A Real Life piece by Chris Randle on how "all recordings are also hauntings"
The rollcall of the over-cited: Nigel Kneale, Mark Fisher, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, T.C. Lethbridge, Roland Barthes...
But at least one name I'd not heard of before:
"With cinema, reanimation became possible. Promoting the Phonoscope, his film-projecting machine, the inventor Georges Demeny boasted he would reverse oblivion: “How many people would be happy if they could only see once again the features of someone now dead. The future will see the replacement of motionless photographs, frozen in their frames, with animated portraits that can be brought to life at the turn of a handle. We shall do more than analyze, we shall bring back to life.”
Overall, though, this cud is starting to feel rather thoroughly masticated
It was an intermittent anxiety from before I even started writing for Melody Maker - it crops up first in Monitor - and it would surface in various pieces over subsequent years. But the first concerted spate of fretting about retro as a crisis occurred in 1990. One prompt or pretext for airing the angst was the group Cop Shoot Cop, whose line of patter - "Smash Retro" - caught my eye when reading the NYC zine Chemical Imbalance. Their album Consumer Revolt didn't quite live up to the fiery spiel, but that didn't deter me from running with it, oh good Lord no. (Sometimes the primary value of a group - see also D-Generation, Consolidated, Manics for half-a-second - is the way it injects ideas into the discourse, rather than fleshes those ideas out musically. ).
Here's the first review I did of Cop Shoot Cop for Melody Maker in November 24 1990, followed by a full-blown piece for Village Voice early the following year.
Cop Shoot Cop
Village Voice, February 19th, 1991
'BURN YOUR BRIDGES' is where Cop Shoot Cop proclaim their oblique intentions most plainly – their "anthem," if you will. "Know what you like/Like what you know," singer Tod A. intones with bleary, bilious disgust, before rearing up for the chorus: "Bite the hand that feeds you/Burn your bridges behind you." Gather your Byrds’ remastered CD box sets, your Big Star and Beach Boys reissues, and all the other fetishes that hold you in subservience to yesteryear, build a giant pyre and ignite the fucker. If you want to "live now," that is.
Faced by the oppressive sedimentation of rock history, by the mire of eclecticism and the musty odor of the anal retentive collector mentality, Cop Shoot Cop see themselves as a purgative agent, a rigorous diuretic or emetic – their LP title Consumer Revolt (Circuit, Box 67, Merrick, NY 11566), is, says Tod, "revolt as in your stomach revolting, spewing back all the media garbage shoved down your throat." Cop Shoot Cop’s dream is that it we raze the archives, the phoenix of the new might rise from the smoking ruins.
Cop Shoot Cop stand in stark contrast to the epigonic tone of ‘90s indie-rock (epigone: the lament of those who believe they live in a less distinguished, somehow "fallen" era in comparison with a preceding golden age). The (ad)vantage point of being able to draw from the treasure of 30 years of rock history becomes a paralyzing predicament; how to rival the incandescence of those who were able to make history rather than simply refer to it? An autumnal glow suffuses rock ‘n’ roll, from Galaxie 500 and the Replacements to REM and Teenage Fanclub: as "great" as these groups have been, all seem to bask in the glory of rock’s sunset, pine in its shadow. Even those bands who’ve reinvented rock rather than relieving us by proving that it can be as good as it used to be – the Sonic Youth of Daydream Nation, the Spacemen 3 of Playing With Fire – can produce a weird ambivalence: exhilaration at the vivid flashes of innovation, gloom that "our" music is condemned to volatilizing an established vocabulary.
So the hope then is that ‘90s rock can confront or at least apprehend the times we live in: an age characterized by media overload; by the inner city usurping Nature as the "dark continent" that inspires fear; above all, by a lack of the sense of a "time," "era," "zeitgest." Cop Shoot Cop’s determination to seize the time is declared by their instrumentation (where their peers follow J. Mascis in the search for arcane, outmoded effects pedals, CSC are almost alone in abandoning the guitar for the sampler) and in their aura (no wistful Jeffersonian longings for an idyllic pastoral America, rather an attempt to thrive on the wired energy of urban life).
Whether their music will live up to their ambitions isn’t yet clear. Although 10 times more forceful live than on the murky Consumer Revolt LP, they’re still in the preparatory stages, the awkward initial stirrings of a corrosive novelty. Jim Coleman uses his sampler as an armory of unidentifiable detonations and swathes of locust-swarming amorphousness, but still lags behind the tumultuous effects of the Young Gods (the only other group who’ve grasped the sampler’s potential as crucible of the new rather than as a "quote machine"). Cop Shoot Cop’s most original ideas are rhythmic. Phil Puleo’s scrap metal percussion frame provides a pulse of brittle insurgency; Tod and Natz’s twin basses agitate like rats sewn into your colon gnawing their way to freedom. At times, Cop Shoot Cop seem to be playing an avant-garde cousin of funk-metal; not slap-bass-happy and sinuous, but a metallurgical orgy of torques and vectors. Rather than being woven into a seamless piece of organic/harmonic fabric, Cop Shoot Cop songs are like intricate clockwork devices constructed from riffs and rifts that mesh with varying degrees of precision. "Noise" here is the friction that no mechanical system can eliminate. The stop-start, staccato dynamics deny the listener the forgetful bliss offered by the consensus rock of the day, creating instead the painfully awake and hair-trigger alert mind frame of the survivalist or urban guerrilla.
