Dream on

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. 

I think this is the fifth time I have interviewed Rudy Tambala - and still there were so many new things I learned about the A.R. Kane story.  

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There are also some "ghost quotes" from Alex Ayuli, taken from unpublished parts of an interview I did with the Kane boys in 1989.  

Dream daze

Lovely to speak with Rudy Tambala for the first time in 34 years about A.R. Kane and the wonderful new A.R Kive box of their kore kreation.  The distillate of our 3-hour conversation appears at Pitchfork as this Q+A. 

Chatting with Rudy by Zoom, I learned a surprisingly large number of things I never knew about the group, which is perhaps odd given how many times I interviewed A.R. Kane back in the day. But then again, in those days I wasn't really a journalist in the conventionally understood sense. I conducted colloquies with musicians that got pretty lofty pretty quickly - and generally gave a wide berth to the nitty-gritty stuff about band formation, biography, etc. The conversations would be written up with no reference to where the interview took place, what the artists looked like or how they dressed, their manner or gestures. A disembodied encounter between spirit-beings. 

Hey, the approach got results! And it suited the sort of ethereal, leave-and-let-loose-the-real-world music I was exalting.  Features that were mutually dreamed between the writer and the group,  rather than reported.  

Nowadays I find it all interesting and all potentially revealing. The facty backgroundy stuff, the recording process, the business side of being a band, almost every aspect pertaining to and surrounding music: it can enrich and, if handled right, it doesn't necessarily have to encumber and deplete the "we are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams" element.   

 

RIP Joe Cassidy

Very sad to hear about the way too young death of Joe Cassidy of Butterfly Child -  purveyors of gorgeous dreampop from Northern Ireland. 

The debut Butterfly Child EP Toothfairy came out on A.R. Kane's label H.ark! in late 1991,  simultaneously with the debut EP from Papa Sprain, his friend Gary McKendry's group. 

I made both the EPs singles of the week in Melody Maker (see below) and around that time spoke with Joe and Gary for a label profile of H.ark!. 

Another Butterfly Child EP, Eucalyptus, followed on H.ark!, and then they recorded an album each for a succession of labels: Rough Trade (Onomatopeia), Dedicated (The Honeymoon Suite), and HitIt! Recordings (Soft Explosives).  

Here's an interview with Joe around his 2015 album Futures done by The Thin Air. 

And here is a link to the bandcamp for the 2020 album Our Life in the Desert by My Bus - a joint project by Joe and Gary McKendry. There, you can read a nice detailed account of the pair's journey through music:

"The emotion comes from a friendship lost, renewed and remembered, or as Joe puts it, 'a love story. One between two friends, the music they share, ex-girlfriends, pals who are no longer with us and the ghosts of old haunts long gone. It is a longing for a Belfast and a time that never really existed.'”

And here's a nice remembrance of Joe from Ned Raggett. 

And a tribute from Stuart Bailie at the Belfast Telegraph. 

"We called it 'Kaning' the music. So-called perfect music, whatever genre - aims to remove these flaws, to have a true and complete, finished thing. The flaws leave a space, where the listener can still add something of her own, where she can sit and be.. Kaning means going to the threshold of creation, of maximum potential where all things are possible yet uncreated, the realm of Lucifer and the Dark angels, the shoreline where angels build sandcastles in defiance of the creator..  This is the level of creativity we aspired to, without having a bloody clue. But this is what drove us to make music, as ill-equipped as we were" -- from a riveting dialogue between Rudy Tambala and Neil Kulkarni at the Quietus, on the occasion of  A.R. Kane's The Complete Singles Collection being released by One Little Indian.

I wrote the bio for this double CD anthology. That text has also been issued by One Little Indian as one of their Collectors Booklets, which come housed in seven-inch sleeves. In it there's also another interview with Rudy that takes you through their discography release by release. The booklet is free if you buy the Singles collection as part of One Little Indian's Totem Series.

                                      



It starts like this...


It is tempting to describe A.R.Kane as the great lost group of the 1980s.

"Great" is spot-on. And "1980s" is more or less accurate (they did release some stuff in the Nineties but the late Eighties was A.R.Kane's recording prime). 

No, it's the "lost" bit that is misleading. It gives the impression that this was a group that was neglected, overlooked... if not utterly unknown, then certainly marginal in the scheme of things. And that is inaccurate.  

Not only were A.R.Kane renowned and revered, but, in certain quarters, they were regarded and written up as one of the central groups of their era. The singles and albums received rave reviews (and when I say "rave" I mean frothing at the mouth, purple-prose-drooling paeans). Their faces appeared on the front covers of the British music weekly papers. But A.R. Kane weren't just critics' faves either. Sixty nine, their debut album, topped the independent charts in the summer of 1988....

Off their debut single, a track I always thought was titled "Haunted"

And, not their greatest tune by a long shot, but who knew there even was a promo video for "Green Hazed Daze"?