Thoughtland

PK column in The National: The building media narrative that Scottish music has died is misplaced

By Pat Kane. First published on JUNE 15TH, 2019

WHEN a festival dies, there’s a range of lamentations. The organisers make their apologies to the “community” that’s grown around it. The local politicians regret the loss of income from thousands of revellers coming to their locality.

Some of the regular attendees, and a few of the acts, may mourn the end of these particular epiphanies – but mostly they’ll move on to the next “unique experience”. Because there’s bound to be one. Festivals, these days are irrepressible.

PK column in The National: Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows – an appreciation of Aretha Franklin

By Pat Kane. First published on AUGUST 18TH, 2018

AS the Queen of Soul, she would expect nothing less than candour. So, on the passing of one of my lifetime inspirations, the elemental Aretha Franklin, I will try to appreciate her as honestly as I can.

Like Sinatra’s, or McCartney’s, or Bowie’s, Franklin’s voice makes possible what any singer afterwards even imagines they could produce. It clears original ground. She fused together the best of the gospel tradition, and the timing of jazz and blues, to perfection.

PK column in The National: Let’s all channel our thoughts on what we want to see on the BBC's new Scottish platform

By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 25TH, 2017

‘ALL things are possible. But happen less and less”. It’s always been a sore line from Deacon Blue’s Fergus Sings The Blues – a shot straight to the heart of our national miserabilism.

But the new BBC Scotland channel is something of a triumph for those who steadily believe things can happen more and more in Scotland, even short of our necessary statehood.

PK column in The National: Celebrities should not be at the behest of our politicians

By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 17TH, 2016

They go trudging into Trump Tower, hit the elevator button, then pop out of the gold-plated doors – there to meet the Sun God, or at least the Suntan God. Our innards took enough of a lurch seeing Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks smear themselves across the marble floors, barely hours after his victory.

But this week, the world’s most dangerous reality TV show – centred around Trump’s big corporate table on the 22nd floor, with chosen family members as a creepy consiglieri – had some notable new contestants.

PK column in The National: Rise of right has left us questioning what it means to be a white male

By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 26TH, 2016

WHITE, middle-aged, middle-class male. That’s what I am, undeniably. I have long thought of myself as a supporter of women’s rights, of the rights of sexual and ethnic minorities. Yet here I am, the empirical fact of me, appearing in analysis after analysis as the foundation of a poisonous turn in Euro-American public life.

What should I do? What can I do?

The answers to those questions reverberate up and down my own timeline, and across the field of society before us. And before I assume any right as a pundit to suggest anyone else’s course of action or behaviour, I should examine my own path.

PK's "The National" column: As hip-hop once again becomes the voice of American protest where’s ours?

My Saturday column in The National (online edition), June 27th, 2015. All comments/shares welcome.

As hip-hop once again becomes the voice of American protest where’s ours?

Pat Kane in The National 

I’M playing Glastonbury tomorrow – well, in a way. Call it a small (potentially very muddy) side-benefit of three years of indyref table-thumping. Brother Billy Bragg has invited me to speak at his Left Field zone (the Left Project’s Cat Boyd is on today), along with ex-London Mayor Ken Livingstone, the head of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, and the journalist John Harris. My pal Robin McAlpine, founder of Common Weal, sat on this stage last year. I expect a Daily Mail drone to be hovering over my bins soon, x-raying the contents furiously.

Is this the last residue of Glastonbury’s hippie radicalism? I’m sure we’ll all give it, er, welly (though how much fomenting can be done from a prone position on a literary-festival-style couch is debatable). The headline act later that night is Paul Weller, a man from whom those of a certain generation might expect much, in terms of rousing a rock crowd to righteous anger.

But I’m not overly hopeful. Glasto seems to go in for unspecific, merch-moving epiphany these days. The key controversies are over whether hip-hop or R’n’B are “appropriate” for the big stages (nice dog-whistle politics implied there).

Yet who’d be a rocker (or soulster) with a conscience, and thus a burning message, to deliver to the bouncing tens of thousands – and watching millions – these days? The critical jeering; the outraged TV producers; the managers and A&R men having heart-attacks about their playlist prospects… By the time you get anywhere near the main-stage, you’ve no doubt built up such a web of music-biz dependencies that playing safe (or at least, playing ambiguous) is the obvious option.

Unless, that is, you’ve put a political critique at the heart of your music in the first place: add unassailable sales figures to that, and you might be able to burn through the wet mattress of careerism. I don’t fully check for Muse, but I deeply love the paranoid techno-critique that laces their current “Drones” album. I’d go to see how they answer the Nirvana challenge – “here we are now/entertain us” –with that body of work.

When Hue And Cry played Isle of Wight a few years ago, my partner and I hung around to watch Springsteen and the E-Street Band close the festival. Again, while not enthusiasts, we thrilled to his mastery of the great American music traditions.

