The Von Südenfed Family Singer

It is not customary for me to do reviews herein but I was moved to write about my experiences last night at a Von Südenfed gig in the Liquid Room in Edinburgh. Where to start?

Lets start with the album and the reason for going. Tromatic Reflexxions is a good album, quite a different sound for me and those familiar Mark E. Smith groans make it simultaneously new and old. I can't lay claim to being a hardcore Fall* fan. OK, I've maybe got 10 albums or so, but I know there is quite a lot of it I find average at best. Not something a real devotee would ever say. Clearly, there are many highlights, Frightened is probably in my top 10** songs ever. Mark has always been able to bring something different to songs. Take, for example, way back in 1994, his inspired addition to the Inspiral Carpets' I Want You ( Note use of lyric sheet, of which more later. )

The album isn't universally great, but The Rhinohead is marvellous, filled as it is with the spirit of the SID chip and Rob Hubbard. So, I was looking forward to hearing it live. Well, I might have heard it live. I'm not too sure.

Don't think I've been to a gig before were no one played instruments. That itself was novel. Two blokes behind and desk and they did their thing very well. The bass was like some form of battlefield organ-curdling weapon. I'd imagine that the Mouse of Mars fans in attendance would got exactly what they were after. Loud, incessant, kicking beats. Wasn't much of a dance atmosphere. No obvious signs of dancing or moshing. I thought I'd survived as much bass as was humanly possible in a night club in Mumbai, but this was much bigger and louder than any Bhangra.

A good few minutes in and no sign of Mr. Smith. Which was fine. Built up the expectation a bit. And then he arrived. He wandered onto stage, not too steadily and with ill-defined purpose. Dressed like he had just got out of jail in the clothes he went in with (in 1979), he cut a fine dash in a leather jacket that even your oldest, coolest Uncle would be proud of. Thing is, any concept of what he looked like was instantly over-ridden by the realisation that he looked not unlike the dwarf from Twin Peaks*** This was even more of a dramatic likeness as he bent over a light, reading the lyrics from an A4 sheet. If, at this juncture, I was auditioning for the more pretentious end of the music press I would launch into a discussion about David Lynch and dystopian nightmares.

That isn't as ridiculous a description as it my seem, but maybe not all that accessible. Imagine you had hired a rave band to your wedding. The young ones are dancing, the old ones are tutting and then your crazy Uncle gets up and starts shouting the words to "Ghost Riders in the Sky", except that he doesn't know the words and blurts out noises incoherently instead.

The first mic doesn't seem to work to well. A roadie appears with a new one and calmly escorted aside by a wise hand "Listen son, I've been in this game a while now." Good, he's on his game. Maybe. Things progress well, lyrics are read, mic is rammed into amp for ear-splitting reverb. Every time he approaches the desk there is a definite look of foreboding on the faces of the ever bouncy knob twiddlers (a great name for a band/porn film if ever there was one ).And then, as if my magic, he's gone. Off stage. Somewhere. Must be the smoking ban we think. The 'singing' continues from afar. Seems louder than before. Is it him? Is it a conveniently available sample. Its amazing what they can do nowadays.

From there, nothing much changes. The bass assault continues until my face starts to hurt in a way that you think it shouldn't. And then he's back for some more hunched burbling and away again. At this point, I am laughing almost constantly. Somehow it just wouldn't be right to turn up and just hear the album, only a bit louder. This is a proper occasion. Mark doing what Mark does best. Its not like he hasn't got previous. Even on live Fall albums from nearly 30 years ago he had a tendency to randomize any on-stage attempt at normality. This is what it should be.

A roadie appears on stage and can be seen to start a sentence with "Mark..." in the ear of the left boogie-meister. We all believe the full sentence is "Mark has passed out." But no!

The last triumphal appearance on stage is a tour de force. He's back, the lyrics match the tune, its kicking. For a couple of minutes. Cue march to front of stage, lyrics flung into air, mic handed to audience member and exeunt. No bears in attendance. Fantastic. Although, fantastic with "WTF?" tattooed on it.

There have always been those who saw Smith as a genius. And these aren't fools. But, to accept what I saw last night as genius demands quite a lot. Clearly he was out of it and it was undeniably funny. But a 45 minute set in which the lead 'singer' appears on stage for about 10 of those, seems to be a little profligate. Not least because of our foolish hope that there might be an up tempo, techno cover of Cruiser's Creek thrown in due to lack of material.

But hey, this was proper rock and roll, it was a much better story. And as I climb into my family MPV on the way home, you have to respect him for what he is and what he has been. Ain't none of us is as young as we used to be.****

In case you are wondering what it was that took me there in the first place, have a listen to this.

* For a start, the real fans would insist on saying "The Fall", then again, I've read the book, wonder if they all have.
** This is a "Tardis" top 10 containing 100 songs, deliberately not capitalised to annoy another set of devotees
*** If Stuart also uses this image, I thought of it first, he stole it
**** That was Stuart's line, I just stole it.