There are other, less interesting, strings to CSC’s bow. 'Suck City' is redolent of late-Birthday Party (with the concrete jungle as Nick Cave’s Faulknerian swampland), and the barrel-chested melodrama of 'If Tomorrow Never Comes' brings to mind the Doors’ morose version of 'Alabama Song'. But ultimately, Cop Shoot Cop partake of the very "purgative innovation" from which postmodernism was supposed to have provided both reprieve and escape route. Suddenly, we’re "back to the future." And herein lies the major problem for Cop Shoot cop: the simple fact that their discourse of Total Break and Absolute Renewal, shock of the new and shock of the now, has its own history. Ironically, they’re in a similar position to the postmodernists and retro-maniacs: they’ve an embarrassment of Futurist options and year Zeros from which to pick-and-mix – No Wave, or the 1979 British postpunk vanguard, or Einsturzende Neubauten, or early Swans/Sonic Youth.
Cop Shoot Cop are fully aware that every grand gesture of severance and repudiation has been preempted, every manifesto of cultural patricide already unfurled. At CBGB last Friday night, they found themselves agitating for change in an age and a scene that’s seen way too much and is way too cool to be mobilized. Their response oscillated violently, from desperation (Natz prefaced 'Smash Retro' by haranguing the impassive Lower East Siders sitting quietly at tables: "This is not your living room, I am not your TV set") to self-mockery (Tod: "How to become your own self-parody in 10 easy lessons"). I can share their anguished awareness of the pathos of living in a "late" period; perhaps "nostalgia for the future" is the least dishonorable option these days. And Cop Shoot Cop deserve credit for putting the problem of boredom – the specter that lurks beneath all our pleasures and plenty – back on the agenda.
Oh and a little before, another live review for Melody Maker, rehearsing some of the same lines and ideas:
Like other BBC Radiophonic Workshop fiends, I first came across the name Rosemary Tonks in connection with "Sono-Montage": a 1965 collaboration between the experimental poet and Delia Derbyshire + otherWorkshoppers. The program tantalizes in large part because it's not easy to hear - you'd have to visit the British Library to order it up. Some say it can be found on the internet, if you really dig around - but I've had no luck.
"Sono-Montage" is discussed, but not played, in this Lunar Poetry podcast, also available in transcript form here. Host David Turner says, paraphrasing Tonks's introduction to the program: :
"Sono-Montage is an experiment to combine poetry with electronic sound. Its aim is to put a dramatic edge on poetry read aloud and that edge is sound. What you hear in the recordings are sound collages or sound illuminations."
Sound illuminations!
Here at the unofficial BBC archive Genome is what theRadio Times said about "Sono-Montage" the week of its eventual broadcast on June 21st 1966:
A experiment in combining spoken poetry with electronically produced sounds
Arranged, directed, and introduced by Rosemary Tonks in conjunction with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
The programme is based on the following nine poems:
Speechhouse and Steeple-jock by Michael Baldwin
Mediterranean and A Silent Man by Peter Redgrove
Midsummer Thames and Fisherman of Alaedras by Paul Roche
Poet as Gambler, Badly-chosen Lover and Orpheus in Soho by Rosemary Tonks
Produced by George MacBeth
The original effects on which the orchestrations in this programme were based were recorded by 'Stagesound' for a public performance of sono-montage in Hampstead followed by an interlude at 18.50.
Here's a not entirely swayed review of "Sono-Montage" from The Listener.
And here's a photo of Tonks with Alexander Trocchi working on "Sono-Montage"
Along with the experimental poetry, Tonks had a sideline in writing novels. She saw them as her more commercial front of operation and they were reviewed at the time as comic fiction, satires of Sixties London. In recent years, a coterie of Tonks-converts have been agitating for these long out of print, incredibly hard-to-find-secondhand / prohibitively-expensive-if-you-do novels as lost classics of the decade. You can hear two of these enthusiasts - Jennifer Hodgson and Stewart Lee - enthusing on this podcastBacklisted.
Where at approximately 56 minutes in you can in fact hear a small snippet of Radiophonic Tonks.
Another small portion of it can be heard here - go down to the Steve Cleary segment.
