Le Tigre@ ATP

Posted by Sarah Bowles on Saturday, June 12th, 2004
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Posted by Sarah Bowles on Saturday, June 12th, 2004
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I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that Bow Wow Wow B-side - too heavy on the Dick Dale twang and tribal drum beats - but I’m listening to it because I cycled over to Lewes yesterday, all downhill except for one brief hill near Falmer, and found that the wholesale emptying of charity stores that occurs closer to home (for sale in secondhand stores at vastly inflated prices) doesn’t extend to Lewes. So I picked up that, and Divine, and Bomb The Bass, Art Of Noise, Kingpins, Madness, En Vogue and Booket T (etc) for 25p each. Sweet. Even sweeter was finding a seven-inch carrying case - the sort which frequently go for upward of £6 in Brighton - for 75p. Then, today, found a couple of Dexys singles to replenish my supply - 99p each, but at any price a bargain. Man, this Divine single is obscene even after all the years… The Vaselines were sexier, but nowhere near as seedy.

Put up some Plan B night posters in town, poor substitute for an issue that hasn’t come back from the printer’s: machinery breakdown. Tomorrow. That’s the new forecast. Poor David will have to suffer another sleepless night.

Recieved an email from a Dorset magazine entitled The Void, informing us to desist from using the phrase as the title of one of our sections. Hmm. Hmm.

Been playing the new Jonathan Richman album Not So Much To Be Loved As To Love, with its rather icky cover photo of a silhouetted girl kissing a dog, nonstop the past week. Well, not nonstop…of course. But several times a day, because it is perfect for the summer. Thank you Jonathan.

Saw Pixies last Saturday.
Kelley Deal to ET: “You’re going back to Brighton tonight? Why? It it sailing away?”

ET to other Pixies, minutes before they take the stage: “Everyone’s been raving about how great your shows have been, even better than first time round. Guess everyone’s a lot older nowadays. Memory goes.”
My wife was very impressed to be rubbing shoulders with Jude Law. I singularly failed to recognise him. “He’s the good looking one, you fool,” she sighed. She wasn’t so impressed at the fact Kim Deal rushed up to kiss me just before she took the stage. “Why did she do that?” she demanded to know. Because it’s good luck to kiss Everett True. Everyone knows that.

Posted by Everett True on Friday, June 11th, 2004
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“When you see a kingfisher, you know it’s a good day,” said my mother. We were walking through an Essex forest and suddenly a streak of turquoise shot past us and yes, it was a kingfisher. Nothing of that lovely day - wild roses, baby geese pecking at the grass, chaffinches intimidating a jay by literally shouting at it until it flew away - comes quite close to that briefly glimpsed kingfisher, which I’m choosing to see as a good omen for our lovely magazine that’s coming out tomorrow.

Being a pedant, I looked up some kingfisher lore to see if it really was an omen for anything, but all I could find was a sweet story about Noah’s Ark, and how the kingfisher was flying too far up above the ark, looking out for land, and got too close to the sun. It scorched its head on the sun and its body took on the colour of the sky and that’s why it’s bright blue and orange.

You might have noticed I’m not in writing mode the way I was when I was writing nineteen to the dozen, writing reading and planning the Plan B onslaught upon the world. It’s funny how deserts you the minute you let it slip for an instant, the writing thing. The last week or so I’ve been writing music , which means intense bursts of concentration mixed with long, pleasant periods of whimsy when your mind’s just open to everything and every phrase is a lyric, every scene in your life set to a soundtrack, every sound a sample. You walk around staring at beauty and ugliness, walk miles instead of using a bus or a bike, on the grounds that the more you walk the more rhythms and melodies will come to you. I mean, I do. I am over-using the word ‘you’ when really I mean ‘me’ and ‘I’.

What else have I been doing? Losing myself alternately in whimsy and creativity (as above) and mindless hedonism, both states which I consider to be sacred, on the grounds that when you’re fully immersed in either it’s not you pulling the strings, you’re (arguably) in the service of some good or bad higher power. You. I mean, I. Sorry. That’s a state I strive for and also dislike and fear, hence my rather, er, varied progress through life so far. I strive to be lost but I always get scared I’m not gonna get found again. That’s why sometimes you’ll find me curled up next to the coffee table at 5am with Neu’s ‘Isi’ on a loop, trying to project myself into the grey dawn clouds because inside is just this Bosch-like scene of everyone just doing what the fuck they like, following desire like it’s some kind of holy path, and I just want blank space and icy-road motorik. My friend strides into the room, kneels on the floor next to me. “This music’s like aspirin to you,” he says, half accusing, half affectionate. That’s why the same morning you’ll find me staring at my wife across the table in the Turkish cafe. “I don’t have a personality,” I say. “I never did have one. I just do what other people want me to do. I’m just a fucking blank canvas.”