But Springsteen hardly needed to slap politics on top of his songs. Call him a multi-millionaire bullshit artist if you wish – and many do – but he has a body of work addressing American inequalities and injustices that goes back 40 years. It’s baked into his art; he’s been unable to stop scratching that itch. So yes, the bathos on The Boss is only a search-query away. But on the day, the way his poetry and passion combined to articulate anger and hope for a better society was an incredibly powerful experience.

PERHAPS it takes a historic thunderclap to compel musicians to get their heads out of their own navels (or for that matter, other people’s). And maybe the times reveal the depth of the artist. Those of us who worship at the altar of the R’n’B colossus D’Angelo have intensified our devotion recently. He has raised his voice to address the Charleston shooting, the Ferguson riots, and the rising social anger gathering around the hashtag #blacklivesmatter.

Again, like Springsteen, D’Angelo has form as a political artist. His recent record, Black Messiah (over ten years in the making) is named after J. Edgar Hoover’s derisory label for powerful leaders of the civil rights movement. 

In a recent New York Times article, D’Angelo hooks up with Bobby Seale, one of the founding Black Panthers, to cruise the streets of Oakland, California, the Panthers’ initial turf.

D is full of fire. He cites his song, The Charade: “All we wanted was a chance to talk/’Stead we only got outlined in chalk... Crawling through a systematic maze of demise.” When asked how he feels about the public disorder of the last six months, he replies: “I feel awesome. What people call a riot I call a rebellion. In my humble opinion the word ‘riot’ is used by the media to dismiss or degenerate what’s really happening. Everybody knows the looting and burning is the voice of the unheard.”

Yet his hero, a now elderly Seale, tries to gently temper his young acolyte’s zeal – praising the Federal authorities for launching an investigation into Charleston, urging more action through the ballot box and the raising of black political ambition, even allowing the decency of police in the system (“some are my friends”). 

Our drummer in Hue and Cry, Paul Mills, grew up in New Haven in the 60s and 70s, with many of his male relatives in the Panthers. 

He describes them as very focused on the attainment of community power. “They were very practical, about economics, developing the place. Not all guns and threats.”

D’Angelo has been joined by the rapper Kendrick Lamar in speaking out against the “systematic” nature of violence perpetrated against the black population. Yet one can barely imagine what kind of new protest music could arise to protest this. A black President regularly hosts the ageing soul heroes of the 60s and 70s in the White House, yet seems to be leaving behind a more racially polarised America as his legacy. When the whole system looks fallen and compromised, a black punk may emerge, just as the early politicised hip-hop of Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy so inspired D’Angelo.

IS music still powerful and credible enough to be the lens that concentrates the voice of protest? In the indyref, we can’t say that significant Scottish artists didn’t try to write their motivating anthems. Stanley Odd’s Son I Voted Yes, and Paulo Nutini’s Iron Sky (the wee man roaring “Freedom!” at the top of his golden voice towards the end), are the two most notable examples.

But it seemed to me that social media images and memes were the real riffs being played to an audience by motivated artists; and when audiences did gather in halls, they actually wanted to hear the arguments first and foremost. It was also the nature of the cultural Yes movement – young, worldly, constantly checking themselves with their networks – that no-one wanted to be caught writing crude patriotic (or even ideological) songs. Scottish independence is about realising the power we already have, not about resisting the kind of ambient violence currently suffered by black folks in the US For which state of affairs, give thanks and praise.

However, if we can’t find troubadours to speak the sheer denigration of fixed-term benefits, or decry the soul-shrivelling scripts of retail employment, or the evoke the acute disorientation of the refugee in a strange land, then music on this island really will have died, at least from the fists down.

I regularly listen to Loki and the Cartel’s “Knightmare” to be reminded of what’s possible for modern protest music; I’d love to hear your recommendations. Will I find it at the over-mediated, big-name friendly, blissed-out group hug of Glastonbury? Maybe only if Brother Bragg reaches for his Telecaster.

Pat Kane is on at Glastonbury’s Left Field stage, 3-4pm, with Ken Livingstone, Shami Chakrabarti and others

PK's "The National" column: PuNK’s NOt dEaD... even if its history has been hijacked by big business

My Saturday column in The National (online edition), June 13th, 2015. All comments/shares welcome.

PuNK’s NOt dEaD... even if its history has been hijacked by big business

Pat Kane for The National

‘DON'T know what I want/But I know how to get it.” Pin number please, sir! One of many lyrics you could quote, in response to this week’s news that Richard Branson’s Virgin Money is bringing out a new Sex Pistols-branded credit card. 

My favourite Twitter quip was: “18.9 per cent APR In The UK”. The old punks are only wearily sighing. John Lydon has already flipped his bum flap for British butter, and Iggy Pop sold life insurance (whose policies wouldn’t actually insure musicians). No more heroes anymore, etc.

