Layer 45 Voices, Time and the Floyd

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This is a double blog, as I won’t have time to write one tomorrow.

Wonderful Radio 4 today featured a writer, a novelist, I’ve never heard of - Kate Mosse. The interviewer mentioned that Kate has created a very good website, on which she has a whole section of advice for writers.

http://www.mosselabyrinth.co.uk/advice/intro.asp

He website also has very interesting interactive section, like a blog, where she shares what she’s doing as a writer whilst she’s actually working on a novel - the idea being that she gets feedback from a certain section of her readership as she’s writing her next novel, which affects the way she’s writing it.

This is pretty much what I’ve been saying to friends about my enthusiasm for blogging - if everyone comments on everyone else’s blog it really helps to generate new ideas, helps to refine your previous writing, etc. The interactivity is crucial.

I guess in years gone by when people had no telephones, let alone email, if they wanted to share their thoughts and their lives with good friends then they pretty much had to write letters - lots of them. These days we can just publish blogs - letting the whole world know what we’re thinking and doing, or just letting a select readership have access to our journals, and giving them a means of instantly feeding back.

I have several good friends who are good writers, though most of them have yet to officially publish anything. Some of them annoy the living daylights out of me because they are so talented and such good writers, and yet they make little or no time in their busy lives for blogging or writing a journal, or whatever.

They all recognise that the process of putting their thoughts into writing is incredibly enriching, like a meditation. And yet they don’t have the drive or the energy to do it, at least not regularly. Or maybe they don’t think it’s worth the effort, or maybe they have misgivings about sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings, and don’t see the point of keeping a journal that’s pretty much for their eyes only.

I’m now fascinated by the thought that the thing we might miss the most about somebody we don’t see frequently is their voice - meaning their unique perception, their take on the world, their way of expressing themselves, their sense of humour, their original thinking, and so on.

And the more I think about this the more I feel angry that our schools don’t recognise that this is the most important thing we can do for children - to help them realise that they have an individual voice, an individual take on the world, a unique perception, which they need to recognise and learn how to express to the full.

It’s all very well learning to enjoy the individual voices of great writers, through reading them as often as possible. But children usually take in an implicit message that only the voices of published writers are interesting and important and valid - i.e. their own voice is extremely unimportant and invalid. In fact they don’t even understand the concept of having an individual voice.

I remember coming across Harold Rosen’s efforts to address this issue back in the seventies, through his work as a secondary school teacher and researcher. And subsequently his son Michael’s continuation of this work, especially in books like Did I Hear You Write?

I remember my own time as a teacher, returning from a day’s outing with my class, and hearing them ask the dreaded question, “Do we have to write about it?” Well no, they didn’t. It took me only a few minutes to scribe on the board their recollections of the actual events of the day. What was the point of 25 - 30 children all writing a useless list of “We did this, and we did that; we went there, and we saw this, and we had our packed lunch . . . “

All that I asked of them, in return for a brilliant day visiting exciting new places, was to write down their individual impressions of their experiences. What was interesting? What was exciting? Funny? Scary? Puzzling? And then, having written their individual thoughts and feelings, their responses and their conclusions, they loved listening to one another read out their pieces. Lots of appreciation and laughter. Which then inspired another burst of writing - “Oh yes! I’d forgotten about that! That’s what I thought as well! I need to write about that!”

They soon learnt that what’s important in the process of learning is not so much recording the facts as recording their individual take on the facts, which is as true for a science experiment or the discovery of a new maths concept, as it is for a geography or history or art or geology field trip.

Being able to examine and reflect on our own unique and individual thoughts is a vital part of living and learning - about ourselves and about life in general.

It’s a waste of time being an individual human being unless we enjoy our individual humanity, and the individuality of others. Unfortunately our school system doesn’t care for developing children as individuals, and certainly not as individual writers, and it claims it has no time to do so, as it rushes each day to cover the ‘curriculum’ and prepare for tests.

A cracked record? Moi?

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Time and the Floyd.

Last night was Pink Floyd night on BBC4. A whole evening of brilliant TV, and music, and without a single advert. Pure magic.

The story of the Floyd is a fascinating one. There are so many elements that make their story so unusual. They were a unique band to begin with, thanks to Syd Barrett. I hadn’t fully appreciated what a strange, wonderful, courageous, charismatic and brilliant human being he was in those early days, before he lost his mind. I hadn’t realized either how much his talented peers had loved him, and how much they had missed him, both personally and musically, after he’d gone off with the fairies.

