On the internet only people just like you can hear you scream

Posted on January 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

One of the things that scares me a little about our record club is the idea that, because we’ve got broadly analogous backgrounds and tastes, we’re just reinforcing our own already-entrenched perceptions and opinions about what makes “good” music (or about what makes music good) rather than expanding the horizons, expanding the parameters, and expanding the rhymes of sucker MC amateurs.

I’ve vaguely wanted to write an article about this for months now, but every time I witness another little bit of self-reinforcement at one of the myriad record club variants I pay attention to via Twitter or Facebook or a blog, even if my first instinct is “step away from the canon! challenge yourselves!”, I remember that a big part of the reason why we meet at our club is the camaraderie, the friendship, the community; the sense of warmth that comes from finding people you have something in common with and spending time with them engaged in that common thing. Plus, we get to listen to music like Big Black and Aphex Twin and Rita Lee and The Feelies and Sunn o))) and Pere Ubu and Gravediggaz and Melt Banana and Kate Bush and Caribou and so on and so forth.

Anyway, I had an interesting Twitter exchange with John Mulvey and Laura Snapes yesterday about Chuck Klosterman’s confession of professional incompetence / negligence re: tUnE-yArDs. There’s a great take-down of his inherent sexism, mansplaining, and misreading of the record from Charlotte Richardson Andrews, but though that gets to the core of his ignorance, it doesn’t deal with his attention-seeking, or with the flurries of comments, tweets, status updates, tumblrs, blog posts and so on and so forth either agreeing with him or disagreeing with him. It was onyla brief exchange, but John wrote that he genuinely does blame Twitter for people being more interested in writing about themselves when they ought to be writing about music. (As an aside, for reference, Nitsuh is still the best, most reasoned, most human music writer on the planet.)

I blame Twitter as well, for further reinforcing already entrenched perceptions by casting us each into a delirious bubble of likeminded chatter and engagement and online cultural gatekeeping that can very easily make it seem like everyone in the world is just like you. The internet has always done this, of course, through mailing lists and forums and Facebook and all other types of communities, so Twitter’s not alone.

But there is something about the way it works in particular which makes it feel as if the 500 or so people I follow, and all the people they follow, and retweet, and all the people who write the articles and blogposts that they send out links to, somehow encompasses the entire world, and that this means the world is a much finer and better and nicer place than it actually is, because everyone is a nice, progressive liberal, interested in culture and science and humanity and equality, and thus, when you see something bad, all you need to do is Tweet about it and receive some affirmation via a retweet or a new follower, which makes you forget the bad thing itself, and carry on down your own little path, rather than fix that bad thing, which is still bad, and is (and this is the crux) doubtless being Tweeted and retweeted and thought of as good and wonderful and affirming entrenched beliefs just as much if not even more for a whole host of people you can’t even comprehend exist. Which is to say that Twitter takes the Venn diagram of beliefs and opinions and values and cultures and makes the circles furthest away from each other practically invisible except in the most abstract way, by inflating the perspective you have of the bits that actually do crossover with other groups.

Does that make sense?

I’m talking about Ian Martin’s adventures in “bad twitter”, trying to show us nice progressive liberals how much rightwing hatred and bigotry and intolerance is out there (thanks to Rob for telling me about this on the way to record club the other night).

I’m talking about the disgusting, abominable racist abuse suffered by Stan Collymore.

Because the fact is that crazed creationist zealots, despicable racist criminals, absurd, small-minded buffoons and nasty, horrible, awful people use Twitter too. (Of course, there is the question of whether anyone is a nasty, awful, horrible person in and of themselves, or whether there are only nasty, awful, horrible acts and contexts, and it’s not their fault really, and so on and so forth.) And my fear is that the semi-closed loops we fall into via these networks are presenting an illusion of being open and all-encompassing and giving a true representation of all of humanity, when they’re not, and we’re just talking to ourselves or people very much like us, not changing anything for the better in the wider world but just, in actuality, making our own cosy, comfortable worlds a little bit smaller and more entrenched. It’s the same thing I was touching on with my mini-rant about 6music the other day.

On the flipside, following and engaging with people who are like ourselves in some ways but not like us in others can and does regularly throw up links to fascinating and awesome and reasoned and compassionate things that we otherwise wouldn’t have known about at all. (Thanks to Kate for that link.) So it’s not all bad. We just have to remember that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance; and watching your own Twitter stream isn’t vigilance. It’s comfort.

To regress for a second to what I wrote about a couple of days ago, here’s a truly excellent blog post by someone who managed to make records, play gigs, work regular jobs, and not spend $109,000 or whine about not getting to hang out with models enough whilst doing so. I’ve seen many other blog posts and messageboard discussions about Abner and Harper Willis, many of them very insightful and reasoned, but this is about the best of them.

Maybe I should feel a little sorry for Abner and Harper for having all this opprobrium unwittingly heaped upon them. After all, they’re only young, and trying to reach their dreams. Then I think about how shitty, avaricious, and shallow their dreams are – models, lavish riders, trashed hotel rooms, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame – and how shitty their music is, and I think, no, they deserve everything they get. Which is perhaps mean; they’re real, live human beings with feelings, after all.

Anyway, 33 & 1/3 are calling for proposals again. This time the list of demands for a proposal seems daunting, and there’s no advance, but to be fair, given the state of publishing at the moment, any other non-fiction book pitch would need all they’re asking for and more. I pitched a Spirit of Eden book a few years and got through a few rounds of eliminations to about the last 20 or something (they wanted to do half a dozen books or so as I recall). I’ve got an idea for an angle and a meta topic that would happily fill a book this time (something I was very half-heartedly considering trying to turn into a piece of academic research a couple of months ago), but there isn’t a clear, obvious album to gaffertape it to. Oh well, I’ll keep thinking.

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Posted in Existentialism, music writing, The internet, social media

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On selling out and privilege in music

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 4 Comments

Nearly 8 years ago I wrote a column for Stylus about the concept of selling out and how it was, by and large, a dangerous, damaging idea in the weird little milieu we call indie or indierock or alternative rock or alternative music or whatever. For the most part, I still stand by what I wrote back then – that the idea of ‘selling out’ as a pejorative concept seems to me like yet another ideological state apparatus designed to keep the people in their place and maintain the status quo. That module of Marxist cultural theory in my first term at university still rings in my ears.

Two brothers, by the name of Abner and Harper Willis, who are a band and go by the name of Two Lights, have written an article themselves about how much money they (or their parents, more accurately) have spent in order to try and become successful musicians. Their outgoings include $25,000 on gear, $18,000 on “living in New York City” (because they couldn’t possibly live in their hometown in Maine and be rock stars there), $1,000 on “a guy to send email blasts to databases of hip music blogs”, and $25,000 on “lost earnings” (Harper turns down writing assignments worth $400 per week because he spends 20 hours a week on ‘band-related work’; I’ve thought about this, and I can only assume he’s writing rich college kids’ essays for them at a rate of about $400 per 2,000 words, rather than pitching features, reviews, or stories at actual newspapers or magazines).

