P.E. That’s my abiding memory of what came to be known as the second summer of love – prancing around in my underpants yodelling something unspeakable. I don’t imagine your average late eighties warehouse party was very different, actually. Just more sweat and wider pupils. And hopefully less D Mob.

My early experiments with druggy dancing were soon cut short by a nagging guilt and fear of what I had done. One day we were all getting changed for games as usual, and Olivia initiated the acid dancing, but I didn’t join in. I said rather sheepishly that I didn’t want to do acid house anymore. The incantatory wail started to make me feel odd. A year or two later, my London cousin was up north for Christmas, and the feeling resurfaced. Life in the big smoke always seemed so decadent and glamorous, and my cousin always talked about foods and fashion lines I’d never heard of. This time around, she had her hardcore house tapes with her, and they sounded frighteningly full-on blaring out of the ghettoblaster speakers. It was lawless music, pumped out in illegal spaces, or in legal spaces which turned a blind eye to illicit activities. I rushed back to my Mozart cassettes for refuge.

By the time I was installed at secondary school, though, it was impossible to avoid what had come to be known as ‘dance music’. It thumped from every Nissan Micra; quieter radio stations carried a ghost of bassline as pirate broadcasters trespassed on their frequencies. In my first term at Park View, everyone was obsessed with The Shamen. It turned out that ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ was actually about little happy tablets. Imagine my shock on being disabused of my own mishearing (‘laser gun, laser gun – he’s got a laser gun!’) Nineties chart dance music now invokes Proustian responses; one bar of anything by Cappella or Snap and I’m instantly eating porridge in front of The Big Breakfast or dodging the dolly-beads at break-time.* I also feel affectionate towards it. I found myself singing ‘Rhythm is a dancer’ in a room full of likemindeds last New Year’s Eve, wondering whether I’d come to the nineties twenty years too late. Of course, it seems much safer among sozzled thirtysomethings in the comfort of an owner-occupied house, than sweating it out with a load of wired teenagers clutching Evian bottles.

But what did I dance to in my bedroom as a teenager? Everyone has the hairbrush song, the vanity track that prompts a bit of mirror boogie. For some, it may well have been Corona or The Original. But for me, it was Donna Summer. Always Donna Summer. And my love for ‘I feel love‘ (which is, naturally, a little sexual) comes, rather surprisingly, from the same root as my anxiety over D Mob. Something in those juddery sequencers sets the heart into overdrive (a kind of amyl nitrate-aided frisson, apparently, which made the track the queen of late-seventies gay clubbing). It feels wrong; creepy and sinister, pregnant with danger. It feels so wrong, in fact, that it makes me want to run behind the sofa. And ingest things.

I’ve always been utterly, unhealthily obsessed with synthesizers, particularly those big, burly, wiry boxes that crept into pop culture in the late seventies and took up permanent residence in the early eighties. You don’t really need me to tell you that ‘I feel love’ was the first entirely synthesized UK number one, or that it pretty much invented ‘dance music’ singlehandedly, during that fateful summer of ’77, when Elvis died and punk reached its peak. But it’s worth reminding yourself that while Johnny Rotten wore bondage trousers and declared there to be ‘no future’, Giorgio Moroder ushered in the future, and it wasn’t wearing any trousers at all. 1977 was alive with these isolated sightings and soundings. Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene was on many a turntable, and Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express was leaving the bahnhof, ready for the long ride towards electro and hip-hop. Bowie and Eno filled their first sides with pips and blips and ice-cool synth-strings, and saved up a load of doomy Europeana for their flips. But Donna Summer spent a magical three weeks as the nation’s favourite, a nation poised at the point of no return. And yes, I am talking about orgasms.

Sex in popular music had previously been something to do with guitars and pouting. Mick Jagger begging for brown sugar, that sort of thing. But then a little Italian chap with a very porn moustache flicked the wrong switch in his Munich studio; the atom was split, and pop-sex could never be the same again. From now on, it was going to be all about computers and quantizing. It was going to be about the rigid logic of the male blending with the otherworldly abandonment of the female, or else the falsetto male discovering naughty things he never knew existed. That way lies….ooh, Sylvester, Bronski Beat, Madonna, The Source featuring Candi Staton, Kylie, Rihanna. ‘I feel love’ seems to boomerang back into our lives at regular intervals, its unmistakeable sequencers percolating like the molten core of the earth, firing up the loins and stupefying the speakers into a trance. The fact is, nobody has ever bettered it. As with any drug, the first hit is always the most powerful.