His whole spirit was unique, iconoclastic, anarchistic. And the band therefore didn’t give a damn about fashion and trends and commercialism. Sure, they wanted recognition and appreciation, but not as individual egos. It was all about the music, and what they had to say about life, the universe and everything.

I remember well their early days - the incredible live shows they performed just after “Arnold Layne” - coming into the mod haven of Coventry Locarno on the back of their chart hit, and playing unbelievable spaced out music that was nothing like Arnold Layne and nothing like anything anyone had ever heard; playing in semi darkness, with a liquid light show projected over the entire stage.

The audience wasn’t stoned, as such, but it sure felt that way. I guess people either loved it or hated it. Either you got it or you didn’t. I guess quite a few of my mod mates might have been unhappy that it wasn’t an evening of Arnold Layne type ditties, and headed off to the bar. I didn’t really notice anyone else. I was too wrapped up in the music and the performance. These guys were the house band of the incomparably trendy and freaky UFO Club, for chrissakes. Not that I’d ever smoked a joint, let alone taken LSD.

Arnold Layne, though untypical, was itself a great song. I still have a pristine 45 rpm copy of it. Such wry humour, such a strange thing to write a song about. Someone’s strange hobby. Collecting clothes. Moon shine, washing line. A see-through mirror. "He dug it". Lyrics and a tune you could never forget.

http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/p/pink_floyd/arnold_layne.html

That was the beginning of a lifelong fascination and appreciation, right through to my current enjoyment of David Gilmour’s ‘On An Island’, and his band’s brilliant performances of ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’ on the DVD. Nobody else plays and sings like that. The Floyd completely stole the show when they invited Roger Waters back to perform at Live8 in Hyde Park in 2005. Which would have happened with or without Waters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/06/30/bmfloyd30.xml

Their very early stuff, though immature and relatively amateurish, on account of them being non-musicians (apart from Rick Wright), was totally original, totally off the wall. They maintain, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, that they weren't good enough as musicians to copy or imitate what other bands were doing, so they didn't. Following Syd's example they weren’t afraid to experiment, and improvise, and jam. Their gigs were all about improvisation and jamming. Nobody had ever seen or heard anything like it. And this was before Dave Gilmour joined the band.

By the time I saw them in Manchester in 1969, at a college gig, they were on their way to becoming megastars, and Gilmour was a well-established member. The light show was projected all along one side of the hall by now, as well as all over the stage area. They had well and truly mastered their instruments, and the stage was filled with their gear - a huge drum kit, amps, speaker units, even kettle drums and a gong.

Their catalogue of tracks by now included Astronomy Domine; Careful With That Axe, Eugene; Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun; and A Saucerful of Secrets. All of which are immortalized on the great live album recorded at that Manchester College of Commerce gig in June 1969 - Ummagumma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ummagumma

Coincidentally I was also at the first ever live performance of Floyd's Atom Heart Mother at the legendary Bath Festival in Shepton Mallet in 1970, but that’s another story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_Festival_of_Blues_and_Progressive_Music_1970

I also remember standing in the amphitheatre in Pompeii in the mid ‘80s and picturing the Floyd playing there, performing the amazing track Echoes from their album ‘Meddle‘, in Live At Pompeii. They showed clips from that last night on the TV, including shots of them strolling around the rim of Vesuvius, which is indeed an amazing experience. Awesome!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd:_Live_at_Pompeii

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2hFZ8KnsSo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sein6WnbY0

You can get a flavour of the film from the comment on the youtube video, posted by StripeyElephant - "Holy fuck this is the best thing I've ever seen."

My own favourite part of it is the middle section, where the camera tracks slowly around huge menacing black stacks of speakers - studying an unbroken black wall of speaker units, with protruding horn units looking like military grenade launchers, about to lob sonic bombs around the deserted amphitheatre. Roger Waters' bass thunders and throbs its incessant pulse

Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum

followed and accompanied by Gilmour's howling, wailing, pleading guitar; soaring and wrenching your spirit, demanding you go with it to some otherworldly place in his emotional universe, accompanied by Rick Wright's vibrating rotating wail of electronic organ and Dave Mason's precision drumming and splashing smashing cymbals. I still find electrifying the moment when Gilmour first cuts into the bass drone with the nastiest bluesiest most jagged chord imaginable, whipped into some previously unknown sonic dimension by his incredible mass of electronic gadgets and effects.