Oh, and there was $30,000 on piano, guitar, and voice lessons, too. Their estimated grand total is $109,000 dollars, and they’re still not famous despite all this hardship.

On one hand, you could see their “treat it all as a business” ethos as not a million miles away from Black Flag or Fugazi’s DIY approach to their careers. In fact, let me just remind you of something Steve Albini wrote ages ago about the evils of major record labels and the deals they offer new bands.

On the other hand, you could be wishing these whinging, privileged, burdened-by-entitlement arseholes would DIE IN A FIRE and take their shitty music with them, because it’s disgusting to moan at how much money you’ve had to spend trying to be famous in the middle of an interminable economic downturn that is losing hundreds of thousands of people their jobs and obliterating the economies of countries all around the world. Not getting to hang out with models as often as you’d imagined, or being given riders as flash as the ones in your dreams, is not a complaint that should be tolerated in any civilized society.

I don’t recall Ian Brown moaning about how he had to apply for a loan (to buy a cooker for his flat) so he could spend the money travelling around Europe on tour, or Orbital whining about how they had to record Chime into their dad’s tape recorder rather than get Pater to pay for it to be done properly at Abbey Road.

As a friend of mine said, “these people have always existed, especially in NYC. I used to make good $$$ playing session bass in their shitty bands.” Occasionally one of them lucks out, and we end up with Beastie Boys or The Strokes or Vampire Weekend, and they squeeze a great album or two or five out. Some kids, whether they’re rich or not, will always see minor hindrances in a relativist way and assume them to be enormous, insurmountable and unfair obstacles placed directly and deliberately in front of their dreams, whether it’s not being as famous as Maroon 5 yet or a lift not working properly so you have to take the library stairs with an armful of books.

If I’ve got no objection to people “selling out” (musicians have to pay mortgages just as much as marketing people or stock brokers or nurses or civil servants, and everyone deserves fair pay for making art for the rest of us), why do I object so viscerally to Two Lights and their ilk’s expenditure? Is it the crassness of their sense of entitlement? The fact that their music is such generic, mediocre piffle? Perhaps if you don’t have everything paid for already you have to work that much harder in order to pay your rent and make a success of it, and as a result of working harder you simply become better at your art.

If there’s anything good about Abner and Harper’s navel-gazing about their own pseudo-plight, it’s that it goes a little way towards explaining to people how musicians like The Beta Band can get into so much debt that they see no alternative but to split up. I know of bands who’ve had strings of hit singles and albums, sold hundreds of thousands of records, and still the backstage areas of the venues they play are hollow, exhaustion-filled wastelands after gigs; still after each album they need to make another as soon as possible because they couldn’t afford not to. I know of yet more musicians who work dayjobs alongside making music all the time, even many records down the line; if they’re lucky it’s music related work, and they can produce other peoples’ records, or arrange music for films or TV. If they’re not, it’s carpet-laying or telesales or teaching or any other job that normal human beings do.

Because musicians aren’t Extraordinary Golden Gods. They’re just human beings who make music.

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Posted in Branding, Existentialism, music writing, Pop music, University

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Why don’t cyclists use cyclepaths?

Posted on January 13, 2012 | 3 Comments

This hateful piece of sub-Clarkson publicity-by-controversy was published on my local newspaper’s website recently. The newspaper is going rapidly tits-up (like all newspapers), having recently gone weekly, and the author has just launched a new radio station in the area, so is no doubt trying his damndest to get as much attention for himself and his new media business venture as possible by being an odious twat. Anyway, after spitting bile about the piece briefly on Twitter, and having been sworn at and had nasty, mean hand-gestures made at me on a couple of occasions by cockfarmer motorists whilst cycling on the road , I thought I’d quickly outline some points about why I don’t always use a cyclepath, and, more importantly, why I am entirely entitled to cycle on the road if I choose to do so.

Different people cycle for different reasons
In fact, so do I. Sometimes I’m just nipping to the shops. Sometimes I’m going for a gentle summer ride with my wife. Sometimes I’m exploring new parts of the countryside. Sometimes I’m going to work. Sometimes I’m out for exercise. Depending on the reason, I might cycle at different speeds, some of which are wholly inappropriate for narrow, winding, bollard-studded cyclepaths. In fact…

I like to cycle quite fast
Over the course of a 30-mile ride across Devonshire countryside, taking in country lanes, main roads, cyclepaths, hills, flats, etc etc, I will average just over 15mph. On a straight, flat, wide road with a nice surface I will average 18-22mph depending how much I’m going for it. Cyclists are apparently not actually legally allowed to ride on cyclepaths at speeds of over 18mph; therefore we go on the road. There’s a reason skinny, drop-bar bikes are called road bikes.

Cyclepaths are full of obstacles
Bollards; chicanes; gutters; leaf-mulch; bins; broken twigs and branches; people on rollerskates; benches; children on those little silver scooters; pedestrians; dogs: these things are all much more common on cyclepaths than they are on roads, and they are all dangerous to cyclists, and cyclists are all dangerous to them. Shared-usage paths are one thing, but I regularly see pedestrians walking on specifically delineated cyclepaths when there are also specially delineated walking paths – if I were to do that as a cyclist I’d expect abuse.

Cyclepaths are often badly designed
Especially where they cross junctions with side roads, roundabouts, traffic lights of any kind, or any other complex road topography. Cyclepaths are almost always added later, as an after-thought, which is why they can stop seemingly arbitrarily or continue without signage, causing confusion and thus danger amongst cyclists and motorists alike. Coming down the hill from Haldon, a cyclists’ paradise, you’re dumped from broad, fast, excellent cyclepaths onto what’s effectively the hard-shoulder of the busiest stretch of dual carriageway in Devon; it’s petrifying, and signed so badly that I’m surprised there aren’t regular deaths.

I pay for the roads too
There is no such thing as road tax. Council tax, which I pay, because I live within a council (several, in fact – Devon County Council and Exeter City Council for a start), pays for roads. The tax disc on your car is Vehicle Excise Duty, and is a tax because cars are dirty disgusting things that pump out rancid minging fumes. I pay Vehicle Excise Duty too because I drive a car. Bicycles don’t have to pay Vehicle Excise Duty because they don’t cause any pollution (whilst being ridden – obviously there’s the embedded pollution of their construction, but that’s paid for in business taxes). It’s quite simple; cyclists pay for the roads as much as motorists (and pedestrians too, for that matter), and thus are allowed to use them as much.

