Sounds, May 17, 1980<\/strong><\/p>\nMaybe it\u2019s a symptom of the generally stale and unimaginative after-Punk musical spectrum, but there doesn\u2019t seem to be any longer a space at all for quiet music.<\/p>\n
Apart from MOR slush and anything calculatedly tepid from the charts, and with the recent mighty exception of Joy Division\u2019s remarkable \u201cAtmosphere,\u201d quiet, imaginatively unflustered music seems to have quietly gone down the drain in a big way.<\/p>\n
The explanation, of course, is easy.\u00a0 The music scene is in a staccato state of mock-vicious toil and bluster, all big and colourful and overproduced until it\u2019s indecent.\u00a0 As now championed with Dexy\u2019s \u201cGeno\u201d (which as a matter of fact I\u2019m quiet partial to) at the peak of the chart pile, the trend is for sheer noise.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t matter whether it\u2019s got backbone or not, it has to be shiny and sure of itself, and the only way you can sneak out of that in the big stakes is to be like the Cure and Genesis and disappear up your own Moog being sincere and wackily modern(e).<\/p>\n
Even in the seventies, when things were in a similarly h.m.\/pseud-rock dominated state, you had the efficiently low-decibelled fine arts of the likes of Richard Thompson, Roy Harper, Ivor Cutler or Country Joe, each in their own way as subversive as anything else around.<\/p>\n
Now it\u2019s pure Hollywood, you have to have a degree in chat-show politics to be a rock performer, and a big reactionary mouth to back it.\u00a0 Which brings us to the uniqueness of Young Marble Giants.\u00a0 The first impression is: God, have they a nerve!\u00a0 Stepping into the showbiz whirlpool of \u201980s\u00a0 rock & roll with a pitter-patter trickling of songs that have more silence than sound!\u00a0 You can hardly hear them!<\/p>\n
To which the candid young Marble\u2019s fan with an eye for logistics must reply, Colossal Youth, the colossally quiet album, is in the Alternative charts (Ugh! I hate those tidy charts!) and kicking: it looks like quiet music never went away.<\/p>\n
I always say that for every supreme truth you must be able to take the opposite, the complete reverse of that truth and prove it real as well, like two poles of a unity.\u00a0 In this sense, Colossal Youth is the opposite of \u201cAnarchy In The UK\u201d or \u201cClash City Rockers,\u201d and it\u2019s every bit as good as well.\u00a0 It almost affected me as much, made me feel almost as excited and surprised when I first heard it.\u00a0 Literally speaking, it is an exceptional record (my favorite album of the year so far with Magazine\u2019s The Correct Use of Soap).\u00a0 It stands out a mile.<\/p>\n
Stuart Moxham, disarmingly tall writer of Marble tunes, draws some light on this when he says, \u201cYoung Marble Giants is a reaction to everything successful today\u2026\u201d which although misleading in terms of presenting you with idea of the music\u2019s content, does indicate how far away the Giants are from modern mass trends.<\/p>\n
Like Swell Maps were to DIY last year, Young Marble Giants are a splinter representation of \u201chow else it can be done,\u201d of new (and not really so new) ways of communicating through music.\u00a0 By mellow subtlety.\u00a0 By extravagant sparsity.\u00a0 By not pushing it too hard.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve heard tracks from Colossal Youth on everything from Radio London morning kiddies\u2019 shows to the horrifically young and trendy Radio 1 spots, and it\u2019s made me feel good and surprised each time, because the music has sounded right, not at all in keeping with the village idiot\u2019s idea of a Rough Trade group, but still a little spooky and full of character.<\/p>\n
Images the music makes are: tiny Welsh tearooms, childhood fear, coffee-bar intimacy, murder, lost love, sleep, tension and longing constantly underlied by an enduring eeriness in the music which I find similar to the now-forgotten eccentricity of Ivor Cutler.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve never even heard of Ivor Cutler!\u201d Stuart protests and I believe him.\u00a0 Young Marbles are very separate, they come from Cardiff and they\u2019re still a little frozen in \u201cprovincial\u201d (Stuart\u2019s word) ways, so that the bravely detached aura of the music is readily explained.<\/p>\n
