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Magazine - Howard Devoto Knows Thyself

“Suicide has always been quite an important idea to me,” says Howard Devoto, vocalist, lyricist and mouthpiece in chief of post-punk fabulists, Magazine. Devoto is talking about Hello Mr Curtis (with apologies), the band's recent single which trailed No Thyself, the first album of new Magazine material for thirty years.

The Mr Curtis in question is one Ian Curtis, the former singer with Magazine's Manchester scene contemporaries Joy Division, who hanged himself on the eve of what should have been the band's first American tour in 1980. Devoto's song also references a certain Mr Cobain, as in the late Kurt, of 1990s grunge icons Nirvana, and another rock and roll suicide.

By the end of an appositely jaunty number in which both of his forebears are put on the couch and encouraged to explain what caused them pain enough to take their own lives, Devoto is declaring his own intentions to die like a king. Such a lofty pronouncement is up-ended somewhat when the monarch of these aspirations is revealed to be Elvis Presley, and that the said death will take place 'on some god-forsaken toilet'. The outro of a song dedicated at recent live shows to author, Alzheimer's sufferer and champion of assisted suicide Terry Pratchett finds Devoto scatting the all too familiar line, 'I hope I die before I get old'.

“In my mind,” Devoto explains, “I'm talking about assisted suicide, and I'm talking about a subject I feel really quite strongly about. I'm not someone who thinks about topping himself every six months or anything like that. Far from it. I'm the happiest now that I've ever been. But as a young man, I was very tense, and very intense, and suicide has always been an idea to me. I'd go as far as to say that, when my time comes, I'd like to die by my own hand. Some people might call me a control freak, and in some respects that's probably quite understandable.”

This weekend's Glasgow show will be the first chance for aficionados of a band named partly after a coffee table accessory, part loaded gun, to see how Hello Mr Curtis and other songs from No Thyself stand up next to material from the band's first incarnation. Since reforming for dates in 2009, Devoto, keyboardist Dave Formula, bass player Barry Adamson and drummer John Doyle, with guitarist Noko replacing the late John McGeogh, have reinvigorated Magazine's sophisticated melding of post-punk, prog and glam.

Never a comfortable figure onstage, Devoto himself looked reborn in a theatrically inclined live show that proved the magnificence of songs like Shot By Both Sides and A Song From Under The Floorboards, both of which had influenced the likes of Radiohead and Jarvis Cocker. After such a triumphant second coming, then, writing new material was a calculated risk.

“When we first talked about getting together, I thought it would be okay for a year or so,” Devoto explains of going out to play songs largely from the first three Magazine albums, Real Life, Secondhand Daylight and The Correct Use Of Soap, with one or two of the better cuts from the original band's half-formed swan-song, Magic, Murder and the Weather, thrown in. “After we'd played on Jools Holland and at the Electric Proms, we had a meeting and talked about the possibility of putting one or two new songs into the set. In due course, Dave, John and Noko knocked out six backing tracks, and I started working on them.”

The songs that later became Holy Dotage and Happening in English, both on No Thyself, were duly forwarded to Adamson, arguably the only member of Magazine who'd carved out a significant solo career since the band's demise.

“We waited a long, long time,” Devoto deadpans. “Barry had always been the most resistant of all of us to doing new material, and we eventually got the message that he was quitting to make his first film, which is not a task I would want to take on.”

Adamson's replacement, Jon 'Stan' White, debuted with Magazine at the Hop Farm Festival in June this year, and, on record at least, retains his predecessor's understated sense of John Barryesque noir. No Thyself as a whole is what the follow-up to The Correct Use Of Soap might have sounded like if McGeogh hadn't left the band to join Siouxsie and the Banshees. Led by a largely upbeat mix of Formula's science-fiction vintage synthesiser swirls and Noko's scratchy guitar riffs, matters of life and death are as dramatically evident in Devoto's words as they ever were. This is the case whether in the sexually explicit Other Thematic Material or the knowingly self-referential Of Course Howard (1979).

The words to the latter song are taken from an introduction Devoto wrote to a collection of lyrics penned for the first two Magazine albums, as well as during his brief tenure as vocalist for Buzzcocks, whose debut EP, Spiral Scratch, arguably invented DIY indie-pop as we know it. In both the introduction and the song, Devoto somewhat portentously declares that 'I demand special consideration as the most human'.

“I re-read it, and I just thought, 'Wow. You were really going for it, weren't you, lad.' I felt I wanted to interrogate my old self, and I wanted a dialogue.”

In this respect, such diary-like dissections have long-seen Devoto regarded as the Marcel Proust of pop, with each record a very succinct form of memoir.

“I keep notes, and I always have a special category for lyrics and song ideas. Hello Mr Curtis actually goes back about ten years. But mortality is a big theme on the record. I don't know how you can avoid it.”

Now just shy of entering his sixth decade, Devoto remains teasingly vague on the subject of just how long Magazine will continue beyond the band's current reincarnation.

“Stop and smell the flowers,” he says. “I'm just living in the moment.”

Magazine, O2 ABC, Glasgow, Saturday November 5th. No Thyself is 
available now.

http://www.livenation.co.uk/event/241003/magazine-tickets
http://www.wire-sound.com/shop/magazine/magazine--no-thyself-cd/

The Herald, November 2 2011

ends

 





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