Motorists often ignore cyclepaths
I do not think motorists are idiots. I am one. I am also a cyclist, and a pedestrian. I have witnessed many, many fine, courteous motorists, and many, many awful, idiotic cyclists, sans lights, sans attention, sans care for other road users, sans knowledge of the law. Idiots come in all modes of transport, as do decent people. An idiot, discourteous cyclist, however, isn’t quite as likely to kill someone as an idiot, discourteous motorist. So please, don’t park on cyclepaths; don’t even pull over onto them for a second to drop someone off. Don’t pull up into the green block for cyclists at the head of traffic lights. Don’t regard cyclepaths as extra space for you to swerve into; there might be a cyclist there.

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Posted in Cycling

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Top 10 musical odds and ends from 2011 (and some vague thoughts on BBC 6music)

Posted on January 11, 2012 | 1 Comment

A side effect of the death of physical singles in the face of the proliferation of downloads is that, well, there’s loads of music out there that falls through the cracks by not being, well, categorisable: iTunes bonus tracks, vinyl-only tracks, remixes that never got properly released, weird stopgap EPs compiling songs that would otherwise have been b-sides back in the day, Record Store Day releases…

In any given year at least some of these odds and ends songs (or b-sides, as I still think of them) make up some of my favourites; this year the only difference is that I own barely any of them physically (still a bit of a bind, I must confess – but having spent 45 minutes earlier this evening fiddling with the glorified spreadsheet that is iTunes, I definitely still like having music physically; it’s less like being at work).

So, here are my top 10 musical odds and ends from 2011

Tongue Tied – The Antlers
This Elbow-ish slow-burner, built on a mechanised rhythm, is (in the UK at least) an iTunes bonus track with the group’s excellent Burst Apart album; it’s as good as anything on there, to be honest, and well worth hearing.

Hey Boy (Nicolas Jaar Remix) – The Blow
I have no idea as to the provenance of this remix – I heard about it on ILM, and sought it out via Hype Machine – but I love it. Minimal dance-pop built on a kick drum, handclaps, and cut-up, looped, female vocals; it’s more direct than anything on his album proper but just as much of a synaesthetic treat.

Pinnacles – Four Tet
This is from a split 12” with Dan Snaith (AKA Caribou) under his Daphni nomenclature. The Snaith track is good, and eminently danceable, but this elongated jazz-house workout from Four Tet, which I think he played in his solo set at ATP (if it wasn’t this, it was something very like it), is an absolute star, one of the best, grooviest things he’s done thus far. It ties together the early, jazzy part of Kieran Hebden’s career with his more recent dance dalliances almost seamlessly.

You’ll Improve Me (Caribou Remix) – Junior Boys
I’ve no idea what the original sounds like (having not really kept up with Junior Boys after So This Is Goodbye), but I heard this remix on 6music in late November and finally remembered to download it (legally) a couple of weeks ago; I could listen to Caribou remix people forever, and seemingly do, some days.

Video Games – Lana Del Rey
We saw her on Jonathan Ross’ show last weekend and were both let down by her vocals and lack of presence – I know her whole schtick is sexy insouciance, but she went beyond laconic disinterest into irritating absence. The recorded version, however, remains excellent. I have doubts about her ability to sustain much interest over 45 minutes, but we’ll see in a couple of weeks, I guess.

Flicker and Fail – Laura Marling
Another iTunes bonus track, this time accompanying Marling’s excellent third album; this isn’t up there with The Beast, but it fits right in with her regular quality control.

The Big Guns Called Me Back Again – PJ Harvey
A bona fide b-side, except that, as far as I can tell, the single it accompanies (The Words That Maketh Murder) only exists virtually. Which makes this… what? Spam? A cookie? What else do you call something you download alongside the file you’re actually after? Whatever; writing this off as digital junket is harsh, because it could easily have fitted on Polly’s magnificent Let England Shake, mining that same misty, blood-drained aesthetic and war-poet lyrical seam.

Staircase / The Daily Mail / Supercollider / The Butcher – Radiohead
Radiohead seem to be going out of their way to throw random songs into the ether, starting a couple of years ago with (the really rather excellent) These Are My Twisted Words. People complained that The King Of Limbs was too short, but given the four songs Radiohead put out on vinyl / download this year separately, it was clearly an aesthetic choice to make it concise, as they had plenty of quality material. Staircase might be my pick of these.

Catherine Wheel / Smother / Thankless Thing – Wild Beasts
Three more bona b-sides, released to accompany digital singles and then compiled together on 12” vinyl for the Reach A Bit Further EP. The would-be (were it on the album) eponymous Smother is a minimal, piano and ambience rumination, and Catherine Wheel a spiralling, reserved but still dramatic salutation, both in keeping with the evolving sophistication of Wild Beasts’ latest record. Thankless Thing, though, is a step above – as good as if not better than anything on Smother, establishing an compelling, synthetic rhythm before exploring both emotional sides of… not an argument, but an instance of discord, in an established relationship; the protagonist rails against a partner’s foible, curses their love, leaves, realises he only cares because he cares, and returns. I first listened to it when I was in… similar emotional territory, and it hit me hard.

Bitten / Anthem / Divine Intervention / Mercia / The City (Richard X Remix) / Sing (Acapella) / This Time Of Year / etc etc etc – Patrick Wolf
Patrick’s also pumped out reams of material this year in addition to Lupercalia; the Lemuralia EP accompanied pre-orders of the album, and contained alternate versions of album tracks, and later in the year Brumalia contained a selection of all-new songs. Add to this bona fide vinyl b-sides, remixes of singles, and the obligatory iTunes bonus tracks, and Patrick produced more than enough material for a full second album this year. Choice picks are Bitten, Brumalia’s lead track, which combines the fulsome, confident songwriting of his current phase with something of the strings and evocation of Wind In The Wires; Sing (Acapella), a Lemuralia-version of an iTunes bonus track which features an extraordinary choral arrangement; Richard X’s remix of The City, which strips away the excitable saxophones to show the song’s inner pop strength; and This Time Of Year, his ‘seasonal’ (but not Christmas) song…

Some thoughts on 6music
Since moving into a new office in November I’ve been listening to 6music for approx 3 days out of 5, which is the first time I’ve listened to any serious amount of music radio (rather than 5live) in what seems like an age.

For the most part, this is a good thing – it’s great to hear obscure Beta Band tracks (if Dr Baker counts as obscure), Boards of Canada, aforementioned Caribou remixes, Roots Manuva, 60s classics (be they Eight Miles High or You’re Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher and Higher) – but the sheer amount of arse-end Britpop dross (Kula Shaker, The Bluetones, Marion, The Bluetones, Catatonia, The Bluetones, etc etc) is frustrating when, to all intents and purposes, the DJs have the entire history and breadth of recorded music to pick from.

