"Chronometer 71is a 1971 piece that comprises recordings of clocks in London's Big Ben and Wells Cathedral in Somerset. These were sequenced to a graphical score by [Sir Harrison] Birtwistle using Zinovieff's studio system to control several tape machines, much like an early sampler. The piece was created in Zinovieff’s second Putney studio, Musys, set up in the basement of 49 Deodar Road." - The Wire
"It’s the first quad sound classical music piece.... This piece was designed with Birtwistle in about 1970... But it was made as a quadraphonic piece, it was one of the first quadraphonic pieces." - Peter Zinovieff interview at Red Bull Music Academy.
Sir Harrison Birtwistle: Chronometer - for 2 asynchronous 4-track tapes
Realized by Peter Zinovieff at Electronic Music Studios (EMS), London using the Musys system developed by Peter Grogono (software), David Cockerell (hardware/interfacing) and Peter Zinovieff (system design and operation).
I have "Chronometer" on vinyl (it's the flipside to Birtwistle's The Triumph of Time - which is where that Zinovieff 1974 text comes from).
I also have it on the Zinovieff double-CD anthology Electronic Calendar of 2015. Which occasion prompted this Guardian profile of his career, achievements and intersections with pop culture.
Birtwistle is not the only posh composer Peter Z collabd with - there was also Hans Werner Henze
And recently cellist Lucy Railton - resulting in Inventions for Cello and Computer
Now I am honestly not sure if I've ever listened to the first side of the album, "The Triumph of Time" itself, but if so, it was almost certainly just the once. Let's give it another go, shall we?
Below are some Gang of Four related graphics (the greatness of which I didn't have space to go into in the eulogy) interspersed with off-cuts from the piece + sundry informational nuggets.
[pic by Christopher Tomond]
Gill's stage persona - always stern and unsmiling - in his later years started to resemble Alan Rickmansworth armed with a Stratocaster.
Gang
of Four rearranged the structural grammar of rock as music while reinventing the way that lyrics could process and probe political reality. “There’s almost nothing in Gang of Four that relates to anything a purist would
describe as ‘punk’. Most punk rock was slightly
faster and slightly worse-played heavy metal. Whereas Gang of Four is stripped
down, it’s funky, there’s no power-chords.There’s
very little about it that’s punky” - Andy Gill, 2001.
Several years before G04, while still at Sevenoaks School, the teenage Andy Gill and Jon King had dabbled with being a band. They called themselves the Bourgeois Brothers!
Waiting for the Great Leap Forward...
Although it's taken from the ruling cabal in Mao's China - and would later be applied to the leadership of the SDP – the name "Gang of Four" is like a demystified version of "the band". It takes the piss out of the adolescent romanticism and male-bonding camaraderie of rock 'n' roll - the idea of the group heading out on an adventure together - while hinting that those very energies could be channeled for higher purposes, a true mission-quest.
The Wilko influence: Johnson didn't exactly "slap" the strings, he sort of cuffed them - flicked at them with the tops of his fingernails (as opposed to picking with his fingertips) while muting the strings with his other hand, to get that choppy percussive sound. Gill himself used a plectrum, I believe, but built from Wilko's jagged rhythm style.
The emergence of the Leeds Sound. With Gang of Four, it’s angular and spartan; with Delta 5, it’s
loping and bouncy; with The Mekons, it’s loose and blurting... but there are
similar riff-structures and approaches to the guitar as a primarily rhythmic
instrument; there are textural affinities in terms of scrawny abrasiveness; vocally there’s a shared deployment of catchy but unmelodic chants, a gruff
flatness of address, and a general departure from rock’n’roll norms of singing
and emoting.
Gill’s first great guitarist crush had been Jimi Hendrix. On the day of his death in September 1970, the teenage Gill wore a black armband to school. But in Gang of Four, the volcanically cascading solos of Hendrix and other guitar-heroes of the pre-punk era were strictly forbidden.
“Andrew was… I was about to say he
was a ‘master baiter’! But he would bait you” - Hugo Burnham
The title track of their 1978 debut
EP, Damaged Goods, used the language of commerce to present a
startlingly unsentimental anatomy of desire and frustration.
It wasn’t just the controlled paroxysm
of Gill’s playing on songs like “Natural’s Not In It” that was so bracingly
abrasive. It was the sound too. Clipped and clean, it came from using transistor
amps rather than the valve amps that most guitarists then and now prize for
their “warmth” and “fat” richness of tone. “It’s more brittle,” Gill said
of his beloved transistorized sound. “And it's not warm – Gang of Four
were against warmth.”
