Sweat, nudity, and Morrissey: that was a good weekend

I'm skint now. Well, more so. But I'm happy.

My good friend John, who I have not seen for yonks, came up from London on Friday. John is thirty-nine years old, lives on the dole, and gave up on romance three years ago. He is, in spite of all this, the coolest fucker I know. A while ago, he tried to count how many gigs he'd been to in his life and gave up around the 2,500 mark. Amazing.

Friday night we ventured into Chorlton for the 'Friends of Mine' indoor festival thang going on at the Irish Centre, principally to see The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, a band we saw together supporting the Wedding Present last year and fell in love with from the off. I realised when we were on the bus that I'd forgotten my ticket (I'm blond on the inside), so John went in and I spent an hour knocking around Chorlton bars waiting for my flatmate to arrive, who kindly brought it along. It was worth the wait.

The first band we saw were pretty atrocious, one of those odd mis-billings where someone decided that a mad-fer-it, lad-rock outfit in Courteeners haircuts would make a good warm-up for a decidely less macho Brooklynite indie-pop gang in cardigans. 'This one's for anyone who's dropped a pill tonight!' the singer declared before one of the songs, to an audience who one suspects would equate that sentiment with losing their hayfever tablets sooner than swallowing illegal substances. The next and final support act, however, were astonishingly good. Dutch Uncles are a local band I'd heard some good things about, but nothing that prepared me for the wonder ahead. They share a rhythmic kinship with Field Music, and there's a bit of the Foals about them, but they nonetheless create something quite in its own league. What really impressed me was how tight and musically accomplished they were as a band. There was nary a 4/4 in sight - in fact, they work in constantly shifting, ridiculous time signatures - and yet that rhythmic dexterity served to underpin the quality tunes they have, rather than to compensate for a lack of them. This is borderline math-rock, but it's fun and quite, quite brilliant. Also the singer's attire and dancing have to be seen to be believed. Check out Dutch Uncles if you get the chance.

Then came the Pains of Being Pure At Heart. I've waffled on enough already, so I'll try and keep it brief. This was possibly the best gig of my life. I'd just been offered a ticket to see Morrissey the following night, which was the perfect giddy tonic before they came on. When they did, they all looked a little nervous. As soon as they launched into the set though, the crowd went for it. Just as I had upon my frustratingly brief first glimpse of them last year, the audience fell in love with the Pains, and the feeling was apparently mutual. 'This is the best night of our lives... you guys are awesome!' was Kip Berman's response to the delirium in front of him, before dedicating the next song to Manchester. About ten minutes later, still reeling, he was dedicating his second song to the city. I was at the front row, singing, pogo-ing, dancing, whooping, arms aloft. So was more or less everyone else. By the time a bewildered Berman and co. returned to the stage for an encore - in an Irish Working Men's Club, I remind you - band and audience alike were drenched in sweat. We walked back to Withington elated, stickier than most, but most certainly happy.

The following day, I had work at nine. (I worked all Bank Holiday weekend, which, along with the gigs, contributed to my general frazzlement as I write this.) After getting home from work, I longed for nothing more than a nice long nap. Nothing more, that is, than perhaps the sole exception of going to see Mr Steven Patrick Morrissey perform in concert for the first time.

I used to pretty much hate Morrissey's solo stuff. When I lived in Didsbury last year, the two blokes I shared a flat with played his solo stuff all day and all night. I found it all a bit flimsy, twee, too much emphasis on clever words and not enough on interesting music. Recently, that changed big time. Probably because it wasn't blaring out after getting home from a long day's work for the hundreth time, I actually listened to his music for the first time. I discovered his 1994 classic Vauxhall and I, and majestic songs like Speedway and Now My Heart Is Full. I went back to Ringleader of the Tormentors and was bowled over by how much it impressed me, when once I couldn't see its charms. I suddenly saw what made people obsess over the man, and I began to as well.

