"there are immaturities, but there are immensities" - Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
"the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "It may be foolish to be foolish, but, somehow, even more so, to not be" - Airport Through The Trees
An interesting piece at the Quietus by Keith Kahn-Harris about Silverfish as a great lost band from a great lost mini-era.
I remember them fondly as a band that was great onstage but never really caught it on record.
Like maybe they should have put out a video instead of a record - capture the cartoony kineticism.
At Melody Maker, we were quite taken by Silverfish. Quite as in "fairly" rather than quite as in "very".
Then, they seemed like a UK response to recent American noisenik stuff - Pussy Galore and that kind of thing - but thinking back, maybe the comparison should have been more local: World Domination Enterprises. "Noise you can dance to" as one of Silverfish puts in the mini-interview below. Jive to.
Stubbs brings up World Dom actually in this measured assessment
Yesterday the first ever release by Cranes - 1986's cassette-only FUSE - was reissued on vinyl, CD, and digital, complete with previously unheard track "New Liberty"
Here's my Melody Maker interview with Alison Shaw + Jim Shaw from 1989
CRANES
Melody Maker, November 11 1989
by Simon Reynolds
The Cranes are one of the precious few truly unusual groups to emerge during '89's protracted creative drought. Unusual in that their sound owes next to nothing either to last year's formations or this year's recapitualation of same.
Their debut album Self-Non-Self confounds the critic's impulse to categorise. Imagine a sound and a feel somewhere between Joy Division's stark staring space and the prostration of Black Flag's Damaged. Between Skinny Puppy's sonic abbattoir and the ruinous catharsis of Einsturzende. And then imagine that combined with a disconcerting female voice, that's been likened by their publicist to "Sinead O' Connor's foetus"; a voice that stretches from a secretive, sickly whisper to a banshee wail of uterine anguish.
There's definitely something regressive about The Cranes. It's as though the 'everyday' woes that inspire the lyrics have triggered a disproportionate amount of distress, because they've somehow echoed earlier traumas that can never be healed. Songs like "Focus Breathe" and "Fuse" have treadmill rhythms that drag you along endless cloisters of dread. "Beach Mover" is unusual for them because it's static: it's an enormous dungeon of sound, all scabrous death-rattles and chain-gang clinks. It sounds like the dustbowl that could conceivably have been left after the inferno of the Birthday Party's Junkyard.
When I run through the list of all the things they vaguely remind me of - European electro-trance, American hardcore, Black Sabbath - Alison and Jim Shaw (brother and sister, and creative core of The Cranes) look puzzled. When I mention the word "Gothic", Alison frowns.
"We don't like all that spooky stuff, though...
Jim adds: "We're happy people!"
It's my turn to look puzzled. Cranes music is oppressive, surely. Claustrophic.
"Oppressive, yeah, but always with a way out, a light at the end... It's not doomladen."
Self-Non-Self, it seems, was born of a predicament so extreme that Alison and Jim thought they'd never disentangle themselves.
"It started when we got our loan. It was the beginning and the end of us, cos we got into a lot of trouble with this debt, but it enabled us to do everything that we're doing now. We took out a loan to buy an eight track studio. We thought that we'd have written so much great material that the world would flock to our door, and we wouldn't have to pay off this three thousand quid we'd borrowed, when we were both on the dole. Then we had another loan on top of that, for the extra gear we didn't buy the first time. We didn't ever miss a payment, but we missed out on everything else."
Alison: "We got into a terrible state. The real starving artist syndrome. We had to sell everthing, absolutely everthing: television, records, clothes... And then starve."
They hooked up with local Portsmouth label Biteback, recorded Self-Non-Self, and immediately received another self-inflicted blow when they accidentally wiped half of the master tape, by recording over it at a gig.
"When we re-recorded the erased songs, the tape recorder broke down so we couldn't mix the album. And we were completely stuck for months on end, cos we couldn't afford to get it repaired. It was a nasty time, and we reacted to it by going further and further into the music. We just did nothing else. At that point, that was all there was. We used to have this little shed, with no heating. And we used wrap our legs with blankets to keep warm and sit there and record and record. We lived on potatoes for months. Jim's got this great recipe for the needy..."
Jim: "Get a spud, boil it. Get some Bisto gravy granules, mix up a cupful, tip the gravy on it... and then pretend it's the end of a meal. It don't half work, I tell you!"
Alison: "I used to have 90p a week left after I'd payed my debts and my rent. All I could get was potatoes and a pint of milk. So for months all I had was potatoes and salt. When I was sick of them, the only thing to do was not eat anything at all for three days until the thought of a lovely potato was really great."