By contrast, sex, unlike drugs, generally gets better the more you do it. On one level, this appears to be what ‘I feel love’ is about. This is no virginal epiphany, but the sound of a woman who knows. But she’s also a woman at a distance. Donna Summer’s voice, usually a rich alto, scales previously unknown heights. The air up there is thinner, her breath shorter and shallower. You wonder whether there is anything bodily going on at all; perhaps this is all going on in the ionosphere, at a far remove from the bedroom. But the Moogs give the game away. If anything, ‘I feel love’ pays shivering tribute to the auto-erotic. This marriage between woman and machine suggests she doesn’t need a man to get high. She is well aware of her own rhythms – more aware than anyone. The ‘you’ addressed in the lyrics is therefore ambiguous. Call me kinky, but is the addressee really a gadget of some sort?

Before this gets any dirtier, and your imagination runs away with you, I’d suggest that it’s also a love song to dancing, a paean to the power of this new, exciting genre of music. As Donna’s voice piles up on top of itself in the third ‘verse’, the triads lend her a magisterial aura; of course, triple-tracking had featured on plenty of records before, but here it’s used to launch a new manifesto, based on the discovery of the electronic manipulability of the human larynx. It’s disco narcissism: the dancer discovering endless repetitions of herself in the glass of the mirrorball. Again, it’s anticipating something. The relentless motor-chug of electro-bass is leading inexorably to a new sort of nightclub, all poise and pose and look-but-don’t-touch. That’s the eighties knocking on the door, trying to smuggle its tassels past the bouncers.

But more than anything, ‘I feel love’ is just so good it scares me. Hypnotic, narcotic, psychotic, it eludes description, being of the body rather than the mind. I like to dance to it in my head, with eyes closed and headphones clamped to my ears. It brings me out in a smiley face; though these days, I keep me kecks on.

* For those unfamiliar with 1990s confectionery, dolly-beads were little hard sweets sold as necklaces. Most young people used them as catapults.

25 – The Divine Comedy: Lost Property

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

So runs one of the great twentieth-century poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s perennial ‘One Art’, which proposes that loss can be a boon for the artist; indeed, that much if not all art is driven by loss, real or threatened. I’m not sure whether Bishop tuned into FM radio while penning her villanelles, but she would find an abundance of songs to prove her theory. As another great bard had it, ‘ ‘tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’. In Tennyson’s prophetic couplet we have probably half the entire pop canon; the other fifty percent deals with the love that hasn’t yet gone down the dumper, so it’s implied in any case. So many of those sodden-hanky songs are favourites of mine. There’s Elvis’s greatest record, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, in which that unbeatable voice runs the gamut from outrage to sulky snivel, and gifts every vertebra a little shiver, playing the spine like a xylophone. There are a thousand gorgeous songs in which the singer hopes to regain lost love, but knows that reality will deny them – ‘Nothing compares 2U’, perhaps (that Nellee Hooper production – so big and so bare, permeated by what has been left out). There’s the most perfect of all Cole Porter standards, ‘Every time we say goodbye’, where the turn ‘from major to minor’ furnishes the song with a metaphor for diminishing returns. I could go on and on. Perhaps the art of loss is relatively easy to master; or else, music is peculiarly suited to articulating the apparently inexpressible.

Bishop’s poem does hinge upon an addressee, the ‘you’ who appears in the last stanza; lost love is certainly there. But the other things to which she refers are touched with the mundane. She exhorts the reader to ‘lose something every day’, to ‘accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent’. Even if we have never experienced grief or the pain of parting, we know loss through the myriad objects we misplace every week, the time that runs short as we are swallowed into commonplaces or detained by interruptions and distractions. For Bishop, adjusting to these regular lapses prepare us for the big ones; the absent keys and runaway hours are mementos mori, reminding us that from the moment we are born, our batteries are winding down. That’s the poetry of the everyday for you. The smallest things are in fact the greatest. William Blake saw ‘a world in a grain of sand’; Bishop finds death in a watch or a wallet foregone. And while this may not be the province of much pop music, I’ve no doubt that Neil Hannon has taken Bishop’s collected poems on the tourbus with him and scribbled lyrics behind the flyleaf.

