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There's so much stuff of all kinds going on in London that it boggles the mind and burns out the body. Take my visit there this June/July. I'd hardly got in from Vancouver when I found myself in Brixton Academy watching LA's Dilated Peoples making an incoherent mess of their Platform LP, one of the hip hop highlights of this year. Amazing that a band with so much wit, imagination and idiosyncracy on record could be so tediously cliched live. Hearing the Academy's booming acoustics swallow up the Peoples' endless "throw your hands in the air" exhortations was a disheartening experience. Still, not as bad as witnessing the show's headliners, Cypress Hill, allowing a heavy metal backing band to crush their sharpest gems into mud. This wasn't what I'd come to London for. The same goes for the performance of late Maoist composer Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning that Michael Nyman and Brian Eno had organized for Islington's cavernous Union Chapel. Still, this post-Cageian concept epic proved to be a compelling, if endurance-testing, spectacle - it was certainly interesting to see free improv legends AMM and Blur's Damon Albarn performing in the same ensemble. I was actually in town to attend the South Bank Centre's annual Meltdown festival, which was being "curated" by my idol, '60s pop star turned '90s avant rocker Scott Walker. The great man, following previous years' down-melters Laurie Anderson, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave and John Peel, had organized a pretty intriguing two-weeks of dance, film, theatre and - most of all - music. Highlights
included a fantastic new piece by British composer Mark Anthony Turnage.
Bizzarely, it was performed by a youth orchestra from the suburbs of
North West London who coped admirably with the daunting task of expressing
Turnage's garish, turbulent cascades of orchestral colour. Things really
started to heat up with the appearance of Fuckhead. Opening an evening
headlined by dour indie-rockers Smog, these Austrian art terrorists
created a truly formidable mix of cutting-edge "glitchcore" electronica,
hypnotic film projections, metallic math-rock and puerile pranks. Clad
in nothing but a little well-placed electrical tape they were a truly
hilarious spectacle. Behaviour that could be highly irritating from
a less professional combo, instead cohered into a cutting satire of
Germanic male identity. After that,
even much-loved Britpop prankster Jarvis Cocker (of Pulp) couldn't have
much impact. His mid-bill side project A Touch of Glass mixed minimalism,
electronica and spy film soundtracks to pleasingly Stereolab-esque effect.
The highlight came, when a cappella choir The Swingle Singers came on
to help out with a rendition of Scott's "On Your Own Again". This sort
of one-off curio is just the kind of thing that is making Meltdown an
unmissable part of British summertime.
Smog's headlining set may have been somewhat standard by comparison but it still used some interesting gimmicks including a huge real-time film of a human eye that hovered over the stage throughout the performance, the presence of two Tortoise members and an appearance by cowgirl backing singers The Dongettes. The eye, in particular, was the perfect accompaniment to mainman Bill Callaghan's unflinching gaze at the grimy underbelly of mundanely failed romances. His skeletal dirges were utterly compelling in this context. Certainly
more intense than the opening set performed by Cathal Coughlan at another
Meltdown show. Coughlan, a pitbull-like Irish firebrand, started his
career in soft-rock satirists Microdisney but really found his raging
voice in the ferocious Fatima Mansions. Sadly he seems to have returned
to his more mannered style of songsmithery in a last-ditch attempt to
rescue his failing career. Strangely,
Coughlan's old Microdisney partner Sean O'Hagan (of The High Llamas)
was playing as part of the evening's headlining band, which had been
assembled by Jim O'Rourke to recreate the lush avant pop he's been producing
to much popular acclaim recently. With various excursions into intensely
hypnotic repitition and one venture into electro-acoustic improv, this
deceptively laid-back performance was the musical highlight of my trip.
It would have been nice to hear Jim indulging his free improv tendencies a little more but there was plenty of that sort of thing just around the corner. Evan Parker's Meltdown performance, the following night at the Purcell Room, was just about as good as this sort of music gets. Accompanied by Johns Russel and Edwards going crazy on acoustic guitar and double bass respectively, Parker's painfully extended, gradually evolving circular breathing meditations created richly evocative flurry of micro-tones and timbres. This provided a fittingly masterful end to my Meltdown experience but, for most people this was actually where the festival got started. The last two nights were the most high-profile by far, featuring much-anticipated gigs by Britpop megastars Radiohead and Blur, on consecutive nights. Tickets for these shows sold out before I'd even heard they were happening but I did manage to attend Radiohead's after-show party where I accidentally touched buttocks with teeny pop megastar Robbie Williams. On the night of the Blur show I was in Shepherd's Bush Empire for the second night of Sonic Youth's two-night residency. Joined on stage by the aforementioned Jim O'Rourke, the godparents of rock dissonance provided a rousing, if rather cursory mix of old favourites and excellent new tunes. By the end of the set I was exhilarated and exhausted. In short, I'd had enough. I'd taken all I wanted from this particular metropolis and it was time to go west. After all, London's a nice place to go on holiday but you wouldn't want to live there. |
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