When
Max Richter’s eight-hour composition, Sleep, was first broadcast live on BBC
Radio 3 in September 2015, I decided to go full method, and listen to it in
bed. The result of this was that within a few minutes of lying in the dark with
the light off while Richter’s neurologically inclined epic washed over me, I
promptly fell asleep.
Richter’s
performance that night alongside soprano Grace Davidson and five string players
took place between midnight and 8am in the Reading Room of the Wellcome
Collection in London. Played in front of an audience lying in beds rather than
seated, Sleep formed the climax of BBC Radio 3’s Science and Music weekend. It
was composed, as Richter described it, as “a call to arms to stop what we’re
doing.” Ergo, my response in nodding off so rapidly, before drifting in and out
of conscious and unconscious hearing over the next eight hours, was probably
the point of the exercise.
Whether this happens again when Sleep is
rebroadcast this coming Easter Saturday night from 11pm as part of BBC Radio 3’s
Slow and Mindful series of broadcasts during the current pandemic-enforced
lockdown remains to be seen. And indeed heard, as Richter’s Guinness World
Record holding composition for the longest broadcast of a single piece of music
and longest live broadcast of a single piece of music is aired across Europe,
the USA, Canada and New Zealand.
My response
to Sleep in 2015 was akin to what used to happen thirty-five years or so
earlier, while listening to John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 late-night programme in
similar circumstances. The self-mythology of my generation as being a bunch of
socially awkward teens who found solace tuning in to Peel-championed unlistenable
obscurities on unreliable transistor radios under the bed-clothes has been
propagated to the point of cliché, but only because it was true.
For
me, while I was kept as alert as I could be in my back bedroom overlooking
Anfield Cemetery by all manner of noiseniks, eccentrics and avant-provocateurs,
my Achilles heel was dub. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it. Being a skinny white
indie kid I had absolutely zero frame of reference for reggae, but heard it
between bands at pretty much every gig I went to. Which, to be honest, wasn’t
many at that time, but still.
As
soon as Peel announced a pre-release by King Tubby, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Eek A
Mouse or any other of their sound-clash contemporaries, however, I knew I was a
goner. There was something about the elongated bounce of the low-slung rhythmic
sludge that seeped into the brain and slowed down the heart enough to drag me
under into dreamland. Next thing I knew, I’d come awake to the crackle and hiss
of the post-show static that punctuated the airwaves back then when it was BBC
radio that went into lockdown after midnight once Peel’s show was over.
These
days I listen to dub all the time. Played low, the bass and drums possess an
unobtrusive propulsion that makes it easy to work to. Live, it’s trouser-flappingly
loud sonic whoosh is brain-meldingly invigorating. Either way, dub reggae keeps
me very much awake. It’s playing now, in the middle of the night while I’m
writing this, my playlist on permanent shuffle as I try to get on with stuff.
As
with the intention behind Sleep, my everyday soundtrack is one way of getting
through the lockdown, giving each day some kind of ballast. As a long-term
freelancer who works from home in a job where I’m essentially trying to make
some kind of sense of what’s going on in my head, this was the case long before
the pandemic took hold. One might argue too that not being able to go out
anywhere and being stuck on your own indoors is a bit like being back on the
dole. Except, even though solitary confinement undoubtedly becomes me, it’s all
a bit different than both those things, and requires a new set of responses
that Sleep is contributing to.
The
fallout of the pandemic in terms of the closure of theatres, concert halls,
music venues and galleries has provoked a wave of activity from assorted
artistic communities, many of them online. First out the traps that I became
aware of was Cryptic, the Glasgow-based experimental visual music auteurs, who
had programmed one of their Cryptic Nights events in the Glad Café on the
city’s south side. Rather than cancel, Cryptic took advantage of the company’s
multi-media aesthetic, and streamed the event’s performances by Russian artist
Aeger Smoothie, Vietnamese composer, LinhHafornow, and Glasgow electronicist, Alex
Smoke, live online from an otherwise empty venue.
