DONE: RUST (WHAT'S DONE IS DONE)

Nothing like a bleak and misty January morn to instil a sense of hopelessness. No, scratch that, not hopelessness, more inevitability. Hopeless is a a state of feeling, an ur-idealism, whereas inevitability carries at least a tint of realism, an acceptance possibly,  rather than the blanket sense of fear. Which may have you thinking to skip this one, for fear of contagion. But don’t go, I’m OK and this gets lighter. Well, not the song. Clearly.

Rust (What's Done Is Done/Therapy?

A confession. I originally planned this post around a different song altogether, that being the Joni Mitchell deep cut, Nothing Can Be Done. But I discovered my compadre, KKhafa of this parish, was planning on doing the same song, getting his dibs in first. That needed some swift recalibration, and another song to convey a similar mood. Digging around in various lyrics search engines I eventually came across this, by Therapy?, the metalheads from N'orn, a band I have never knowingly heard or investigated. But their name, ahead of listening to the track, gave a semblance of also being able to address the full mental health of my current. Plus, for all I knew, maybe listening to them would prove good medicine. (Intriguingly, a scan through their song titles gave me no small joy, as they contain some evident wit and a fair amount of apparent self-deprecation. Jude the Obscene certainly grabs the eye, as a title, as does Stark Raving Sane and Perversonality, each title suggesting some experience on one side or other of a white coat or padded cell.)

Stories (cello version)/Therapy?

So, I listen, bemused. Not really heavy metal as I know or ever knew it, smacking more of punk in the pace and the attitude. Do I like it? Not sure I'd go that far, but it has a certain angular graceless charm. It comes from the band's 7th album, High Anxiety, in 2003, with wiki telling me the sound, my bad, is actually melodic punk, rather than metal, heavy or otherwise. Sometimes a four piece, as on this record, more often they have been a trio, my interest piqued by the fact that cello featured amongst their available instrumentation. Sure, it isn't really evident in Rust, but the other track, above this paragraph, displays this better. Clearly a wormhole needing exploring!

Peek-a-boo/Siouxsie & the Banshees

Martin McCarrick is the cellist, and was a member of Therapy? between 1996 and 2004, doubling also on guitar. I confess to being unfamiliar with his name, so decided to do a bit of a search, discovering him to be quite the journeyman, with time spent in, or attached to, a number of bands, with quite an illustrious career. Possibly better known as a Banshee, he featured on several of their records, between 1984 and 1995. Starting off as their string arranger, for the Thorn EP, he was later contributing keyboards, as well as playing cello. This includes the accordion in Peek-a-boo, above. But even ahead of that he was a Mamba, Marc Almond's backing band of the early 80s, and with whom he has maintained a lasting link. At possibly the same time he joined Therapy?, he was also integral to any number of looser knit collectives, including This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance. He would also add the strings to records by Kristin Hersh and, later, Skunk Anansie. Diversity clearly his middle name, it seems almost strange he spent so much time in the less than rarified atmosphere of the Belfast rockers. Unless it is just me? Unsurprisingly, he has since become a well known soundtrack composer, as well as working with his wife, Kimberlee, as/in the McCarricks, she playing violin to his cello.

Letter From Nagoya/The McCarricks

My final clip shows him, back with Marc Almond, back on accordion and playing live, in 2020, ahead the pandemic. Let's truly hope he isn't done.

Hymn of Love/Marc Almond

Where we began...... 

(And I no longer feel hopeless, btw.)

SAME NAME/DIFFERENT ARTIST: MARC/K ALMOND

When I was a boy I was always suspicious of Marcs, feeling them to be a little affected in their ways, a name for hairdressers and models, not actually realising that the name, in that spelling, is a diminutive, for Marcus. Marks always seemed more manly. Anyway, this is not a tale of two Marc/ks, being a little more complicated than that, as Marc Almond is one person and Mark Almond, or to be more correct, Mark-Almond were a core of two, but with anything up to another 30 associated. Let me explain........

Jon Mark, guitar/vocals, and Johnny Almond, sax and flute, were a pair of jobbing musicians in the 60s, each earning a pedigree from a combination of sessions and the company they kept. Mark was in the short-lived 'Sweet Thursday', alongside Nicky Hopkins, later becoming bandleader and musical arranger for Marianne Faithfull's nascent works. Almond was kept busy in 'Zoot Money's Big Roll Band', also including later Police-man, Andy Summers, and the ex-Animal, Alan Price's 'Alan Price Set'. Meeting on the sessions scene and becoming members of the legendary John Mayall's band, like all Mayall alumni, the logical next step was to form a band. Arguably jazzers more than rockers, their music was a hybrid of the two, with hints of the later Steely Dan in some of the moods evoked. Augmented by a swathe of the great and the good in both genres, with the likes of Billy Cobham, Dannie Richmond and Steve Gadd present on occasion, individually if not collectively, and that is just the drummers. They actually lasted way longer than just the first two albums I am familiar with, with a number of reunions, ahead of finally calling it a day in the mid 80s. Mark still plays music, producing new-age and celtic fare, actually gaining a Grammy for a record of tibetan chants in 2004. Almond died in 2009.

