Sinister: character does not equal personality

[Kieran Devaney]

A car drifted by me, the souped up bass searing as the speakers shredded out 
some big bolshy record that I didn’t recognise (perhaps because everything 
other than the bassline and drums were drowned out) at top volume, driving 
slow enough so that everyone could see and hear it. I’m sure everyone’s 
experienced similar. It got me thinking about cars – that is, it made me 
actually aware of the existence of cars, usually they don’t really register 
other than as inconveniences or obstructions, but that snatch of propulsive 
low end noise, as abrasive and calculated to annoy as it seemed to be really 
registered. I suppose you have to be of a certain mindset to drive around 
like that, it’s difficult to talk about it without being disparaging – it 
seems an adjunct to a part of a culture that I’m not very well versed in. 
One that works to the exclusion of others and other possibilities, one that 
places the self at the centre and sees all else as a void to be filled with 
that self. One that sees roads as a silence to be broken. A hole drilled in 
the exhaust pipe of life. But consider yourself as a part of that for a 
moment, it shouldn’t be too difficult, and imagine marking your territory 
like that – what kind of a statement would playing say, Belle and Sebastian 
or (I know I sound like a dickhead for mentioning Merzbow all the time, so I 
wont here), I don’t know, Whitehouse at that volume in your car? Or is the 
content of the noise irrelevant because the point is less what the music 
says or is about and rather just the fact that the music *is*? It made me 
think, as I say. When I went on about listening to headphones while out I 
said I stopped because the natural sounds are regularly and potentially more 
interesting than any private soundtrack that I could come up with, but here, 
with the car’s soundsystem so heavily dominating, to the exclusion of all 
other sounds it was almost the reverse of that. Someone else’s soundtrack 
foist upon you, their version of events overwhelming your own. Forcing 
closure on the openness of history, you might say. People talking had to 
momentarily suspend their conversations. People stopped. The ambience of the 
quiet street was threatened for a moment. There’s a kind of austerity in 
that moment – you sense it coming for a time, there’s a few seconds of 
expectation and then, just as the car passes and there’s an instant of pure 
aesthetic asceticism – the hollowed out world that is all sound, with all 
else just reacting to that sound. And then, as red-shift demands, it 
disappears more quickly than it came, and things return to normal. I 
wondered about driving myself – I might have mentioned this to people before 
but a few years ago my parents offered to pay for driving lessons for me and 
I refused, flat out. I hadn’t really given it all that much consideration 
before, but that refusal surprised me somewhat – on closer reflection it’s 
mostly down to the fact that I have an innate fear of driving, the prospect 
of being in control, or, worse still, out of control of something as 
powerful as that petrifies me. Add to that the singular phenomenon that goes 
with driving which can turn even the most mild-mannered into a raging ball 
of frustration and stress. My concentration isn’t up to driving either, I 
get distracted and wrapped up in my own thoughts much too easily. Public 
transport is too much fun anyway, as nice as it would be to be able to stop 
wherever you wanted and, I don’t know, take a picture or whatever, you can’t 
beat a nice train ride can you?