Bad timing I guess. Standing in the swelling crowd of paunchy, bequiffed men in their thirties at the Apollo, I waited to see the man I had grown to idolise. And thusly he arrived, as an idol in the classic sense: a relic. A Smiths-heavy setlist, while joyous to hear for the many fans there who, like myself, never got a chance to see the short-lived but legendary band, added to the sense that we were watching a tribute act, each audience member colluding in a slightly tragic nostalgia-fest. The contrast could not have been starker. Last night I had seen a band who were at the other end of their career, ferocious in their raw, youthful vigour, and very much at the top of their game; young, beautiful, wide-eyed, and fucking brilliant. It was the kind of gig you immediately felt proud to have witnessed, as I imagine many of the early Smiths concerts were. And, twenty-four hours later, that was just the problem. Morrissey looked bored, washed-out. When he twice tore his shirt off before the crowd, it struck me as a little unnecessary, undignified even, for a man who had just turned fifty the previous evening. And while the older material sounded great, beefed up by the heavier guitar sound of his new band, the songs from his new record fell distinctly flat. No Suedehead, no Everyday Is Like Sunday. I left feeling no less affection for his music, but a tinge of disappointment at what had become of the man himself. Your idols always let you down in the end I suppose.

After this, sweaty once more, we trundled into the city centre to see my friend and co-worker's excellent band, Six 10 Repeater. Terrible name, but great songs, as evidenced by the fact that I have endeavoured to see them every time they play in Manchester. This time they put in as stunning a performance as ever, throwing about every rock shape and pose in the book, but this time there was no adoring crowd to recieve them. Nine Black Alps had been on before them, and Stuart was shitting himself about going on in front of the large audience that had gathered to see them. After NBA added to their label of 'Nirvana tribute act' the prefix 'failed', the room emptied. About seven people watched Six 10 Repeater, of which I constituted the entire front row. Shame, but another great live show nonetheless, marred only by the drummer's repeated insistence on revealing his own chest. Having seen quite enough half-naked men for one evening, I trundled home again.

Which brings us bang up to the present, wherein I am mercifully showered and fully-dressed. No more sweat and nudity for a while ta. Still plenty of Morrissey though, and his successors in indie fandom.

227 Lears

Perhaps it's a generational thing, or perhaps it's a personal foible, but I struggle with history. Or rather I struggle to acquire it: to horde it obsessively, to assemble it within a linear chronology to be reeled off like a stretch of Pi, or to gather up a cache of names, dates, places and other capitalised chunks of data that demonstrate the knowledge of a subject. I think it's just because I've always had a terrible memory, especially for facts. I'd really make a poor historian.

I have, however, always been fascinated by the process itself. I think the human obsession with story-boarding the past is astonishing. Where does it come from? Although history is associated with documenting the past, it could just as easily find its origins in more selfish motives. Ancient Egyptian pharoahs insisting upon stone-carved biographies of their lives were presumably not thinking of the past, but of projecting their own egos into an imagined future, where generations to come would know of their legacies long after their physical death. And it worked. History, from the ancients through to David Irving, seems to be 'done' for a number of reasons, but always with one more or less constant desire: to put the present in some kind of logical context. Rather than leaning too heavily on absolute relativism or absolute imperialism, history has always seemed to me to represent a dialectic between the two: a compromise between recorded events and personal attempts to colour the world with one's own beliefs. Certainly both exist and inform the process of telling the past.

It's in this spirit that I find myself thinking about what is a simultanously tedious and interesting idea: namely that things were better in the past. Of course one could point to the simplest explanation, that it is a belief fostered and propagated by older folk, who need (or choose) to see the generation following their own as deficient in order to bolster their own collective egos. Douglas Adams called it 'clique maintenance'. That's true and real enough.

But it seems to be an increasingly popular attitude among younger people, in Britain at least. For these people the fabled 'golden generation', be it of music, art, cinema, national cricket, or anything else, is always tantalisingly out of reach. It is immaculate because it arrives to us fully formed, a coherent narrative that cannot be tampered with. It is a morbid fascination for sure, and one that finds its apogee in death. Much has been written about the immaculate figure of the youthful corpse. River Phoenix, Jeff Buckley, Ian Curtis, Rimbaud, Aaliyah, James Dean, so on. Even the messiest of lives, such as Kurt Cobain's, prove attractive by way of fossilising so compactly. Morrissey, himself idolised and written about extensively, put it rather bluntly in 'Munich Air Disaster 1958': 'They can't hurt you / And their style will never desert you / Why? Because they're all safely dead.'

