actwithoutdoing

In the annals of musical nomenclature I can’t think of a more accurate and viscerally evocative label than ‘hair metal’. (The obvious exception being The Blues, but that is probably the most accurate appellation ever applied to anything, so it would be unfair of me to compare the two.)

The term hair metal is so outrageously indicative of a certain cultural era and a remarkably transient zeitgeist that it’s as much defined chronologically as it is stylistically – if Motley Crüe were to appear on the scene today, playing and looking exactly as they did in ’86, they couldn’t be called a hair metal band. Not anymore. Prog, Hard Rock, Punk…even Grunge - that most time-limited of genre labels – all of those can still be used as descriptors. But not hair metal. Its time has passed.

Like with any genre tag, it is sometimes best to define it using hazy, temporal imagery rather than using some form of pseudo-empirical criteria. And so, what is hair metal? Hair metal is sun-drenched beaches and neon-washed nights; it’s Los Angeles during a few gloriously wasteful years in the mid-to-late 80’s; it is loud, over-produced guitars and huge, catchy hooks. It’s the unholy offspring of pop sensibilities and guitar worship; it is strippers and cocaine and make up and massive hair; it is excess… It is a culture eating itself and finding the flavour to be a bit too much. Hair metal is all of those things, but more than anything else it is being inspired to write a song called Kickstart My Heart, and the inspiration coming not from heartbreak, but from a death-and-back-again overdose. In other words: it is awesome.

Or, it was anyway, before it descended into poodle puff self-parody and a series of bubblegum nothings. Somewhere along the way hair metal lost its balls – it strayed too far from the hard 70’s blues rock that spawned it, and it tripped and hung itself on a noose of its own making. But before this demise, there existed a band that could have been an example, an anchor, to those who would soon water the genre down to nothing, if only they had heeded it. At a casual listen they seemed to be just another latex and hairspray beast, apparently typifying both the best and the worst of hair metal, but the plain jeans-and-t-shirt combos they chose to wear – in direct contrast to the bombastic ensembles all around - should’ve been a dead giveaway that this was in fact not the case. When listened to properly, this band slowly revealed itself to be a valuable link back to the genre’s largely forsaken past; one eye looking back at the bands that paved the way, and the other fixed on the road ahead. They did this by eschewing the farther flung extravagances and vacuous posturing of their contemporaries, as well as ensuring – crucially - to never strangle the rich, bluesy artery that gave life to rock in the first place. This band was Tesla.

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Finally. After 8 years of foreplay comes the climax. 8 years after picking up a guitar, growing my hair and pledging my soul to rock music, the first gig with a proper, complete band playing original material has materialised. The culmination of 8 years worth of hope and hair, followed by the loss of both and then the resurrection of the former is happening tomorrow at the Richard Mulley Basement Bar at UCL at 7:30pm.

I’ve played live with a band before. Twice – each time with a different line-up revolving around the central core of me and the other guitar, and each time playing one cover song. At the first gig I leant forward, fully prepared to rip my Sunshine of Your Love solo screaming from the woodwork, only to have the sound cut out exactly as I hit the first note. If the guitar is indeed a phallic symbol then the guitar solo must be the analogue of ejaculation – which makes this technical fuck-up… Well, a hell of an introduction to playing live. The second time was more successful, in that I didn’t stumble, but the band was thrown together about a week before the performance, and our pre-emptive insistence on, ‘More dry ice! More!’ resulted in a member of the band who was on a lower level of the stage becoming a performing whack-a-mole. Submerged in fake smoke, all that was visible by the end was the very top of his head, bobbing up and down in time to Kashmir. Both performances, though fun, were hardly a proud entry in the history books.

Years down the line; and a chaotic sequential array of drummers, singers and bassists (those fickle fucking bassists!) later, the thoroughly unremarkable date of 23rd February 2012, against all odds, now means something – it stands as a monument to perseverance. Because, in the end, talent, charm, intelligence and all those other flashy attributes have to sit down and shut up the fuck when the only quality that really makes a difference shows up.

And the same applies to Lysis fucking Strata.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Lysis-Strata/180172452086395

What is it about certain music – a song, a band, a genre – that makes it appeal to someone?

Some people like their music heavy. They can’t listen to anything unless it pummels their eardrums into bloody submission. Others need integrity; if it sounds forced or contrived they’re not interested. Most people, unfortunately, just crave hooks – surface flourishes that quickly embed themselves deep in the brain and refuse to leave. In a fantastic turn of events, nature has provided a living metaphor for this: the candiru fish of the Amazon.  What this little devil does is wait for you to have the punch-drunk notion of performing a submerged piss in that ridiculous river, at which point it swims up your urine stream and entrenches itself in your urethra.

