#MAN i also need to give the calamity a proper ref sheet

[narsh-poptarts]

One man's trash is another man's hydrogen bomb

[pleiadesounds]

Where To Start With,  Pt 1

 This week, Harry Fanshawe from UK noiseniks Modern Rituals acquaints Kai with the inimitable Silver Jews, while Kai in turn shows him the finer points of British post-punk stalwarts Wire. 

  Kai Woolen-Lewis Wire are, for me, one of the great bands in the history of punk music. Whereas a lot of other bands you’d describe as such would subsist largely on folklore and be a calamity if judged on their incarnation in the present moment, Wire however seem to be one of the rare bands who have managed to be both very influential (if you need punk credentials, they were covered by Minor Threat and if you need trendy floppy haircut credentials, they were covered by My Bloody Valentine) and forever forward-thinking - bridging the gap between the pompousness of progressive music and the snarl and brevity of punk, a bridge between what were two ultra-partisan camps. Though they’re contemporaries of elder statesmen of British punk like the Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks, there’s far more of an art-school vibe to Wire - one gets the impression that they must’ve stood in stark contrast to the image and the attitude of their peers, with cerebral and challenging songs that refused to succumb to the immediate hedonism of the punk music of the time. One gets the impression that they have far more in common with genre outliers like Patti Smith, Pere Ubu and Kraftwerk than with any of their counterparts in the British punk scene. 

 When I first saw them, at the Lexington in London 4 or 5 years ago, they played almost entirely new songs, with only a few songs from their “seminal” LP’s included in the set. Now that the horror of not knowing many of the songs has worn off, it’s a clear sign of their continuously forward-looking approach. With seventeen studio albums and god knows what else in the way of releases, here’s where to start with Wire - despite their huge legacy, absolutely not a legacy act…

 Playing Harp For The Fishes

 KWL Even after decades of churning out consistently stark, highly original songs, Wire still absolutely excel - although lots of their current and recent material is a lot more digestible than in their early years - this, from 2017’s Silver/ Lead is big slow-grooving song which gives an excellent idea of the kind of discomforting experimental noise Wire have always dealt in. A steady rhythm section struggles against all matter of ethereal out of key guitar, weird oscillating noises and throbbing synth lines. Musically and lyrically challenging and abstract without ever feeling overwrought. Sardonic without any hint of bitterness. Dense without even a smidgen of unpalatability. Is it always so? Aye.

Harry Fanshawe Wire for me have always been a band on the periphery of punk history. Not to say that is rightly so, but they're a band that I've seen has being earmarked as integral by the nerdier music fans (I mean that with fondness). Take Joy Division, they formed because they saw the Sex Pistols, but they made something much deeper and more meaningful. My mental placement for Wire has had them alongside the likes of Killing Joke in that history (weirder and less easy to associate with the common idea of 'punk'), and I feel like their evolution has been similar. Like you say this track favours simplicity with the steady beat, allowing a nicely sized canvas to throw as many different colours at, which they do with the layers they chuck on top. That is an approach that I see as being more contemporary of today than the 70s (favouring simplicity and excelling in it has really come back in the last few years). It shows how adaptable this band has been over the decades. 

Lowdown

 KWL Wire’s first album Pink Flag has gone down in music history as one of the seminal British records of the early punk movement, largely down to it’s combination of abrasiveness, melody and brevity. 21 songs in 36 minutes, often fleetingly abrupt, played at breakneck pace and infused with an abstract sense of humour and an art-school sensibility that set them miles apart from their contemporaries. This one, Lowdown, sounds like a soul single on 33rpm; a fascinating disco dirge and highlight of a pretty highlight-heavy first LP.

 HF Right back to the 70s and for me that Crazy Horse vibe is straight in there. This is the THE Wire album. Fight me. Musically, it's a whole different sound to the last song, it's got vibe and groove and all the amazing characteristics of the best 70s bands. Vocally I find it more alike the stuff of the 2010s, though I reckon that's probably debatable! It's obviously got that old school, British punk oi! to it and today they're much calmer. But you can hear it. For anyone who knows Kai and his musical projects of the last few years, this riff is SO Kai.

