And this got me thinking about the proximity of hauntology and comedy - more precisely, a certain strain of British comedy...
Now, on account of some of the write-ups the H-zone gets - the droves of dissertations even now being written on this area - it's easy to come away with a sense of H-ology as this rather sombre and gloomy thing. Especially if you go with the Fisher-ian take with its focus on Burial / The Caretaker* and things adjacent like Disintegration Loops and The Sinking of the Titanic and all that. Lost futures, decaying memory, cultural entropy et cetera.
But, as anyone who really knows the area knows - and who has a wider sense of what it is - hauntology is actually riddled and addled with whimsy and macabre humour. When you listen to and look at the graphic presentation of what I consider to be the canonic core - Ghost Box, Mordant Music / eMMplekz, Moon Wiring Club, Position Normal - comedy runs through the whole thing.
And I'm not just talking the album art and the song titles and the samples - rather often the music itself has an antic air.
(Same goes for the sources too actually: whatever else it is, TheWicker Man is also a comedy).
(Think also of the "sinister camp" flavor of The Prisoner.... Kafkaesque yet absurdly English.... deliciously over-thesped)
(Or the Dr. Phibes movies)
So partly it's to do with the source material... and partly the proximity to pastiche and parody in a lot of the work... and then there's the element of retro-satire in something likeScarfolk, or the early records by The Advisory Circle.
I made this point in the sleevenote for the Ghost Box tenth-birthday compilation In A Moment:
One of the things some people don’t seem to get about Ghost Box - and perhaps they’re thrown off by the name - is that this isn’t meant to be some hair-raising, soul-harrowing trip into necromantic darkness. It's much gentler than that, a twisting or tinting of the everyday. Softly spooky, sweetly creepy, Ghost Box enfolds the listener in a cosy unease. It’s umheimlich you can live with, live inside. No, we are not dealing with Gothshit or pierced-dick second-wave industrial shlock here. Yes, humour is involved: in the artwork, the song titles, the fabric of the sound itself, with its queer mix of solemn and jaunty. A humour of a particular poker-face kind that reminds me of old dear comrades from long-ago campaigns of mischief and obfuscation. That’s a personal resonance, but it illustrates a wider public fact: the existence of an Anglo-Surrealist continuum that crops up repeatedly across the generations, based each time around slightly different constellations of esoteric erudition and arcane research.
So anyway, all this got me thinking about it from the other side - what about actual comedy on the telly that has haunty undercurrents? Britcoms that are fellow travelers with Ghost Box et al.
Way back when, there was Victor Lewis-Smith’s Buygones for Club X on Channel 4 - these were standalone mini-programmes (later a newspaper column) focused on obsolete gadgets and quaint appliances, once-popular toys, fads, and foodstuffs, dead media and forgotten TV personalities, etc etc... Things like the Spirograph, candy cigarettes, the Stylophone, Frank Bough ... An early example of retro-futurism.
Then there was Vic Reeves' Big Night Out.
Now I must admit, when I saw the first episodes I disliked it intensely (see the negative review at the end). But about six shows in, I realised my grave error - the moldy-old all-too-English stagnant odour that I initially found suffocating was actually the source of its musty genius (The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer indeed). I don't know if it is quite hauntology but it nourished itself on similar decaying culture-matter.
Then, by the early 2000s, we have Look Around You, series 1 and series 2 - quasi-pedagogic retro-TV that could not be more congruent with the Hauntology Project. There's even an episode about ghosts!
"in today's modern world"
What else?
Blue Jam, in moments (there was an album on Warp wrapping blackest-ever-black humorous sketches in creepy ambient IDM)
More recently, some of the episodes of Inside No. 9 are straight out of the H-zone. There's one, "Mr King", that is very much ripping off The Wicker Man.
The Mighty Boosh had retro-fantasia aspects that connects to that side of hauntology that imagines musical counterfactuals and alternative history trajectories for pop.
I also think of Detectorists as on the outskirts of hauntology… not quite bucolic horror but a sense of the past inside the present...
Whoever did these fake Penguin / Pelican / Puffin paperback covers for the show is picking up on the same thing I am...
Not having lived in the UK for the last 30 years or so, I have missed much. So I decided to ask a few people who might have a better sense.
Neil Quigley of KilkennyElectroacoustic Research Laboratory grew up in Ireland but has been exposed to much of this stuff. He told me that Reeves & Mortimer were actually a formative influence on what he does, especially their later stuff (which I had never heard of) like The Weekenders and Catterick, describing them as "tonal companions to Scarfolk and more like art school projects than the prime time TV stuff they did"
Neil also pointed me towards Garth Marenghi's Dark Place - another one I'd never heard of.
He also mentioned Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom as a non-Brit counterpart
And This Morning with Richard Not Judy (again, never heard of it)
He pointed to a series called Mammoth and said "there was enough in there to make me wonder if he was
a Ghost Box fan".
Any more for any more?