Murmurs of Earth

At the risk of attracting "most boring post since that last crap space one" comments, I'd like to take a few moments to pay tribute to arguably the best space missions ever, Voyager.

Launched an unbelievable 30 years ago, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still going strong, still returning data to earth despite the former being the farthest man made object from earth. Designed to last 5 years, most of their instruments still function with only minimal degradation.

There is no point it recounting the incredible list of achievements of these spacecraft other than to encourage the reader to investigate further and marvel and the ingenuity and robustness of technology that we would consider archaic now. A 4-bit processor and an 8-track tape form the core of the processing power and storage. Go figure.

As a technology person, it is a salutory lesson that you can produce powerful, robust product without having to use the latest and greatest of fancy tools and technology. Concentrate on getting it right and you can do deliver results with anything.

So, well done NASA and JPL. Staggering stuff. Just hope that you continue to get funded to keep the Voyager missions running until 2020. Shouldn't abandon them to the cosmos yet.

Blinking Flip

Not like me to miss a stat milestone but unbeknownst to me, sometime today, I passed over half a million views of my photos on MorgueFile. That's quite a large number. Clearly it is a greater testament to the site that Michael has created, but thanks to all that took the time to click and have a look. Full steam ahead for the mill.

Sunday Morning Loud Lawnmowers

I cut the hedge yesterday. More remarkable than you would imagine. But as I did it, a vague idea for this blog post started to solidify. Its all about progress, more of the hedge later.

Everything progresses, everything moves forward, we try to make everything better. We invent new things, new ways of doing old things, things that make bad things better. We improve. Some do this for the betterment of all things. Cures for diseases and the like, but progress is a thing of commerce. Quite often, things don't need to get better, but unless there is a new, improved version. then there is nothing else to sell.

My favourite analogy for this is computer games. When the Commodore 64 was unleashed, I really couldn't see why you'd need anything else. Great games, great fun, perfect. Same, for the original Playstation. Wow. Right. That'll do. No it won't. We need to sell you another 'improved' version. Well, do you?

This applies to almost everything. My TV is great, but I feel I need an HD one (I don't). I can make toast under the grill, but I have a toaster etc, etc, I won't labour it. Commercially driven innovation.

And therein lies the problem. We progress, innovate along discrete paths unique to their own domain, TV's get better, drugs get better, the Internet gets more pervasive. Each strand, fuelling its own progress to an attempt to sell more. And we all believe that any and all such progress must be a good thing. After all, so much of human innovation has made such a big improvement to all our lives. Running water, heat, food, we nailed the basics many years ago. We are healthier, we live longer but, in all of this, are we still getting better?

Let's imagine there is some central measure of wellness or good in humanity. I know this is a bizarre ideal, but bear with me. You can't argue that sanitation or penicillin was to the overall good of things but looking at the modern world, which of the recent technology innovation has really helped? We are hooked to our phones, PDA's, laptops (ahem), we are information junkies. We are wired. All the stuff that we used to have to spend time doing is done for us, so we have so much time to do, well, stuff. So, we get fat, we have soaring childhood obesity, we have all a whole new set of psychological problems that simply didn't exists 30 years ago.



Keeping it simple with the SLR


The problem is that there is no central arbitration of whether or not any given innovation is for the 'common good'. No one says, "Nope, we'd better not build this ultimate entertainment device, people will stay in and get fat". We assume that moving forward is good for us, hasn't it always? Perhaps we've started to innovate and progress beyond the point of maximum wellness? On the face of it, it looks like things are getting better but perhaps we are just at the early stages of new, bigger problems, created by ourselves. And I'm not talking Global Warming yada-yada, I'm talking about more personal issues, health, mental and psychological. Just how happy do you feel every day?

Do you ever really feel at ease? When are you blissfully relaxed? I like to be out in the open, in the air. With my Digital SLR...

There has to be a strong argument that the whole 'wellness' measure would benefit from far more simplicity in how we live. I, and I know others the same, often hark back to previous times with a large degree of fondness. You think you are being glassy-eyed old fool, you think that your memory is flawed. But its not that simple. Some things are better now, some things were better then. Its not an either or.

A long time ago, people thought hedges round their garden were a good idea. They were cheap, you grew them. They were nice looking, they were plants. You had time to cut them, because there was nothing else to do.

So, what do I want? Do I want to put up a fence? Do I want someone else to put up a fence for me. Do I want a machine that cuts the hedge automatically? Maybe with lasers, yeah baby.

Or do I want to leave the hedge and cut it myself. Because its simple. It gets me away from this machine, from the multitude of stimuli that fill my head. It forces me to listen to what is happening in my head. Just me and the hedge. Maybe I need the Sunday morning loud lawnmowers, the simple things. But not an electric blanket. At least some innovations end up where they deserve to be.

What is better for me? Sure, someone would make money from the Laser Hedge Ray, I would avoid cutting the hedge. But I would contest that that wouldn't be better for me. That wouldn't be progress. It would be human innovation but not human betterment.

Until we learn to separate the two, there is going to be a lot of correction to look forward to as we settle back down until how life should be.