 Marooned

KWL Here’s an older one - from 1978’s Chairs Missing. The jump between Pink Flag and this in the space of a couple of years is absolutely insane, and the jump from this to the next year’s 154 is also pretty nuts. A highlight on a rich, chilling and unique record of challenging post-punk, Marooned is slow, meandering and awash with oceanic wetness, big synths and sheet glass guitars, with Newman singing about hanging out on a sinking iceberg - both sonically and in terms of sheer epic-ness of scope, it’s closer to Pink Floyd than to any of their genre contemporaries. I put this on at a house party once and the atmosphere nose dived and the whole room just totally explicably got really fucking awkward. Take what you want from that, I guess.

 HF Forward a couple of years and the Pink Floyd sounds are in there, the experimentation is kicking off and yeah we're sat on a soft synth cloud here. It is a massive jump and I love that, I fully dig that 'fuck it who cares what anyone thinks I wanna try that'. I reckon that idea is nicely reflected in your house party play of it. I know that feeling, I did it with Primitive Man myself around a bunch of posh hipsters listening to surf rock in Cornwall. Lasted like less than 2 seconds. Proper wankers. Anyway, point is Kai, it's their loss. The tune slaps.

Map Ref 

KWL By 1980’s 154 - so called because at the point they recorded it, they had played live 154 times - Wire had cemented their place as both stalwarts and genre outliers by following up the seminal Pink Flag with the enormous impenetrable curveball-shaped Chairs Missing. 154 is full of big bangers and awkward, atmospheric synthesiser-led songs - this by the way is one of the big bangers. Lyrically it seems to be a geography nerd gushing about the enormous epic expanses of landscape that make up the American midwest. Before you go look it up, the Map reference is somewhere called Centerville in Iowa or Ohio or something. Map Ref has a chorus I frequently cite alongside “That’s When I Reach for my Revolver” or “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” as a contender among underground punk rock’s biggest fist-in-the-air choruses.

HF Again, 70s vibes are rife, the energy of the rhythm section just holds it all up so strong. Weirdly, I find his voice sounds loads like Blake Schwarzenbach [Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil]? Any influence on him there? Who knows. Way more in the way of vocal melody here and the vibe is moving more along the way bands like Talking Heads were at the time. Definitely a banger. Love the lil satirical 'chorus' drop in there. As for landscapes inspiring songs, fuck yeah why should it always be about people? I mean animal rights punk is usually dreadful and dull, let's talk about something inanimate for once.

 Blogging

 KWL Brazen, streamlined and groovy, with a chugging downtuned riff and a glorious uplighting chorus - Blogging showcases Wire’s admirable ability to follow their own pretty standard formula and keep churning out highly original and interesting songs. The lyrics deserve a mention - it’s a hard enough endeavour sometimes for those of us born in the 90s, but if you were in a band that existed in 1976, the current musical landscape must be a pretty soul-destroying place to exist. Actually scrap that. If you were alive at a time when art seemingly meant something or was worth anything, now must be a horrible place to live. “I’m blogging like Jesus/ I tweet like a pope/site traffic heavy/ I’m YouTubing hope” 

 HF Totally agree Kai. Today is a fucking terrible time to be alive if you're interested in anything related to the notion of 'art'. It's all been rehashed and overdone. It's everywhere to be seen and no longer has a sacred place. It's been abused and overused for petulant causes. Everyone's a fucking artist and that's killed the concept. Can't believe how much this reminds me of Jets to Brazil, why!? I suppose we can forget about the present if we stick to Wire's back catalogue.

Circumspect

KWL A product of extensive periods of down-time on their part, which saw the members working on other projects - Colin Newman’s Githead in particular is worth a mention - 2008’s Object 47, so called because it’s the 47th Object in their back catalogue - is a really great record and a hidden gem in Wire’s back catalogue for me. Dispensing with the distortion and the abrasion, Wire made a record of sparse, infectious guitar-based songs that you can really lose yourself in, and this is one of the songs in which I have most frequently lost myself. A slow circular guitar arpeggio, laid-back drums and lush vocals result in an almost Manchester-esque slow disco pills-thrills-and-bellyache vibe - this is Wire at their most hypnotic and enjoyable. 

 HF Slowcore Wire! Yeah this is one of my favourites from this list. Having time away from something can let you come back to it without as much creative control or care, and refreshing your image of what the thing is in the first place. Step away, come back more naturally. This is softer, but it's still as weird as anything else they made in the last 20 years. Pretty banging video too, mind. It feels like you're in one of those dreams where you try and run but you got sandbags on your feet. But in this one, it's Drew Barrymore from Donny Darko and she's apathetic as fuck.