While everywhere from Coventry to Liverpool to Belfast to Dorset has had its rock & roll moments in the recent past, Wales has come up with absolutely nothing, leaving you wondering whether Wales hadn\u2019t really given up after Andy Fairweather-Low and Man (and with that track record, you couldn\u2019t have blamed them).<\/p>\n
\u201cCardiff is a really awful place\u2026it\u2019s industrial, a depressed area\u2026and it\u2019s not only provincial, it\u2019s also Welsh which means it\u2019s also very self-important.\u00a0 Quite frankly I don\u2019t like it very much\u2026\u201d Stuart Moxham opines.<\/p>\n
Stuart is already based in London, while the other two Giants, his almost equally lanky brother Philip and singer Alison Statton, are thinking about moving up too.\u00a0 It will be interesting to see if the change in environment affects the music and its quality, because Colossal Youth really does smack of an album done in a particular place and in a particular atmosphere.<\/p>\n
Will movement from that very special, in\u00a0rock & roll terms profitably secluded atmosphere, change the music, make it less special, less original?<\/p>\n
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We\u2019ll see.\u00a0 For now, Colossal Youth is the criteria to judge the Giants on, and that\u2019s plenty.\u00a0 I talked to the band last Friday at Rough Trade and was first struck by how peculiar they looked.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure it\u2019s not my imagination; they looked provincial and slightly wholesome and innocent, though not vulnerable.<\/p>\n
Stuart tells me they get old people liking the music, which fits.\u00a0 They bring their dog with them to gigs, and that too fills out the impression of \u201cThree Men in a Boat\u201d that comes through, with Alison in particular looking wide-eyed and straight out of a Girl\u2019s Own story, as the heroine, of course.\u00a0 You get the impression she\u2019s going to fall over any minute in the big-city smog, and that she\u2019s been brought up on fresh cow\u2019s milk and healthy Girl Guide rambles through the Welsh valleys.\u00a0 She looks frighteningly innocent.<\/p>\n
Stuart: \u201cWhen we first started playing we felt almost apologetic because we weren\u2019t loud and danceable\u2026we were quiet and slow and melodic and all those things you shouldn\u2019t be, especially after Punk\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
The band haven\u2019t always been so quiet; rather they\u2019ve progressed that way through the odd \u201crockier type band\u201d along the way, finally coming to the conclusion that this is how they should sound.<\/p>\n
Is the quietness conscious then?\u00a0 Stuart: \u201cI don\u2019t know if that was deliberate in a way\u2026we\u2019ve tried to go against every possible grain at once and still come up with something that\u2019s an essence of what we\u2019re trying to do\u2026you know, not to conform to anything at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
The important thing to note at the moment is that Young Marble Giants are a serious proposition and Colossal Youth is no one-off, bizarre fragment of talent.<\/p>\n
Stuart in particular, as well as writing the bulk of the material, seems like the organizing, getting-it-together figure.\u00a0 Natch: the band have a new single out at any time (three track, \u201cFinal Day,\u201d Cakewalking\u201d and \u201cRadio Silents\u201d), together with a series of gigs around the country.\u00a0 They mean business, of sorts.<\/p>\n
Stuart: \u201cWe never aimed to do this.\u00a0 We are kind of isolated down in Cardiff in our front-room, working from inside ourselves in a way, and what we\u2019re doing just happens to be acceptable at the moment\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Philip, significantly: \u201cWe\u2019ve no experience of the modern thing\u2026the music we listened to before was the innovators like Kraftwerk, Roxy and Eno\u2026it\u2019s only recently since we\u2019ve joined Rough Trade that we\u2019ve heard about Cabaret Voltaire and the Slits and the rest\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Stuart: \u201cYou see, we\u2019d given ourselves a deadline.\u00a0 I was going to move to Berlin and the band were going to split up at Christmas time\u2026Rough Trade were really timely.