“The
production has got to bring out the material incidents in a perfectly sober and
matter-of-fact way. Nowadays the play’s meaning is usually blurred by the fact
that the actor plays to the audience’s hearts…. They ought to be presented
quite coldly… objectively. For they are not a matter for empathy; they are
there to be understood.” - Bertolt Brecht, 1926, prophesying "Love Like Anthrax"
The scouring power of dour.
“People value themselves in terms of their labour yet leisure time brings an uncomfortable void” was how the group paraphrased the topic in a brief statement on the B-side label of “At Home He's A Tourist”. The flipside itself “It’s Her Factory” was straightforward feminist critique of housewives’ and home-makers’ unpaid labour, inspired by an newspaper article about housewives as ‘the Unsung Heroines of Britain’.
“Generally there is felt to be a very sharp distinction between learning and amusing oneself…. So we have to defend [radical theatre] against the suspicion that is it a highly disagreeable, humourless, indeed strenuous affair” ---Bertolt Brecht, from “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre For Instruction?”
Entertainment! was the party soundtrack in Athens, Georgia for a season or two, influencing art-school bands from that town from Pylon to Method Actors to R.E.M. B-52s's first two albums were essentially Entertainment! if it's lyrical content and stage presentation was had been derived from mass entertainment - in this case post-WW2 American B-movies, TV, mainstream fads, etc - and emotionally based around amused fascination rather than disdain and distaste. No, really - look beneath the camp chassis of Fred + Kate + Cindy's lyrics, voices, and clothes, you'll find an undercarriage of sinewy
dance-rock rhythm, as spare and pared as the spray paint job was garish.
The verse in "I Found That Essence Rare" about the girl dressed in a bikini not knowing the name comes from the Pacific Ocean nuclear test site Bikini Atoll is the exact point where the Go4 and the B's meet.
“No escape from society” - a Gramscian
aside in a song ("Natural's Not In It") that otherwise offers a fractured-vision panorama of a
consumerist paradise, a “heaven” that “gives me migraine”, as King’s
protagonist sings it.
Key line: “coercion of the senses”, referring to the
bullying bombardment of libidinally-charged imagery from media and advertising - what Marcuse called “repressive desublimation” i.e. sex and desire put in
service of capital.
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
Ideal of a new purchase
A market of the senses
Dream of the perfect life
Economic circumstances
The body is good business
Sell out, maintain the interest
This heaven gives me migraine
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
Coercion of the senses
We are not so gullible
Our great expectations
A future for the good
Fornication makes you happy
No escape from society
Natural is not in it
Your relations are of power
We all have good intentions
But all with strings attached
Repackaged sex keeps your interest
Like the earlier Damaged Goods EP tune “Armalite Rifle”, “Ether” addressed the troubles in Northern Ireland, its lyrical tail-sting hinting that the British authorities's interest in keeping a foothold in Ulster might be economic as much as geo-strategic: "there may be oil / under Rockall" - i.e. the granite islet and surrounding sea 263 miles northwest of Ireland. “Guns Before Butter” took its inspiration from John Heartfield’s
1934 anti-fascist photomontage “Hurrah, The Butter Is All Gone” – a
riposte to Nazi leader Hermann Goering’s remark that “iron always make a
country strong, butter and lard only make people fat.”
For 1981’s Solid Gold, the group
recruited Jimmy Douglass, a sound engineer who'd worked for funk band Slave and for AC/DC among others and would later be Timbaland right-hand man, in order to help them achieve a “live” sound with more bass bottom. The resulting sound on Solid Gold contrasted markedly with the
compellingly arid and anti-naturalistic (no room ambience, no reverb) production style of Entertainment!
Gill supplied the most striking sounding and emotionally compelling tune on the album in the desolate faltering funk of “Paralysed”, which he wrote and recited: seemingly the blues of a victim of the mass unemployment induced by Thatcher-Reagan, the character knows “history’s the reason / I’m washed up” but can’t help feel humiliatingly shamed by his own fate.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ And how sadly weird / weirdly sad that Andy Gill's namesake - the otherpostpunk-associatedAndy Gill - should have died less than a year ago. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Here's my tribute at Pitchfork to Pete Shelley and the timeless newness and nowness of Buzzcocks.
Getting older, as a person and as a writer, means having to get used to not just losing people, but writing about the loss of them.
The last month for me has been substantially taken up with commemoration of Mark Fisher and now Pete Shelley.
Strange indeed that the last time I should have seen both of them alive was at the same place - the Incubate festival in Tilburg, Holland, September 2012.
Writing about a dead person that mattered to you - personally known or not - is a odd business.
On the one hand, you're confronting loss, and trying to measure and convey in words the dimensions and the particularity of the loss.Which is a gloomy business. But on the other hand - being a writer and all - there is joy and satisfaction in finding the right words. A pride that can feel inappropriate, given the context, but in its own way is a defiant flexing of the life force.
