John Heron Project

FYI: Moved to a new server today. Some disruption was inevitable: I lost e-mail for a few hours and I think we lost a comment left in the time between copying the site over and deleting the old site (if you fancy leaving it again, go ahead). But on the whole, all done and dusted.

All of this brings us to Heretic Pride, which has decent production, a backing band and even - gasp - backing vocalists. Female backing vocalists. One of those female backing vocalists is the marvellous Annie Clark (AKA St. Vincent), but you can barely hear her on the song she’s on (”Autoclave”), so we’ll let that slide.

But female backing vocalists on a Mountain Goats record is a novelty to me (I never bought the umpteen records he made before All Hail West Texas, but something tells me it didn’t happen), and I think part of the reason it feels so wrong is that Darnielle is fundamentally a boy’s singer-songwriter. This is by no means to say that women shouldn’t be listening to him or that they can’t appreciate what he;s saying, or any of that crap. That would be silly. But it’s like men watching and enjoying Desperate Housewives - nothing wrong with it, nothing stopping the enjoyment… just, you know, not the target market.

If that makes sense without making me look like a discriminatory sexist tosser, I will be relieved.

Anyway, the point is that the songs with female backing vocalists work because they add a hitherto unheard dimension to the music. Or something.

The album returns Darnielle to storytelling, anyway. Rather than the apparently personal material of the last couple albums, he’s got a new cast of characters. Some you identify with; some you don’t so much, but it was always the way.

Anyway, my own highlight is the narrator of the title song, who is dragged from his home on a beautiful summer morning by an angry mob bent on killing him, and like a host of martyrs and saints before him, faces his imminent death in a state of ecstasy:

And I start laughing like a child,
and I mark their faces one by one.
Transfiguration’s gonna come for me at last,
and I will burn hotter than the sun.

I waited so long, and now I taste jasmine on my tongue.
And I feel so proud to be alive.
And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives.

Darnielle likes using thematic metaphors to unify albums; in We Shall All Be Healed, for example, he tells his stories of alienation and guilt using the language of paranoia and conspiracy theory. In Heretic Pride, his vehicle is genre fiction, from the pulp spy novel stylings of “Sax Rohmer #1″ to the quiet rantings of “Michael Myers Resplenent”.

The allusions aren’t direct. You need to have some idea of what he’s referring to, to get the point. You might know that Michael Myers is the killer in slasher classic Halloween, and there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll have an idea that Sax Rohmer wrote the Fu Manchu novels, but when it comes to “Lovecraft in Brooklyn”, you actually need to have some knowledge of the biography of legendary horror hack HP Lovecraft to really get why it’s significant to a song about paranoid misanthropy.

Woke up afraid of my own shadow,
Like, genuinely afraid.
I headed for the pawnshop
To buy myself a switchblade.

Someday, something’s coming
From way out beyond the stars
To kill us while we stand here.
It’ll store our brains in mason jars.

And then the girl behind the counter asks
How do you feel today?
I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn.

Lovecraft lived for a while in a place called Red Hook in Brooklyn, and in his time there went a bit wrong, being inspired to write some of his nastiest, and sometimes most incoherent¹ stories. The thing about invading aliens killing people and storing their still-conscious brains in jars is straight out of one of Lovecraft’s stories, actually. Not that you need to know that to sympathise with the narrator or enjoy the song, but it kind of helps.

Notwithstanding the obscurity of some of the references - I know I don’t get them all² - that doesn’t take away the fact that the album’s got power, and emotion, and depth, and you know, actual tunes. It’s well organized: the policy statement of “Sax Rohmer #1″ precedes the delicate Indiana Jones-channelling hopefulness of “San Bernardino”; the prettiness of “Tianchi Lake” follows the urgent horror of “Lovecraft in Brooklyn”. It has highs and lows.

In short, it’s at least as good as The Sunset Tree. It may be the best thing Darnielle has done. If you hate the Mountain Goats, you may find it less objectionable. But I wouldn’t bank on it.

Anyway. I’m going to take a leaf out of Robot Hero’s book and post a song. Hope he doesn’t mind.

This is still about the Mountain Goats.

So all that stuff about him not being able to sing and the crap production, why was I so instantly bowled over by We Shall All Be Healed? It’s not like I’m usually one to go for difficult-listening, really. I tried and tried to listen to Joanna Newsom before finally admitting that I could not bring myself to like it; My Bloody Valentine and Felt faced similar fates. I have cloth ears. Maybe I should just go listen to Dido or something.

Except I heard “Home Again, Garden Grove” and immediately understood. A man hides his fears about going home under a cover of bravado. Half way through, he cries out, incoherently, as if in pain or frustration. He sounds like he means it. I suppose I related.