(There may be little point playing this video unless you're able to pump it through a good sub-woofer setup or some good headphones)

You may like to know that, according to an old book of mine about guitar players, Gilmour used to use (pre digital and Midi) an effects board consisting of a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, an MXR Phase 100, a Dynacomp noise gate, a Uni-Vibe, a Pete Cornish Custom Fuzz, a Jim Dunlop Cry Baby, and three sweep pedals. "This new state of the art board had sophisticated revolutionary switching capabilities - each effect could be individually by-passed or configured in any sequence, and there were three outputs for various amps." On the other hand, this may be too much information.

The centrepiece of last night’s broadcast was a documentary about the making of Dark Side of the Moon, which is now seen as their magnum opus, and which they are quite rightly extraordinarily proud of.

It was so interesting to find out that it was made in the Abbey Road studios, pre-computers and digital recording, and the sonic effects were all done on an early sequencer and using tape loops set up on banks of reel to reel tape players. Of course! And of course nobody else had ever tried to work in this way. Nobody else was so experimental and innovative.

Roger Waters’ lyrics might now be viewed as typically ‘angry young mannish’ (as he does himself), but he was able to encapsulate perfectly in words what so many of us were feeling in the aftermath of post-60’s disillusionment - feeling about materialism, about the rat race, about the lack of sanity in the world, about militarism, about mortality, about religion, and about ‘hanging on in quiet desperation’. Lyrics that were not wordy, lyrics that were economical and evocative and precise.

The programme told the story of how Clare Torry came to perform her incredible improvised wordless vocal over Rick Wright's brilliant ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’. They described how their old mate Dick Parry was invited to play his wonderful sax pieces on ‘Us and Them’ and ‘Money’. They also told the story of how the strange rambling voices and the manic laughter were specially recorded for the album.

I first heard Dark Side of the Moon lying beside a log fire in a darkened room in the house of a VSO teacher in Northern Nigeria in 1973. In the context of the time, and having just a week ago emerged from the Heart of Darkness, so to speak - from the jungles and rivers of Zaire and Central Africa - it was an unforgettable and mind-blowing experience.

Just listening to some new music on some good quality hi-fi would in itself have been mind blowing after all the time I'd been without it, after all those weeks of traveling across the Serengeti, through the mountains of Rwanda, and along the mud roads of the central African rainy season. Coming into contact with the Dark Side in those circumstances was a breathtaking sonic culture shock and mind-fuck of the first magnitude.

Dave Gilmour says in the documentary that he only wishes that he’d been able to have the experience of hearing the album for the first time, from start to finish, completely ‘out of the blue’. Well Dave, I can tell you, listening to it in its entirety in the stoned darkness of an African evening in front of a flickering log fire was spine-tinglingly overwhelming and incredible. And for that, many thanks.

It says something for the quality of the documentary and the strange brilliance of the band and their music that even my son, no lover of rock or the sixties or psychedelia, sat with me and watched it all through, even though he was dog tired after a double shift at work. There’s hope for him yet! He’s a wonderful young man, but has a lot to learn about music, which, by the way, he seems to have stopped listening to. He’s reached a hiatus. The day he plays and enjoys one of my precious vinyl albums on my turntable I’ll know he’s getting fully on message and fully on track.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398868/

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Having just re-listened to 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene', I'm still amazed by the insane power of Roger Waters' diabolical screaming, and recall vividly the effect of it during live shows. Thrilling, scary and and somehow liberating. I didn't realise at the time that you were allowed to be so full-on crazy and anarchic in public - so utterly emotionally over the top. If you were standing close to the stage it was as disturbing and disorienting as witnessing The Who smashing their instruments.

Sure, it was wild and anarchic and pointless and childish, perhaps. But then isn't this what art is supposed to be about, at least some of the time? Delving into our innermost darkest thoughts and feelings, and expressing them, in words, images, colour, movement and sound. As I say, a kind of liberation.

It's interesting that Michelangelo Antonioni was so determined to have this track in 'Zabriski Point', and I well remember what a controversial movie that was when it was first released.

And going back to Romeo and Juliet (see Layer 31) there an interesting image in Romeo's response to being told "From Verona thou art banished" -

"There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence banished is banish'd from the world,
And world's exile is death; then 'banished'
Is death misterm'd. Calling death 'banished,'
Thou cutt'st my head off with a golden axe,
And smilest upon the stroke that murders me.

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One final thought, Let Pink Floyd be an inspiration to all fledgling musicians and writers - don't be put off your desire to be creative and expressive by a lack of technical training and know-how. Don't worry about not being able to do what others can do. Do your own thing, create in your own way using whatever skills and abilities you have, and enjoy whatever you do. Be original and then you can't be judged by conventional standards. Start a new genre of your own perhaps. And the more you do it the better you'll become.
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