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And here's my Vic Reeves pan - I think it hones in on an essence that is proto-hauntology and in that sense the review provides a hauntology critique long before any one in the 2000s mounted their critiques of it - the need for some force of newness to blast open the windows, let the stuffy air out
Meat paste did, in fact, figure in a later episode of VR'BNO
* Not that The Caretaker is devoid of humour - even when confronting the most terrifying prolapse of consciousness, there's flashes of dark wit. But also the pre-Caretaker identity of James Kirby - V/VM was all about puerile laffs and icono-vandalistic glee. The butchering of middle-of-the-road entertainment as perpetrated via the CD-R series Offal reminds me of the kind of malarkey we got up to as kids - defacing Ladybird books and other innocent childhood books, adding obscene addenda to the pictures, inserting foul utterances and actions in the text. Or at a slightly cleverer level, parodying things like Stars Wars or the Famous Five.
"The future fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like." - Fredric Jameson, 2015
"The return to history everywhere remarked today… is not a return exactly, seeming rather to mean incorporating the 'raw material' of history and leaving its function out, a kind of flattening and appropriation"
-- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991
"Randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles.... the 'historicism' of the new painting [enables] its secession from a genuine history or dialectic of stylistic evolution, 'frees' it to recover painting styles... as a sort of objet trouve... an omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for all the styles and fashions of a dead past"
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991
"A gleaming science-fictional stasis in which appearances (simulacra) arise and decay ceaselessly…. The supreme value of the New and of innovation, as both modernism and modernization grasped it, fades away against a steady stream of momentum and variation that at some outer limit seems stable and motionless… Where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, nothing can change any longer…. If absolute change in our society is best represented by the rapid turnover in storefronts…. it is crucial to distinguish between rhythms of change inherent to the system and programmed by it, and a change that replaces one entire system by another one altogether"
-- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991
"[Spectrality is that which] makes the present waver: like the vibrations of a heat wave through which the massiveness of the object world--indeed of matter itself--now shimmers like a mirage.”--Fredric Jameson
Saw this around and about and so much wanted it to be real - to be an actual existing, gigging tribute band - that I have not done due diligence, in terms of checking it is not just an AI whimsy.
If it is real, then is this the birth of a new genre of tribute group - the hybrid tribute band?
Any other known examples of this kind of retro mash-up?
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I liked Sigue for the duration of that first single.
In The Guardian, Simon Priceargues that "Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history"
Good point about the reductive idea of working classness wielded by those fans who accuse naysayers of being snobs:
"Oasis have been presented as the true voice of the council estates from the very start of their career. But what of their less stereotypical, but equally working class, 1990s contemporaries? Don’t they count? No band was more aware of class politics than Sheffield’s Pulp, for example, but Pulp were arty and sang about outsiderdom and dressed like Oxfam dandies instead of Arndale Centre townies, so they’re considered somehow less “real” than their Mancunian peers. Meanwhile, the Manic Street Preachers are as working class as they come, but refused to conform to lads-lads-lads cliches, played with androgyny and homoeroticism, and wore their (state) education on their leopard print sleeves."
Sharp too on how the failings of the music might ultimately be decisive, more so than the retrograde attitudes of Noel and especially Liam....
"We’re all familiar with the concept of separating the art from the artist, though everyone’s mileage varies on where to set the line in the sand. But the art needs to at least be good. Oasis, memorably described by the late great Neil Kulkarni as the “English Rock Defence League”, offer nothing but a sludgy, trudgy, brontosaurus-bottomed waddle, perfect for that adult nappy gait so beloved of their singer and fans. Lyrically, too, they’re dismal... dull platitudes that might as well have been written by AI. But the problem is the music. Oasis don’t do fast songs. Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s funkless, sexless plod is always carefully pitched below the velocity at which fluid dynamics dictate that you might spill your lager. Is there anything more useless than a rock band that doesn’t rock?"
Liam, seven years ago, on what they'd be doing if they'd never split up.
"I guess we'd still be making good albums. And just doing the fuckin' same thing on loop. I hate all these cunts that try to reinvent the wheel, 'oh we need to go jazz fusion', with rap and all that. Fuck off - get Faces down your neck, Pistols - just do that on loop. It's great. Why you want to fucking change it? Bit of fucking lager thrown in, and a couple of spliffs and that, and a couple of cheeky ones and that. Fuckin' great!"
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I have softened slightly towards Oasis, at least compared with back in the day when I wrote real-time diatribes as caustic as Price and Kulkarni.
Liam is an empty-headed arse, but whenever I read an interview with Noel, or see him in a doc (like the Hipgnosis one recently) I can't help warming to him: he's funny, acerbic, sharp within his delimited range.
The thing that gets me about Noel G - about Oasis as a whole - is that they are so uninterested.
Not uninteresting. Uninterested. They appear to have zero interest in anything outside of an extremely circumscribed area. Musically, obviously. But in all ways and all things.