Stina
Tweeddale of Glasgow band, Honeyblood, set up a regular half-hour nightly show,
broadcast first from the sofa of her Iceblink Luck studio, and featuring guests
Emme Woods, Carla J Easton and Martha Ffion. Once full lockdown hit, Tweeddale
streamed a series of intimate shows from her living room featuring
stripped-back original songs from her back catalogue alongside some charmingly
quirky cover versions.
Meanwhile,
in London, Café OTO, arguably the UK’s most adventurous small music venue,
presented a series of nightly shows by the likes of Alasdair Roberts, free
vocalist Elaine Mitchener and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor. These again, were
performed to an otherwise empty room, with creative multiple camera action
taking advantage of the space to play in.
If
Tweeddale’s Honeyblood Studio Sessions looked like early ‘80s DIY public access
TV, the Café OTO shows recalled proper 1970s BBC 2 arts television. Both used
the situation they had found themselves in as fund-raisers. With planned live
dates by Tweeddale cancelled, she set up a GoFundMe campaign, with money raised
split between paying her guest artists and the Help Musicians Scotland charity.
Café OTO similarly invited those watching to donate in order to ensure some
kind of survival in the precarious post-pandemic world that will exist at some
point in an increasingly far-off future.
Other
venues too started fund-raisers, with Henry’s Cellar Bar in Edinburgh setting
up a GoFundMe to accompany the venue’s weekly Monday night open mic style
affair, now hosted from assorted living rooms and kitchens. Quarantine Cabaret
set up something similar, while the first night of The Stand comedy club’s regular
online Saturday shows saw the likes of Phill Jupitus and Jo Caulfield perform online
to an audience of 8,000.
Film-maker
Mark Cousins improvised an indispensable two-hour online essay, 40 Days to
Learn Film, and art galleries across the globe promoted their long-standing
virtual tours. There were already existing podcasts, including Ida Schuster’s Old
School, a wise and witty look at life and work by the 101-year-old actress and
one-time doyen of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, who sadly passed away this
week.
As
the full impact of the Covid-19 lockdown took root, larger institutions
responded to enforced cancellations of entire seasons. The National Theatre of
Scotland announced a series of Scenes for Survival commissions. Pitlochry
Festival Theatre started up a daily broadcast of solo performances. Elsewhere
there were mini ceilidhs, bedroom gigs and an online performance of Bubble, a
new play by writer of Beats, Kieran Hurley, presented by Theatre Uncut. Edinburgh
baroque pop band Storm the Palace made a wry video cover of Eric Carmen’s 1975
mope-along classic, All by Myself, with the band’s five members operating out
of rooms in different locations.
Others
put their archives online, with the National Theatre of Great Britain starting
a weekly stream of hit shows, including One Man, Two Guvnors and Sally
Cookson’s reimagining of Jane Eyre. The Metropolitan Opera in New York did
something similar, as did Scottish Ballet in Glasgow and The Wooster Group in
New York. There have been benefit shows for frontline workers by Elton John and
fund-raisers by Frank Turner for the small venues he came up through.
Glasgow-based
record label, Last Night from Glasgow started taking pre-orders for The
Isolation Sessions, a forthcoming double album of the label’s roster covering
each other’s songs. All proceeds from sales are set to go to the various venues
where the label had planned assorted launches and show-cases. While the album
has yet to be completed, it is already the biggest seller by the label to date.
All
of this was pretty great to have around to fill the void where work used to sit
alongside rest and play, and for the first couple of weeks of lockdown I embraced
it. Myself and a couple of mates developed a kind of virtual kidology, whereby
we made out we were just having a normal night out, only indoors.
“What
are you up too, later?” we’d ask each other by text as the off-the-leash weekend-starts-here
anticipation began on Friday afternoon.