Even stuff I love (and I’ll admit to having a soft spot for some Bluetones songs, just not Slight Return every single day) like She Bangs The Drums becomes annoying when you hear it often, and seems like lazy, consensus-reinforcing comfort-blanket indie choices; yes, we’ll play you this awesome new boundary-pushing music, but don’t worry! Shed Seven will be along in a minute, like a big plate of mashed potato to wash that foreign muck away. It makes all the fuss about the potential axe hovering over the station seem like little more than conservative-white-male protectionism. Maybe I’m being harsh.

Also, the other day Huey from Fun Lovin’ Criminals played one of my absolute favourite piece of music ever – I Believe In You by Talk Talk – and, shorn of context and respect and fidelity and so on, it seemed pointless, and strange, and lacking in all the grace and power it has in situ on Spirit Of Eden. And, at the same time, he had the temerity to say he distrusts critics (Spirit Of Eden being “a critical favourite”) because “those who can, do; and those who can’t, write about it”. Presumably those who can’t even write about it just play records.

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Posted in Pop music

Why do I cycle?

Posted on January 6, 2012 | 5 Comments

So Rob has decided to abstain from the cycling challenges we’ve been doing via Endomondo. As he explains, we set-up these challenges between a (very) loose group of us, connected via friends of friends and the internet, occasionally finding strangers stumbling across our challenges and joining in, people taking part for a couple of months and then vanishing, a core group of three of us – Rob, myself, and my brother-in-law Peter – the most committed and consistent participants, more often than not jostling with each other come the end of the month (or year) to see who can finish first.

My initial, pretty thoughtless reaction was to hold my hand to my forehead in an ‘L’ shape and breathe a sigh of relief that this year I’ll be able to win our mileage challenge (had Rob not done his epic and admirable Land’s End to John O’Groats trip I’d have beaten him by about 100 miles for the year – except that he’d not have let that happen). My second reaction was a twinge of sadness, because it’s been great fun competing against each other for the last 18 months or so, pushing each other onwards to better things; I’ll miss it.

But reading Rob’s post and thinking about why I love riding so much, I can see completely where he’s coming from. There is a danger that tracking your mileage can make the act of riding a past-tense pursuit, about having ridden, about the miles you’ve covered rather than about the things you might see if you head down that road or over that hill. I never went as far as going out for a ride just before midnight on the last day of the month just to pip my competitor at the post, but Endomondo certainly offers a frightening potential for competitiveness when, as I’ve written before, the main thing I get out of riding isn’t a sense of being better at it (or more frequent at it) than anyone else, but, as Rob put it, a rush of endorphins and a sense of discovery. (Saying that, I know from playing board games with Pete that competitiveness doesn’t just need a GPS device in order to manifest itself spectacularly.)

I don’t think I took our monthly challenges quite as seriously as Rob; I never considered the psychology or habits of my fellow challengers (bar Rob himself on a couple of occasions) for instance: the person I was competing most against was almost always myself. As Pete got more and more into running, and Rob’s mileage total leapt into insurmountability via LEJOG, my monthly and annual efforts were less about beating or catching them than they were about pushing myself, setting a target and going for it – like wanting to do over 500 miles in one month (August), ride at least 10 miles each day (and generally quite a few more) over the Christmas holiday, or finally take on the hill at the back of my parents’ house (this morning; and it was wonderful).

I’ll admit that there is occasionally a certain edge or intensity to the motivation behind cycling, beyond discovery and enjoyment and freedom. A hint of masochism and testosterone; almost something a little Fight Club-ish; the desire to keep one’s body from the flabbiness of sedentary comfort, to not die without any scars (or shoulder injuries, or the imprint of a chainring on your calf, or aching thumbs from braking hard on a fierce downhill bend in an effort to avoid eating hedgerow), a wish, in the joyful realisation that we’ll never be movie stars, to at least know that we are alive now, and living, not always tied to screens and phones and electricity. The irony of GPS tracking being, of course, that even in those blissful moments of pedalling free, the iPhone is in the pocket, relaying information back and forth. We’re never free.

The other day I received a transcript of an interview I did about cycling with a researcher a couple of months ago; while talking to him about why and how I cycle, how I feel about it, how it’s changed me, etc, it struck me that writing, cycling, and music, the way I approach them, have something in common; a sense of wanting to discover new routes in order to re-experience emotional phenomena in new dimensions: not mere recreations or facsimiles of former feelings, but extensions, developments, new versions. The 2,000 CDs in our front room are all an attempt to get that magic feeling from as many different sources as possible, lest it wear out and fade from any direction. Riding and writing, both done usually with an end-point or duration in mind but seldom a route, seem like similar undertakings to me, perhaps. It’s not about winning, even if it is about achievement of a sort.

Maybe now we’re not riding against each other, we can (literally) ride together more; not just Rob and me but Pete and anyone else who fancies it (I suspect Steve is going to want some social training for his summer ride to Istanbull [not Constantinople]), and take the social side of riding off the internet and put it onto the tarmac (and cake shops) of Devon. I’d like that.

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Posted in Cycling, Existentialism, music writing

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The Nightmare Before Christmas – All Tomorrow’s Parties

Posted on December 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

It’s taken a decade, but this weekend Em and I finally went to All Tomorrow’s Parties. Despite being a music lover, I have never been to a festival; as I’ve said many times before, I’m into records rather than live music; a side-effect of growing up in the extreme South West of England (someone said to me the other month that “nothing good, or bad, ever comes further south or west than Bristol”; they were only half joking, but they were more than half right).

Why did it take so long? ATP seems like the perfect festival for someone like me. The problem is that I’m such a fussy bastard that it took probably my favourite musician of the last decade to be curating one night of The Nightmare Before Christmas (and two artists I like a lot curating the other nights) to sway me. But, predictably, now that I’ve been I want to go again, and can see it becoming an annual fixture. Em is probably both relieved and irritated by this – she’s been saying we should go for years.

So, belatedly, I loved ATP; despite my misgivings about such a homogenous (bearded, jumper-wearing) crowd of corny indie fuxxors, it was actually nice to know that, even if there was a certain amount of mental out-cooling going on, everyone was there for the same reason – because they love (a certain type of) music dearly. And, you know, I wore a big jumper most of the time, and had a moustache (now shaven in order to prevent divorce proceedings); I keep a blog, and used to write about indie and postrock and electronica for a webzine, for heaven’s sake. I’m the biggest corny indie fuxxor hipster in the world Exeter. Maybe.

