My String Snapped

Enjoying a day out at the seaside

Siouxsie and The Banshees are generally classified as ‘Post Punk’, i.e. they didn’t release a record until 1978 and they were more subtle and cerebral than, say, UK Subs. Their music is distinctly ‘against’, but is cool and ironic and caustic, rather than simply angry and loud. In ‘Suburban Relapse’, a song from their aptly titled first LP ‘The Scream’, Siouxsie (formerly Susan Janet Ballion of Chislehurst, Kent) details her own potential nervous breakdown.

‘I'm sorry that I hit you but my string - snapped
 I'm sorry I disturbed your cat-nap
But whilst finishing a chore
I asked myself what for
Then - something – snapped’

There’s something horrible about that opening verse, especially its politeness and the banality of the phrase ‘cat-nap’. The violence of the situation is not in the physical attack, but in the twang of the snapping string. The words are perfectly complemented by the backing music, which sounds like sheets of metal being tipped over a cliff, and by Siouxie’s vocal, with its perfect balance of numbness and growing hysteria, full of the fuzzy, unpredictable threat of madness. She goes on to ask:

'Should I throw things at the neighbours?
Expose myself to strangers?
Kill myself or you?’

Rather a difficult question to answer.  

Not afraid

Although it’s hard to imagine the fearless Siouxsie Sioux in an apron, she nevertheless understood the underlying dread of the suburbs. Her father had died of cirrhosis of the liver when she was 14, and one can only imagine the pressure of growing up in a home where one of your parents is a chronic alcoholic. Not surprisingly, the thing that young Susan most wanted was to be like everybody else -

‘My family felt like the Addams Family, and I grew up desperately wanting to be normal. We stuck out - even our house was different from all the others on the street. It was this modern house, with a hedge in front that was so tall you couldn't see the house, and the neighbours complained’.

It’s the small details of that private hell that nag at you: the embarrassing overgrown garden, the neighbours ganging up on you, or, in another memory, the dolls pram with a bent wheel from when Daddy fell on it when he was drunk.

When her father died, Susan became dangerously ill with ulcerative colitis. As she recovered she saw David Bowie on the TV and realised that being like everybody else was over-rated. Her ‘race memory’, of the straitjacket of life in the suburbs, however, is a recurring theme in the band’s early work, and brilliantly exemplified here.

Unmann-Wittering.

King for a Day

(or, Depressing Films of the Early 1970s, #4: The King of Marvin Gardens)

A couple of immediate impressions, in reverse order...

Mainly: Atlantic City in the wintertime of 1972 looks for all the world like the elephant’s graveyard, the place where the American Dream of unending postwar prosperity went to meet its final resting place. The aging tourists line up for the photographer along the boardwalk. The tourists are old enough to remember the boardwalk and the City’s glory days. They line for the photograph in the shadow of the hotels along the boardwalk, the hotels which also once knew – if not hosted – those long-gone glory days, their flanking facades a persistant motif throughout the film, themselves lined as a backdrop before the camera of cinematographer László Kovács. Autumn years all around, for nearly everything and everyone. For the pensioners, for the hotel owners throwing in the towel and putting the whole kit & kaboodle up for sale, perhaps even for the enterprising young hustler who wanders onto the scene and thinks that maybe there's an opportunity of a lifetime to be wrung from it all.

But initially, before any of that: You’re confronted by the fact that It’s a bold move to begin a film with a full six-minute monologue. With a tight close-up of a face floating in darkness, pensively spinning a morbid tale. Especially when that monologue – in lieu of any other contextual prompts – at first appears to be some sort of confession, the sort of confession that usually only turns up in the course of a group therapy session. It’s only well past the five-and-half minutes that the viewer is given any sort of clue as to what’s going on.




^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

The story:

David Staebler (Jack Nicholson) is a writer living in Philadelphia, residing in mid adulthood at home with his elderly father. It’s difficult to tell what sort of writer he is exactly, aside from being a somewhat dark and dejected Jean Shepherd type – sending his stories out over the airwaves of a local radio station between 2-3 AM, relating them to whoever’ll bother to tune and listen during such lonely hours. But it’s clear that his life is cloistered and hermetic; a life devoted or resigned – we gather – to a peripheral existence.

Or so it's been up until the night he receives a call at the station during a broadcast. It ends up that the call is from his older brother Jason, to whom he hasn’t spoken with in a number of years. As it turns out, his brother is summoning him. Jason (Bruce Dern) has a new enterprise in the offing, he's in the process of taking over an Atlantic City hotel that was recently put on the auction block by its owners. "The Essex Carlton – the Oldest and Finest Accommodations on the Boardwalk." And Jason wants David to aid in the venture – to help him bring the deal to a close, with handling the outgoing management as things change hands, with the wheeling and dealing of roping in investors. And Jason also wants his younger brother to share in the eventual reward of the enterprise.

