For the last three years, it appears to me, that I’ve forgotten who I am exactly. But the past few days I’ve had a few musical moments that have pulled me back to my essential Darren Lock-ness, if there is such a thing. Who am I? That’s a good question. Who are you? I can’t answer that.
I am the perennial seventeen-year-old, like all men, the boy who doesn’t want to grow up, who is fascinated by technology and gadgetry and the future arriving every day. The boy who wanted to write a for living, but got jaded with it all when he realised that nowadays it is more about keeping the advertisers happy than actually serving your readership. The guy who wants to just have the time to create. To produce, because there’s nothing else to do really. If things had been different, I’d have had a million children by now, but I am grateful for my place in time and grateful that my various creative pursuits fill in the gaps.
But music is more important to me that I can possibly realise. Of course, I’d cut my ears off and break my fingers and throw my guitars out of the window, just for the chance to read another bedtime story to my kids. But music – the purity of music – the way it can transport or lift your emotions and make you fly is something I’ve kept surpressed, or forgotten, or maybe I’ve just been a little distracted by all the other bullshit in my life.
It began earlier in the week when I discovered a piece of music that really turned me on and I managed to find a copy of the album it came from on eBay. “Regular Music” – for that is the name of the album and the band – arrived a couple of days ago and it has been a delight to spin vinyl on the deck for the first time in an age. I’ve not bought an actual record for at least five years, possibly more. But to be transported back to those youthful days and to hear some new/old music that makes the hair on the back of the neck stand up is a joy.
While I was aware that there was a new Neu! boxset being released at the beginning of May, it was over £100 and The Missus would have raised an eyebrow (probably not – she’s too forgiving of my foibles), but I resisted the purchase. Maybe another time, I thought. However, today I discovered that the release is on eMusic and at a fraction of the price. So, OK, I don’t own the lovely vinyl set, but at least I can listen to some of the rarities for the cost of about £15. Result!
Then just about half-an-hour ago I was doing a trawl on said eMusic site when I discovered that an album called “Kinna Sohna” had been released on 30 May 2010. This means nothing to you and that’s fine, so I will explain what it means to me – the perennial enthusiastic seventeen-year-old trapped in the ruined body of a near-forty-year-old.
Let’s go back in time to 1995. I’ve been reading the music production magazine “Sound on Sound” since as long as I can remember and I remember reading an interview with Canadian guitarist Michael Brook talking about the trials and tribulations of recording a new album he’d made with Pakistani Qawwalli singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The interesting thing about this album was that it hadn’t been released on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label yet and Brook had basically been given a load of performance tapes by Khan with the instruction to weave his magic with it.
Now their previous collaboration “Mustt Mustt” was a more traditional affair with them recording together and ended up a unique fusion of Western and Eastern musical culture. It is a good record. But the article detailed how Brook had created what seemed the first patchwork quilt of a recording, by loading performances into a sampler and then adding his own bits to create a completely new work. Nowadays such techniques are commonplace but when I read the article I was completely mesmerised by the idea. When the resultant album was finally released, I rushed out and bought my copy of “Night Song”.
“Night Song” is probably one of my all-time favouriate records. It’s hard to describe – again it is a fusion of Eastern and Western ideas but it feels old and new at the same time and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice is more like a separate instrument and because I have no understanding of the language in involved it is more like a guitarist soloing that a person singing to me. And his voice is invigorating, dizzying, logic-defying and takes you to heaven – which is the whole point of a Qawwali singer I believe. It is a fine album – an album I truly love and probably defies other’s description of me – they’d probably think I’d have a Pink Floyd or Yes album held in higher regard. But I don’t.
Whenever I am feeling a little down or need a little pep or want to get the creative juices flowing, this is the album I go to. It is a tonic and I have fond memories of listening to it the album on the way to work and its power getting me through my claustrophobia on the Tube and the murky Monday mornings in Winter in London.
So tonight I discover this album “Kinna Sohna” tonight and it is a live performance of tracks from that album with Michael Brook and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan doing a tribute to the departed Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I downloaded it immediately and I am listening to it now as I type. And it is very good. It is also a reminder that this was another gig that I missed due to sacrficing my life to this place, for the recording was made at the Royal Festival Hall on 14 October 2007, about a fortnight after we’d moved to the site of my own personal Waterloo and month before the tribute gig to Simon Jeffes of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, which I also missed. Joy and sadness, two faces of the same coin.
But the important thing is that this music reminds me exactly who I am…
Category: Diary
Today, it is story time and Verity gives her unique interpretation of the children’s classic “The Gingerbread Man”. Despite only being two-and-a-half, she does a cracking job, complete with voices of the characters, which causes the videographer to lose his composure at a couple of points, such is the delighful nature of her delivery.
The accidental collisions and seemingly random mouse clicks lead me to an amazing piece of music today. For a moment, I was transported back in time, to a younger place, a place when I was seventeen again, where the world held no obstacle and I was a superman, before the cynicism and brutality of life crushed my youthful, optimistic spirit.