The campaign seems to have led, directly or indirectly, to the reissue of The Bloater - originally published by The Bodley Head in 1968 - earlier this year as a Vintage Classic. Hodgson's review forNew Left Review got me intrigued enough to pick up the mauve paperback while in London last month. I read most of it while holed up in our Islington AirB'n'B while recovering from a nasty bout of food poisoning, while the beautiful weather streamed through the huge windows. That seemed appropriate as The Bloater is a London novel that takes place in the summer. My gastric distress fit the unsettled feeling of the prose, with its heightened sensitivity to all things bodily and gastronomic. The title of the book comes from a cured herring with a pungent odour - but is also the main character's nickname for one of her would-be paramours, whose strong aroma lingers after his visits.
Part of the interest of The Bloater for the Radiophonic fiend is that there's a character based on Delia Derbyshire in it. Jenny is a colleague and a confidante to the protagonist, a musician / radio producer called Min. A couple of scenes take place in "The Electronic Sound Workshop".
Those nine and a half pages are not really reason enough to buy the book, though. What is?
Well, at first, I really wasn't sure. It took me a while to get on with Tonks's style, to get the hang of it. The writing initially feels frightfully mannered. "Brittle" is a word that reviewers often use. "Arch" also fits. The prose feels like - or even smells like - an emanation of the personality of Min, who's magnetic but not exactly likeable. Every interaction with an Other has a kind of pettish, catty quality, a flip flirtatiousness that feels (with her various male love interests) mildly sadistic. The writing also has a elliptical quality that reminds me a little of Wyndham Lewis's disjointed modernism but suffused with the personality of Oscar Wilde or a Wilde character (same difference). It can often feel like bits of information that would make a smoother read have been rubbed out with a capricious eraser. I kept trying to think who and what it reminded me of and suddenly it hit me: Morrissey and Autobiography. That quippy tone, wilful indirection, and contorted syntax. There's the same (very Wildean) inversion of seriousness: tiny defects in others, trivial inconveniences or setbacks, are monstrously inflated and absurdly bemoaned; the actual tragic is danced past blithely. Min is not unlike the demanding, impossible, amuse-me-NOW heroine in that early Smiths B-side "Wonderful Woman."
The book's demented gaiety eventually becomes compelling, though. You also begin to sense that the determined superficiality might be papering over damage deep below the surface. Apart from the BBC scenes, the milieu is posh - fancy restaurants, nights at the opera. But even though it doesn't overtly reference much that is specific to the decade, the mood is "British Sixties" in a way that vaguely reminds me of films like Accident, The Servant, and Blow-Up. The old standards and inhibitions are eroding, but archetypally English qualities of detachment and clipped coldness carry through into the new less-repressed era.
Tonks's life story is fascinating - and oddly parallels Derbyshire's. There's the burst of creativity (six novels between 1963 and 1972), the trendiness and immersion in the adventure of the Sixties... then retreat, the drying up of productivity, and disappearance. In Tonks's case, her withdrawal was into extreme conservatism. She became a fundamentalist Christian, renouncing all things worldly, and a recluse. She is believed to have gone round the country taking her books out of libraries and destroying them. She went by the name Rosemary Lightband - but amazingly this wasn't some born-again invention, just a reversion to using the name of her former husband.
More on Rosemary Tonks and the Radiophonic Workshop in this blogpost at Superintendent Idle Tiger
And more about her poetry, novels and life in this long piece at The Paris Review by Lucy Scholes.
"Sono-Montage, a critical intervention into sound and poetry was not unrecognised at the time, but apart from a single repeat on the BBC hasn’t been heard in public in nearly 50 years. A few segments – Rosemary’s own poems – were played at a recent event at Flat Time House, Peckham, due to the curator, Lucy Reynolds, being Rosemary’s great niece. She has also been able to give me some insight into Rosemary’s character and background, and her complex relationship with feminism. She was fun, but John Horder recalled, she ‘spoke with an intensity bordering on active aggression’. This opinion of her may have been mistaken for assertiveness; Tonks achieved so much in her short career that others could not.
"I managed to listen to Sono-Montage several times at the British Library, as well as being able to access her novels, after their forty-eight hour transit from the deepest darkest vaults of literature. I decided it was worth excavating; it is an interesting, and important, critical intervention in radio, coming quite early in terms of broadcast experiments into poetry and sound, alongside more famous broadcasts by Bob Cobbing & Barry Bermange. Accessing information about Sono-Montage was difficult, even Neil Astley hadn’t heard it, so to excavate it now, one year after her death, seems like a fitting tribute to her not inconsiderable efforts to make this thirty-minute recording. There are many links between the programme, her writing (both poetry and prose), and criticism, but also many contradictions: in style and attitude, if not tone. An unusual artefact, Sono-Montage is the invisible peak of Tonks’s personal epoch."
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