“I’ll
probably head over to Stina’s place early doors,” came the reply, “then grab a
bite to eat and a couple of beers before going down to Café OTO. Although
Blanck Mass are playing tonight as well, so I might swing by there if I can
make it work.”
The global
village of online entertainment was a non-stop party of living room gigs,
straight-to-camera stand-up and intimate-as-anything performance poetry sets.
It was all very urgent in the need to keep alive the spirit of the places that had
just gone dark.
But
for all the energy and the will to survive and the need by some artists to get
their work out there, sometimes it became barely possible to take all this in
along with everything else going on in the real world without at times feeling
overwhelmed. There is the sneaking suspicion as well that, regardless of this
sudden surge of bespoke not-quite-live online artistry, most people are
watching box sets on Netflix as they would do anyway, same-as-it-ever-was, carrying
on regardless. Having just caught up on six seasons of laugh-out-loud American police
precinct comedy, Brooklyn 99, I’m totally down with that as well.
And
then there are the treasures of YouTube. One of these is Marc, the cut-price
tea-time pop vehicle for doomed glam pixie Marc Bolan, made by Granada TV just
before he died in a car crash in 1977. Given the overload of music TV these
days, it’s fascinating to watch Bolan’s awkward and clearly out-of-it intros to
a limbo-land compendium of old hams and new wavers. Other than Top of the Pops for
teens and The Old Grey Whistle Test for album-loving bores, this and other
shows produced by Muriel Young was all there was back then
After
watching the first three episodes of six, Bolan’s own performances include a
cover of Jody Reynolds’ rockabilly teenage tragedy, Endless Sleep, later a hit
for Marty Wilde. Other delights have included the Bay City Rollers, who
previously hosted their own Young-produced show, Shang-a-Lang. There was also
an appearance by mutton-dressed-as-lamb punk pretenders, Radio Stars, fronted
by Andy Ellisson, Bolan’s old mate in ‘60s hippy combo, John’s Children.
Then
there was Alfalpha, led by future Dream Academy fop and Pink Floyd
collaborator, Nick Laird-Clowes, and a Scottish would-be heartbreaker new to me
called Jamie Wild. There are appearances too from The Jam, Hawkwind doing the very
Velvet Undergroundesque Quark, Strangeness and Charm, and Bob Geldof’s Boomtown
Rats performing Looking After Number 1.
A
treat too is the sartorial elegance of Bolan’s bassist Herbie Flowers, the man
whose bass-line for Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side pretty much defined the
song, and who here sports an entire range of workman’s dungarees, dirty old
man’s raincoat and pyjamas ensemble.
Best
of all is the show’s resident four-woman dance troupe, Heart Throb, whose school
disco routines to numbers by Showaddywaddy, Confessions actor Robin Askwith and
Desmond Dekker make the same era’s Pan’s People and Legs and Co troupes on Top
of the Pops look sophisticated. It turns out that Heart Throb’s choreographer,
Teri Scoble, was also an actress, who played one half of Siamese Twins, with
her sister playing the other half, in David Lynch’s film, The Elephant Man. It
also turns out that both Scoble siblings played uber-blonde demon seeds from
outer space in Village of the Damned, the 1960 big-screen adaptation of John
Wyndham’s science-fiction novel, The Midwich Cuckoos.
The
first thing I thought of when lockdown happened was another science-fiction
story, this time written by an American. The Pedestrian, by Ray Bradbury, was first
published in 1951, and collected two years later in The Golden Apples of the
Sun. Bradbury’s poignant short tale charts a late-night walk by an old man
living in a future where the empty streets are policed by robot cars. As the
man is walking, he is detained by one, taken in, and driven down the deserted
boulevards and past his own house in which the warm glow of humanity still
resides.
I
first read The Pedestrian years ago, probably around the same time I was
listening to John Peel under the bed-clothes. I later heard a recording of it
read by actor David Horovitch on BBC Radio 4 that was first broadcast in 2001.