The Nightmare Before Christmas was curated by Battles, Caribou, and Les Savy Fav, who each took charge of a day, playing an opening set in the afternoon, a closing set late in the night, and picked all the other acts in between, spread across several venues and including a cinema (with lectures and films), a book club, a TV station, and anything else they cared to conceive (Caribou curated a smell, a free Sunday Supplement magazine, and some nightingale song which was played in the massive empty space at the heart of Butlins).

Over the three days we saw about 15 different acts (only three of whom we’d seen before), attended a book discussion (on Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, which I managed to talk about without having read it…), a lecture on krautrock, watched a short film about a plastic carrier bag on the festival TV channel, ate pistachio gelato in the ice cream parlour, played copious games of air hockey, went bowling, ate pizza in a popular international restaurant franchise on-site while the usual dinnertime muzak was replaced by Suicide’s audaciously terrifying Frankie Teardrop, bumped into old school and university friends and people who run excellent music websites, stood behind the mixing desk alongside the great and good of alternative music in 2011 (and the little guy from Mogwai too), and had a fantastic time.

Bands seen on Friday

• Les Savy Fav
• Marnie Stern
• Wild Flag
• Oxes
• No Age

Les Savy Fav’s afternoon set was great fun; Tim Harrington, like Brian Blessed in Flash Gordon, climbed inside the steel girders that held the lighting rig above stage, and dangled from them by his knees while still (sort of) singing – I’ve got a couple of records by them but had no idea he was such a nutter.

Marnie Stern was disappointingly fiddly and disconnected live; Oxes were a guitar-wank bore, but Wild Flag were great rocking fun and No Age were a storm of guitar-scree-obliterated punk pop fun.

Bands seen on Saturday

• Nisennenmondai
• Walls
• The Field
• Flying Lotus
• Cults
• Battles

If Friday was all about guitars and no bassists, Saturday and Sunday were about drummers. I’d never heard of Japanese all-girl trio Nisennenmondai before, but they were the awesome surprise package of the festival, churning out intricate, dazzling, bewitching krautrock-esque grooves. If they come within 100 miles I’ll rush to see them again.

Walls disappointed a little considering I love their album so much, but The Field more than made up for it, turning Butlins’ weird nightclub-style venue into a proper synth-rave. A lesson, synth-warblers – adding a (fantastically powerful and tight) live drummer makes you 100x better.

I didn’t get Flying Lotus anymore live than I do on record; the 15 minutes of his set that we caught consisted of him talking (albeit charmingly) about his weird jetpack dream and then trying to spill everyone’s drinks with outrageous bass. I just didn’t get any sense of tunes or point, so we went to see Cults instead, who bemused for the first three aimless guitar-led tunes, and then slowed down, played some beguiling hooks, and became considerably better.

Battles, shorn of Tyondai, were maybe not as dazzling as when we saw them four years ago, but were still a technically impressive spectacle, and left the crowd joyously psyched, sweaty, and satiated.

Bands seen on Sunday

• Caribou
• Toro Y Moi
• Four Tet
• Caribou Vibration Ensemble

Despite having been buying his records for a decade, I only managed to see Caribou live for the first time last November, when he played the Thekla in Bristol, an excellent, atmospheric venue on a boat. If you’ve seen him, you’ll know he plays live with a four-piece band, turning his solo-assembled records into a visceral, electronica / jazz / krautrock hybrid. His opening set on Sunday saw the regular band swollen with a second drummer and a four-piece brass section; it was a short set, but terrific.

We skipped most of the jazz on offer, as we were both pretty knackered, but we caught Toro Y Moi in the afternoon; they were more song-based than I expected, reminding me of Wham! as they might sound if remixed today and played to you while you were underwater in a swimming pool. I’d not heard the album, but I’m intrigued to now.

We saw Four Tet seven years ago at The Cavern, Exeter’s tiny underground indie venue, and, for many reasons, not all of them musical, it sucked. He sat at a laptop and essentially destroyed music that I loved for two hours. At ATP it was very apparent that he’s been DJing regularly at big clubs for the last few years, though; much more open, much more communicative, much more focused on making people move their bodies rather than stroke their chins. We stood behind the mixing desk and the sound was incredible; he played at least a couple of tracks I didn’t recognise, hopefully a sign that a new album isn’t too far off.

The Caribou Vibration Ensemble, a 12-piece band featuring the aforementioned Caribou regular live crew, plus second drummer, plus brass section, plus the legendary Marshall Allen on additional sax, plus James Holden on enormous modular synth, plus Four Tet on electronics, was simply astonishing. I don’t really know how to begin to describe what it is that they do – a monstrous, jazz-inflected psychedelic kosmische rave-up that had the crowd moving as one (bar the handful of stock-still beardy miserablists at the back), arms in the air and smiles on their faces. I have no idea what it must have been like to see Miles Davis live in the early 70s, but I can only think that the Caribou Vibration Ensemble is the closest you’ll get today. If they ever play live again I’m going to do my damndest to get there.

Butlins

Butlins seems to have acquired a weird amount of cultural capitol over recent years, no doubt part in due (for my demographic) to the success of the ATP events there, but also spreading beyond that – friends of my brother were there the other week for an 80s weekender to see the likes of Madness.

The place itself is weird, partly caught in a time warp and partly sadly contemporary. The information point sign in the main pavilion said ‘infunmation’. There were foul-stinking hot dog stands in every corner of every venue. A toyshop was open in the weird little shopping boulevard. The Spar shop sold out of copies of The Guardian by lunchtime on Saturday but was left with enormous stacked piles of The Daily Mail. There was a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, a Soho Coffee, and a billion slot machines, penny-push machines, air hockey tables, and so on and so forth, underneath an enormous tent stretched out between three giant warehouses. Everything was hideously expensive. The staff seemed strangely both bewildered and completely unfazed by 5,000 bearded postrock fans descending on them for three days; in some areas it was clearly business as usual, and in others they’d made strange concessions to their clientele’s demographic – we ate in the Pizza Hut on Sunday evening and Suicide’s Frankie Teardrop was playing. Bizarre. I’d not go there for a regular holiday, but we’ll definitely go there again for ATP. Next time we’re getting a proper self-catering chalet, though.

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Albums of 2011

Posted on December 6, 2011 | 4 Comments

It’s December again, miraculously, so I’ve taken all the released-this-year CDs that Em and I have bought, put them in a couple of piles, and taken a photograph of them. It seems to be becoming a tradition. You can click on the photo to see a larger version and read all of the spines, if you like.