Hence the album's feel of being trapped...
"It brought everything we were writing about into focus, intensified it... But we never wanted to wallow in it and stay there."
What were you trying to get at with the title Self-Non- Self?
"You could take it as the idea that there's various parts of yourself that you can project at different times, but they're all you. They're very different, but they're all one. Not so much the split between the unconscious and conscious, but between the emotional self and the everyday self. But what we do is a real thing, not a spooky thing, it's not about ghosts, and the uncanny..."
Are you talking about the way having an identity necessarily entails suppressing all these other potentials, all these other selves? In many ways, an identity is just a collection of scars, possibilities that have been closed off, dead ends that have been reached...
"Some things are suppressed, some are unnaturally focused on and developed... I think you could say we've been over-developed in certain aspects. Certain things like personal lives have gone out the window for the music."
Self-Non-Self makes me think of the way schizophrenics turn elements of their personality they can't deal with into into voices or demons...
Alison: "No... No ... I'm not invaded by anything. We're shaped by normal experience, and we turn it into sound, I suppose..."
So why does it come out in such a dramatic way? After all, a lot of people write confessionally, but in a prosaic, kitchen sink sort of way, to the accompaniment of a strummed acoustic guitar... Your songs are abstract, heightened not humdrum...
"Maybe some of our experiences have been ... a bit more disturbing than other people's."
That's as far as Alison will go tonight in opening up her wounds to the public. She's very wary of claiming to have undergone anything special. But clearly the pair are driven to make music. Why else would they have landed themselves in penury, why else persevered through years of subsisting on a standard of living lower than even a Rumanian peasant?
Perhaps a clue lies in their fraught childhood. Their mother and father split up after five years of "hellish war" when they were ten or so... Each of them lived with a different parents as teenagers, and got back together only much later.
Jim: "But then just about everyone I know in music comes from a discordant background... It's a real factor behind creativity."
Certainly, early exposure to conflict and a sense of the irreconcilable, can endow you with a tragic sensibility, a natural predisposition towards morbidity or poignancy.
I try a different tack. A lot of people have commented on the childlike quality of Alison's voice. But if it's innocent, it's an innocence that's marred, damaged in some way....
"I thought the child-like thing is just my stupid, squeaky voice... I just don't know how far I want to go into talking about specific things."
Do you know what specific songs are about? How about "Starblood" (the Cranes' outstanding unrecorded song, a bloodcurdling staccato dirge that's mostly voice and drums).
"You could take it on a lot of levels. I do know that the day I wrote the words Jim and I had had the most screaming row... I can remember the mood I was in when I wrote it, but not why that word came into my mind."
I thought it might be about stars, about how pop and film stars live out their dreams for us, and how they can sometimes almost get crucified in the process. Or that it might be a star bleeding might be an ultimate image of pain, in the way that the 'Black Sun' has been for centuries this ultimate image of melancholy. Alison shakes her head softly.
How about "Joy Lies Within", then?
"I don't know exactly. But one of the things that was happening at the time was my mum was in hospital, in the intensive neurological section, having an operation done to her spine. And all the other people in that ward, it was like hell. People dying from road accidents. People having epileptic fits. Every time we visited our mum, someone else had died. What I think I was trying to say was ... well, when I wrote it, I was looking at a really beautiful sunny sky... Oh, I don't know, it's just impossible to explain. I probably could if I was more clever. Or together."
We struggle for a while with other songs, Alison trailing away in half-sentences, then agonised half-words. By the end, she has her face buried in her hands, as though contemplating a future of endless interrogation and self- exegesis. "We know, but we can't say", she offers, finally.
And that's what you feel when you listen. You're in the presence of something that's appallingly intimate, but alien. You understand, without being able to articulate it.
"If you're a human being, a voice is a really small thing. But it's all you've got. And if you can make it into the sound of your existence, it can be very powerful. Just speaking something can be a a way of getting over it. And unless you make a sound, no one will know you're there."
It certainly seems to have worked for The Cranes. Only a few months after Jonathan Selzer's trumpeting of their name, The Cranes find themselves being hotly pursued by several of the bigger indies. 1990 could very well be their year.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Bonus bits
Jonathan Selzer's live rave from September 1989
Me on Cranes live in a paired review with Chris Roberts on Young Gods - May 5 1990
At the risk of demystifying, Cranes get technical in Melody Maker's musicians-only Control Zone section
Oh I didn't realise they remade "Fuse" for the later Wings of Joy, which I reviewed for Spin in December 91