When
Douglas MacIntyre was playing in Article 58, he took inspiration from the words
of his record company boss, Allan Campbell. MacIntyre’s Lanarkshire-sired band
had named themselves with ambitiously contrary chutzpah after the Soviet
classification for counter-revolutionary ‘enemies of the workers’. Campbell,
meanwhile, was putting on some of the best nights in Edinburgh’s burgeoning
late 1970s post-punk scene. As well as managing Josef K, the future TV producer
had picked up Article 58 for his Rational Records label. This was after Alan
Horne, who co-produced the record with Josef K guitarist Malcolm Ross, passed
on the band in favour of signing Aztec Camera.
“Allan
said to me, the future lies in the past,” MacIntyre beams as he prepares to
celebrate 25 years of running the conceptual ideas factory that is the Creeping
Bent Organisation. “That period in Edinburgh was really exciting. It felt like
people were having great ideas every week. Hearing the Scars record the first
time, walking into the Tap O’Lauriston and seeing Josef K and Fire Engines
sitting there, for a kid from Strathaven that was really exciting. There was
something in the air at that time. It wasn’t just the music, it was about
literature and art as well. When John Peel played Article 58, the excitement of
that is something I’ve been chasing ever since.”
Campbell’s
pearl of possibly appropriated Proustian wisdom bears long-term fruit this
coming weekend at a very special one-night extravaganza programmed as part of
Celtic Connections. Things Are Tough, We Can Still Picnic takes place at
Glasgow arts lab, the CCA, and features the world premieres of two very special
musical troupes. Not for nothing, it seems, was Article 58’s three-minute opus
titled Event to Come.
First
up, MacIntyre will unveil his own Port Sulphur project, a Creeping Bent house
band of sorts, whose live incarnation features a pan-generational pedigree of
artists including former Orange Juice guitarist James Kirk and ex Aztec Camera
bassist Campbell Owens. MacIntyre likens it to “a post-modern version of Booker
T and The MGs.”
Port Sulphur’s
first foray into the world was with the motorik strains of the knowingly named
Fast Boys and Factory Girls single. This featured on full-length follow-up,
Paranoic Critical, while the live set will also feature excerpts from
Valentino’s, a collection of musical sense memories named after Campbell’s Rational
era club and available for one day only on February 14th.
“Port
Sulphur is effectively my indulgence,” MacIntyre says of what began as a solo
project excavating half-formed recordings and reconstructing them using chance
elements drawn from Luke Rhinehart’s novel, The Dice Man, and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. “The initial idea was to have no collaborators, and taking
any notions of authenticity out of the project was really liberating for me.”
Things
changed, however, and MacIntyre started seeking musical responses to what
already existed from a pantheon of fellow travellers.
“Once
you have Vic Godard or Davy Henderson from the Sexual Objects on a song it
becomes amazing,” says MacIntyre, “and you let them sculpt those songs the way
they would rather than how I’d do it. The best example of that was when I gave
James Kirk a really electronic track, and it came back sounding like Orange
Juice.”
Sharing
joint headline status is Pop Group guitarist Gareth Sager and the new beat
combo he styles as The Hungry Ghosts. Sager’s musical eclecticism has seen him
move from the incendiary ferocity of The Pop Group, through the free jazz
playfulness of Rip, Rig and Panic, the punk-funk of Head and even a Debussy and
Satie influenced solo piano record recorded at Abbey Road.
The
Hungry Ghosts, however, strip things down to what Sager styles as
“stomp-glam-funk. I’ve made about 25 albums, and I’ve never put any limits on
what I do, but it felt like the right time to do something just with guitar,
bass and drums and nothing else. I’ve never written in a purely rock and roll
context before, and I wanted to see if the songs would stand up without me being
tempted to put strings or a Hammond organ on them.”
The
results of this back to basics approach can be heard on Juicy Rivers, which
forms the third part of Sager’s Creeping Bent triptych begun with The Last
Second of Normal Time, first released in 2003, with the second part, 2009’s
Slack Slack Music, just released in a new CD edition.
Sager
also appears on Paranoic Critical, providing loops and fuzz clarinet on
constructions based around the vocals of poet and sometime collaborator, the
late Jock Scot on one track, and the also departed Suicide vocalist Alan Vega
on the other.
“It’s
not everyone who’d phone me up and ask to put music to this recording by Alan
Vega,” says Sager, “but Douglas is a maverick, and I think it’s important as we
become an older generation not to just curl up in front of the TV, but to get
out there and do what you want to do whatever age you are.”
Friday
night’s extravaganza will be presented under the guise of Everything Flows, a
happening new ‘cultural events organisation’ which has already hosted German
record label Marina’s similarly styled quarter-century shindig. This weekend’s event,
which also features support from nouveau indie janglers The Plastic Youth,
looks set to be even more conceptual. Its attitude dates back to A Leap into
the Void, the Yves Klein referencing multi-media extravaganza that launched
Creeping Bent at Tramway in Glasgow back in 1994.
“To
me, Creeping Bent isn’t a record label,” says MacIntyre. “It’s an art project. We
believe in having total control over the means of production.”
This is
something picked up from Bob Last and Hilary Morrison’s Edinburgh sired Fast
Product imprint, which understood the value of packaging, both in terms of
visual identity and putting on events rather than plain old gigs. It’s also
about working with artists over a long period of time.
“A
core part of Creeping Bent has been working with Gareth and with Davy
Henderson,” says MacIntyre. “What they’re doing is really valuable, and it’s
not a nostalgia trip. The work they’re producing today matters as much as
anything they’ve done at any time in their careers. They’re great artists, and it’s
important to get their work out there.”
Key
to Creeping Bent’s cross-generational continuum is Green Door, the
Glasgow-based studio credited on Paranoic Critical which has become a musical
think-tank for some of the most interesting younger musical auteurs in town.
This includes Sam Joseph Smith, who will play as part of Port Sulphur on
Friday.
“It’s
great being around the place,” says MacIntyre. “It feels like anything
interesting coming out of Glasgow just now is coming out of Green Door. For us,
working in that environment and seeing what’s going on is really exciting. It’s
all about keeping your antennae up on what’s happening,” he says, “and then
stealing it.”
Things
Are Tough, We Can Still Picnic, 25 Years of the Creeping Bent Organisation, featuring
Gareth Sager and The Hungry Ghosts, Port Sulphur and The Plastic Youth, CCA,
Glasgow as part of Celtic Connections, February 1. Juicy Rivers by Gareth Sager
and The Holy Ghosts and Paranoic Critical by Port Sulphur are available now.
Valentino’s by Port Sulphur is available for one day only on February 14.
The Herald, January 31st 2019
ends
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