Bad Worn Thing

KWL Their first album properly “back” after a period of sporadic activity through the 2000s, Red Barked Tree is the sound of a band of fifty-somethings consistently at peace with the idea of re-defining what their band IS, without at any point ever stepping on the toes of their older selves. Another album highlight (with acoustic guitars) Adapt, sums it up pretty nicely. "Go east / Go north / Go south / Go west / Leave mouths open / With your best / Adapt to change / Stay unimpressed”. Bad Worn Thing finds the band both tapping into 2000s alternative music and subjecting it totally to their musical and lyrical interpretations. An upbeat, undeniably British-feeling slice of sauntering pop, one that makes me feel like I’m taking an afternoon walk through a British urban landscape to the shop on the first sunny day in weeks - all while giving a pretty caustic account of Britain’s ongoing relationship with its past and by implication, it’s future. “Follow me, no explanation/ the future sold the chancellor paces/ the growing pains associated with a past that no-one faces.”

 HF This feels so much more British than much of what we've had from them on this list so far. This is Britpop Wire. Dam right they sound like they're back, they have something new to say, they're older and more jaded, but they still have something to say. I love the 'overcrowded nature of things' repetition. Like they've come back to this messy DIY music thing and it's a fucking full house. So you gotta build your own. Mind you, I'd say Wire have always lived in the garage.

Used To

KWL Another huge cut from Chairs Missing - and a perfect example of what critic Simon Reynolds called Wire’s “strange clockwork geometry” - a blissful piece of post-punk psychedelia and definitely one of the climaxes of a record that enjoys an embarrassment of rich, blissed out moments. I would definitely cite Wire’s work in this period as proof of the utter compatibility of the experimental, expansive, forward thinking music of the 60s and 70s and the abrasiveness and brevity of punk. Indeed, it sounds like bullshit now, but the same A+R man who signed Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols was responsible for EMI’s acquisition of the band while they were still in their infancy. For me, basically everything that made the years 1976-1979 so exciting and vital in the history of unpopular music is represented in this album, whether it be this, the Beatles-on-glue vibes of ‘I am the Fly’ or the aggressive minimalism of ‘Being Sucked in Again’, the album just gives and gives and gives. An absolute classic.

 HF Very pleased we went back to this to close. Absolutely loving the post-punk psychedelia tag on this baby. Again, everything you say above that I hear in this record is their observant nature as a band to look back at the twenty years before them and incorporate what's important, what's wrong, what's right and the relationship of all that against their own stronghold. It reinforces their importance and their place in all of this. Not everyone, hardly anyone, has the ability to be the originator of something whilst being so observant (the latter being one of the most troubling things for humankind) at the same time. A perfect place to end with Wire: it repeats, it talks, it stays with you for a moment and then it's gone. Thanks Kai.

 Silver Jews

Harry Fanshawe Like many of us, my summer last year was consumed by the release of David Berman's new album under the 'Purple Mountains' moniker and then his sudden death. I'm sure many of us also went back through his entire catalogue once we'd exhausted our ears of his latest and last offering. Silver Jews have always been a standout band for me, usually sitting with things like Leonard Cohen or the Velvet Underground in my poor attempts at genre categorising. 

What's always stood out to me in this way, making it something I've struggled to place with more contemporary artists, is the looseness in the music and the corresponding looseness in its lines between music and prose. Like Leonard or Lou, SJ have a truly unique way of delivering and intertwining music and meaning. Where the new Purple Mountains record is much more polished in its production, my fondness for the old Silver Jews records has always been like that of an old, familiar room; their rusty structures and broken floorboards bring with them more character and heart than any solid new build could and, given last summer’s events, it now holds a very special place in my heart.

KWL I remembered having heard about David Berman’s suicide because many of my most misanthropic and refined friends had been especially despondent about it - it seems I missed the boat on that particular opportunity to be saddened by the loss of a great artist, so having this opportunity to go back and be able posthumously introduced to him has been a strange experience - cool that Harry and I have these different perspectives on his work and death…like reading a sentence with a full stop at the end, or something.