Anyway, ten is a nice number, and words about records are good, so here are words about my ten (arbitrary) favourite records of the year, in reverse order, because, y’know, tension…

10. Wilco – The Whole Love
There can, and often does, come a time when you have the sad realization that you don’t so much love a band, as love a small part of a band. In my case, with Wilco, I love I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, and Reservations, and Spiders (Kidsmoke), and Company In Your Back, and At Least That’s What You Said, and Misunderstood, and I Can’t Stand It, and Poor Places, and Sunken Treasure… but there are whole big chunks of them that I’m not bothered about, even if there’s very little (maybe nothing) that I dislike. So I pretty much ignored Wilco (The Album), having been a little nonplussed by the smooth, mature proficiency of Sky Blue Sky. And I was trepidatious about The Whole Love, despite talk about it being a (slight) return to more experimental textures. In truth, I’m staggered by the two bookends, and especially Art Of Almost (when Cline and Kotche let rip for the last two or three minutes!), and could (almost) take or leave the rest of the album. But I’ll take it; the whole thing sounds stunning, and there’s something intrinsically pleasurable about watching (or listening to) human beings doing something they’re very good at; even when the songs are traditional and/or predictable, there’s always a skill, dexterity, and panache to the playing here that is impressive. And on top of that, songs like I Might and the title track are good pop/rock tunes in their own right, even if tracks like Capitol City veer a little too far into pleasantly inconsequential Beatles homage.

9. Walls – Coracle
I reviewed this for The Quietus; it’s very good. The opening track, Into Our Midst, rivals Art Of Almost as my favourite opener of the year. Lots of records tried something similar this year – The Field, Blanck Mass, Tim Hecker, Robag Wruhme and more all had at least something in common at some level – but Walls seemed to do it best.

8. Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know
We saw Laura Marling perform at Exeter cathedral a month and a bit ago; I’d say that her voice was possessed of a surprising power in a live context, except that it wasn’t surprising. Her debut now sounds callow and naïve, and even last year’s excellent I Speak Because I Can, which I adored, has paled a little in relief; A Creature I Don’t Know adds a sensuality and tension to her tunefulness and musicianship which provides a new dimension. On The Beast, the album’s central, emotionally unhinged, most electrifying moment, Marling channels something of the dark magic that crept into Mojo Pin and Lover, You Should’ve Come Over by Jeff Buckley. I look forward greatly to watching her career develop even further.

7. tUnE-yArDs – W H O K I L L
I was initially a little nonplussed by this much-hyped record when Tom played it at Devon Record Club; it seemed at first to be a clattering mess. But at some point in autumn it opened up to me, and clicked neatly into place; the energy and chaos of the opening trio, clattering hooks and beats and amazing, corrupted and pure voices, and the beautiful swoons and twists of Powa, still imbued with a passion and strength. Garbus is an intriguing musician and a great, soulful singer.

6. Nicolas Jaar – Space Is Only Noise
A continuous, sensuous, aesthetic pleasure, Jaar’s debut isn’t quite the minimal house odyssey some people wanted, but it is immaculately constructed, captivating and unusual, a strange nowhere land between techno and jazz and minimal and Germany and South American and east and west. I love it, and I can’t wait to watch him grow.

5. Destroyer – Kaputt
My first dalliance with Dan Bejar has impressed me enough to make me go back and investigate Rubies, Your Blues, and Trouble In Dreams; I like them all, especially Rubies, but Kaputt has something else going for it. Maybe it’s the aesthetic of smooth, 80s sophistication, the tight, highly held guitars, the saxophones and synthesizers. Or maybe it’s the strange nostalgia for other countries and other cultures. Bejar seems to do something different with every album – Bowie pastiche, bizarre orchestral midi-dreams, shoegaze overtones – so I doubt the aesthetic adopted on Kaputt will be continued into whatever he does next, but right now both Em and I are finding moments of this buzzing through our heads between plays.

4. Patrick Wolf – Lupercalia
I reviewed this for The Quietus too. It accompanied us on car journeys throughout the summer, something Patrick’s not done since The Magic Position. The first four tracks are almost too much to bear, too ebullient, too happy, too in love, but the album fulcrums on Time Of My Life, which might just be Patrick’s best pop song yet, and which tilts the emotions out of fairytale happily-ever-after into something much more prosaic and, therefore, more moving and real. And the tunes! Bermondsey Street! House! The Falcons! Together! I want Patrick to make an album of full-on German techno next.

3. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
Annie Clark’s previous effort ended up being my accidental favourite album of 2009, a long-burning grower that crept up on me (and Emma, too) over months and months, intriguing and beguiling us. So there were high expectations for Strange Mercy, especially when she let Surgeon into the world as a teaser. In truth, the album didn’t strike me straight away, but I kind of wasn’t expecting it to after Actor, and I’m glad it didn’t. We saw Annie live last month, and I wrote the following:
“Strange Mercy has a disorienting drama, a never-ending tension in some songs that builds and builds and frustrates by never quite climaxing, at least not in the way you might expect. It’s almost like jazz – you expect a refrain to develop or repeat in a certain way, and it doesn’t; you expect an introduction to end, but it continues, and reveals itself to be an entire verse (such as a verse is) rather than a mere prologue; you’re left waiting for the pattern to alter, for musical satiation, and you’re left without it, like unending, climaxless foreplay. This might be enough to drive some mad. Live the new songs fitted pretty seamlessly with the handful of older ones – a few from Actor, very little from Marry Me (a splendid Your Lips Are Red) – even though on record they are perhaps a little more disjointed, more awkward, more complex. She’s a very special musician. Some seemed to think that Strange Mercy would be her breakthrough record; I don’t think she’ll ever “break through” in that mainstream-crossover audience way. She’s too complicated, too dreamlike, too dangerous, perhaps. I feel like the artifice of her music – the unusual, varied guitar tones, synth washes, unreal-sounding drums – are manifestations of her attempting to create the music she hears inside her own head. I suspect the inside of her head is an interesting place. Twice onstage she swore in songs, adding the word “fucking” to a lyric where it doesn’t appear on record, and the affect was a little frightening, a real example of a curse word holding emotional power.”

2. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
I wrote this, and also this, and also this about PJ Harvey’s latest album, which is taking plaudits left, right, and centre this year, as well as various tweets, messageboard posts, and snippets in blog posts about other things. So I’m not sure I can write anymore, except to say that it’s wonderful, and poetic, and enticing, and moving, and a massive, massive accomplishment.

1. Wild Beasts – Smother

Likewise I waxed extremely lyrical about Wild Beasts’ third album back in May; it’s stayed near the top of my pile, where it’s accessible, because it needs to be, because I play it often, ever since. It, and its b-sides (especially the marvelous Thankless Thing), and Two Dancers, have been in the car, on the iPod, on the hi-fi, more often than any other records over the last 12 months, even Polly’s. Between These New Puritans last year and Wild Beasts this year I now feel like there are bands of boys with guitars (as opposed to bands of men with guitars, or lone women with guitars, or bands of women with guitars, or lone men with computers) who I care about, who I can invest in, who I want to go and see play live, and wear t-shirts adorned with their name. Smother is a subtle, creeping, emotionally and sexually tense and intense affair, passionate and impassioned at the same time as being incredibly controlled and nuanced. It’s my favorite album of the year.