And then today the capricious urge to buy a record came over me – I haven’t 
in what seems like ages what with various expenditures and what have you, 
and, well, I thought it’d be nice to hear something new. Actually what I had 
in mind to buy was that newish John Fahey record – the Red Cross one - which 
got an excellent write up in Wire and sounds as though it would fit my 
current, er, mindset quite well. It’s been recommended all over the place, 
you’ve probably all already got it I expect and all find it passé and have 
moved on to No Neck Blues Band 7”s or Birchville Cat Motel bsides or 
something similar. But there I was in the fairly aptly named ‘Rare and Racy’ 
– Sheffield’s premier outlet for *v*nt g*rd* tuneage. As shops go it’s a 
prevalent and very pressing danger in many respects, stocking all sorts of 
things that look fantastic in principle – your man from Add N to (x), Barry7 
I think he’s called, has put out two records of Italian library music from 
the 70’s – Library music that you *actually* want to hear sez Q magazine in 
the blurb on the front. I was mighty tempted I can’t deny. And similarly 
tempted by silly things like one of the new Keiji Haino records, silly 
because since I can’t read Japanese I don’t even know which of the two it 
was, and various other bits and pieces – the sort of things I heard two 
years ago on ‘Mixing It’ and noted down, but have since so forgotten that 
only the name rings any bells. It’s obviously great to buy records in that 
way, but since I was only able to afford one new thing I thought it best to 
go with something at least a little bit predictable. Boring of me I am well 
aware, but there you go. Well to move this along a bit I asked about the 
John Fahey record, which had been in the window for a while last week, but 
has since been replaced with a display of gardening books – a bit late for 
planting I’d venture, but the lush green covers certainly do fit the current 
clemency of the weather. I mentioned ‘Rare and Racy’ being a pressing 
danger, and these window displays are one of the chief reasons – it’s easy 
enough to walk past the door but, gosh, is that an early Boredoms import in 
the window? It was, by the way - a copy of ‘Wow2’ and they’ve had all sorts 
of things in there that beckon me inside with their irresistible promise of 
transcendent noise – a Sirens simile here would be almost too obvious 
wouldn’t it? So I wont bother with that. But variously featured have been 
such delectables as those new Acid Mothers Temple eps, all three of them 
lined up with their pretty holographic covers sparkling away and, well I 
wont do a boring list, but if Wire gives it a positive review and it’s not 
*too* hard to get hold of then it’ll probably be in the window of Rare and 
Racy sometime later that month. Oh yeah, I was moving the story along – I 
asked about the John Fahey record and they’d sold the one copy they had, 
they can get it on order if I want, but I declined, I wanted something 
*today*. I decided to move down the road and have a look in Fopp records, 
which is an entirely different proposition altogether. Apparently Britain’s 
leading independent record shop, the stuff it actually stocks is pretty 
disappointing at times. It has everything you’d expect, and probably nothing 
you wouldn’t. Or maybe not everything you’d expect even – just try getting, 
I dunno, a Heavenly cd there and – well you can’t, they don’t stock them. 
But I went for my usual half-hearted wander around and thought about buying 
stuff like the new things by Cat Power and Steven Malkmus – I could go off 
into a detour about why those artists, and some others who excited me in the 
past, and whose records I still like a great deal just don’t really interest 
me at the moment, but that’d probably be even more dull than this has become 
already, so I wont. I was about to leave when, out of the corner of my eye, 
sitting in the new releases section was a stack of cds by the unpopular 
American anti-folk combo The Moldy Peaches. My interest piqued I went over 
and had a look and well, would you credit it, it was a double cd of live and 
unreleased material. All those potentially better and more rewarding records 
that I had seen previously dissipated and in a moment of madness I went and 
bought it. Now it didn’t really occur to me at the time to think about 
whether I really needed fifty-five new Moldy Peaches songs. Did I? Well, 
probably not. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad record, I’m not sure that it’s a 
very good one either – the live versions of the songs are predictably a bit 
more rocking than the ones from the album, the great ones still sound great 
and the slightly irritating ones are still… guess what? It does make me 
lament the fact that I never got to see the band live though, it does sound 
as though band and audience alike were having a great time at all of the 
shows, as with a lot of live recordings it’s difficult to feel part of that 
listening at home. Alas. The unreleased tracks are pretty sub-standard fare 
it has to be said. I think, though, in terms of how the Moldy Peaches fit 
into whatever musical landscape you care to draw up, this is a fairly 
perverse release – their album from a couple of years ago sounds a bit like 
a collection of outtakes in itself, few other bands I can think of would 
release records with the phone going off or whatever in the background, not 
by accident anyway, but this was, fans of the band, myself included I 
expect, would argue was all part of the charm, and detractors would argue 
was part what made them so awful. So I don’t expect this collection will win 
the band any new fans, but then I don’t expect that was the intention anyway 
– perhaps it’s purely a contractual thing with Rough Trade. Which, again, 
isn’t to say that this is a bad record, I just wonder quite what has 
prompted this release. Oh, and they also cover Hulk Hogan’s seminal ‘I Wanna 
Be a Hulkamaniac’ – the prospect of hearing that may have been what swayed 
me during that brief second while I scanned the tracklisting in Fopp 
records. Sadly, perhaps even criminally, they don’t attempt to replicate 
Hogan’s rapping, but instead just go for a couple of blasts through the 
chorus. A missed opportunity if ever there was one I have to say. In some 
ways it sums up the entire record for me – if the Moldy Peaches were a 
charmingly bad joke then this new release is that joke taken just that 
little bit too far. Though perhaps if they would’ve taken the joke a little 
bit *further* we might have liked them even more. Those kooky kids.