 Albermarle Station

HF A tender country offering inhabited by old ghosts, broken bridges and ivy covered screens. This song always reminded me of travel, of the lingering memories from recent events in recent places bouncing around the mind after an experience somewhere with people. All whilst anticipating the next destination. There's a train station near my parents’ house and as a teenager I used to travel from it a lot to see friends. That place hasn't changed at all in the 15 years since, and the rare occasions I go there now just bring back all of it; all the old ghosts while I sit and wait near the ivy covered screens and the rickety old bridge.Travel is a time that allows for rumination and retreat, and that can be savoured in all of its broken glory. 

KWL A surprising first listen - I’m not sure exactly what I expected, maybe something a bit glossier and more upbeat, but this is great - ramshackle, melodic and with lyrics that will take a million listens. It sort of reminds me of Red House Painters but with wit, self-deprecation and genuine insight in place of abrasiveness and machismo. Berman is a prepossessing and fascinating figure in light of his suicide, I should imagine before just as much and also considering the esteem in which a lot of people held and hold him. Maybe you led me there but this song definitely feels like they have a foot in the past, in those old, deserted spaces you pass through on the way somewhere.

 New Orleans

 HF From that slightly out of tune guitar at the start to the doubled up lazy groans about the trouble in the stairs; to me this song is the dusty corner of an old house, the gold in the cellar, and it's not the house you think it is. Keeping up with a nostalgic line of thinking, this track captures the 'otherness' of the past, the distance it eventually takes, even when it can be so well set in stone by old artefacts and rooms. It beholds the length of reflective nights and the depth of their texture. Trapped inside the song where the night's are so long, we count sheep to find soothing sleep. An early banger from Berman.

 KWL This is also great - there’s something hugely admirable about a song being able to be this rickety and cobbled-together-sounding while still being so evocative. It’s like, they could probably have recorded it without the out of key guitar lines or the drums losing the beat, but they didn’t - and there’s beauty in the imperfection. The song has that ‘On The Beach’ feeling of the end of a long, drunken night, when the ash-tray is full and the kitchen needs tidying before bed. But you’ll do it in the morning.

Tennessee

 HF Clearly a trend is setting in here: the slowest country SJ numbers titled by places. Aside from the obviously amazing play on the title word in the chorus, this love song has some of the best one-liners as far as I'm concerned. Here's one: 'Punk rock died when the first kid said "Punk's not dead, punk's not dead”'. Here's my favourite: 'We're off to the land of hot middle-aged women'. Is this an optimistic look to a future with a spouse? As far as I care to know, the whole song is. Punk may be dead but love isn’t.

 KWL I always knew you had a type, Harry. Another piece of rickety out of tune folk-country storytelling that somehow plays with superficiality and reaches into the darkest depths at the same time. A bit of cutesy word-play and a really lovely key change in the middle of the song - this is actually going really well, isn’t it. I’m guessing the lady singing is Berman’s wife, just because the whole atmosphere just feels very close and personable - listening to these songs of Berman being in love and happy and stuff is startling in this current context. A great song.

Sleeping is the Only Love

 HF What's that? Another love song? Maybe! As blurred as it seems deliberately to be about loving someone and how incredible a good night's sleep is. As someone who troubles with sleep, I can agree that there are times when I would crawl over broken glass and hot coals to make it to sleep. I also love the reflection from that onto the peace had with a good functioning relationship with someone you love. Sleep and love intertwined.

 KWL All these love songs have taken on a very strange overtone, now. This one has somewhere in it a snapshot of Berman and his wife settling down to the quiet life in Nashville - it’s all pretty beautiful, and it’s very impressive to go about making so intricate a love song about something as banal as sleep. I think there’s a snapshot here of the kind of intimacy that goes beyond the sexual - where somehow sleeping next to someone is the most intimate thing of all - the rolling over, the arms going to sleep, the waking up, the bad breath. The real deal.

 Punks in the Beerlight

 HF A song for the addicts! After a hot summers day, what better than the transcendence found in the cooling of a beautiful summers night? How could you make that even better? I guess you could smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch? This song is for a long summer night where you can go and run away into the night with a friend, find the nicest, deadest park around and watch that sun go down. And what comes after we exhaust our routes for escape? Let's not kid ourselves. It gets really really bad. Gotta love that 80s glam section after the first chorus too.