But hold on. Let’s remember the next few lines: “I wanna destroy passers-by/Cause I wanna be anarchy/No dogsbody.” The late Malcolm McLaren might have ended up as a tawdry “celebrity hijacker” on Big Brother in 2008, but in 1976 – as the Sex Pistols’ svengali – he knew exactly what he was doing. ”[This record] is a call to arms to the kids who believe that rock and roll was taken away from them,” he said of Anarchy in the UK. “It’s a statement of self rule, of ultimate independence.”

That’s a rich stew of a declaration, bubbling up in many possible directions this fine Scottish day. It would be easy to point to Branson’s vampire grin – sucking the blood out of his own legacy (Virgin did sign the Pistols, after all) – and shrug off the punk moment with embarrassment. Indeed, you could frame punk not as the Great Refusal, but as the herald of the last forty years of capitalist cultural dominance.

Generate “cash from chaos” as McLaren once preached? Isn’t that exactly what neo-liberalism, Thatcher’s legacy, does relentlessly – that is, subject common goods to commercial forces, and profit from fixing the resultant mess? “How many ways to get what you want/I use the best/I use the rest.” That’s a line from Anarchy, but it’s also as pure a statement of market individualism as you could wish.

Even punk style – raiding and parading taboos, making a bricolage of wildly different styles – is now one of the basic development methods for any advertising or brand agency: a strategy whereby they blast open a new consumer niche for their clients.

But hold on again. Yes, punk was planned as a trickster intervention by the most artful of London dodgers. We may well be able pick out of it the seeds of a style-capitalism to come. But what it also became – and especially as it flowered into post-punk – was a mass popular culture of rebellious experiment using music, fashion, technology, forms of organising and an ever-widening protest agenda.

Arguably, we face the same kind of overall social and political conditions that allowed McLaren and Lydon’s sparks to take flame. Punk emerged in the final years of Callaghan’s Labour government, which actually introduced Thatcherite monetarist economics before Thatcher did. Today, with the soft-Tory farrago of the current Labour leadership contest before us, could a young proto-punk be forgiven for wishing a snotty plague on all houses?

So let’s snip up the credit cards, and stick with the seditionary end of the punk legacy for the moment. To use the language of the geeks: what would a Punk 2.0 look like? For one thing, I think it might well be English first, before it’s Scottish. McLaren was thinking like a rocker and an anarchist, rather than a civic nationalist, when he talked about “self rule” and “ultimate independence” – he cited Eddie Cochrane as the paragon of the latter. But punk’s roots feed from a profound alienation from the current order. Isn’t one of the consequences of an effective and evolving Scottish sovereignty that we are a wee bit less alienated than that?

I don’t doubt the radical credentials of the Greens’ Patrick Harvie or the Left Project’s Cat Boyd. But their stance towards “passers-by” is to seek their proportional list-member votes, not their destruction. (Question: should Scots be more alienated than we are? Discuss.)

HOWEVER, with an explicit war on the poor and an amnesty for the rich being waged by a Government with a small but clear parliamentary majority in a broken electoral system, based on a quarter of the potential vote… 

Well, it’s hard to imagine that something won’t soon begin to storm in the societal depths of the UK.

But will music and lead singers be the cultural weapons to hand for Punk 2.0? Maybe not. Russell Brand’s performances haven’t exactly restored Cockney rebellion to a Rotten-level status. I heard reports from Glasgow this week that Patti Smith didn’t trash her guitar on stage… just her guitar strings. An all-too-perfect metaphor for how well-behaved the music business is these days. (Though in other parts of the world – take Pussy Riot in Russia – the thrash of classic punk might still have its uses.)

If you are to find young men and women in dingy rooms furiously producing rebel culture, they’ll more likely be churning out computer code than grappling with three chords. And it’s not as if every disgruntled “script kiddie” (those pesky virus-makers) doesn’t have his or her digital heroes to follow, raising their radical ambitions. That’s Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, obviously – but it’s also Cody Wilson, the encryption radical who enabled the first open-source, 3D-manufactured gun a few years ago.

Original Punks revelled in the fact that straight society couldn’t make sense of them. Punks 2.0 revel in the idea that the powers that be can’t even access what they’re doing in the first place. The spreading surveillance ambitions of the Conservatives are set to produce their countervailing force.

And there is at least some continuity with the founding punk moment. The digital activists of Anonymous wear their V For Vendetta masks, based on Alan Moore’s comic masterpiece, launched at the tail of post-punk in 1982.

So Punk 2.0 might be as much about accelerating beyond the limits of the current situation, than just sticking two fingers up to it, using the slippery potential of digitality. “Our New Future” rather than “No Future”.

The Australian/US cultural thinker McKenzie Wark characterises these “data punks” by riffing on the old Sniffin’ Glue slogan: “Here’s three gigabytes – go form your own society!” But he also suggests there could be “metapunks”. Can we build platforms to manage our own metadata, and use for common benefit what Facebook and GCHQ use against us?