Well, eventually there is joy and satisfaction. At first there is struggle - the usual struggle, but more severe in this case, because more is at stake: this is a life, and a life's work, in review, not just a recording or a performance. There is a sense of gravity. The Shelley piece was an all-nighter. That used to be how I wrote everything that was larger than a record or gig review, back in the Eighties. But over the last 25 years or so, this kind of all-night ordeal became a vanishingly rare occurrence for me. This was a flashback and... well, let's just say it was touch-and-go for a moment there.
It's sobering to consider that I'll be doing more and more of this kind of writing in the years ahead. That's just the way life will be going, from here on out. It'll be.. going. More and more gaps will appear in the company of the valued and meant-a-lot. Life, increasingly replaced by death. Presence, outnumbered by absence.
Alongside public memorials, there'll be private occasions for writing about lost people - eulogies addressed to smaller, more intimate and exclusive audiences. Twice in the last three years I've faced the challenge and the duty of summing up, or catching aspects of, a life.
When we write these things, or read them, we are of course mourning ourselves too, as well the lost precious individual. Confronting the passing of our time. All the things that mattered, all the people who kept us company on our journey - in real, first-hand ways, or in remote and mediated ways that are nonetheless just as intimate and essential.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This is the first Buzzcocks song I ever did hear - when my brother Tim (another person who's gone, eight years now) brought the single home. There's still something wonderfully insolent and adolescent and bratty about "when your mummy says 'noise annoys; - GO" and the blare of guitar that follows.
I love all the obvious Buzzcocks classics, of course, but this one is a fave that I haven't seen other people posting. Love that endlessly cycling guitar figure needling away like a twilight-zone thought-beam. Apparently "ESP" has the longest fade in recorded history.
This is such a strange and lovely piece of music - such a gorgeous yearn. I can't think of anything else quite like "Why Can't I Touch It?". Love the super-stereo-separated jousting of guitar-riffs, with that unique Buzzcocks feel of clumsy and delicate, stiff and graceful.
Another of the killer B-sides
Late gems on A Different Kind of Tension
What makes first-wave punk-pop like Buzzcocks so different from the melodious emo-punk of the Nineties, its ostensible descendant, is that the Nineties lot (G.Day etc) can really play but are choosing to restrict themselves within an established genre format. Whereas Buzzcocks you can hear them straining against the limits of their ability - and creating that genre template as first-time cultural event. You can feel the freshness still.
Sung by Shelley, written by Diggle
Here's the performance of "Harmony In My Head" from Tilburg with the declamatory middle-bit and guitar-hero poses from Diggle. It doesn't sadly capture the incredulous Shelley comment.
Shelley and the band were staying in the same hotel as me and on the last morning I saw him and a young friend having breakfast in the basement parlour. I did toy with the thought of going up and saying "great concert, thanks for the music" etc etc. But Shelley seemed so quiet, so inwardly focused, that I decided to respect his privacy. Regrets, I've had a few...
Some great TV documentary clips about Buzzcocks and Manchester punk.
Love the way Tony Wilson has gratuitously shoved in some Situationist graffiti slogans at various points throughout.
Pete Shelley as fan - pages from his fanzine, NME Portrait of a Consumer, his testimonial about Can from the 1978 compilation Cannibalism.
His Krautrock fandom also surfaced in this side project with Eric Random - The Tiller Boys. "Big Noise From The Jungle" was in regular rotation on the John Peel show and I was pleased to pop it in an imaginary list of the DJ's favorites of the postpunk era in Rip It Up, although I have no idea if Peelie would have agreed about any of the inclusions. In the book I described "Big Noise" as a clangorous Neu!-like stampede or words to that effect. But of course in 1980, sixteen-year-old me would have had no idea of Neu! existence or what the record's makers were aiming for or inspired by. It was just a glorious clamour. There are advantages to knowing nothing.
Here's a great interview with Shelley by Taylor Parkes from only a few years ago, for the Quietus.
Shelley: "We wanted to be intelligent, but not intellectual. We wanted to be entertaining, but not entertainers..."
Parkes: "At 15, Buzzcocks seemed the perfect music for 15 year olds who were classically randy and anxious and brash and uncertain, and definitely looking for something, but not inclined to heavy metal posturing, nor – that much – to the deep-and-meaningful pose. Fast, rude songs about the urgency and horror of new hormones; a way to come to terms with your preposterous new self, without so much of the narcissism or the ludicrous bravado. I'm not sure I could ever love Buzzcocks quite as much as I did when I was 15. And for some bands that would constitute a diss, but in this case I think it's a compliment."
And here's an interview with the whole band from 1979 on Canadian television.