It wouldn’t be peculiar, after all. Hannon is known for a certain bookishness, an air of undergraduate aestheticism. The name of his ‘band’ is straight out of Dante, of course; and there are other incriminating instances of reference-dropping – the quotation from Cold Comfort Farm that provides ‘Something for the weekend’ with its hook, the setting of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems on the Liberation album. So many rock critics hate this, predictably; clever-cleverness is at odds with their Springsteenish view of the world, particularly when accompanied by an arch smirk and a reading list. Neil Hannon was born to be Wilde; and for a while, he seemed to know it and revel in it. I must admit that I used to find The Divine Comedy rather silly in the nineties, even nauseating at times. There was something smug, not to say faux in that baritone; this was a man who crashed weddings in a fake bowtie, only to write daft, disingenuous character sketches of the guests. ‘National Express’ was about the worst of it; such an ungenerous, cheap skit, all that stuff about the woman with an arse ‘the size of a small country’. How astonished I was, then, to happen upon ‘Lost Property’ on a compilation album ten years ago; in that one track, I regained a band.

Regeneration was an apt title for The Divine Comedy’s 2001 album. It marked a Doctor Who-ish metamorphosis, a reset clock. For several years the sound of the ‘band’ (in reality a loose collective of associated musicians) had been ballooning, gathering, gaining. It was all plush orchestration and finery. But Neil Hannon fell under a spell; he heard OK Computer. In an interview at the turn of the decade, he revealed his envy of Radiohead’s cosmic tone poems and the game-changing production of Nigel Godrich, which did wondrous new things with the traditional guitar-band format. It was enough to convince him to reconvene The Divine Comedy as a group (including Hannon’s erstwhile musical collaborator, the classical composer Joby Talbot), ushering in a brief period of limelight-resistance and indie demeanour. With Godrich on board, the resulting album was a tingly, shivery thing, luminescent with synths and glocks and recorders, dotted with melodies to die for. On the opener, ‘Timestretched’, it’s as if Hannon is whispering ‘sssh!’ There’s something in the woodshed, but it’s benign and magical, and you have to approach it on tiptoe. On ‘Note to self’, you get the mordancy of indie shoegazing, but with sublime chord changes and a sort of classical handsomeness; Hannon might be have swapped Italian leather for Converse, but he’s still sauntering down Savile Row. ‘Love what you do’, the album’s main hit single, is possessed of another wondrous chord sequence, sweetened with Wombling woodwinds and idyllic bass runs. It could almost soundtrack the pleasant exertions of knowledgeable craftsmen in one of William Morris’s utopias. This all sounds smurf-like, but it’s actually adult music; these are songs about adjusting to everyday disappointment, settling for things, surveying the vicissitudes from an askance position. It’s fabulous stuff.

But best of all is ‘Lost Property’. The immediate subject matter is Bishop-like; the wider implications even more so. Hannon intones a litany of left luggage and ephemera, his baritone for once devoid of irony or suppressed glee. It could be a song whistled by a minion at Heathrow as (s)he rakes through the day’s haul; though I like to think of it hummed by a beachcomber, somewhere wild and end-of-the-line, like Dungeness or Spurn Head. The flotsam and jetsam of the discarded and forgotten are juxtaposed poetically, taking on a dignified beauty: ‘Silk Cuts and Bennies, / Ten packs and twenties’, ‘Two tennis rackets, / Blue Rizla packets’, ‘Passports and Parkers, / Mobiles and chargers’. Divorced from their owners, denied of their usefulness, they become objets d’art. The song also reminds us that these artefacts depend on people to give them meaning and purpose; it reminds us that nothing has its significance alone. Gradually, we sense they may be old friends, loved ones, people left behind or forgotten. The choruses lead us to this; the list-making gives way to existential rumination. ‘All through my life there have been / Many rare and precious things / I have tried to call mine’. By the end of the song, he dreams he finds them, stacked on top of each other in a sort of Platonic realm, but they are not to be restored to him on earth. It’s rather as we might imagine heaven, populated with those we mourn.

Loss is everywhere in the music, but the down-up-up-down of the genius chord sequence, and the rippling piano leitmotif imply endless motion, the sea washing up a new batch of unidentified items with every cycle. In the choruses, the chords start unpeeling themselves into vexed diminished triads, as Hannon contemplates the losses of his own life. As ‘Lost Property’ closes, the ‘dream’ of which the lyrics speak also slips from our grasp, the music sliding downwards and the glints of synth becoming ever more distant. If you listen, though, you’ll hear that it ends on an augmented chord (that is to say, a chord with a seemingly superfluous note). There may just be the dimmest hint of possibility here, a raised eyebrow, a ‘what if’. But it’s emphatically not the kind of arch touch you’d get in ‘The Frog Princess’ or ‘Generation Sex’. Instead, it’s a songwriter at the absolute height of his powers knowing when to go forth and when to hold back, served by first-class arrangement and production.