 KWL Ok, so I feel I need to state here that Harry’s article has sent me down a deep rabbit hole of SJ/David Berman appreciation. It’s strange to find him here, at this point and I just wonder what it would have been like to have been like “I hope David Berman’s doing okay” at random intervals in life. This is easily the most conventionally beautiful song on the list so far and somehow it examines some of the darkest corners of the human experience. It reminds me of the beauty of being in love - all other markers fade into unimportance, rendering the rich paupers and the poor rich beyond dreams, together; a beautiful juxtaposition, part love song, part junkie memoir.

 Advice to the Graduate

 HF 'Your third drink will lead you astray.' Let's follow on from the last theme. 'So you've got no friends and you wander through the night. And now you watch the sunrise through a rifle-sight'. This song speaks for itself.

 KWL This song seems to be quite strongly advocating the “school of life” diploma - that when you finish all the arbitrary self-building, that there’s a big wide world to step out into that’s all misery and addiction and what’s your deep critical analysis of Edgar Rice Burroughs going to do for you then? It sounds so slack, a borderline The Shaggs influence - Berman said that all of his favourite singers couldn’t sing, and it doesn’t sound like he or his backing band was much better. A genuine advert for keeping the musicians out of music…

K-Hole

 HF I've never understood the appeal of a K-Hole, I suppose that DB doesn't either, since he compares it to the feeling of being left alone. Though he does still reserve his fondness for booze as a trustworthy fallback during tough times. Perhaps that's it; it can go too far. I love the string arrangements in this song, it feels outback and rural, the lyrics appeal to that sense of dusty distance too.

 KWL I have a real soft spot in my heart for when the music of a song seems to run in tandem with its lyrical content, and I must say lots of the instrumental here feels like an out of body hallucination of a country song - large swathes of the song feel like Alice in Wonderland or that first Pink Floyd record that sounds like a Kaleidoscopic Circus.  

Dallas

 HF You know the way a city can change completely in character when night hits. When all the blazing sunlight lifts and leaves you with the purity of a place. It's like a deep breath of fresh air after a heavy day, you can feel your spirits lift as the weight peels away. This is a great, simple example of DB, highlighted best in the last lines: 'Poor as a mouse every morning, rich as a cat every night, Some kind of strange magic happens, when the city turns on her lights’.

 KWL The lyrics to this really grabbed me too - but not so much in respect of the city at night, but the string of non-sequiturs that pepper the song, something that DB is obviously really great at - painting those little pictures. There’s the bit about his shrink’s former NFL career, the eroticism of CPR, “our record just went aluminium” - all absolutely amazing. I’ve heard hundreds of songs about hundreds of places, but they never came as unique or as vivid as this.

 I Remember Me

 HF Another example of being a sucker for the whimsical. 'I remember you and I remember me': through the years you can lose the old parts of yourself. When you're in a relationship these losses double, and when you look back in your 'now' state to the person you were right back at the beginning, and the person they were, it makes you appreciate the whimsical and the romantic because they are so short-lived and random. Even though you change through those years, that change enables each quirk and trait that you might look back on and miss. So soak it up while it's there lest you regret its disappearance. In this story, the characters end up apart, but whether or not you do, know that even if you are still together, parts of you can always remain apart.

 KWL This is the best song on the list, for me - absolutely gorgeous and very very moving indeed. Somehow, Berman manages to sum up in his songs and in his writing that life is a huge collection of these tiny tiny moments, and maybe if we looked more closely at the tiny moments, the enormousness of life might not seem so terrifying. A sort of temporal looking after the pennies, so to speak. This one screams “don’t wait for the perfect moment, it’s now”. 

How to Rent a Room

 HF A great ender for this list. 'I want to wander through the night as a figure in the distance even to my own eye'. 'No I don't really want to die. I only want to die in your eyes'. If only…

 KWL Further research into the life of DB has directed me towards the fact that his father represents the worst of the worst of the American Republican corporate lobbying parasite - against environmental protections, the minimum wage, health warnings on tobacco, labour rights and trade regulations, to name just a few, and whose son Berman seemed ashamed to be. I just looked through the lyrics to this and they genuinely seem to be a letter to his dad, who he called “a despicable man … [a] human molestor … an exploiter … a scoundrel” saying “I’d rather be dead than your son.” 

 Thanks for this Harry, it’s been a real pleasure and a great introduction to a fascinating man and his band. May he rest in peace.

For the full playlist, click here