A Spot Of Housekeeping

Just gathering together a few old reviews from the last few years into one place. Move on, nothing to see here...

BILL BRUFORD - THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In his many guises, Bruford has been a part of at least three records which would go onto the proverbial desert island with me – “Discipline” by King Crimson, “If Summer Had Its Ghosts” with Ralph Towner and Eddie Gomez which might just be the best Sunday morning record there is, and “Bruford Levin Upper Extremities”, with an honourable mention for the live album that followed, BLUE Nights.

And that’s not to mention the fact that it would take plenty to tear me away from at least a couple of Earthworks efforts such as “A Part And Yet Apart” and “Footloose And Fancy Free”.

He’s also the reason why it’s worth hunting for as many bootlegs of Genesis’ 1976 tour as you can find, just to hear him play “Supper’s Ready”, “Los Endos” and “The Cinema Show” never the same way twice.

I’m a fan, get it?

But even I was surprised by just what a good read this is, I’m hard pushed to think of a rock book of recent times to rival it. It genuinely is that good, both for the zealot, but also for the more casual observer who wants to know just what it’s like on the inside of the music business as a gigging, recording musician.

Over the years Bruford has proved a wry, witty interviewee, even amidst his unconcealed dislike of the form, as he makes clear here. That dry, cynical turn of mind informs the pages here but while there’s a healthy scepticism for the business he’s in and the characters who inhabit it, there’s none of the sourness of tone that you get from his erstwhile bandleader Robert Fripp.

Bruford accepts that, if you want to play music, and you want to make it your living, there will be compromises, you will have to play the industry game at times and that it makes sense to embrace your audience rather than wish they were somewhere else.

There are stories and anecdotes aplenty about his days in an assortment of bands, from Yes to Crimson, Uk to Earthworks, Genesis to ABWH.

There’s a playful edge to some of them, while keen observations on the likes of Fripp, Chris Squire of Yes or Phil Collins are enlightening.

The catastrophe that was Yes’ “Union” project is a glorious morality tale on just what can happen when management and money come before the music.

But always, it comes back to the music and his desire to explore just where those sticks lead, to stretch his ability to the nth degree, to seek out different ways and different settings for the drums that clearly fascinate him.

The sharp difference between the world of rock – sloppy, disorganised, uncertain yet bloated by huge amounts of money that you may never see again – and that of jazz – professional, organised, run on a shoestring – is neatly illustrated, as is the difficulty of maintaining a band, even a career, in an age when your recorded work is swiftly translated into zeroes and ones then disseminated for free by torrents and downloads.

The sheer grind of being a working musician is well captured here without being self pitying – it’s clear that Bruford still rates a career in music as being better than working for a living – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t tough, with long hours and emotional hardships that few of the rest of us would sign up for.

The balance of the opportunities it offers and the toll it takes is a fine one, and clear as he has got older, the balance has shifted.

There’s a sense that Bruford realises he might just have got his timing absolutely right, living in an era when he could flit from one group to another and make a reasonable living from it, and that this might be an opportunity to get out while the getting is good.

In the final section of the book, he muses on the issue of self confidence, belief in your ability. In few other fields – sport is another – must you shore up your ego to the same extent before you go to work, in the full knowledge that you are in the spotlight with nowhere to hide if it all goes wrong.

I think he underestimates the forgiving nature of the audience on those occasions when it might be off kilter, along with our inability to spot it anyway in most cases, but that’s more a function of perfectionism / professionalism.

It’s a poignant end to the tale, an acceptance of the passing of time and a reluctance to fight it, at least on stage, and it’s a downbeat note on which to end. But it’s a true one and that’s the strength of this autobiography. It rings true on every page.

Bill Bruford has added to the sum of human happiness as PG Wodehouse would describe it. What better achievement is there than that?

May he enjoy the future in good health and heart for a long, long time to come, continuing to curate and care for a rich, rewarding back catalogue. And may he find time to pen a volume two…

THE FIREMAN - ELECTRIC ARGUMENTS
After a couple of ambient projects, The Fireman – Paul McCartney and Youth – are answering the call of a different conflagration this time. While it’s not wholly accurate to call this an album of songs, it stakes out more traditional territory, albeit with a nicely idiosyncratic approach.

Clearly these were not songs painstakingly mapped out in demo and rehearsal sessions, but instead it’s music made up on the spot in the here and now, 13 tracks cut in 13 days. That raggedy edge and spontaneous feel is something that McCartney has rarely exposed over the years where too much polish has too often been applied to his output.