There was a link thrown up on my other music site’s newsfeed about a piece of music written for eighteen electric guitars and I clicked on through to the composer’s MySpace page where I found a remarkable piece of music called “The Fourth Door” by a band called Regular Music, which was helmed and written by this chap called Jeremy Peyton Jones. Unfortunately, this album is out-of-print but luckily for me I found a copy on eBay and purchased it immediately. The music is from the minimalist movement and sounds very much in a similar vein to the experiments made by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra crossed with a healthy dollop of Michael Nyman.
Thankfully, by chance or fate or whatever, there was one copy on eBay which I bought up immediately. On perusal of the recording credits, I noticed that the percussionist on that album was a fellow called Charles Hayward who worked with a band called Quiet Sun, an experimental rock-jazz band led by Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera. Of course, I am very familiar with this chap and that album but I am always bowled over by the interconnectedness of things, especially in the world of music.
This explains a lot…
As someone who has always had the urge to create, whether it be writing or music, I always wonder what makes me different to other people. Take for instance fellow musicians. In the past, through work assignments, you often come into contact with others who say: “Yes, I also play the guitar” and then you ask them if they’ve written or recorded any songs and they shake their head in the negative way. Being someone who likes to encourage people to push themselves forward, I’ve been in such guitarist’s company and explained to them how easy it is to record and offered them my services or knowledge only for them to do nothing. Then you realise that for these people playing the guitar is more of a social pursuit. It’s about getting together with friends, murdering a cover version and then having a beer. More power to them, I say, but it’s not my modus operandi.
For me it is about pushing myself forward. As I’ve bleated on before, I am not a natural musician and it has taken me years of slog to get this bad. I’ve known other folk who are naturals. Music just flows through them and I am both in awe and a little envious of their talents. I remember back at college, I got shafted into writing the play for the school musical (and then the guys that wrote the music tried to take credit for the words as well and said so in the local paper – much to my chagrin). During this time, I came into contact with a couple of the lads who were playing behind the curtain: a drummer and the bass player and they were both naturals. The drummer was the most down-to-earth, natural human being I’d come across at that age and had a natural self-assurance that people of older years tend to have. He gave me a lot of advice about people and myself and it’s those brief encounters that leave an impression. I’d forgotten his name for a while and then the other week it came back to me in a flash. Somehow my memory had dredged it up from the depths (without me even thinking about it) and I found the guy was now a top-class jazz drummer on YouTube and everything. That made me feel very good indeed. I was right – this guy really was a pro, but then you can just tell.
But I digress…the creative impulse is hard to control – or at least I find it hard to control. For me it used to be writing, but there was no challenge in it because I got to the point where I could write a novel in six weeks and what’s the fun in that? Of course, these novels were probably a load of old rot, but I wrote them purely for the excercise and not to get them published. But then I found another creative outlet and it was the music and then I discovered that this really did take effort and every victory was often marred by crashing depressions – moments where you question yourself and wonder why you waste your time producing this stuff? And then there’s the times when you want to give it all up and sell your instruments and the times when you feel that you have a direct line to the muse and the ideas just fall into your lap.
I always say to The Missus that if fate had played a different game, I might have been a cartoonist. For when I was about 10 or 11, I was fanatical about writing and drawing little cartoon strips. Loads of them, mainly sci-fi, I think it was. But then one day, my dear mother told me that she’d found my sketchbook and commended me on my sketching. The book was hidden, in private, because those cartoons where for me. So I tore up the sketchbook and never doodled again, because I felt my private world had been violated. The ability to create also comes with the need to destroy too. It’s two sides of the same coin.
I always wondered what this process was about and now I know. It is all part of the plan, I guess. Oh well, at least the music making keeps the multitude of voices in my head quiet! <---- THAT WAS A JOKE!
Oh dear, Gary Coleman of Diff’rent Strokes fame has passed away. 🙁
In ye olde days, in ye olde unenlightened days, it was quite common to open up a guitar magazine and see an advert for a guitar brand that featured a half-naked model draped around the instrument. Those days have gone, but you do often see pretty models with instruments as I guess it is much more pleasing to the eye to see them with said instrument than to see a corpulant, gut-bucket like me standing there with pizza stains on his T-shirt and three-days stubble growth on his chin. Mind you, at least I got to use a blog title that nicked from a Sparks LP (although subtly altered for my purposes).
But I digress…
My attention was driven towards an article on the Daily Mail website that features the daughter-in-law of playwright Tom Stoppard appearing in the all-together in a feeble attempt to advertise a £1 million violin that she’s involved with that’s encrusted with Swarovski crystals. To be honest, the violins look nicer on their own, but at least it gives me a chance to post pictures of half-naked women on my blog…the shame!
Nice violin, shame about the…err…
You can hear more from Linzi Stoppard at her own official website here.