Or there could be “infrapunks…builders of tiny bits of the structure of another life”. Here, Wark refers to current activity around alternative currency systems (eg, Bitcoin) and new manufacturing technologies. This invokes an alternative legacy of the punk era – not the art-terrorism of McLaren, but the DIY community ethic of small labels and bands like The Slits, The Mekons or Crass.

We’re lucky in Scotland: to some degree, we’ve built our collective structures – whether made up of values, laws or institutions – to defend a robust sense of the good society, no matter the Westminster political weather. But England’s in trouble. A crisis of identity and purpose like theirs can go a variety of ways – and end up in some very dark places.

I wish for the non-conformist, ranting and rebelling tradition of English protest to link up with the new digital tools of “self rule” and “ultimate independence” and start to build an “alternative England”. Perhaps it could even disturb some Scottish complacencies along the way. To invoke a wonderful record by PJ Harvey (herself in the best post-punk tradition): let England shake.

Because – contra Branson, and his pestilential credit cards – punk’s not dead.

The National column: How can we find what we love? Step forward award ceremonies

My Saturday column for The National, dated May 30th, 2015 (online version). All comments/shares welcome.

How can we find what we love? Step forward award ceremonies

Pat Kane for The National 

IN a digital age of content overload - with a thousand ways to take it, and an infinite number of ways to make it - how do we even make a start on finding the band, the book, the film, the artist we truly love?

The final stages of the SAY Awards - standing for Scottish Album of the Year, and in their fourth year - are upon us, with the usual highly contentious shortlist just decided by a team of judges. They’re a good starting point to explore our opening question.

For one thing - facing the ocean wall of music advancing on all of us, from small rooms and ubiquitous devices - at least the SAYAwards try to use “Scottish” as some kind of filter or frame. Even that could cause a fight in an empty room. It’s worth quoting in full:

“For the purposes of this award, albums will be deemed to have been recorded by a ‘Scottish Artist’ when: the artist was born in Scotland; at least 50% of the band’s core members were born in Scotland (session musicians will not be considered); an artist or band, irrespective of nationality, has made their creative base in Scotland for the past 3 years.”

Does any of this sound familiar to anoraks of both the fitba and constitutional persuasion? After the last few years, I’m sure it does. It’s also one of the most useful aspects of an awards process, in that it can ask us to relate our cultural whims and purchases to bigger themes, broader issues.

The Orwell Prize awards for “political writing of outstanding quality”, the Orange Prize to “female authors of any nationality”, The Royal Society Prize for science books of the year. The Turner Prize, coming to Glasgow next year, pushes conceptual art through the mainstream media channels for a precious few months.

Busy with family and work like everyone else, I can’t have enough of these awards. The shortlist is a crucial element of it all. What, you’re giving me a menu of 5 to 10 excellent consumer options, carved out of vast domains of content that I know I should be up to speed with, but am usually hugely daunted by? Well, thank you!

The shortlist for the SAY Awards is a perfect example of how it can work (and time for full disclosure in a small country: my brother Gregory is on the management board of the SMIA, who organises the whole process). With my 4G bandwidth handling it easily, I’ve wandered the streets of Glasgow in the last 48 hours, listening to a free track from each of the 10 finalists.

Of course I have my favourites, and my perplexities about who didn’t make it from the longlist. But if you listen without prejudice, you can just exult in the carefree invention (and often sheer idiosyncrasy) of these Scottish artists.

From Young Fathers’ wall of noise laced with sweet soul phrases, to the Amazing Snakeheads’ making me laugh delightedly at their “Sauchiehall Street, 3am” sense of drama; from Slam’s serialist dance grooves to Paulo Nutini’s Sly-Stone-era ambition (who won the popular vote option).

We often glibly invoke our “creative” Scotland - but here it is, and it’s only one sample from a buzzing, blooming mountain of artistic striving.

Are you infuriated by selections and absences? Then you’d go to see who the hell these judges are - that’s one way we assess an authoritative awards process. The SAY Awards passes my test for both expertise and eclecticism.

I might not agree with their decisions, but I’d trust a group that has both Bob Last (post-punk manager and indy-movie producer supreme) and Cora Bissett (playwright and songwriter) in its ranks.

So it’s humans of evident distinction, making selections from humans of manifest talent, offering it to humans who want to make the best choice, in the leisure time they have. Yes, I emphasize humans - not algorithms.

How many times have you been well-serviced by Amazon’s or Apple’s online suggestions, based on their massive data-crunching of yours and everyone else’s purchases? If you “liked” this, then did you “love” that?

I’m not entirely down on the recommendation engines. If I’ve been on a research theme or mild obsession, they do shuffle up to you with some reasonably interesting options, like slightly less creepy versions of the Fast Show’s “suits you, sir!” tailors.

We are becoming well aware of the implications of automation for many routine mental and manual jobs in the next few decades. But we’re also developing a sense of what can’t (or shouldn’t) be automated, at least not to our human satisfaction.

