How NOT to write about music – 168. Leonard Bernstein

“The violence is senseless, but Bernstein’s score makes us feel what we do not understand”
The Washington Post review of West Side Story

It’s my birthday today.

A beautiful four-CD box set featuring the music of Leonard Bernstein (“An American in New York”) turned up unannounced on my doormat, a present from my friends at Cherry Red Records. Beautiful use of monochrome colour and stills from theatrical rehearsal sessions to adorn the inner sleeves, a booklet that should be an example in minimalist art magazine design. It’s very linear, but starkly enticing. I know that, much as I want to, I cannot skip straight to disc four – 1957 Original Cast Recording of West Side Story – because it will distract me too much. I won’t be able to type. Instead, after briefly checking in to listen to Billie Holiday’s prologue for Fancy Free, I settle on disc two, On The Town (including various cool jazz interpretations of popular numbers). We used the opening 10 seconds of ‘New York, New York’ (no, not that one) to illustrate the power and pull, the intoxicating sway, of musical numbers when we were teaching Film Studies to third-year performance students at BIMM London last term. A strictly cultural studies module, it was hard not to burst over with joy and enthusiasm presenting entire universes of sound and sight to students who’d never encountered them before/ The songs from On The Town are suitably overblown and histrionically sung – think South Pacific for the general tenor if you’re unfamiliar with the film, oh come on you must know that one. I don’t need to hear them. It’s enough to have them playing in the background, creating textures and invisiable cities in the air around me as I hover over the keyboard and try not to let this chill spring air pervert my spelling. Invisiable cities, but I can hear/see them plain as the dirty cream wall next to me, the stark outlines and shadows of mid-century Manhattan skyscrapers, the dirty tenements and teeming street life and coarse laughter of Will Eisner’s bevy of immigrants.

God.

I wish I had been there.

I know this world never existed, that it’s a simulacra, a simulation and stimulation of reality that was never so attractive or enticing, but – man. I wish I could have been there. And what difference is there between this sharp, cool, finger-clicking reality and the reality I live in these days, except that one I have to continually shell out money to take part in, and in the main hide myself away from and if I do dream, I dream dull dreams All reality is mediated, all reality is different – the world created within books and music is no less ‘real’ than the one constructed by neoliberals and venture capitalists. Ineed, the venture capitalists had much play within Bernstein’s worlds. But why not? My waking dreams when I occasionally catch them are ceaselessly full of vigour and life and rudeness. And oh. These four CDs are going to make my train journey reality so different to everyone else’s train journey reality in the coming weeks.

Here. Above. This is why I am not paid to write about music. All I do is talk about myself. I know that’s all I ever did, but back then I was an active participant, dreammaker, keeper of the keys.

How NOT to write about music – 67. The Membranes

This feels important.

No reason, but this feels important. Doubtless my 23-year-old self would disagree with me – he always was a cantankerous bastard – but I feel that out of seemingly nowhere The Membranes have made the greatest album of their career. (Let’s not call it a career, eh?) Of their lives. I would go over the recent review I wrote about it for Classic Rock, and dwell on each and every word, but. Do not take my word for it. This is high praise, from me, from my former self certainly. I had a couple of main noise bands in the 1980s – UT, The Birthday Party, Membranes, Sonic Youth – and one of them has returned after a near three-decade gap and made the greatest album of their lives. (It’s their second in recent years, and the other was almost equally as fine.) Playing out of their skins. Literally. So good, all I can do is gape at the hollowness inside my hollow inside and wonder why some of my friends are so great at growing old while others (well, me) are so crap. Pain, humiliation, death – this is all that life promises me as I edge closer towards 60. Not for John Robb and his merry bunch of swaggering, dissolute reprobates though.

What nature gives… nature takes away.

They embrace the mantra and do not swerve from it, but face up to it and create thundering beauty out of the Void, seething wonderment out of chaotic despair. There is kindness here at the heart of the violence and mesmerising noise, a beauty that only the human voice can provide (the 20-piece BIMM Manchester Choir provides texture and an iridescent counterpart to Robb’s thundering bass). The Membranes should have been massive in the 1980s, with their bone-rattling teeth-shaking finger-breaking excursions to the other side: aligned with My Bloody Valentine and Big Black, and rightly so. (In truth, they were always the greatest on stage.) It would be irony heaped upon irony now if they achieved that deserved success now, the Last Survivors Standing.

Thundering.

What Nature Gives… Nature Takes Away is a brooding Gothic masterpiece – and yes it’s dark disco, death and romantic, apocalyptic (but not in a fucking superhero way), discordant, sweeping and epic and brimming over with feedback and emotion and turbulence, melancholia and wonder. The sheer volume of noise threatens to destroy melody but never does. The sheer magnificence of the BIMM Choir threatens to destroy rock but instead amplifies it, charges it.

In places, overcome with emotion.

Shut it down. Shut it down. Please, shut it down.

You can order a copy now from Cherry Red, but hell. Don’t take my word for it. What the fuck do I know?

As I wrote four years ago:

You see, some of us still remember the secret history of the 1980s.

Not me. Most of it is blinding white light followed by blinding white light followed explosions of noise followed by the sound of puke splattering onto the pavement from the side of a taxi followed by useless imagination followed by a stage door left open followed by the sound of a big heavy metal typewriter hitting rows of LP albums followed by neon lights glinting miserably in the rain followed by a minute of detail followed by the sound of heads hitting cold Aberdeen floors followed by crazy… nothing. I have no memory.