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Disco Inferno – The Five EPs

Posted on December 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

The way the internet has affected music – the business models, the way we listen, the journalism around it, the places we buy music from, the way we’re exposed to new music – is an endlessly fascinating and frightening paradigm. The record shop my brother worked in, which was in the same place in my hometown for 20+ years, has closed and stands empty. The print publications I hoped to write for when I was a teenager have pretty much all folded. The way I used to play music for my friends, at their houses, has become a new world of status updates and public playlists on streaming systems. It’s unrecognisable.

The economics of this new musical world, the supposed utopian “long tail” of consumption with all niche interests catered for, have ultimately failed pretty spectacularly in the wake of the global economic crisis, major labels haemorrhaging cash, independents struggling to maintain themselves, artists on the breadline more than ever before, and huge marquee TV programs like X Factor using a combination of old techniques (live TV) and new technologies (real-time mobile-based social media chatter) to eat up vast market share and public consciousness. If you thought about it too long, considered the people in the middle and at the bottom, the artists, writers, publicists, record label people, doing something a little different but wanting an audience nonetheless, wanting to pay a mortgage and live a reasonable life off their creative toil, you’d probably despair.

One good thing the internet has done for music, though, is turn up lost classics in an entirely new way. Equally slowly and suddenly, through mailing lists, forums, webzines, blogs and now social media platforms, like-minded people in search of buried musical treasure have been able to become aware and get hold of records long out of print, long forgotten, under-recognised gems that never crossed over for whatever reason when first released. I’ve found myself exposed to and in love with huge reams of vintage postpunk, krautrock, tropicalia, folkrock, and experimental rock and electronic music that I seriously doubt I would ever have come across in a pre-internet age.

This CD I’m ostensibly writing about here, The Five EPs by Disco Inferno, early 90s indie also-rans signed to Rough Trade, is a prime example of how something utterly lost and obscure, but full of worth and vitality, can become found. Thanks to a steady groundswell of voices praising their music, and in particular this run of 15 songs spread across five EPs, from 1991 to 1994, One Little Indian have rereleased their two key albums (1994’s D.I. Go Pop and 1996’s Technicolour), and now compiled the EPs for the first time ever. You need to own this record. I really can’t emphasise that enough.

I first heard these EPs as digital downloads, acquired via a long-since-vanished peer-to-peer network; smitten with them, I had to own them, and tracked down original CD copies via auction sites and specialist second-hand record retailers. I think the cheapest one cost me about £6, the most expensive in excess of £30. It took me over 18 months to acquire all five, but I had to do it. Now I own all the songs on one CD, with full liner notes explaining the mystique, genius, and provenance of this awesome music, the reissue inspired directly by that groundswell of opinion on the web, and by one voice in particular –the inimitable and estimable Ned Raggett, whose tireless championing of this band has brought them to the attention of hundreds if not thousands of people.

So what’s so special about Disco Inferno, and these EPs in particular? The band started out as unremarkable postpunk followers in the late 80s, gauche teenagers with records by Wire and Joy Division, but at some point they acquired a sampler and almost overnight their aesthetic and approach changed radically, and they became one of the most progressive, experimental, and creative bands in the UK.

The full context and methodology of what they did is explained in the extensive liner notes, and without wanting to regurgitate too much of what’s there I’ll précis it: rather than stick the Funky Drummer beat behind everything, or samples of film dialogue at the beginning or end of songs as so many contemporaneous indie bands did, they integrated the sampler fully with their instruments, so each guitar note played, instead of sounding like a string, pick-up, amplifier, and distortion pedal, instead reproduced the sound of breaking glass, or birdsong, or camera shutters, or fireworks, or lapping waves, or squealing brakes, or a thousand other found-sounds.

The genius of this trick is that Disco Inferno didn’t make some kind of unlistenable avant-garde ‘musique concrète’; they made melodies out of the maelstrom, guided the cacophony on tight, taut grooves, and used the samples to construct a sound-world which reproduced, rather than mimicked or alluded to, the world they lived in, but which functioned as- no, which was, at heart, pop music.

Through this melange of urban (and occasionally rural) sounds and shapes, structured into tunes, they weaved lyrics delivered in a heart-achingly laconic and distraught deadpan, telling stories of economic collapse, social decay, unsympathetic Tory governments run through with a sense of entitlement and ennui so strong and undeniable that our rulers see fit to ignore the strictures they placed upon the populace. There is fear of the Middle East, fear of the high-rise ghettos, fear of the moneyed elite, fear of the alienation at the heart of our society. Sound familiar? Lyrics about immigrants being kicked to death, about rising food prices, about specific incidents of modern life that run a sense of woe and panic through your veins, make the unspecific modern melancholy of various current musicians seem hopelessly, ineffectually vague.

But in the midst of this evocative despair, every so often, there would be a passage of music so beautiful and pointillist and delicate (Love Stepping Out), or a guitar solo so star-kissed and inspirational (Second Language), or a squall of noise so thrilling and visceral (D.I. Go Pop), or a beat and sample juxtaposition so joyous (It’s a Kid’s World), that the panic, the fear, the horror, would fade away, if only for a moment, as the power of pop music, the reason we’re here, the reason you’re reading this article, eclipsed everything as only it can do.

15 years since their demise in the face of disinterest and disaster, Disco Inferno’s finest music is now easily available, all together. You owe it to them – you owe it to yourselves – to listen. This record is quietly epochal. Its ripples filter through so much of what you love. Hopefully now its exposure can match its influence.

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Keep Warm with The Warm Digits

Posted on December 3, 2011 | 4 Comments

I wrote this piece about three months ago and sent it somewhere, admittedly on spec, to be published, but they never did. I’ve felt bad ever since for having got the record for free, so here’s the review anyway, a little belated. It’s a good record; you might like it.

Keep warm with the warm digits

The Warm Digits – Keep warm… with the Warm Digits
Distraction Records
www.warmdigits.co.uk

Influence is a tricky and contentious word in music. “Influenced by” and “sounds like”, contrary to popular opinion, don’t actually mean the same thing. Thus who an artist identifies as influences on any given album or song may not necessarily translate as the musical lineages you as a listener think you hear in the sonic soup, no matter how wide and systematic your knowledge of music. So an indie band may namecheck Frank Zappa or Shudder To Think, having been consciously listening to those artists in the studio and attempting to interpolate certain ideas or approaches from them into their own music, but there is absolutely no guarantee that anyone listening will notice, and the result may be scorn and incredulity poured on the artists for attempting to gain credibility by dropping slightly leftfield names as influences.