Thing is, it soon becomes apparent that Jason didn’t swing the deal on his own, but has instead fallen in league with some questionable business associates – organized crime, by all appearances – to help him leverage the purchase. What's more, David arrives to find his brother holed up in one of the hotel’s suites with a pair of female companions – the older Sally (Ellen Burstyn) and the much younger Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson), the latter apparently being the former’s stepdaughter by a previous marriage. Jason's not sure what's going on between the three, about the exact nature of the sexual relations involved, and he’s fairly sure he's better off not knowing.

Throughout, David remains skeptical about many of his older brother’s boasts and claims, if not about the business venture as a whole. Still, he wants to be a part of it – maybe for the sake of joining the larger world that Jason inhabits, maybe with the hope of reviving the fraternal ties and ambitions of years-gone-by, maybe both. Despite these misgivings and the feeling of being a peripheral latecomer to the whole affair, David plays along at times and finds that he actually enjoys the opportunity of walking in someone else’s shoes – enjoys, for instance, playing the role of co-owner and pitching the hard sell to a pair of potential Japanese investors over dinner. But at other times his doubts aren’t so easily shaken; at which point Jason harangues him for his chronically sadsack demeanor, his defeatist pessimism, his pragmatic caution and his chronic lack of faith. Even though, as soon becomes apparent, Jason is blithely sailing into treacherous waters.

Privilege checking 1973

Saturday 29 September

I got buttonholed in the bar by Tommy [Lord] Balogh, who is such a bore ... 'Moreover, Tony, we must see to it that we never have any more lower middle-class Ministers like Dick Marsh and Roy Mason who are just bullied by these fascist civil servants. We need public school boys like you to stand up to them.' That just about sums up his view of politics. You put in your aristocratic friends, who then are able to down the civil servants. I said, 'If this country changes, it won't be because of public school Labour Ministers beating public school civil servants. It will be because the people at a Conference simply won't accept the explanations given from the top and will just go on demanding change until they actually get it.'

Tony Benn, Against the Tide: Diaries 1973-76, p.65

Give The Punky Drummer Some

When it comes to (post) punk drumming, one can crudely identify two 'traditions' at play: A harsher variation on Bo Diddley's 4/4, or the elliptical wonkiness of Captain Beefheart. The more versatile (or expensively produced) bands of the era often combined both, retaining an air of 'primitivism' either way. Purists stuck with the 4/4 well into the 80s, and the more adventurous weren't averse to indulging electronics by the next decade. Being the late 70s, the influence of 60s garage, reggae, Krautrock, disco, and to a lesser extent Afrobeat (not really funk that much - although acts like Talking Heads pulled it off by hiring in the creme de la creme of session musicians) was all over the place. The end of the 70s was arguably the high point of pop as melting pot, just before neoliberalism reconfigured that as multiculturalism (for niche marketing) with respective corners of fundamentalism, in which I'd include the unashamed gloss of New Pop. More mainstream 'new wave' acts frequently referred to 70s Stones and funkier Bowie. But in accordance with the ethos of the time, enthusiasm took precedence over virtuosity. The grandstanding of prog and fusion - though never quite erased - was drastically downplayed by a newer generation. When it came to drumming, it was a process of weeding out. Not so much back to basics as establishing further basics. Hiphop would do the same with drum breaks, sometimes to the point where hearing originals after samples could prove frustrating and/or disappointing.

Below are examples of a striking variety of styles and rhythms from the period. All of them are tracks I'd return to again and again. I know the lyrics to all of 'em by heart, even when I don't know what the hell they're talking about. Despite Simon's initial rule of no electronic beats or sampling, some were nevertheless enhanced at the mixing desk; perhaps difficult to reproduce with as much force played live. For purposes of space, I've left out tracks which were more overtly dancefloor - orientated (like the Ze records/August Darnell axis, for example). I'd consider them under the rubric of 'disco' rather than 'punk', and plan to discuss that mini-movement at a later date. But anyway, the beats here are so distinctive, that it's impossible to imagine them played any other way. Glorified tribute acts like Nouvelle Vague really do lose something in translation. As Greil Marcus noted, the point when key tracks of the punk era lose their power is the point we know popular culture has moved onto something more exciting. I'll leave it to the reader to judge whether or not we have yet.

Fascinating stuff.