I first heard the recording on BBC Radio 4 Extra, the BBC’s brilliant archive
station that I sometimes listen to on what used to be the BBC iPlayer Radio
app, but which has now been rebranded as BBC Sounds.
On
being reminded of The Pedestrian, I looked up Ray Bradbury’s name on BBC Sounds
to see if the recording was still available. It wasn’t, but what came up was a
programme from 1989 called Meridian, which featured an interview with Bradbury.
I’d never heard of Meridian before, but it had an archive dating from 1980 and
1981 – again, the same era I was falling asleep to dub on John Peel – going
right up to 2004.
Meridian
seems to have been the BBC World Service arts magazine equivalent of Front Row.
Features to be found in the treasure trove include William Burroughs talking around
the time of his Cities of the Red Night tour, and English sci-fi novelist JG
Ballard interviewed about his then new 1981 novel, Hello America. Ballard’s
book is set in a future where an ecological collapse has caused North America
to be virtually uninhabitable, with most of the world’s population evacuated to
Europe and Asia. England, meanwhile, is suffering from a radioactive fallout,
and the book charts an expedition to North America by the European crew of a
steamship in order to discover the cause of the fallout.
Meridian
has become part of my new daily lockdown routine, as I listen to one episode
through headphones on my mobile each morning over breakfast, working my way
through the archive in date order. One of the interesting things about
listening to it is how attitudes have and haven’t changed since then. The
presenters of Meridian are terribly posh, and not a little patronising towards
their subjects. One interviewer basically tells Peter Ustinov to his face that
the film he just made is rubbish, while a younger writer is informed his work
really isn’t up to scratch. A review of play on in Stoke about the history of
the mines is judged with the disclaimer that some of the regional accents might
be hard to understand.
In an
analysis of whether the British Museum should be giving its plundered treasures
back to colonised African nations, the then head of the Museum, Dr David Wilson,
rather testily makes clear that while they might be happy to loan them on a
short-term basis, the Museum categorically wouldn’t be giving anything away. In
other episodes, Meridian covers the death of Bob Marley, the opening of
Mustapha Matura’s play, One Rule, about a successful reggae star not unlike
Marley, and the latest fiction from African Caribbean writers now living in the
UK. All this and a report on the gala opening of Pitlochry Festival Theatre
too.
Put
in context of these early episodes of Meridian being broadcast around the same
time as the UK inner-city riots of 1981, such snippets are a fascinating time
capsule into attitudes towards cultures outwith the Oxbridge-designated canon.
In some of the items described above, Meridian tip-toes its way around issues
of diversity and inclusiveness without ever really knowing what to do with
them.
In
contrast, I was alerted to Between the Ears, BBC Radio 3’s programme of what it
styles as ‘adventurous listening’, but which does roughly what online at radio
station Resonance FM has been doing for years. The episode I was pointed
towards was aired a couple of weeks ago, and featured Icelandic artist Ragnar
Kjartansson talking about his work, Me and My Mother, in which once every five
years he gets his mother, actress Guorun Asmundsdottir, to spit on him.
I
first encountered Kjartansson’s work several years ago in Reykjavik, where I
saw two of his multi-screen installations. One of these, The Visitors, features
a group of musicians filmed playing a song written by Kjartansson’s ex-wife,
Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir, over and over. Each musician or group of musicians are
filmed playing in nine separate rooms in Rokeby House, set in a large estate in
upstate New York, before they eventually come together at the end of the film
and wander off into the grounds of the estate, still playing. The techniques
used in bringing the performance together in different places probably aren’t
that far removed from how Storm the Palace made their video for All by Myself.
Other
episodes of Between the Ears have featured impressionistic studies of Victorian
dioramas and fairground arcades, as I’ve now discovered after introducing an
episode a day to my daily routine alongside Meridian, this time while cooking
dinner. As I move through the archives of both programmes, with Meridian I am
moving forwards towards then unknown futures I can now judge in hindsight. In
contrast, with Between the Ears, it feels like I’m rewinding on a state-of-art
present of tone poems built from the past.