Likewise a listener, even, heaven forefend, a reviewer, may be utterly convinced that they can hear a reference to Pachelbel’s canon in d in the chord structure of a certain song by a certain artists, may be certain that a key reason for the existence of the new song is as some kind of tribute to or recreation of canon in d, while the artist in question may never have thought of Pachelbel in their life, the chord sequence being the result of strange serendipity or subconscious appropriation (which I guess is another kind of influence, albeit a different kind). Or perhaps a band writes a new song by jamming around on the chords of something incongruous like Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” or Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, throws an entirely new melody and lyric and a radically different arrangement over the top, and no one hearing the new song ever has a clue as to its provenance. These things happen all the time. There are only so many notes, so many chords, so many ways to put them together.

Sometimes though, an artist makes it really obvious. Sometimes you can tell almost exactly what a record will sound like just by looking at the cover and reading the song titles. Keep Warm… with the Warm Digits is just such a record. The sleeve is printed to look old and worn, with fake creases, crumples, and fading colours lending the geometric rainbow of lines and curves an authentic air of early 70s German technological hippiedom. With a cover like this, it can only be a krautrock record. Then you turn it over and see that songs are called things like “Trans-Pennine Express” and “Here Come The Warm Digits”, and if you hadn’t already nailed Kraftwerk, Neu!, Eno, and Harmonia as influences then you surely couldn’t fail to now.

And sure enough, when you drop the needle or press play or shake your phone in the air (or whatever it is kids do to start listening to music these days), you’re greeted by an analogue synthesiser wheeze and a collapsing tower of drums, which disintegrates and coalesces back into a metronomic pulse and layers of melodic fuzz which are the very embodiment of the epithet “repetition is a form of change”.

This is anything but a cold and computerised record, though; if the punning song titles weren’t enough evidence, The Warm Digits’ human warmth and sense of humour is expressed by drums which are a touch more swinging and less robotic than one might expect, and by a series of major-key melodies and chord changes which, though they still paint images of 70s European kids TV dramas about the sons of businessmen being kidnapped and driven across the Alps in my mind, do so with a wonderfully energised sense of naivety and excitement rather than the desolate melancholy of being alone in a foreign land. If that makes sense.

The friend who alerted me to this record described it as being a bit “Fisher Price – My First Krautrock Album”, but emphasised that this was far, far from being a bad thing, and I’m inclined to agree. Though I have an armful of records by Cluster and CAN and Tangerine Dream, plus modern reference points like Lindstrom, Emeralds, and M83, enough to ask why I’d want to listen to anything as clearly and happily derivative as The Warm Digits, there’s enormous pleasure to be derived from hearing these kinds of sounds rearranged and made new yet again. Andrew Hodgeson and Steve Jeffries, the producer and electronica-guy duo who are The Warm Digits, may not have hit upon any kind of newness or innovation here, but I’m pretty sure that was never their intention, and they’ve created something enormously enjoyable nonetheless.

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On having a moustache

Posted on November 28, 2011 | 1 Comment

I have been growing a fine, nay, magnificent, horseshoe moustache since the first of November, in the name of charity. You may have heard of Movember, the fundraising scheme which encourages men to grow a moustache in order to raise awareness of men’s health issues such as testicular and prostate cancer.

I’ve fancied taking part for the last couple of years but somehow always managed to forget. This year, though, I stated my aim early, set-up a page on the official Movember website, and then, on the first of November, made sure I was completely clean shaven so I could grow a moustache from scratch.

It’s been an odd process; several of us at work are taking part, and between around a dozen of us we’ve now raised well over £1,000 in sponsorship. We’ve met up once a week to see how we’re all getting on with growing our face-furniture, and the camaraderie and encouragement in the first couple of weeks, when we all looked like hapless adolescents, was a definite help.

I decided to grow a full on “Hulk Hogan” style moustache (which I understand is called a ‘horseshoe’ in some circles), as it seemed the most fun; a tiny hint of style and a healthy dose of self-aware amusement. For the first few days it was fine; a couple of weeks in and I was very aware of the fuzz above my mouth, conscious of it every time I moved my lips to speak, eat, or assume any kind of facial expression. There have been a couple of moments, generally when very tired or warm, when it has itched me into irritation, but the weight of sponsorship has kept me from shaving it off.

The itching barrier is always what prevents me growing a full beard (that and vague patchiness / creeping ginger) on the occasions where I’ve left it more than a few days without shaving and wondered whether I could / should take it further. (I hate shaving, and try to only do it a couple of times a week; I’m cursed with sensitive skin, which no amount of moisturiser or soothing aftershave balms can keep from becoming inflamed and irritated when I scrape sharp metal over it.)

I’ve been called a lot of things whilst growing the moustache: “el bandito”, ‘a German porn star”, “a trucker”, “a hipster”, “a Mexican”… A colleague’s toddler son called me “daddy” purely because his dad apparently has a beard, and toddlers are nothing if not easily confused by facial hair. Several people have told me that it suits me, and asked if I’ll keep it; while it’s nice to know that I don’t look as daft as some people taking part in Movember, I don’t think I’ll be keeping it; for a start, Emma’s dad has had a moustache for as long as she’s been alive, so she’s not keen on me keeping it past the end of the month. Also, it seems like more of an effort to maintain a moustache than to shave completely; a well as being careful not to clip the edges of it when shaving, you also have to shampoo, comb, trim, moisturise and manicure the damn thing, and all while it’s on your face, to prevent tangles, dry skin, and looking like a tramp.

Having a moustache this month has made me wander what moustaches mean, what they signify, and I haven’t the foggiest. It does change the way people look at you, from time to time. Some people stare; some people take a second glance. Is growing a moustache about the reclamation of an eroded masculinity? Beards in recent years have assumed a certain counter-cultural acceptability when worn by young men, generally geeky alternative types empowered by certain musical aesthetics. But the moustache, although celebrated in some hipster circles, and popular with a certain breed of cyclist, still seems to be a rare affectation except during Movember. Obviously there are a number of styles it can be worn in, each carrying its own signifiers and cultural baggage – no one, I would wager, will be growing a “Hitler” this month. Almost anyone you see with a proper, established, more-than-a-month-old moustache is generally older, but beyond that I can’t generalise. Some look like truckers. Some don’t. Not many look like Charlie Bronson.

If I can manage to put up with it for a few days past the first of December, my hairdresser has offered to shear the moustache off for free with her clippers next Saturday, to save me the agony of scissoring and wet-shaving it off. I think I’ll grow another next Movember.

If you’re feeling flush, you can sponsor me here.

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