Last week, I found it very hard to get down to the work I was supposed to be doing. Writing about music felt trivial, absurd. That feeling has passed - for now at least. Not because the trauma and dread has receded. But protecting the mental space to be excited and obsessed and amused by music, ideas, art, etc - life's essential inessentials - feels like something worth doing. Allowing one's consciousness to be completely monopolized, fixed in a flinch - that really would be defeat.
So here's something I wrote a few weeks before the election: a cover story for The Wire on A.R. Kane. As is the magazine's wise way, it's a print-only piece, so hie thee thither to the newsagent's or record shop.
Also interviewed: sister Maggie Tambala, backing vocalist back in the day but now the newly active (concerts, recordings) group's lead singer; Stephen "Budgie" Benjamin, whose clarinet flickered through the grotto of 69's "The Sun Falls Into The Sea" and who's now a fixture of the group's line-up; Amos Childs and Jas Butt of Jabu, the excellent Bristol outfit (check out their just-out album) with whom A.R. Kane are collaborating on an EP; and Vinita Joshi of Rocket Girl, who put out A.R. Kive last year and the recent Up Home Collected.
There are also some "ghost quotes" from Alex Ayuli, taken from unpublished parts of an interview I did with the Kane boys in 1989.
I've been feeling numb and burnt-out since the election. The mood feels like the spring of 2020; I recall writing a review of a Lady Gaga album then and thinking "I'm encouraging people to fiddle with Rome burns." But it's great to hear A.R. Kane are back to making music. Do they have an album on the way in 2025?
ReplyDeleteThey have this EP with Jabu in the works - and there is talk of some kind of record, of an unusual nature....
DeleteKeep on keeping on Simon. Don't forget that you held it together during the 1990s, amid all that talk at the time about 'pre-millennial dread' (!). I remember watching a BBC documentary (possibly Horizon) at the beginning of that decade that painted a very bleak picture of the new century to come: environmental collapse, massive migration flows as a result etc. It quite freaked me out & stayed with me. For a couple of decades, if I came across something in the news that was a little unsettling, I used to console myself by saying: 'Well, at least it's not as bad as that documentary I saw . . . '
ReplyDeleteI remember myself and others going on about dread and darkness and all that in the '90s, about how that was reflected in the music of the time, Tricky, darkcore, gloomcore etc etc. For the life of me I can't think what was going on then that warranted the handwringing tone. Okay the Tories hung on until '97, and the Republicans were giving Clinton a hard time. But otherwise - and globally - the '90s seems like a picnic in the park compared to the current doomgloomscape
DeleteIt all makes sense just considering music as an early warning, canary in the coalmine thing, the environment hasn´t collapsed, but it´s certainly going down fast, and there are massive migration flows and one of the reasons is climate change, I´ve seen an article in the Guardian or somewhere about that, but anyways, unprecedented drought in vast chunks of the planet, more and worst hurricanes, developed countries can cope with that but the undeveloped world
ReplyDeletecan´t. Also, according to Paul Krugman the origin of trumpian republicans were Newt Gingrich republicans