But then that’s why you’ll also find me up until three making tiny adjustments to the features you wrote for us, or to the notes I just wrote for me, when even my obsessive sound engineer friend is calling from Olso to tell me to “turn off the synth and go to sleep.” It all figures itself out eventually, usually when I find myself alone with a pile of books and cups of coffee and a big bed all to myself early in the morning.

I just wish I could work these bursts of driven and obsessive working and playing into something resembling balance and normality so that I don’t tire myself out. So that what I do has the stamp of care and attention and a peaceful relationship with my talent or skill or whatever, instead of being just impressively bruised, as it seems now. Everything I produce seems to read or sound like it - or I - was flung at a wall and that’s because it mainly was.

On purpose, I think, last week I met some very special people, whose working practices seemed to shine out to me like a big neon sign saying “LOOK FRANCES MAY STOP HURLING YOURSELF AT EVERYTHING OR YOU WIL BREAK YOUR HEAD”. One of those people was a wonderful artist, whose elegant interpretations of rurualism gave me that catch in my heart and dazzle in my eyes half-sad half-happy wonder I get when I think about the English countryside, that feeling that it’s both a magical space and an exasperating member of my own family. We looked at other people’s work together and I felt that I was seeing it with more and better eyes than just mine. I’m still smiling just thinking of it.

The other people were Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt from Matmos. Possibly the nicest men I have ever interviewed, as well as the most erudite, their relationship with their work and with what inspires their work pointed me in directions I knew I was thinking of going in anyways. After talking to them I walked all the way home from King’s Cross to Dalston - a good 4 or so miles - buzzing with ideas that I could visualize ahead of me like beautifully crafted buildings just waiting for me to open the door.

Then I had a day in the forest with my mother and a kingfisher flew right by us and it was good. I found out that the ancient greeks called the kingfisher a halcyon, which is good to know because I always did wonder exactly what manner of a bird a halcyon was. And now I know.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Friday, June 11th, 2004
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.. although the fall’s DRAGNET is currently on top of the CD pile, it must’ve been 4 or 5 days since i listened to it. i like ‘before the moon falls’ and ’spectre vs. rector’.
the plant in the office (i think it’s a ficus something) has gone worryingly pale, i fed and watered it, hopefully it’ll bounce back, it’s nearly 10 years old. i don’t know what that is in plant years. reminde me of a line i wrote for a song:
“your plants could use a drink/if they could, they’d jump in the sink.”
the plants have never been all that happy since i moved away from Lewes Road. Evidently they thrive on soot, lead, carbon monoxide, and intense negative psychic energy. a bit like the people you meet when you walk down the street.
what else did i do this week… ar! yes, i’ve been writing some songs, or at least words for existing songs. something i’ve been putting off for ages. it finally clicked, so that was nice. yesterday i walked over to the practice room with a drill and took the fucked up old sofa wheels off my amp and replaced them with nice new ebay wheels. i wanted pram wheels but settled for some machine castors.
also got my website up and running: www.giantfieryhand.com
today is wednesday, tomorrow night i’m playing a show at the windmill in brixton. the line-up is Charlottfield (very, very good angular post math screamo outfit from brighton), i’m being good (formation flying guitar stunt team making detuned clank from brighton) and sucio perro (from scotland, that’s all i know). it’s three quid in.
i’ll be the one in the wet teeshirt.