And so in that paean to loss I gained a band. Well, actually, I haven’t listened to anything Hannon’s done since, but I find myself revisiting the old stuff, which, dusted and divorced from its original context, seems to stand up better than I had previously thought. Ditties such as ‘Becoming more like Alfie’ and ‘Something for the weekend’ are still daft, but they’re also bloody brilliant, among the best singles of their era; and lest we forget, The Divine Comedy were also responsible for ‘My Lovely Horse’, the greatest song never to represent Ireland at the Eurovision Song Contest. But ‘Lost Property’ is a true lost classic. Ultimately, it belongs in that parallel universe which Hannon visualises in his dream; perhaps you too will dream of it anon, and, like him, weep tears of joy.

24 – Joy Division: Transmission

There’s a haze surrounding Manchester. A sort of vapour that grows thicker and soupier as you roll on down the M62. It’s not the industrial fug of Victorian cliché, or the drizzle-clouds of the Southern imagination.  It’s the atmospheric pressure of myth. In its own way, it’s just as irrepressible (irresistible?) as the mists swirling around Glastonbury Tor or the breakers lapping at the lip of Fingal’s Cave. Some of it is merely the hot air of dozens of talkers: the patter of Tony Wilson, Shaun Ryder’s halitosis. But there are other chemicals in the mix – the powdery ghosts of the Pankhursts, Marx and Engels, former Guardian editors and co-operative society pioneers. And there’s the dust that still refuses to settle – the dust of a thousand demolished backstreets, the terraces we know from Morrissey and Tony Warren and Shelagh Delaney. Manchester is all particulates; a fine mesh of reference, suspended cloud-like over the redbrick.

Well, maybe. Every time I’ve been to Manchester I’ve tried to feel it. It should be a spiritual home of sorts – Northern, a bit pinko (a bit pink in fact, if not rainbow), nodal point for some of the coolest music ever committed to vinyl – but it hasn’t been shrouded, and the wraiths have stayed well underneath the cobble-line. I’ve seen a lot of consumption, as much as anywhere – palaces to it, in fact. A city once world-renowned for production, now erecting glass edifices with nothing in them. Many would say that Manchester’s always been about ‘front’ (something that unites Elsie Tanner and the Gallaghers) but I don’t want veneer. I don’t wanna be adored. I want to be hemmed in like a boar between arches.

I want the vapour to bear down on me, to stop my breath, to dampen my pleural cavity. And that’s when I reach for Joy Division.

‘Transmission’ appropriately begins with the faintest hum of static. It’s the ambient hiss before the station settles, the echo of unintelligible voices in the hall before the conductor lifts his baton. We’re waiting for something to happen. It’s damp and drear; we need a match to catch, a gas-lamp to light. In the event of it, we get Peter Hook’s bass guitar cutting through the fog, and it briefly promises something menacing. The light isn’t glowing as much as glowering. It’s all front though. Stephen Morris’s drums stutter into life and then the tinny, skinny Sumner guitar, two notes played with pale fingers. ‘Radio, live transmission’, sings Ian Curtis, to himself and his bandmates. Live but barely living: if this is a broadcast, it’s the 4am shift, just as the quarter-light becomes the half-light, and the eyes open into gummy slits. Joy Division are practising in the basement of a disused textiles factory, watching malnourished hands strike strings in the dismal wattage of a dimmed bulb. The walls are thick with mould; spores bother the throat.

Are there any opening bars in popular music more pleuritic, more bronchitic, more burdened with the set-in weather of the industrial Pennines? It’s not such a jump to see chimneys and furnaces when listening to Joy Division (they were on Factory Records, of course), but Ian Curtis grew up in Macclesfield, within sight of the western fringe of the Peak District, and the frowsty atmospherics of peat moorland, the lurch from clam to chill, are there in the fug of synth and the spitting snare and cymbal. For those unfamiliar with these landscapes, or unsympathetic to Joy Division’s music, this might be a virtual no-brainer. The band is a byword for a type of Northern ‘miserabilism’ – cue the clichés about trenchcoats in Ancoats. But then, the sun does sometimes shine up there on the pocked hillsides; its fingers poke into the viscid canals, revealing spectrums in the foam of industrial waste and the rusting shopping trolleys. These moments can be epiphanic, and this is what makes Joy Division’s ‘Transmission’ so damned special.