And among an increasingly interesting list of the non-automatable - those of us who are good at hands-on caring and empathising, for example, will happily defy the robots - one of the obvious examples is aesthetic sensibility, whether you’re an art-maker or art-receiver.

In the music business, we know what digitalisation, and the loosening of content from pricing, has meant for a while. Making beautiful unique objects to sell (whether musical or merchandise), or controlling the gate on a one-time only performance, are the only reliable ways of making any kind of buck.

Is this re-emphasis on a unique product, and on the singular nature of live performance, a good thing for the music industry? Undoubtedly, I’d say.

While we know this story, I think what’s also coming back is the return of the critical taste-call. Of course, Simon Cowell has built a global business empire on a garish, exploitative Saturday night version of this - where the car-crash spectacle is most of the point, the “judges” have near-to-zero credibility, and social media allows for every fragment of every viewer’s opinion to be vented.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. However about reviving the era of the great, daring, thesis-defending rock critics - Greil Marcus, Julie Burchill, Paul Morley - but amplified with blogs and available content? One of the SAY Awards judges, Sean Adams (founder of music site Drowned in Sound) hints at what’s possible. But I would point you to a brilliant young music critic called Adam Harper, whose blog Rouge’s Foam is a delirious mix of curated electronic music, and his startling theories and responses to it all.

To give the BBC its due, it’s picked up that there is a deeply committed audience who craves quality discussions about, and expert curations of, popular culture of all kinds (Friday night on BBC4!). And delightfully, they’ve often realised that the easiest solution is to get great artists themselves to make the selections.

I have pals who are literally devoted, even soul-saved, by Bob Dylan, Jarvis Cocker or Iggy Pop on digital radio - selecting records, and then talking as they wish between each record. Imagine that! Revolutionary!

This isn’t about the return of “gatekeepers” or “elites”. We’re in a much more democratised and mutually-engaged world in general these days, with all the communicative power we need in our pocket smartphones - and we’re all the better for it.

It’s more about realising that, if we can collectively and effectively harness the productive powers of our age, we can make more time in our lives for culture. And that enjoying, arguing about - or even better, maybe even contributing - to a list of this year’s best Scottish albums is exactly the kind of thing we should be making time for.

Pat Kane is a writer and musician (www.patkane.today)

Scary Monsters (and Super Neeps): PK on Bowie on indyref

Speedly commissioned (and written) piece on David Bowie's five-word intervention into the referendum debate, for The Guardian. Happy to see it there - but some interesting editorial cuts from the article itself as it appears on the Guardian website, involving a Playboy interview in 1978 and Hugh Macdiarmid. The cuts restored below.

Scottish independence supporters can forgive David Bowie's union folly

First his union jack frock coat, then his intervention at the Brits. Tendrils of moist patriotism have penetrated his alien mind

Pat Kane
theguardian.com, Thursday 20 February 2014 14.09 GMT

Amidst the relentless Ibizafication of popular music that was the Brits last night, a welcome moment of real-worldery appeared at its close. Kate Moss delivered a New York message from David Bowie, in which he cryptically accepted his lifetime award, but declared with ringing clarity at the end, “Scotland - stay with us”. 

Cue the independence referendum Klaxons, arrooga-ing sternly across the island.

Any hopes that Bowie the icon might induce genuflection among the referendum Don’t-Knows was instantly dashed by Twitter. The #scottishbowie hashtag immediately wrestled him down into the dusty kailyard. Ziggy Played Stranraer, Scary Monsters (and Super Neeps), Speyside Oddity, Black Tie White Pudding, The Spiders From Largs, Hunky Doric, Under Perthshire… The hits kept on coming.

But will Bowie’s Ukanian love-bombing play in the debate? It’s a truism about the Yes campaign that they are teeming with stellar artists in all genres, who see a natural fit between their own, opportunity-friendly lives and the collective leap towards full independence. This is in comparison with the somewhat threadbare - or in Scots, shilpit - pantheon of the No campaign. 

Their most recent cultural intervention was a toe-curling Burns night viral from John Barrowman, draped in the kind of tartan usually seen in dog mangers and over car seats. (There are strong rumors that the The Krankies, Barrowman’s partners in Glasgow Panto, have also recorded a No endorsement. Given Barrowman’s reception, we may need the data-retrieval powers of an Assange or Snowden to unearth that one). 

But though I am partisan - as a musician and YesScotland board member - I would concede that the Dame’s Unionist drone-drop of love from across the Atlantic has mildly troubled a few indy-minded creatives. 

Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite is probably paradigmatic: “I somehow forgave Bowie for the Placebo collaboration. I”m sure I can can forgive him for this folly too”. Pro-Yes comedian Frankie Boyle noted: “I completely respect Bowie's right to express views on Independence, just as I'd respect Iggy Pop's opinions on the CERN particle accelerator”. Dramatist David Greig went into a meltdown of ambivalence: “The weird thing is, I'm feeling giddy that HE NOTICED US! David Bowie mentioned Scotland! We exist! We're real! HE LOVES US! And we love him.”