Marc Almond actually was a Mark, leaving this behind him as he started his musical career. (What did he leave behind him? Do keep up.) With training in performance art, his childhood idols were Marc Bolan and David Bowies, hints of whom remain evident in his extravagant feyness. It was whilst he was at college that he met Dave Ball, the pair forming 'Soft Cell' in around 1980, with massive worldwide success arriving in 1981 with 'Tainted Love', a song by Gloria Jones, the wife (and widow) of Bolan, originally the b-side and segued with 'Where Did Our Love Go', the Supreme's hit. More slow burning in the U.S. than Europe, it got as far as number 8 on the Billboard chart, but later held the record for the most number of consecutive weeks on the chart. Some further success followed but the band were short-lived, splitting 3 years later, bar a later (or the inevitable) brief reunion tour.

Since then Almond has had a varied career, veering between distinctly arthouse material and more obvious chart-bothering, such as gloriously over the top duets with Gene Pitney and with Bronski Beat. His camp persona and theatrical overtones seemed  entirely appropriate for Gallic chanson styles, and one success came with his covers of Jacques Brel, 'Jacques', and then a more varied set in a similar style, 'Absinthe'. Later years saw him move to Moscow and work with russian artists on traditional folk song based material. In 2004, and back in London, he sustained a life-threatening motorbike accident, taking some few years to recover. Sustained by a decidedly odd covers album, he has since been been energetically pursuing increasingly widespread projects, with collaborators as disparate as neo-classical composer, John Harle, and, as above, boogie-woogie TV presenter and ex-Squeeze pianist, Jools Holland, with whom he has toured extensively.

I feel some irony that, given the purpose of this piece, to demarcate the differences between the similarly named artists, now, in 2019, the idea of Marc Almond fronting Mark-Almond would seem strangely not so odd. A pity it can't happen.

K.
C.

IN MEMORIAM: JOHANN JOHANNSON

I've a sneaky feeling this possibly unfamiliar name may mean more to the cinephiles out there than to the musos. I'd like to hope I'm wrong, but if you have been to the cinema over the past few years I am sure you will have heard some of his work, probably the most well-known being his soundtracks for sc-fi film 'Arrival' or the Stephen Hawking biopic 'The Theory of Everything'. But he was much more than a composer for films, even if that is where the bigger money lies, as other neo-classical composers like Max Richter and Olafur Arnalds have discovered.

What even is Neo-classical? Or indeed Contemporary Classical? Or even Classictronica as I prefer to call it, the indie mindset progeny of New Age and Ambient, fusing (often) elements of orchestral music with electronica? Here's a good, if a little already outdated article from UK newspaper, the Guardian.

Johannson had a what turns out to be a relatively typical start to his musical career. For Iceland, at least. Iceland, a tiny country of around a third of a million population, has been pushing way above it's weight for the past few decades, in a steady production of premier musicians across a vast gamut of genres. Go look! It seems every other person on the island is in a band. Well, Johannson, like fellow Icelander Arnalds, started off in rock bands, initially the brash postpunk of Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, via proto-(death?)metal with Ham, to the synth pop confectionary of Lhooq. And these are only the better known ones, his finger also in a number of other pies, such as Kitchen Motors, his think tank to bring together collaborations between all schools of musical theory, extending further developments already in his practice. Recognition outside his home was beginning to take place, and in 2001 he was the producer of the Marc Almond (of Soft Cell) album, 'Stranger Things', co-writing much of the material and playing most of the instruments.

                                                           Losing Hand/Lhooq

But it is his solo work for which his legacy will be best remembered. Often citing inspiration and building themes based upon arcane and/or doomed enterprises, two of his early works were 'IBM 1401: A Users Manual' (2006), using the actual instruction pamphlet for this early computer system as his source material and the electromagnetic emissions as sound sources, and 'Fordlandia' (2008), a suite developed around Henry Ford and his failed Brazilian rubber manufacturing enterprise. In each of these, and his other work, ambient noise mixes with the orchestral, found sound and spoken word with electronic. Stand alone pieces, unfolding over a perceived sonic narrative, clearly it was only a short step to soundtracking other art forms, stage, television and ultimately film.

                              Fordlandia: Melodia (Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device

Working often with film director Denis Villeneuve, he was prolific up until the time of his death, picking up a number of nominations and awards. Runner-up for an Academy Award in 2015 with 'The Theory of Everything', for which  he had to make do with a Golden Globe, he was again a runner-up in the following year, with 'Arrival'. Keenly anticipated, certainly by myself, had been his planned score for Bladerunner sequel, 'Bladerunner 2049', but Villeneuve eventually went with the more bombastic gloss of Hans Zimmer.

Sadly, Johannson was found dead, at 48, in a Berlin hotel room, in February of last year, apparently the accidental effect of mixing recreational cocaine with prescribed medication. In death too this emerging talent was seeming to echo his rockstar credential.

Before I send you down the big river, here's a clip from one of my favourites, 'Orphée', an almost orthodox classical composition from 2016. This is the opening sequence. The video apart, there is no film it accompanies. Close your eyes: make the images in your own mind.

                                                         Orphée: Flight From the City

R.I.P.
Get here.