(Incidentally, that candiru effect explains the majority of pop music, wherein a few professional songwriters have developed such a skill for composing catchy passages that they are an industry in and of themselves. They have conjured up mountains of money by preying on those people who look for nothing more in music than momentary distraction. All they need to do is wheel out a different pretty face once in a while to give the illusion of variety or progress, thus allowing them to continue to peddle their particular brand of lowest common denominator pap. Same old tunes - different set of tits or abs.)

So I’ve been pondering for a while what it is that draws me to certain music, and whether there is any one particular quality that unites all of the divergent strains of music that I love – from Megadeth to Bob Dylan; Howlin’ Wolf to Motley Crue; Led Zeppelin to Sam Cooke. Is there any thread that could be drawn through my whole collection? After a lot of free time, I think I’ve figured out the answers: yes there is a common factor, and the common factor is…balls.

Wait, hear me out: the concept of musical balls is a much more nuanced idea than it initially seems, and though it would be easy to do so, it should not be confused with the much simpler concept of ‘heavy’. (Once, in a bar and already quite drunk, I approached the bartender and demanded that he, ‘gimme a cocktail with balls, dammit!’ I proceeded to gulp down what felt like a liquid slap made of napalm, cursed the bartender and his ancestors, and then downed a few more. The next few days were spent trying to put myself and my memories back together again. Both that bartender and my liver would have benefited greatly from an explanation of how ‘balls’ is something not quite as simplistic as a steamrolling momentum of force.) Balls can be present in any genre; any artist that displays a mixture of integrity, innovation and passion, and on top of that has a healthy streak of irreverence running through their work is an artist with balls.

Know what else is ballsy? Lengthy preambles. So with that now out of the way…

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Don’t know if anyone else heard Obama’s state of the union address last night, but here’s the closing bit:

‘So it is with America. Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those fifty stars and those thirteen stripes. No one built this country on their own. This Nation is great because we built it together. This Nation is great because we worked as a team. This Nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we’re joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.’

And now, here’s what you would have heard if someone had slipped one of those cartoon truth serums into Obama’s drink:

‘So it is with America. Each time I look at that flag, I’m comforted by the knowledge that the red stripes will never be white, the white will never be red, and that our destinies are predetermined at birth. No one built this country on their own. This Nation is great because we worked as a team: the Vanderbilts worked with the Morgans, the Du Ponts worked with the Rockefellers, and together we exploited cheap, interchangeable labour and kept the rest of you fighting amongst yourselves. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as the few of us at the top are joined in common purpose, as long as the rest of you keep fighting over the scraps we toss you now and then, our journey moves forward and our future is hopeful. Yours – not so good; the sharply declining stages of empire are never pretty for the masses. But we’ll get out alive don’t worry; we’ve built up buffers in anticipation, and we’ve made sure that the state of our bank accounts will always be strong.

Thank you, God bless your ignorance, and may God bless deregulated capital.’

Aww, that’s nice of him to say.

On my way to a gig in Clapham a few weeks ago I decided to cycle the long way round – via Central London, South Ken, Wandsworth and Battersea. Somehow I ended up lost in Chelsea, surrounded by loads of women with plastic tits and faces as well as other similar people who, at birth, would’ve spat out the silver spoon in disgust and demanded to know where the platinum one was.

I asked what turned out to be, unsurprisingly, an incredibly posh man for directions. I said, ‘‘scuse me, mate, do you know which way it’s to Clapham?’ He could probably smell how empty my wallet was because he decided he couldn’t understand me, and that therefore all he could do was to reply - over and over again and with a strangely fervent air: ‘You are in the very epicentre of Chelsea!’

Each time I’d say, ‘Okay, but which way is it to Clapham?’ he’d repeat, ‘You are in the very epicentre of Chelsea!’ Maybe I was missing his point – maybe he did understand me and I was being a stubborn peasant by failing to understand his underlying philosophy of ‘You’re in Chelsea, why the hell would you want to be anywhere else?’ Maybe he genuinely didn’t know where Clapham was and was ashamed to admit any kind of ignorance in front of a person so obviously lower down on the social ladder. Maybe he didn’t know what ‘a Clapham’ was. Maybe he thought I had an STI.

Either way this back and forth carried on and on until a passing builder intervened and said, ‘Clapham’s to the left, mate.’ I said, ‘thanks’ and set off. The Chelsea automaton wandered off, released and relieved. 20 minutes later I arrived, got off my bike, lit a cigarette, and within 30 seconds a crazy old woman decided to talk to me about her dog for 10 minutes. She finally finished and left, only to come back a minute later and ask if I could confirm that it was still Wednesday. I said, ‘Yep.’ She apologised and left, and I was left wondering whether someone had stuck a sign on my back saying, ‘Batshit Insane Group meeting point.’