I doubt this will dent the implacable momentum of the cultural supertanker behind Yes (see this list from the movement’s Diego Riveras, National Collective). But it’s worth a second or two dwelling on Bowie’s own motivations here. The Thin White Duke - which, let’s be honest, is not a good start - has some form on a variety of, er, “national questions”. 

Bowie in Playboy, 1978: “Britain is ready for a fascist leader… After all, fascism is really nationalism…You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up”. Not helpful to the comity of nations.  But then, neither was the mighty Hugh Macdiarmid’s “Plea for a Scottish Fascism” in 1923. 

Protean artists can sometimes be in the grip of noxious ideas, as their contrarian radar sweeps around for inspiration - yet they can still maintain a fertile ambivalence all the way through. I recall Bowie’s guano-spattered Union Jack frock-coat, designed by Alexander McQueen, on the cover of his 1997 drum’n’bass record Earthling. 

There’s two ways to read this, of course. Is Bowie displaying how disrespected and deconstructed the Union flag is? Or, as his defiant stance might suggest, is he the last man standing to defend green-and-pleasant Britishness against detractors from all sides? But this is, of course, Bowie at his best - bringing ambiguous art-power into the pop mainstream. Morrissey’s parallel Britology sends his devotees into just as many twisting spirals of exculpation. Evidently, these quasars of rock are sent to try us.

Certainly, deploying Kate “she’s got the London Look” Moss to deliver a sentimental plea to rebellious Scots shows that the Dame has been reading the Danny Boyle, post-Olympic playbook of pluralist, capacious Unionism. Another thing: Bowie is almost 70 - and thus has some connection to the post-war generation, those who could feel Britishness in their bones, via a victorious war and a welfare state.

As any biography will also tell you, for all his shape-shifting brilliance, Bowie is a right old Royal Variety Performance vaudevillian at heart. I can imagine him enthroned in his techno-lair in Manhattan, sampling news feeds from the Old Country, allowing tendrils of moist patriotism to penetrate his otherwise steely alien mind. 

But from the indy side, we say: You can be The Man Who Fell To Perth anytime you like, David. The Saltire’d, heather-dusted frock-coat has already been tailored, and awaits your beloved, skeletal frame. We may borrow your line, “We can be heroes, just for one day”, if that’s OK. Though could you explain that Japanese rabbit-on-the-moon reference in your speech before you come over? On second thoughts - mibbes naw. 

Facilitating and blogging Creative Scotland's Open Sessions

From March to April 2013, I was the facilitator and blogger for a remarkable process - the Creative Scotland Open Sessions. After a year in which the first head of Creative Scotland, Andrew Dixon, had resigned (with the opprobrium of Scottish artists ringing in his ears), the organisation wanted to open its policy doors to artists, and hear exactly what they wanted the agency to do for the arts. 

We went from Borders to Hebrides, douce Edinburgh to bustling Easterhouse, and mixed polemical speakers with full audience participation, generating a hugely rich dossier of ideas, suggested policies and new vocabularies for Creative Scotland.

It was a fluid time - with government ministers on both sides of the border taking diametrically opposed positions on the relationship between art and commerce; and, over everything, the prospect of the independence referendum, and how art and culture might relate to that momentous process (with Alasdair Gray's "settlers and colonists" essay rumbling in the background). 

My blogs are a reasonable summary of each event (the concluding blog is probably most useful), but do dig into the archive link of each event - some substantive and stirring presentations contained therein, in a variety of media. 

As an example of how small countries can correct the direction of their national institutions quickly and effectively, given the proximity, awareness and willingness of major players in the situation, CS Open Sessions was (in my experience) pretty definitive. I left the process feeling that the essentials of Scottish governance are in good hands. Though as my final blog says, once you open a session with artists, you should never expect it to finish, or never be re-opened...

The Source of the Nile: Pat Kane review of Allan Brown's Nileism: the Strange Course of the Blue Nile

My review (for the Scottish Review of Books) of Allan Brown's excellent rock biography,  Nileism: The Strange Course of The Blue Nile. The book is a funny and sharp evocation of the rise of Glasgow's modern sensibility, via the tortured art of three musical obsessives.

* * *

The Source of the Nile

The music of the Blue Nile conjured a distinctive image of Glasgow in the 1980s.

Pat Kane, Scottish Review of Books, Vol 7, Issue 1, 2011

It’s a straightforward memory test: recall the music you listened to when you went to university or college. Try it; shut your eyes. And once you finally return to this page, has a recollection ever been so vivid? Have the physical details of a place, the faces and clothes and significant conversations and afternoons of passion, ever been so easily recalled?