Anyway, the other night, on the way home from Leeds, I bought chips from 
Ainsley Harriot’s favourite chip shop – there’s a picture of him in there 
with all the staff from a few years back. They all look so cheery. Quite 
satisfying they were too. But that’s just detail to ease you into the 
paragraph really – more significantly was my actual return back to where I 
live and what followed it. Exiting the lift I found the corridor strewn with 
litter, no less than three Pizza Hut pizza boxes lying outside my door, 
after thinking something along the lines of “Why can’t you use the fucking 
bins?” (incidentally, though I rarely swear either in writing or 
conversation - not through any moral objection, it’s just nice if it has 
some impact when you do it I think – my thoughts are a veritable 
post-watershed plethora of profanities, I often wonder absent-mindedly if 
others are similar, or if people who swear a great deal have relatively 
cleaner minds), and threw them away myself along with some other stuff. This 
isn’t a particularly rare occurrence, but for one reason or another, 
probably owing to my tiredness more than anything, it put me in a bad mood. 
I got in and went to bed. This is where I talk about the perfect digital 
symmetry of twelve fifty one. If any of you have digital clocks around, and 
I presume some of you do, then you’ll no doubt be aware that certain 
combinations of numbers are a bit special – one twenty three (I’m talking 
chiefly about am/pm clocks here, you twenty four hour clock people have a 
whole range of other interesting combinations, but of course they only occur 
half as frequently) for example is a pleasant one – there are lots and I 
imagine we all have our favourites. My particular favourite, and it has been 
since childhood is twelve fifty one – go and set your clock to it now and I 
think you’ll agree that it’s pleasing. Done that? Ok, well if I hearken back 
to my childhood now, as I frequently do then I can remember several 
occasions, my little head thick with the fug of tiredness and disorientation 
at being up at so late a time taking some solace in that pretty arrangement 
of numbers on the clock. Now, pedants among us, I expect there will be one 
or two might quibble that it’s not exactly symmetrical because the one of 
the twelve is a wee bit closer to the two than the one of fifty one is to 
the five. And that’s as maybe, but nonetheless, as such an hour became no 
longer so alien I found myself regularly transfixed by twelve fifty one, so 
much so that I often stare straight at the clock for the full minutes worth 
of its duration, a moment of silent contemplation. On the particular night 
which I mention, I was in bed as the minute approached and in my tired state 
I awaited it, thinking that I could finally sleep once it had passed, which 
comforted me a little. Twelve fifty clicked over and there was some 
commotion outside – people were returning from somewhere, quite loudly, they 
sounded drunk, quite unusual for a Sunday (though technically it was Monday, 
but there you go) night – they stopped, it seemed, just outside my door and 
already I was worried that they’d ruin the fast approaching minute. And ruin 
it they did. Just as the digits changed on my clock (or just digit if you’re 
being technical, but there you go) from outside came the opening bars of 
‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Matt, the guy who lives across the hall from me 
had procured this record from somewhere a few weeks prior to the occasion, 
and it has been the subject of several drunken singalongs in the past, but I 
did think I had heard the last of it until then. And sing along they did. 
Given the current political climate, the war and all y’know, I thought it 
was wholly the most inappropriate thing I had heard in a long time. And 
there was a venom in their singing, a bitter tone that cut through the 
drunken slurs and carried on through the next couple of minutes and on to 
the final crescendos and into their cheers as it finished. Next morning the 
taste of the litter they had left on the floor still hung in the air.

- Kieran
xxx

Ooh, actually, on a more boring note, I suppose, I should ask if anyone in 
Glasgow has floor space to put me up for the weekend of the gig. Obviously 
I'd be eternally grateful and all that jazz. Let me know if you are such a 
person. Ta.







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