Initially, Curtis’s eyes are ‘dark grey lenses frightened of the sun’. It’s a Vitamin D allergy, sure consequence of reading Camus by torchlight. But this song is about learning to let go of that; it’s about willing yourself free. And though the bloodless drums continue splishing mercilessly, and Barney’s guitar never finds itself moving in anything but one-tone steps, ‘Transmission’ begins to strain out of itself, wrenching up and away. Martin Hannett’s switches and sliders slowly build the track into something choral and big, hitting upon a new kind of musical paradox: the emaciated epic. Not epic in length (the song is only three and a half minutes long), but epic in implication. At just over the two-minute mark, something uncanny happens – Ian Curtis discovers he can dance, and the realisation is so forceful it threatens the song with disequilibrium. So far, the verse has been chanted tentatively, if portentously, on a monotone; the bridge (or chorus, if it can be called thus) takes Curtis up a fifth, as he decides to ‘dance to the radio’. The effect of these fifths is of open strings, which register in the subconscious as a kind of tuning up. We’re back to the hum of the rudderless orchestra and the static of audience sibilance before the first bar begins. It’s a powerful effect, notating what supposedly comes before the piece proper, voicing the flutter of anticipation; mull this over next time you listen to Beethoven’s 9^th, whose opening movement mimics this tuning-up excitement before battering your eardrums with a ferocious D minor chord.

Funnily enough, we’re in D minor here too, and the open string leads to a thrilling octave. Two and a half minutes into the song, and Ian has vaulted into a higher register, his paranoid baritone morphing into a tenor which, while hardly gleeful, seems to voice a kind of desperate release. This is the territory surveyed by David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, a rise from croon to holler. It’s a fair comparison – we know that Joy Division lapped up Berlin-period weltschmerz, and though equating late 1970s Manchester with the darkness of divided Germany might seem a little invidious, there is scant difference between those two mental landscapes (let’s not forget that Marxism began in Cottonopolis).  Just as Bowie’s lovers kiss by the Berlin Wall, ‘as though nothing could fall’, Curtis’s dancers have to believe in the possibility of unbridled physicality. His painfully inflected yell – ‘we can daaaaance’ – speaks to all those pimply, iron-deficient youths on rundown estates; all those disaffected by Labour and about to be dispossessed by Hayek-worshipping monetarists. It sounds like Curtis is rounding up the undead for a totentanz by the Ship Canal; but it’s a dance nevertheless. Dance as if your life depends on it, he’s saying. ‘No language, just sound, that’s all we need know’. Language is power. What better way to subvert the power structures of society than to call for a new kind of eloquence?  Articulacy happens in the gut, in the legs, in the wobble of the arms.

This threshold is genuinely exciting. The track bubbles under Curtis’s screams, offering more and more glimpses of dappled light, octaved pianos glimmering like Saint-Saens’ ‘Aquarium’ through the post-punk noir. The dance could gain traction; the dance as social movement, as mobilisation, as exuberance unquashed by reactionary edict. Perhaps this transmission leads to transition, change, progress. But then in its last twenty seconds, the track winds itself down. Morris’s drums lose their footing, and the radio batteries flatten. All we are left with at the end is the synth hiss from whence the song was hatched. The possibility of progress is an illusion. The youth movement flares up in a momentary blaze of passion and heroism, but dies as quickly as it sparks. Life is mostly dull. Revolution is a dream. The monochrome grey settles in over Salford once more.

A certain romance now clings to Joy Division, surely one of the most mythologized of all British bands. Contrary to my expectations, I found Anton Corbijn’s Control a genuinely affecting film, though I do wonder how much of this had to do with the exquisite black-and-white palette (Macclesfield seemed utterly foreign, and this to me, a Northerner!), and the pitch-perfect recreation of the electrifying Granada TV performance of ‘Transmission’, which unleashed Ian Curtis’s own flailing dance on the world. Nevertheless, Joy Division’s reputation as doomsters is lazy thinking. Though their name was a horribly ironic reference to Nazi whorehouses, there is yet some ‘joy’ in the Division. ‘Transmission’ is realistic; it knows that as soon as the youths go to dance, the authorities will come and flick off the power switch. But it’s also idealistic; these men are far from conventionally gifted musicians, but with will and individuality, they produce an utterly singular piece of art that recognises the extraordinarily transformative power of good noise. ‘Transmission’, then, is not only a metonym for Manchester’s impressive pop music heritage, but for British indie music at large. Over and out.