The neuropsychologists would pedantically point out the reason why: the combination of a life beginning to be lived as a choosing, autonomous adult, with a youthful brain that’s still growing and ramifying, the switch stuck on “receive”. Which is why the texture of that malodorous couch is still on your fingertips, the first ever croissant still flaky in your mouth, the thrill of an enlivened intellect still electric inside you.

And music – that elaboration of a heartbeat, a mother’s croon, an innate sense of symmetry – just floods the memory circuits, like a red wine bottle tipped onto the crappy carpet of a rented flat. Goes everywhere; never really disappears.

For me, for Allan Brown, and for hundreds of thousands of others, one listen to any track from the Blue Nile’s 1984 debut album A Walk Across The Rooftops makes such a transportation possible. And although any reaction to any piece of music is subjective, it’s easy to tell a personal story about this record which makes a strong claim that it captured something objective, really out there.

To be a studious young Glaswegian male between 1981 and 1985 was to exist under roiling skies, shot through with occasional light: paranoid about being conscripted to fight in the Falklands, living a double life of intellectual demands in Garnethill and hometown mediocrity in Blairhill, yet beginning to explore a great city both in its streets and in your mind.

The city fathers hadn’t really discovered the joys of urban branding yet – the collective euphoria that a few well-chosen symbols, festival slogans and property developments could bring. The modernism, even futurism, that we brought to our student lives in Glasgow, was largely self-generated – and almost entirely based around music. Scottish post-punk was scattering its riches across the available media; which meant the NME, scraps of youth TV, John Peel at ten, and most crucially, Radio Clyde’s Billy Sloan on a Sunday evening.

When Sloan played the Blue Nile’s first single, 1981’s ‘I Love This Life’, I remember sitting bolt upright in my Coatbridge bed, instantly responding to Paul Buchanan’s reckless, slightly cracked swoon of a voice, to the bubbling serialism of Paul Moore and Robert Bell’s music – but perhaps most of all to its mood of bruised, weary romance, resting on a shimmering plane of electronica. A Walk Across the Rooftops confirmed it. In the Blue Nile I heard the dogged optimism, the growing dramatic arc, lurking behind my stumbling, day-time scholarly life in the big city – but set in a soundscape that (as the Edwin Morgan poetry collection from the 1970s put it) seemed to stretch from Glasgow to Saturn.

Via New York, it would also have to be said. Though far less crudely and directly than the late 1980s clutch of aspirational Glasgow bands, the Blue Nile channelled a towering, light-blinking imaginary Manhattan deep into their songs: ticker tape fluttering down from on high, tall buildings reaching up in vain, automobiles not cars, Glasgow-New York fused together as a tinseltown in the rain. 

As Paul Buchanan often admits in Nileism, ‘The music I had was what I inherited from my father and his tastes, which was Sinatra and that generation of singers, that American world.’ And out of all those who inescapably drank from that well, Buchanan has surely taken the richest draught: he combines the staggering ruin of the later Frank’s voice with the vaulting gospel ambition of a soul singer. Quite a combination.

But again, the bold, symphonic confidence of the Blue Nile’s electronica deconstructs all this Americana – makes it less like a clichéd trigger for emotion and excitement, and more like an abstract landscape of urban modernity that almost anyone could live in, and imagine their triumphs and failures, their ardencies and heartbreaks.

The first time I read Don DeLillo’s Libra, with Lee Harvey Oswald sitting on the A-train, I immediately heard the soundtrack coming from the Blue Nile: ‘The wheels touched off showers of blue-white sparks, tremendous hissing bursts, on the edge of no-control. People crowded in, every shape face in the book of faces. They pushed through the doors, they hung from the porcelain straps. He was riding just to ride. The noise had a power and a human force. The dark had a power. He stood at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass.’ 

It’s maybe not such a presumptuous connotation: DeLillo’s latest book, Omega Point, begins and ends with a contemplation of Glasgow conceptualist Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho. I’ve also just watched a YouTube interview with Paul Buchanan, quietly defending their glacial pace of four albums over 25 years to a jocose Irish presenter: ‘Try to think of them as novels.’

Easily done. One of the many delights of Allan Brown’s biography of the band is the way he allows himself enough literary pretension, amidst and between what is otherwise a conventional rock chronology of formation, relative success, and downward slide. This seems to be mostly shaped by his attempt to comprehend the inner dynamic of the band itself, ‘an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a raincoat’, a ‘hive mind’ which he sets himself the task to dissect. Music producer after svengali manager after record company executive relate the same experience of dealing with the Blue Nile: ‘It’s like they have a telepathy going between them’, says one factotum, ‘which it’s very difficult to break into.’

This tactical opacity made it difficult for them to conform to the ‘army manoeuvres’, as Brown correctly puts it, that conventional music business success requires: regular touring, albums every 18-24 months, relentless glad-handing of retailers and media, some commensuration between commercial revenue and recording budget.