Posted by Andrew Clare on Wednesday, June 9th, 2004
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Here is a list of recorded stuff I found when I was going through the box of minidiscs last night:

30 minutes of ducks, geese, swans and moorhens eating bread and fighting and trying to bite me, Victoria Park, London
70 minutes of me sleeping, and not snoring once
A blackbird singing in the evening, very loud
A lady on the bus shouting
Orthodox Jewish children I used to live next door to, singing ‘do the hokey cokey’
Church bells of Solihull, Christmas
Fireworks, Amsterdam, New Years. Me and my wife screaming when people throw bangers at us
Carillions in the Amsterdam Museum
An enormous Dutch barrel organ, in the Stedelijk, Amsterdam. Me shouting ‘HOW DOES IT WORK?’ at the staid Dutch guy running it
Me playing the piano really badly, and my sister saying ‘it sounds like this book I’m reading’
Me playing the guitar at 5am, drunk
Me playing the harmonium, singing nonsense words
Me singing some weird stuff about trees
The first ever recordings of my awesome new drone duo, Morgen und Nite
The first ever gig of my sometime improv group, Promoted to Glory. I cannot believe we did this in front of an audience. It sounds incredibly seasick and there isn’t a single moment of restraint.
Lots of gigs by Now, the band I used to play in. One of them starts with the back of a guitar being rubbed. it sounds like a dog barking.
An interview with Nina Nastasia
Your live editor Sophie Heawood, singing Billie Holliday songs while I try to accompany her on a variety of instruments
Me and Sophie and our genius wunderkind friend singing songs about coal scuttles, hedgehogs, bears and Annie Lennox

And there are still more to listen to.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Tuesday, June 8th, 2004
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so it’s done. finally all went off by lunchtime today. there were some problems with the PDFs but i think it’s sorted, at least no-one’s phoned me up to tell me it’s not sorted.
so i’ve had my first 5 hours of freedom and i’m BORED. it’ll take me a couple of days to get into something else i guess. house is looking clean though, and the plants have finally ad a drink (sorry fellas).
excuse me for a second while i pick a bit of malt loaf out of my teeth…
…
right then, what’s next..

Posted by Andrew Clare on Friday, June 4th, 2004
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When you have some songs to write, two things will happen. One, your harmonium will do something weird so that when you flip that little lever at the side to make it do one note at a time instead of two, the middle G adopts a weird duck-like drone all of its own and kind of flips out from the keyboard and you have to take it apart. And you know what happens when you take apart instruments. when I take apart instruments, that is.

There are some people who should open up instruments and sort them out. And they are usually called Trained Professionals. They are not called Frances May Morgan. I remembered this important point as I wrestled the little wire prongs under the keys with scissors and a spoon. I envisaged the trip to Bina Music in Southall, which is always a fun trip, but one I don’t really have time for; then I thought about getting some good wire-cutters, which was a bit easier. But as I wrestled with the one key, I realised (I mean, I knew this in theory but hadn’t thought about it in practice) how interconnected the instrument was. You can’t meddle with one note without other notes freaking out. It’s a flimsy, complex, sweet thing, my harmonium. I coax it into almost-working (or fully working as long as you leave the side lever alone) and treat it like a delicate invalid until which time I can lug it all the way to Southall, and get myself told off for trying to fix it myself, like in the violin shop after I tried to set a bridge myself and the man just looked at me and said what have you done? in a voice as steely as a string.

And the other thing that happens when you’re trying to write songs? You wake up deaf in one ear. This happens to me about once a year or so, and it’s not cool. It’s to do with my freakishly shaped ear canals. It hurts. I don’t want to go into any more details, but really, you gotta laugh, haven’t you? Thwarted at every turn. Yet, actually, being a bit deaf isn’t too bad. It stops you labouring under the illusion that you have a great voice. The voice you hear coming out of yourself when your hearing’s gone bad is probably closer to the voice that everyone hears - smaller and milder and not so echoey. The fact that I know it’s not a permanent state helps too.

But still.

It stops me enjoying listening to anything that I’ve listened to over the last few weeks, because my memory of those things is the memory if it sounding good and full and complete and not filtered through a bad ear. So I’m listening to stuff I haven’t heard in ages, on the basis that I can’t quite remember how they sound, or at least they’re not so fresh in my mind. So I’m listening to Buffy Sainte-Marie’s amazing ‘experimental’ record, Illuminations, with its treated vocals, psych-out moments and whimsical gothic oscillations, because really, things can’t get much weirder in my acoustic world. And this record is fucking weird. Histrionic and full of flutters and wobbles and whooshes. Slightly painful. Disorientating. In fact, it’s a perfect representation of my poor left ear. Seriously.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Friday, June 4th, 2004
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Finally. Issue zero of Plan B has gone to the printers. Phew!
Place your orders now with Our Subs Guy if you’re worried about getting hold of a copy.

In the meantime, THIS has been keeping me amused.

Posted by Everett True on Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
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