Let’s not be coy. Since rock’n’roll came into being in the 1950s, there has been no greater songwriter than Macca. As a Beatle, for all the post-70, and especially post-80, revisionism, McCartney was every bit the equal of his partner John Lennon and while his solo work has never scaled the heights of the Fabs years – what has? – he has continued to turn out some of the great standards of the time.

But McCartney was a great experimenter too, though he rarely showcased his penchant for the avant garde until it had gone through the filter of his immaculate pop sensibility, while Lennon got greater credit for being “out there” simply because he never used an editor and was hooked on audio verite which, depending on your viewpoint, is a beautiful expression of the truth or an all too painful look at the navel of a lazy arist.

To call “Electric Arguments” avant garde would be pushing it too far, but certainly this is a more naked view of McCartney as writer, performer and singer than we’re used to, and all power to him for giving it us at the age of 66 and to Youth for drawing it out of him.

In terms of it’s ambition, its sprawl and it’s willingness to go warts and all, this is in the mould of “The White Album”. And no, before anybody thinks that’s a direct comparison in terms of quality or its enduring nature, it isn’t. “The White Album” is the greatest record of all time. Fact. But McCartney was a prime mover on that record and some of its spirit permeates the grooves on this one, if CDs had grooves.

From the opening bark of the raucous Captain Beefheart – yes, really – influenced psych-blues of “Nothing Too Much Just Out Of Sight” through to the moody, impressionist inflections of the closer, “Don’t Stop Running” where Macca’s famous larynx is used as instrument rather than storyteller, this is an album happy to meander, ready to go where the music leads. There’s not as much of the friction as the title infers, but it still covers plenty of bases.

It’s also an album that becomes less and less obvious as it travels. After the opener, “Two Magpies” is a classic bit of airy pop whimsy, though it also age withering a little of the higher register of his voice. But it hasn’t take any of his effortless way with a tune. Nobody writes a pop song lie Paul McCartney as the joyous “Sing The Changes” shows, Youth proving himself the perfect collaborator with a production job that keeps it from the sickly sweetness Macca is sometimes prey to. And who plays pop bass better than him? On the evidence of the effervescent “Highway”, or “Sun Is Shining”, there ain’t nobody.

Yet it’s in the mists and murks of the last few tracks that these electric arguments really provoke. “Lifelong Passion” is in trance territory, while “Is This Love?” has Eno style soundscape textures to enliven it. “Lovers In A Dream” is The Doors gone dub, before the album crests on its stand out track, “Universal Here, Everlasting Now”. Heavier, here’s evidence that McCartney still has his ear to the ground for this draws on the post-rock music coming out of Montreal via the Constellation roster, notably God Speed You Black Emperor!

With two records in a year – “Memory Almost Full” was more traditional fare, if showcasing some of his sharpest songwriting in a while – McCartney is on a roll. Mortality is on his shoulder, and once again, he’s an artist in a hurry, just as he was as a Beatle, for very different reasons, all those years ago. Nothing concentrates the mind better than a deadline.

COWBOY JUNKIES - AT THE END OF PATHS TAKEN
More than twenty years in to a career, there aren’t many artists that are going anyplace. You are what you are what you are. You buy a book, watch a movie, hear a record by somebody who’s been at that that long, you’re putting on familiar shoes. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that either, a little security in a fast changing world.

And yet and yet.

Creation is all about change. You want to keep creating, you gotta keep changing, that was Miles’ philosophy, and pretty well every time you got a new Davis disc, you got a charge of electricity that raced up the spine and knocked your wig off, for good or bad. Not many of those guys about.
You find another one, you better relish that, better cherish it, because those are the artists that are worth having around your house, in your ears, taking space in your head. They’re the ones that are going to wake you up, challenge you, maybe tell you something instead of reinforcing what you already think you know, better yet, make you ask yourself some questions, or help you strip away some dirt from the answers that were there all the time.

You probably think you know what the new Cowboy Junkies record sounds like. You don’t. Yes, the trademarks are there. How could it be otherwise after two decades? But they’re all twisted, re-evaluated, renewed. Songs no longer draw life from the understated, almost unheard pulse of Alan Anton’s bassline, a sound that now propels undulating melodies on “Mountain” or “My Little Basquiat”. Anton almost switches places with Margo Timmins, still the most arresting voice in the game, yet buried deeper inside these songs, songs which create a surround sound universe of their own, be it from plaintive acoustics like “Someday Soon” or the kitchen sink overload of “Mountain”, where all hell breaks loose. Tomorrow never knew.