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing because everything\u2019s fitted for us really well and naturally.\u00a0 There\u2019s been no unpleasantness, nothing\u2019s been forced\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Rough Trade stepped in when they heard the band on a Cardiff compilation, and with a sharpness that\u2019s far too often slagged by cruds who can\u2019t think beyond the big-label time-space, told them, in Stuart\u2019s words, \u201cdo whatever you want to do.\u201d\u00a0 Hence, Youth (\u201cWe thought it would make an impact if we came from nowhere with an album instead of a single\u201d) and work with producer Dave Anderson of Mo-Detted, Logic and Pop Group fame.<\/p>\n
Stuart: \u201cDave\u2019s an old rock star (!) and in a way he didn\u2019t know what to expect from us, and I think even then we surprised him.\u00a0 We did the album in five days\u2026twenty minutes for a mix, literally!\u201d<\/p>\n
The album\u2019s eerie wheezy sound comes partly from the nature of the mix, which was hurried and minimalized by the stark input of only three instruments, including Alison\u2019s voice, at any given time.<\/p>\n
Stuart: \u201cWhen you write music you write the gaps in between as much as you write the music.\u00a0 There\u2019s ways of making a sound full without having lots of instruments playing.\u00a0 I think you can lose things otherwise\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
I mention the fact that the songs are often obsessed with food; they react surprised, astonished, and Stuart brings up a more conscious theme in the music.\u00a0 \u201cThe songs are all based on things that happened to me with my girlfriend.\u00a0 That\u2019s the most important thing that\u2019s happened to me in years, meeting this particular girl and what we\u2019ve been through.\u00a0 We broke up and now we\u2019re back together again, it\u2019s been a really stormy relationship\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Thinking for a moment on the frequent chilliness that comes across in Alison\u2019s Sunday school voice, I refer to Philip\u2019s \u201cThe Man Amplifier\u201d on the album.<\/p>\n
Stuart: \u201cPhilip wrote that after seeing a programme about a robot you strap yourself into and it amplified your movements, so that if you want to pick your nose and it isn\u2019t programmed to do it, it\u2019ll pull your head off.\u00a0 It\u2019s a really primitive American idea\u2026that songs always sounds as though it\u2019s about to fall apart, and that\u2019s what I imagine the Man Amp to be like, a kind of prototype, a primitive thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
He talks about Alison\u2019s extraordinary voice: \u201cIt\u2019s really weird, because what happens is I write the melody and sing it, and then Alison sings it back.\u00a0 But when I sing it, it tends to be emotional because the lyrics are mine.\u00a0 Alison on the other hand is really laid back and unemotional sounding.\u00a0 It\u2019s a strange paradox, a disinterested voice singing about something emotional.\u201d<\/p>\n
I leave him to ponder on the consequences of that.<\/p>\n
Some days later I\u2019m sitting here toying with notions of Young Marbles as \u201cpsychedelic bedsit,\u201d \u201cuniquely old-fashioned\u201d and \u201ccoldly romantic,\u201d flicking away each one as it forms, really hoping only that Young Marbles discover the mind-space and the time-space in a clapped out world to be, nothing more or nothing less than, quiet.\u00a0 Long may they be a whisper.<\/p>\n
DAVE McCULLOUGH<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Searching For Mr Right \/ Include Me Out \/ The Taxi \/ Eating Noodlemix \/ Constantly Changing \/ N.I.T.A. \/ Colossal Youth Music For Evenings \/ The Man Amplifier \/ Choci Loni \/ Wurlitzer Jukebox \/ Salad Days \/ Credit In The Straight World \/ Brand New Life \/ Wind In The Rigging A spectacular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-downloads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5789"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5794,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5789\/revisions\/5794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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