He picks up on a phrase that the band delightedly pass among themselves – some overheard diddy in a bar in the 1980s, drawling ‘I’m in a band...as you probably know’ – and cites it as the core of their carnaptiousness. How do you make the purest, most considered modern music you can in a business best summed up by Hunter S. Thompson? ‘A cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.’

Well, you defend your autonomy as best you can. Part of this is the perennial musician’s ability to hunker down and minimally survive (the financial grace and favour of various girlfriends are mentioned in passing). But another part is lucking into the right context for making music: a physical place, or a trusted soundman, or a sympathetic small record label. Some defensible compound that can resist the harpies of promotion, so you can chase the sonics down the rabbit hole, and come up with something sui generis.

The Blue Nile’s mighty first two albums, A Walk Across the Rooftops (1982) and Hats (1989) were produced under exactly these conditions. I’m very pleased that Brown puts producer Calum Malcolm, and his converted-schoolroom studio in Pencaitland, at the heart of the Nile’s story. (My band Hue And Cry recorded two albums with Calum and I can attest to his genius). A somewhat bruised and elderly schoolboy in appearance, Malcolm took this bunch of disgruntled new techno-romantics and sat them down for listening sessions with Eastern European orchestras playing Bartok.

The title track of their first album is surely as evocative an opening sequence as the first few bars of Miles Davis’ ‘So What’ on Kind of Blue: you listen today and marvel at the sound of industrial-meets-post-industrial Glasgow wrenched out of the crudity of 1980s synthesizers. The company context was important too: the Blue Nile have always had a relationship with the recording label of the hi-fi manufacturer Linn, for whom perfection of sound was an absolute.

Yet the second half of Brown’s biography, covering their last two albums (1996’s Peace At Last and 2004’s High), is a familiar tale of how relative success can progressively unravel the delicate conditions that produce something of brilliance. Huge publishing deals were signed; their songs were covered by Rod Stewart and Annie Lennox; major American and London managers were signed up; lives started to be uncomfortably lived between LA and Glasgow; celebrity girlfriends were picked up (Rosanna Arquette).

Simmering tensions over musical direction also came to a head. For Peace At Last, acoustic guitars and gospel choirs rang out in expensive studios; on a stylistic pendulum swing, High is a dense, claustrophobic wall of digitality, apparently recorded in a control room where keyboard player Paul Moore would look only at his computer screen.

‘You have to remember that we were just three panic-stricken guys’, says Buchanan, the only member who consented to be interviewed for the book. ‘If we were full of confidence, the records wouldn’t have the ambivalence that attracts people.’ Their last kick-ass manager, Dire Straits’ Ed Bicknell, who knocked down doors to provide them with six-figure sums to finish their most recent recordings, says ‘the history of the Blue Nile was the most screwed-up I had ever encountered.’

In 2011, where organised noise has to contend with every other attraction in the media sensorium (and is having the financial nexus ripped out of it by downloading), the tale of the Blue Nile – total musical visionaries facing down the cash-rich 1980s and 1990s music business, and mostly winning – seems like ancient and glorious history.

But better this Nileism than the alternative, that’s for sure. One would hope that there are still young Glaswegians staring moodily out of the top windows of their student flat, in the city’s university district; and that somewhere, coiled deep within their Garageband software and infinitely capacious hard-drives, they are planning to take another sonic walk across those rooftops.

NILEISM – THE STRANGE COURSE OF THE BLUE NILE

Allan Brown

POLYGON, £14.99 224PP 

ISBN 1846971381

Map of Thoughtland: Momus aka Nick Currie

via imomus.com

 

On Wednesday September 1st Momus presented his new album Hypnoprism on Barbara Murdter's show Popkontext on Berlin radio station Reboot FM. Momus played a selection of music and talked (in English) about his new tracks. The show is archived here.

 

On Tuesday 21st September Momus will deliver a 45-minute speaking-singing lecture in Berlin entitled The Emotional Lecture. It happens at the ImageMovement shop in Mitte (Oranienburger Str. 18 10178 Berlin) at the invitation of Andreas Reihse from Kreidler, and is part of a biweekly curated program entitled MOVE #.

The 2010 album from Momus, Hypnoprism, is released in the US and Europe (via labels American Patchwork and Analogue Baroque) at the end of September. The album features on its cover Diamond Eye, a painting by New York-based Japanese artist Misaki Kawai. Design is by James Goggin of Practise. The record can be pre-ordered via iTunes (digital) and Amazon (physical), as well as from the labels themselves.

 

Momus aka Nick Currie would probably be surprised to find himself in a list of contemporary Scottish intellectuals - but this brilliant and notoriously beyond-good-and-evil art songsmith, born in Aberdeen but based in Berlin, wrote himself into the pantheon with The Book of Scotlands, a Borgesian spin through alternative realties of Scotland in which "300 years of Calvinism were replaced with 300 years of Calvino" (Thoughtland's review here). Other than that, he's one of the cleverest minds alive on art, politics and transgression.