Thursday, September 08, 2005

More Hatfield, Jonathan Coe and Ben Trotter

In December 2004, I received an email from Burning Shed records, saying that there was a new release from Hatfield and the North on the way. I misunderstood the email to say that the cd would contain new material, whereas in fact it contained live recordings of material which appeared mainly on their first eponymous album. Nevertheless, I ordered the disc (paying extra money to have it signed by the band members, sad person that I am), and to my surprise this came with a booklet authored by Jonathan Coe, who wrote the 'Rotters Club' novel mentioned in my previous post. So Coe is as sick as I am.

Unfortunately there isn't much live Hatfield material around, so this disc ("Hatwise Choice") is worth obtaining if you're interested in them. There isn't much live National Health material either, but I have two performances of theirs, courtesy of DimeADozen. It's fascinating listening to this material as frequently it was performed by a different line-up to the one that recorded the pieces, with different instruments available. Thus 'Tenemos Roads', Dave Stewart's epic tale of Mars, has a guitar playing what is the vocal line on the record. These pieces were never set in stone: there are sections added and sections removed, making these live recordings an interesting commentary on the more familiar studio versions.

Now back to Coe and his books. There's a lovely bit in the first book, a speech called "Goodbye to all that". I found myself quoting it to a friend some months ago -

He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, "Wait, wait".
I was already waiting. What else was there to do?
"Here you are", he said. "Look. What's this?"
At that precise moment, his sparkler fizzled out. I didn't say anything, so he supplied the answer himself. "The death of the socialist dream", he said....

I saw exactly the same thing as I'd seen in Stubbs' eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Philip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of countless millenia into half an hour's worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip's musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that.

A real shame in my opinion that the moment had passed. Who said that changes are good?

A passage which caught my eye in the second book refers to Ben's music:

The music was complex and repetitive, owing something to systems music, but with more chord changes. There was no melodic line: fragments of melody peeped out occasionally, on guitar or sampled strings or woodwinds, before submerging themselves again, absorbed into the densely contrapuntal texture. These underdeveloped tunes were modal, like extracts from half-remembered folk songs. Harmonically, there was an emphasis on minor sevenths and ninths, giving the piece a melancholy undertow; but at the same time , an underlying pattern of ascending chords suggested optimism, a hopeful eye fixed on to the distant future.

This reads something like how I would like my new instrumental music to be described. It's not repetitive and owes nothing to systems music, but the rest seems fairly apt and appropriate. In honour of Ben Trotter, I wrote a new piece called "Ben's theme", which hopefully will be available at Unsigned Bands (see the link on the side) - at the moment I'm having trouble uploading material.

The starting point for this piece was strangely enough the end of James Taylor's "Fire and Rain". I was listening to it the other night along with a few other of his pieces and was wondering how on earth we thought he was the bees' knees in 1971. Anyway, F&R has a coda which basically is a guitar playing a C chord on one channel whilst a piano is playing a Bb major seventh chord on the other channel. These chords give a feeling of potential upset, that something is going to happen shortly. Normally the resolution would be to carry on the song in the key of C, but in this case, the song simply fades away unresolved. Incidentally, the words, especially the first verse, are terrible, but don't get me started on that. I listen mainly to the music.

This polychord gave me the idea for "Ben's theme", starting with a bass pedal point playing C, whilst the chords alternate initially between Bb major seventh and A minor seventh, before developing into something more interesting.

Playing the six ambient pieces which I have created over the past few months, I notice that many of them have sustained bass pedal points. Is this going to be a characteristic of my music?

No comments: