In tribute to Neil Kulkarni, the Chart Music crew - Al Needham, David Stubbs, Taylor Parkes, Simon Price, Sarah Bee - have pulled together a eulogy-episode of the podcast dedicated to their late friend and co-conspirator.
The four-hour special is woven out of each member's personal memories and thoughts about Neil as a man and as a writer, interspersed with a selection of the most entertaining and incisive Kulkarni contributions to Chart Music, drawn from across its 70-plus episodes to date.
As you'd expect, the result is fond, funny, and painfully poignant.
Highlights of the Neil flashbacks include a paean to Cov's own Lieutenant Pigeon; a harrowed account of the final days of Melody Maker (I hadn't realised that Neil had been on the staff, as Gossip Editor, during that grim twilight); and a rhapsodiccelebration of lifelong love Marc Bolan+ T. Rex.
Neil sounds so alive.
You can listen to Chart Music #74 - Neil at Acast or Spotify
Here's one you should really read - a loving portrait from his close friend Simon Price, full of details and stories I never knew. For The Quietus.
Update February 1st: lovely extended meditation by Cam Scott on Neil and specifically his bookEastern Spring: a 2nd Gen Memoir . Here's a mix Neil made to go along with Eastern Spring.
David Stubbs directs Kulkarni fans to a classic installment of the Chart Music podcast, in which Neil rails against the turn-to-shite of Melody Maker in the final years of the '90s, late period Britpop, the infamous "Craig David" cover, etc. From about 35 mins in...
David's Gofundme for Neil's daughters has just topped 40K - an amazing testament to the love and respect he inspired. Contribute if you can.
Neil's colleagues at The Wire have assembled a medley of his pieces for the magazine across 20 years of being a contributor. They have also published what may well one of Neil's last bits of writing - they invited him to pick - and comment on - his own favorite pieces written by other people from The Wire's vastarchives.
Apparently there are plans afoot for a Neil Kulkarni anthology. Below are a few links to classic pieces that are already online - some of them rant-mode and some just passionately perceptive about music he loved.
Neil in dialogue with Rudy Tambala of A.R. Kane around the time of the One Little Indian singles anthology (which reminds me that I've still not read his sleevenotes to last year's Kane box A.R.Kive - can anybody help me out here?)
Neil's series A New Nineties, about the groups that have come to be known as The Lost Generation - i.e. first-wave UK post-rock. For The Quietus:
He also did a follow-up Quietus series about the US end of the "New Nineties", worth looking for although some of the groups, the appeal always eluded me I must say.
Finally, a bit of Kulkarni meta-talk... Neil was fierily eloquent about music journalism as a vocation, the point and purpose of criticism, how to do it right.... often this would come out by implication, a sort of photographic negative, in his tirades about the shite that the latterday NME was trying to foist on the world, famous feats of fight-picking that riled up the guilty parties no end. But here at Drowned In Sound, is one of his positive articulations of How to Do It and Why To Do It.
Stunned, heartbroken, by the news about Neil Kulkarni.
I never met Neil in the flesh but I feel like I did, his personality is so vivid in his writing, and as a social media presence and podcaster. By the time Neil started coming down to Melody Maker from Coventry, I would have been mostly in New York. I did have some lovely phone conversations with him when getting him to review rap records for Spin (his opinions annoyed some of my staider colleagues - mission accomplished!). But mostly I know him through his writing and his presence on Facebook, where he'd be chatting about the stuff of everyday life as much as music ( he was enormously knowledgeable and opinionated about crisps, for instance! And one of his last tweets was a photo he took of a large Swiss roll someone mysteriously left on a stairwell banister).
As a music writer, Neil Kulkarni is one of the greats - the kind of stylist and personality born for (and born in) the UK’s weekly music press. Like many readers I expect, my favorite Neil mode was the rant – these were things of great rhythmic beauty, deadly in their accuracy - incendiary devices that incensed their deserving targets. The energy he could transmit through words was extraordinary. But Neil wrote in many other modes beyond the polemical and shouty - ruminative and tender, for instance, in the pieces for The Quietus that evolved into Eastern Spring: a 2nd Gen Memoir,his 2012 book for Zer0.
"Life force" is a phrase I keep seeing in tributes. I so wish I’d felt the heat of it up close and in person, but it blazed through his writing. It seems inconceivable that this fire has been extinguished, way too early. The world feels colder today.
My heart goes out to Neil's daughters, partner, and family; his friends; his colleagues past and present; his bandmates; his students; and his fans and readers.
Close friend and fellow Chart Music podcaster David Stubbs has started a Go-Fund Me for Neil's children.
Neil aged 18 going on 19, in 1991, just before starting to write for Melody Maker.
Tributes from his friends and editors and colleagues are too numerous to list here, but here's a few to start with
Simon Price meets the moment with this loving portrait at The Quietus
Derek Walmsley, who worked with Neil at the Wire, remembers him at his blog Slow Motion
In the coming week, I will pull together some of Neil's pieces for a post on Pantheon. Here's a couple that already appeared.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
In his latest Singles Page Neil Kulkarni nails a couple of things that have been nagging away at me for a while as an in-car radio-listener.
One is that quavery, breathy singing style that's rather widespread and that I always think of as "peaky": as in your mum saying, "you look a little peaky, dear", but also because it seems to strain at the upper limit of the vocal chords's capacities (like Chris Martin but more feminine and fluttery). Ellie Goulding is a prime perpetrator and her "How Long Will I Love You" spurs Neil to observe:
"What's so horrible at the moment is
that the most dangerously influential voices are the weak ones, or
rather the faux-weak ones, the ones that impart a horrible tincture of
fake fragility to their singing, fake conversationality, a prissy,
self-aggrandizing 'vulnerability' that's monstrously arrogant.
Wonky-mouthed mediocrity Ellie Goulding's ... 'Burn' would have been a fairly emetic slice of EDM-folk in
anyone's hands but with her 'broken' 'breathy' 'natural' tones it
attained fresh new levels of hellishness."
He talks about this is a new kind of bombast that's actually worse than the Celines and Mariahs and Whitney's of yore:
"Things were easier when bad voices,
damaging, dangerously influential voices were the loudest voices, the
most stentorian and bossy and show offy.... that surfeit
of notes and melisma, that mistaking of technicality and proficiency
for emotion that was so analogous to other musicians, guitarists who
solo too much, drummers who solo at all." It's a bombast of timbre, maybe, rather than octave-vaulting vocal gymnastics. An imploded bombast.
And just as the HyperPassion of the Eighties had a perfect emotionally-manipulative fit with the charity records of that day, likewise "How Long Will I Love You" is a Children In Need single. The other vocal trend is more glancingly referred to, in connection with a Fall Out Boy single:
"Fashionably unplugged acoustic oompah bollocks musically and then,
vocally, that hateful thing so much 'anthemic' music does these days -
that kind of soaring simpleton holler to the heavens everyone's
on a ce moment (see also Bastille, Arcade Fire - who could also be
blamed for starting this shit, Lumineers, Fun, Katy Perry, even Derulo
now. . . ) meant I'm sure to imply/recall/become a kind of
open-throated end-of-the-night wail at the wonder at the universe,
coming over as the kind of hateful studenty bellowing singalong shit you
scowl at from the gap in the curtains and can't help wishing will
get scooped up by the wrong kind of cab-driver, then groomed into a
lifelong nightmare of white slavery and degradation i.e reality shows
and reunion tours."
Can't bring myself to listen to the Fall Out Boy single in question but I know what Neil is talking about. Voices, particularly at the chorus, that mingle uplifting, imploring and resignation.
A purely euphoric variant of this is the overdriven vocal: as if the lungs were bellows blasting a gust of air through a fuzz-box. Paradigm example here is the brickwall-roar chorus of Neon Trees's "Everybody Talks", a/k/a "It Started With a Wispa". Oasis and Strokes are in this style's DNA but it's more modern rock force-fed.
Neil mentions Katy Perry in his list of banes of our aural existence and "Roar" is a pop version of the latter style. The thing that fascinates me about her voice is that it's almost without timbre, there's no textural width to it, just this stiletto-thin melodic insistence, pure stridency. Yet despite the lack of grain, the voice is instantly recognisable.
^^^^^^^^^
(Kinda obvious but it had never struck me before: Neil with his Singles Page is doing a form of music-journalism retro. He's resurrecting that most glorious of weekly music paper formats, the singles's column. One of the funnest things to read back in the day, and one of the funnest things to... not do, but to have done. Because actually doing it was a grisly ordeal that invariably took you through the break-of-drawn and often right up to lunch time the next day, and entailed listening to 3 singles to everyone you actually reviewed. Of the ones you reviewed, most of them would be shit. With such a superfluity of shit to hand, the key was to sift selectively, find the shit that could be most entertainingly abused, or the shit that could be used to Make A Point. So at its best the Singles Column could be a format for interleaving Grand Overview Statements / Aesthetic Manifestos with cruel gags.)
Friday, May 10, 2013
Awesome controlled rant by Neil Kulkarni about Peace, the "guitar music" resurgence, and the odd phenomenon of rave reviews that takes the form of a preemptive defense
So many quoteables...
"Don't be fooled by the protectors of Peace that to hate them is to look back. It's not the likes of me or you, but groups like Peace that do nothing but look back,
that have relegated the now to an endless slavish deference to an
ancient past, the flattening down of edges to make the past ever-more
palatable, the breaking down of rock to a smooth paste, spread thin"
"No accident that Peace appeal back
to those 90s because it was those 90s where apologetics became the
internal bloodstream, and arrogance thus became the blaring facade, of
what was served up as alternative/independent".
Neil's angle of attack reminded me of a great line in Paul Morley's recent Stones-at-Glastonbury column, which argued that the spectacle of Jagger's Viagra Swagger on the main stage this summer might actually have more integrity and cool than the other headliners, Arctic Monkeys and Mumford & Sons, for all their lack of liver spots:
"For better or worse, [The Stones] are old men playing young music, not young
people playing old music. The Monkeys and the Mumfords are the dutiful
archivists; the Stones are the bloody archive."
^^^^^^^
While we're on this topic, I note with fascination and disorientation that the Top Ten of the UK Singles Chart contains not one, not two, but four different kinds of retro-dance:
* disco time travel: Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" at #1
* drum & bass coated with pop gloss: Rudimental's "Waiting All Night" at #2
*house (80s-90s model with a lick of digital polish) : Duke Dumont's "Need U (100%)" at #9, on the way down from being #1
* 2step revival : Disclosure's "You & Me" straight in at #10. (And "White Noise", which peaked at #2, is still hanging on at #24)
Friday, October 12, 2012
"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 Collectionbeing released by One Little Indian.
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"?
Friday, May 18, 2012
accuse me of excessive loyalty to my old collegial cohort, but i gotta say that the ex-Melody Maker writers have been ON FIRE the last couple of weeks...
you've probably seen this sulphuric diatribe by Neil Kulkarni on music writing today
then there was David Stubbs with the most entertaining piece I've read in many a month... taking on the Herculean, or to be more precise, Augean, task of reviewing for The Quietus the "A" shelf of John Peel's record collection (as now conserved for the ages in online virtual form, and howzabout that for archive-fever/retromania?). Or as Stubbs puts it, "venturing into the giant, holy sphincter of retention that is the Peel archive". The results made me nostalgic for the weekly music paper institution of the Single's Page: invariably a grim all-night ordeal for the writer, but a wholly necessary procedure of cultural hygiene, a ritual cull that converted the lead of redundant musical production (born of misguided ambition, or the after-dregs of a DIY ethos long past its salience point) into the gold of reader-amusement.
also at Quietus, there's Taylor Parkes interviewing Kevin Shields. And there's that man Neil K again, with the preface to the second series of A New Nineties, looking at the US underground rock that paralleled the UK p*** r*** he wrote about last time. Looking forward to this series unfolding even though hardly of any of these bands (Bitch Magnet? C'mon, be serious now Neil!) meant shit to me.
(Kulkarni's other Quietus multi-part epic "Eastern Spring" is set to become a Zer0 book I see)