In
thinking about Sleep again, I remembered first encountering Max Richter when he
performed in Stirling in 2006 as part of the Le Weekend experimental music
festival. Interviewing him beforehand for the Herald newspaper, I discovered
the German-born composer had not only studied music at the University of
Edinburgh, but had later moved back there, where he co-founded the contemporary
classical ‘post-minimalist’ group, Piano Circus.
Since
then, Richter’s work has become ubiquitous. Amongst a welter of big screen
credits, Richter recently composed the soundtrack for the Josie Rourke directed
film, Mary Queen of Scots, starring Saoirse Ronan as Mary. Other credits
include dystopian sci-fi TV drama, Orphan Black, and episodes of Black Mirror.
Almost a decade ago, Richter scored David Mackenzie’s 2011 film, Perfect Sense,
starring Eva Green and Ewan McGregor as a scientist and a chef caught up in a
global epidemic that causes people to lose one of their senses.
Inspired
by all this, I looked up Max Richter on the BBC Sounds app. As expected, I found
a host of programmes with him on. He’s there on Front Row talking about
composing his ballet about Virginia Woolf, Woolf Works, writing music for TV
show, Taboo, and the prolific use in film of his piece, On the Nature of
Daylight. He’s there too on Music Matters and My Classical Favourites.
Presenting Saturday Classics, he showcases a thirty-odd minute selection of
music by the likes of Charles Ives, Bill Evans and ‘deep-listening’ composer
Pauline Oliveros, all based around the theme of peace.
Richter
is there too on Only Artists, which brings together two disparate artistic
practitioners in conversation. Richter meets visual artist Tacita Dean. Other
editions rather tantalisingly include a meeting between actress Maxine Peake
and musician, artist and former member of Throbbing Gristle, Cosey Fanni Tutti.
I make a mental note to add Only Artists to my daily radio routine. I also
check out Richter on a podcast of In Tune Highlights from 2016, on which he talks
about Sleep a year after its first broadcast. Rewinding to 2015, there he is
again, talking about Sleep on Front Row prior to its world premiere and sending
me to sleep.
Inbetween
my daily bookends of Meridian and Between the Ears, there is plenty to be done.
The state-sanctioned daily outdoor exercise has opened up other possibilities
beyond a computer screen. In the last week, I have stumbled on a park I never
knew existed, and watched the ducks flap about in the pond. I found at least
three chip shops open for business, but managed to resist them all. I have a
new favourite street, with houses built largely of red brick in a way you don’t
often find in Edinburgh.
In
the not quite deserted retail park that my flat overlooks, the shops have
become Ballardian warehouses of everyday consumerism in which bath mats and tea
towels are reimagined as limited edition multiples to pore over. I have bought
an ironing board cover, attracted by the pattern, even though I do not own an
iron. Inbetween the retail park and my new favourite street, a half-built
housing development somewhat optimistically calls itself Urban Eden, despite
their being no discernible patch of grass in sight. The only thing evident is
the unoriginal sin of bad planning.
In
the other direction, on the hoardings beside the deserted building site next to
Meadowbank Stadium, posters for theatre shows at the Lyceum and concerts at
Edinburgh Castle now look like memorials for events that never happened. Next
to them is a display of graffiti art, at the centre of which is Shona Hardie’s
gorgeous mural of Andrew Weatherall that went up a couple of days after the record
producer, DJ and sonic wizard who married dance music to dub and pretty much
everything else beyond died in February. It’s ridiculous it’s taken me so long
to get out to see something that lit up social media when it first went up, and
which is only five minutes away from me, but I guess I thought there was no
time in the way there is now.