English is way too full of euphemisms. ‘The Westbound Metropolitan line train has been delayed due to a person under the train.’ Yeah, that pretty much conveys all the elements of the story, but it’s too clinical. Tell us the truth. We don’t need to be mollycoddled by language. ‘The Westbound Metropolitan line train has been delayed due to a person having been crushed beneath hundreds of tonnes of metal that were speeding through an underground tunnel for some reason. Seriously, what the fuck?! There were bits of skull everywhere. I don’t know why they did it – they might’ve been depressed I guess. But the scary thing is that it could’ve been an accident, and that could easily happen to you. But it hasn’t so far, so don’t be so fucking glum. You’re standing on a platform, next to a train – that dude was just underneath a train. That’s, like, the last place you want to be.’

Euphemisms make language safe; they remove you from the reality of the situation. As such they are a great tool for the ruling classes to anaesthetise the rest of us with. The word ‘war’ conjures up ugly, upsetting visions in our heads. We’re vaguely aware that it’s not the best situation to be in: nasty shit happens and everyone suffers. So they don’t call it a war. Instead they might say ‘intervention.’ That’s a universal good; a moral prerogative. ‘Aw, an intervention, that’s nice – we gave Uncle Frank one of those when his occasional habit of throwing cats through windows became a real problem. It was for everyone’s good, really.’

The same principle runs through specialist language. You see this in terribly written scientific articles; excruciatingly long sentences and convoluted structures. Science should not be an ivory tower pursuit – knowledge belongs to the masses, and scientific knowledge doubly so; there wouldn’t be so much fucking superstitious bollocks floating around the place if more people could read Nature. But they can’t, because the authors are so high on their own intellectual superiority that they’re the equivalent of punch-drunk morons at a bus stop, scrawling some obscure message on a wall in their own shit. Knowledge in and of itself is not the goal; the point is to communicate it. Once you learn a fact, it’s not yours; you don’t own it. Pass it on, be a vessel. Einstein said it best: ‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.’ You should also be able to explain anything while drunk, or by incorporating at least one fart noise.

If I’d have just cycled East since mid-October, I could’ve been on the outskirts of Berlin by now. Instead, all I’ve got to show for the 1,013 km I’ve covered since buying an odometer is…well, a marginally better understanding of London’s geography.

I suppose it could be worse. I could’ve accidentally cycled up to to Hull. Twice. #shudder#

Due to some baffling circumstance there was a radio near me a little while ago that wasn’t tuned to Planet Rock, but instead to Radio 2. Jeremy Vine on Radio 2. Because apparently I’m 40. (And not the good type of 40 that listens to Planet Rock.)

Now, as I haven’t yet evolved the highly desirable ability to close my ears, some of the inane sounds emanating from that noise-box entered my brain, where understanding and retention occurred and a leisurely, two-part conclusion crystallised.

Firstly: Jeremy Vine is a mug.

Secondly: Do not listen to anyone who tries to frame the pensions discussion as a public sector vs. private sector dispute. As always the actual matter at hand is the much wider issue of worker vs. owner – specifically the one where it’s very convenient for the owner that workers on different sides of an imaginary divide battle over an ever-shrinking slice of pie. There’s nothing like a heated, ground-floor dispute to draw attention away from what’s happening up in the penthouse.  

This second point goes hand in hand with the first, as it’s exactly what the mug was doing. He had a few calls and a few guests in – from both the public and private sectors – and the only angle he would allow the discussion to take was the confrontational one. You know the type; it goes a bit like this:

Private sector worker to public sector worker: ‘Hey, ok, look; I know it’s cold here on the ground-floor, but I’m tired of subsidising your blanket with my fabric. There’s only so much of it to go round for fuck’s sake! We all have to accept a bit of discomfort in times of hardship!’

However - every once in a while - one of the guests or callers would notice that while they were freezing and bickering there was a constant stream of delivery men heading for the lift and up to the penthouse. But every time one of them would pipe up and try and draw attention to this oddity - ‘Hey, wait a minute – couldn’t we just, like, grab one of those luxury Persian rugs those guys are carrying to keep us warm? Or what about those portable heaters? And how many fucking hot tubs does this guy need up there?!’ – That’s when Vine would butt in and say, ‘Ah, no, no; forget that. What is it you were you saying about how this guy here needs to share more?’

Pathetic, Vine. Pathetic. Every time someone even hinted at opening up the argument past the carefully assigned borders you freaked out like a little girl. If you’re gonna be a stooge for the corporate media, at least have some balls.

Some upcoming gig dates…

6th December at the Horatia

13th December at The Cavendish Arms

14th December at The Alchemist

20th December at The Lion’s Den

23rd December at the T-Bird

27th December at the Lion’s Den

29th December at the Retro Pub

4th January at The Alchemist

24th January at The Cavendish Arms

30th January at the Hope & Anchor