There are changes here that Junkies purists may baulk at. Drummer Pete Timmins is no longer the easygoing engine. Instead he’s embraced edgy percussion, thoughtful rhythms that knock you off kilter, make you listen more carefully. There’s nothing obvious, or easy going on here. Outside studiophile / musician Joby Baker has added a mesh of instrumentation and sounds that take this record a long way from the skeletal nature of “Whites Off Earth Now!!” Strings play a heavy, dramatic role on several songs. And drama is the keynote in a record which you could loosely call a concept album if the term didn’t bring to mind visions of hobbits, pinball players and wizards on ice.

Yet this is a concept record of sorts. A concept record for grown ups. Like his colleagues, songwriter and guitarist Michael Timmins has dispensed with standbys and certainties, thrown everything in the air, and begun to rework his craft. Echoing the pacifist sentiment that was the core of their last effort, the quickly recorded “Early 21st Century Blues”, “At The End Of Paths Taken” muses on a particular theme, that of family, the way patterns are repeated from father to son to son and back again, the way the greatest joys bring with them the heaviest burdens, the way the outside world can devastate the closest familial relationship, and the way in which we are all helpless to do anything about it. It’s a record that continues to work through themes of war and peace, a hangover from “Early 21st Century Blues”, looking at how the macro can militate against the micro. It’s a record that looks at the biggest betrayal, the one none of us can avoid, the betrayal of mortality. It’s a record that’s simultaneously about surrender, about giving oneself up to the journey while raging against the pain that creates.

That duality, that life is hard, confusing, painful, but still the best thing we’ve managed to come up with so far has long been a core Junkies theme, but on this record, it’s been honed to perfection.
Where Michael Timmins was a short-story writer in song, on this album, he’s a spare, sparse poet, betraying a distinct e.e.cummings influence in lyrics that are impressionistic yet cutting, forensic but embracing, emotional but without a trace of sentimentality. The first track, “Brand New World”, sets the tone, Margo Timmins intoning the list of cares that 40somethings carry about their neck, day after day, “Mouths to feed, Shoes to buy, Rent to pay, Tears to dry”.

The first half of the record covers the darkest fears, that we won’t be up to the job as parents, that we will fail our children or that someone, somewhere will fail all our children, that a madman in the White House could blow us all apart, that a nutcase with a suitcase could take everything down with him. There’s the wonder of fatherhood on the loping, grooving, vaguely sinister “My Little Basquiat”, counterbalanced by the fear of what the world is going to do to those kids when you’re not around to stop it.

Having introduced listeners to new soundscapes, dissonant sounds, powerful emotional terrain, the second half of the record builds and builds, increasingly personal, intimate but wholly identifiable. “Follower2” is a centrepiece, tracing the evolution from father to son, to son becoming father, scraps from Michael’s childhood, inklings from his future, one relationship becoming the other. “I can’t bear to hear his breathing, simply knowing what’s to come”. Is that the breath of a dying father, or a sleeping son, a life full of trials behind or before him? The closing, “Here you will always be, behind me, and you will not go away. Here I will always be, behind you, and I will never go away” is a perfect summation of the handing down of the generations, something picked up on again in “Mountain”, something they used to call a sound collage, mixing the Timmins’ father reading from his memoirs, all kinds of studio samples and sounds, wrenching strings, Margo Timmins wailing “How’d this mountain get so high?” into the abyss. If they hadn’t already come up with the phrase “sensory overload”, you’d have to invent it for this.

But there’s still a peak to come, “My Only Guarantee”. It’s the final twist of the knife, but to say more would be like telling you whodunnit before you started reading a mystery novel. Get the record, set an hour aside, put the headphones on and listen. Really listen. Because the only reference point I can give you to a record this complex, this intriguing, this overloaded with sounds, yet so simple, is one that came out 34 years ago. The effects, the sounds, the overwhelming scale are obvious comparisons, but that’s too facile.

The common ground is that “At The End Of Paths Taken” is a record that somebody needed to make, one that you have to live with from start to finish, one that unfolds, washes over you. It’s a statement of humanity in a dehumanising time, in a time where you’re only supposed to feel what Oprah tells you to feel.

“At The End Of Paths Taken” is a record for those of us who know we don’t know. Take the journey. We’ll meet you on the dark side of the moon.