Why do even the young now feel the need to reject their own present for a past they weren't alive to experience? It seems as though the teenagers of the 1950s and 60s, those who rejected their parents values and formed their own, are now idolised by a generation reluctant to think for themselves. And yet that isn't quite the case. The truth, I think, is that a great deal of people felt the same way then. History does not remember the dull and the reticent. It is an ironic facet of the historicising process that those who reject the past are destined to become part of it. Marx's dialectical materialism in action.

The history of modern history, then, seems to tell a story in which the hero rejects received opinion and forges a new philosophy. It seems a shame to use it in order to knock current social, cultural and political endeavours in this light, but the appeal of doing so will presumably endure. If history is about making sense of the past, we will surely be drawn to its book-ending qualities ever more feverishly as the present splays into a frayed knot of potential endings. We do not know where we may go from here. The 1958 Manchester United side eulogised in Morrissey's song never won the European Cup they were competing in that season. Their potential was unknown then, though much feted. Death, however, now renders that potential infinite. It is the blessing of the dead that their portfolio will forever remain unsullied. Who knows? Joy Division's third album could have been crap.

It is important to remember the past, just as it is important to remember that it was once the present, with uncertainties and a weight of history upon its own back, as we carry the weight of theirs now. It is always difficult to love something in the present, perhaps because we are increasingly too insecure to develop an emotional attachment to something which might fail, or die, or, worst of all, disappoint. The best we can do is to take a chance on what seems right, and maybe carve a little history of our own.

Single of the Year 2008

I can't speak with all these words in my mouth

“The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal:shock disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.”

– David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram” (1993)

I like this quote. I like Cold War Kids for reproducing it in a full-page ad in NME. And yet I'm hesitant to champion its sentiments for a number of reasons.

At first Wallace's essay comes across as completely, almost mind-blowingly, refreshing. Don't you cringe at ironic t-shirts? Isn't sarcasm the dullest form of humour? (I'm reminded of the time that, about an hour after the gig, it finally sunk in for my friend that I really did think Kate Nash's performance at the Dot to Dot Festival was brilliant. A bit like the episode of The Simpsons, 'Homerpalooza': "Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cool." "Are you being sarcastic, dude?" "I don't even know any more.") Aren't you a little worried that you tend to work out life events through examples from TV shows?

Actually these aren't new questions at all, are they? What Wallace taps into is something that a lot of people have been feeling for a long time, probably since transtextual postmodern irony became the native tongue of a new so-called 'Generation X' society some time in the 1980s. And I say transtextual, because Wallace's use of the phrase 'double-entendre' merely implies one extra meaning, when a lot of the time many layers of textual reference are at work. This picture would merely be a Wallacean (Wallacist? whatever) double-entendre if it weren't for the fact that it was also parodying the Roy Liechtenstein cartoons employed in Douglas Coupland's Generation X, which in turn parodied pop art, which in turn parodied comic strips...

Is your head spinning? It should be. But even if what I've written above sounds like garbled nonsense, that is the process you go through every day, reading irony. You recognise and applaud when TV shows are ripping on other TV shows, or even their own show. It's automatic. When we speak, our generation speaks in a thousand voices.

And yet, isn't that pretty much the way it's always been? Is a 'single-entendre' really a purer, less adulterated way of communicating? I don't think so. I'm not as sure anymore, as I once was, that people hide behind irony and postmodern discourse, or that pop culture references are used as a substitute for humour. Not always. Sometimes we yearn, like Wallace (and Cold War Kids), for clarity of expression. But here's the clincher: Cold War Kids quoted Wallace to get their point across. Sometimes the language we speak is garbled crap - I apologise if mine is in my clumsy attempt to get a point across - but sometimes it's just richer.

Otherwise there'd be no poetry.

Daily Express, 05/09/07

Daily Express, 04/09/07

Daniel Kitson

"We must reclaim the night from the cunts and the slags because the night is when the adventures happen. Moonlight, starlight, candle light and torch light: those are the four adventure lighting options."