A long time ago, I read a piece where Noel was talking about his favorite book - the book that was always by his bedside. Revolution In the Head: the Ian Macdonald book that goes song by song through the Beatles career, using a variety of prisms layered on top of each other... musicological, key changes and scales and chords; what happened in the studio with the production and engineering and experimenting with technology; lyrical inspirations; individual biographic arcs; internal band politics and emotional conflicts; the nitty gritty of collaboration and who contributed what; social and cultural and political contexts; external artistic influences and inputs. Not every song can support that level of exegesis, there are trifles and throwaways. But the entries on "A Day In the Life" or "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Revolution" or "I Am the Walrus" are probing panoramas, gyrating around the song and its creators from every conceivable angle.
I was quite impressed that Noel loved the book. Ian Macdonald was a serious intellectual, a polymath, and Revolution is a rich, dense read. The opening essay on the 1960s and what they meant is a definitive take.
But then I thought: Noel's reading this book, picking it up again and again, rereading the entries on his favorite songs.... it's like a Bible to him.
Reading it, doesn't he ever feel.... ashamed?
Ashamed of his own incuriosity, compared to his idols. Who, as the book amply demonstrates, checked out and explored and experimented with just about everything that was happening and that was in vogue in the Sixties - musique concrete, Indian classical music, Eastern spirituality, the latest trends in visual art, cinema (I just picked up Revolution In The Head and there's a bit where McCartney has the gall to play his little art movies to Antonioni, in town to film Blow Up!).
Not that I've read every, or even many, interviews with Oasis but I've never seen an indication they are interested in anything at all apart from music - and even then only an extremely narrow furrow of canonical rock-as-it's-supposed-to-be. The loop-the-loop stuff that Liam refers to in the video above.
In that sense, they are a steep decline even from The Stone Roses, who did have interests in art and politics (and in music beyond the straight-white-line of the Brit canon), who were widely read and liked to argue about serious things.
Oasis are the Beatles - if the Beatles were just about the tunes and nothing else at all.
Except the tunes aren't as good or as differently, variedly good - there's nothing as odd and unsettled as "She Said She Said" .. nothing that approaches the vertical (an Ian McDonald term - Lennon's tunes are horizontal) melodic grace of Paul McCartney.
Oasis are the Beatles - if they were all Ringo, then.
Except
none of them are as open-minded as Ringo, who gamely contributed to the
most experimental things the Beatles did, and usually rose to the occasion and then some - like the drum track to "Tomorrow Never Knows" or his playing on "Rain", or "Strawberry Fields Forever"... or the steal-your-breath beat on "Come Together"…
And that analogy falls down even further when you realise Oasis have never had a drummer as good as Ringo either. They've never shown any interest in rhythmic invention; the drums are always buried deep in the soundmush, subordinated, menial… seemingly with no function beyond marking time. There are drums on these records only because rock bands have drummers in them.
Oasis are the Beatles if none them were Ringo even.
For all their limitations, they have about four or five great songs that nail one feeling exactly, the invincibility of youth. "Live Forever"...
"Champagne Supernova" is the One for me. I couldn't help falling for that one even as I wrote a disapproving piece on Oasis and Blur for The New York Times, around the time of Morning Glory and The Great Escape).
On some visit to England many years later, when I'd been sent to do a story so I was staying in some fairly central hotel, I was woken by the sound of a drunken bloke hollering the chorus to himself as he staggered along the street below Yes, I thought: it's a song purpose-built for those times you are so so wrecked and you feel like no one else in the entire world is having this much fun. A song for people who say things like "we are such fuckin' legends" .... as they engage in the standard excesses... the stuff that people do each and every weekend... that are being replicated all over the country at that very moment.
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Rock counterfactuals:
#1. After "Setting Sun" - freakbeat reinvented for the '90s, the most exciting thing Noel G ever participated in, contributing some decent lyrics too - he decides that Oasis are tame, lame stuff and joins up with the Chemical Brothers permanently and they form a rave'n'roll supergroop, scoring #1 after #1 and changing the whole direction of post-Britpop rock.
(What would the supergroop be called?)
#2. In our reality, luvdup Hacienda-regular Noel is enthused enough to make a few stabs at acid house. But the tracks come to naught and he gives up and goes back to the Rock Trinity of Verities: Tunes, Attitude and Guitars. (While keeping some sort of remnant of the mass uplift and druggy togetherness - Oasis concerts as raves for the technophobic, Knebworth as Tribal Gathering without the diversity, conservative rather than future-facing).
But what if the acieeed attempt went well? If he'd found some suitable accomplices and went down the 808 State path?
( Another counterfactual is the one in which Shane MacGowan, similarly Shoomed-up, manages to persuade the rest of the Pogues to do a 20 minute acid house track called "Get Yourself Connected". In this reality, Shane badgered them to do it - “it sounds great when you’re on E” - but they weren't having it.)