Further
on, past the boarded up shops and an incongruous looking pair of empty steel
benches outside an insurance office, a blackboard in a pub window bears the
chalked-on legend, ‘No money, no booze, only hope. I walk home along a street
I’ve never walked along before.
None
of this experience can be replicated online. None of this can be found on
Facebook, Zoom, Patreon, Instagram or Twitter. On the one hand, everything
going on in these various virtual outlets is creating an artistic archive of a
crucial time in history which will make or break many of us. On the other, I’m
reminded of a one-minute monologue by Quentin Crisp that first appeared in 1980
on the Cherry Red Records compilation, Miniatures, then again two years later on
another compilation, Pillows & Prayers. Actor and Still Game star Gavin
Mitchell tellingly put loaded Crisp’s tersely polite damnation onto his
Facebook page the other day. It’s title? Stop the Music for a Minute.
But
what to do instead? The broadcast of Sleep and all the online performances that
go along with it won’t make Covid-19 go away. If only. Neither will they
protect the NHS doctors, nurses and care-workers on the front-line, the post
men and women, the cleaners, the public transport drivers and supermarket
staff, heroes and heroines all, from possible infection.
What
Sleep might do, in the ongoing storm of uncertainty and fury at the barrage of
misinformation, conspiracy theories and out and out lies is maybe, just maybe,
offer something resembling a few moments of peace.
And
me? I’m one of the lucky ones. I have plenty to keep me amused. I have worked
at home for more than twenty years. I have ‘worked at home’ on the dole and
beyond for considerably longer.
I am
not spending any money. This is just as well, as there is unlikely to be much
coming in for the near future, at least. I took out fifty quid from the cash
machine three weeks ago in case of emergencies. I still have thirty-five of it
left, plus some loose change. To be fair, grocery shops have been paid for by
card, but even so.
There
has been no dashing for tea-time trains. As a result of this, I am cooking
regularly. I have tea bags and toilet rolls. I am domesticating. If it wasn’t
for the walks, I might never leave the house again.
In
the meantime, I’m off in tonight. I might take a wander around the Cooper Art
Gallery in Dundee first, where the website has a host of film and audio
material relating to their postponed exhibition of work by radical film-makers,
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero. There’s a
new film as well by artist Mairi Lafferty called Tongues that’s just gone
online, and there’s bound to be a gig on somewhere. There’s the other three
episodes of Marc as well, but let’s see. I’ll listen to Meridian in the
morning, Between the Ears at teatime, and dub reggae in-between. But for now, at
least, it’s time to catch up on some Sleep.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06db5tv
Stina
Tweeddale’s Honeyblood Studio Sessions archive can be found on the Honeyblood
Facebook page.
Café
OTO’s sessions are archived at www.cafeoto.co.uk
The
Isolation Sessions can be pre-ordered from Last Night from Glasgow at
www.lastnightfromglasgow.com
Mark
Cousin’ film, 40 Days to Learn Film can be watched at www.vimeo/399407221
A
non-BBC recording of The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury is available at
m.youtube.com/watch?v=KtpDc3ySSbw
Details
of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Scenes for Survival season can be found
at www.nationaltheatrescotland.com
The
Meridian and Between the Ears archives are available at www.bbc.co.uk/sounds
Episodes
of Marc can be viewed at m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0NEfm_Y-io
A is
for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero – Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollan, is at the Cooper
Gallery, Dundee on www.dundee.ac.uk/cooper-gallery
Tongues
by Mairi Lafferty is at www.mapmagazine.co.uk
Stop
the Music for a Minute by Quentin Crisp is on Pillows and Prayers, available
from Cherry Red Records on www.cherryred.co.uk, and can be heard at
m.youtube.com/watch?v=5k6UdtxJXMI
Shona
Hardie’s mural of Andrew Weatherall can be seen on the hoardings outside the
building site at Meadowbank Stadium, Edinburgh.
Bella Caledonia, April 2020
ends
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