As soon as I could, I got the immediately preceding album, Tallahassee, which is apparently a concept album about a marital break-up. Again, Darnielle uses weird metaphors and similes; Satan comes into town on the back of a truck and leaves cloven-hoofed footprints in the garden. A man in a skeleton costume walks up to a guy in a superman suit and runs through him with a broadsword. Hope is lost. Its production is no better than We Shall All Be Healed, and I didn’t find it as immediate or enjoyable, although a couple of songs (”First Few Desperate Hours”, the hilariously negative “No Children”) got played a lot, for a while.

I think I rate 2005’s The Sunset Tree higher than any of the three that preceded it. This one tells the story of Darnielle’s own abuse at the hands of his alcoholic stepfather. It could be bleak as hell, but it turns out to be both hopeful and funny in equal measure, which I suppose is the mark of a true survivor. Also, musically it’s a step forward, with a proper band and a tighter, cleaner sound. The chorus to “This Year”, although not really applicable to my own experience, became my theme tune for 2007: “I am going to make it/ Through this year/ If it kills me”. The songs are not really any better than the ones on the other albums, but the tunes are in places more immediate and hummable.

On the other hand, Get Lonely, which came out in late 2006, was a massive disappointment. It has the production, and even some decent tunes, but its unremitting bleakness is without any of the humour or lyrical firecrackers of the other albums. Which brings us to the new album, Heretic Pride.

In the last six years, John Darnielle, the man behind The Mountain Goats, has released six albums. I like the Mountain Goats. I do. But I’m really ambivalent.

Were I really clued about music, I would no doubt pretend to have been following Darnielle’s music since he was releasing cassettes recorded on a tinny boom box in his bedroom. I am not, not really, and to be honest, having heard one or two of his songs recorded in that style, I’m sort of glad. But more on that later.

John Darnielle’s music depends on the words. Which is just as well. He can only just about sort-of sing, really. As a musician, he’s no Nick Drake. But his lyrics are truly amazing, about as close as pop music gets to real poetry. Although not oblique in any meaningful sense, the songs present pictures of difficult childhoods and break-ups, paranoia and desperation. I know that sounds bleak, but Darnielle’s best lyrics. although miserable, are also laugh-out-loud funny.

Here is the video for “Sax Rohmer #1″ from his most recent album, Heretic Pride. It’s a song in which he uses metaphors from a pulp fiction novel to portray the resigned acceptance of the narrator to a sudden upheaval in his life.

The video itself more or less presents in visual form what matters in Darnielle’s songs. It’s all about the lyrics.

I can’t pretend to understand all of what Darnielle sings about, but his words are evocative. I first heard the Mountain Goats three years ago, thanks to Daniel. In a few weeks, I’d picked up three albums, and have bought every new release since.

The first album I heard in full was 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed. It portrays people who are witnesses and bystanders, people who seem to have missed the world: a man who writes thanking a friend for electrical equipment and stage make-up (”Letter From Belgium”), a man who sits beside the intensive care bedside of a friend or lover who has fallen in a gun battle with the police (”Mole”), a convenience store assistant who shoots an armed robber in self-defence and who denies he’s guilty about it but still goes down to the Catholic church on a whim and prays the rosary (”Against Pollution”). In “Quito” a man makes drunken resolutions about his homecoming that ring hollow; in “Palmcorder Yajna” someone goes on a wild bender with friends… but thinks he’s being watched.

It’s a good album, with crap production. It’s tinny; not easy listening. It sounds like it was recorded in a toilet. But We Shall All Be Healed is lavish compared with 2002’s All Hail West Texas, which was recorded on a tape player so rubbish that you can hear the motor whirring away. Notwithstanding the fact that it has at least one solid gold song-parable in “The Best-Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton”, I find All Hail West Texas near-unlistenable. I know some people who fetishise crap production, as if it’s more real somehow, more honest.

I think that’s often elitist, in the worst possible way, a means of excluding people who can’t be prepared to work through waves of tape hiss and echoey vocals to get to the music. I have heard far too many joyless indie-pop bands with off-key vocals and sound levels all over the place to sympathise with that. It’s actually a pose, more often than not - they don’t have to produce their records in a studied-yet-deliberately-inept fashion. They just choose to. I mean, I don’t think that music needs to be dumbed down

This is why I will never be an indie hispter.

But I digress.

Does my desire to see Mike Leigh’s new film Happy-Go-Lucky stem from my respect for the work of a great British director and his emphasis on truth and realism and humanity and stuff, a desire to go to the cinema and see that rare thing, an artistically worthwhile film that both Wood and Mrs Wood are likely to enjoy, or does it stem from a sad thirtysomething man’s aesthetic appreciation of Sally Hawkins?

Guess (clue: two of them are true).

It’s academic, anyway, since - big surprise! - it’s not showing in Swansea.

Sigh. Maybe the arts centre’ll have it… in like six months’ time…

A journalist goes to Lake Geneva and plays DnD with the bloke who invented it.

Actually very interesting. From The Believer, a couple of years ago.

Children’s TV presenter Mark Speight found dead, in really tragic circumstances. BBC children’s news page report.

File under “bloke on telly we quite liked dies tragically / bit sad.” That is all. Sympathies to his family and friends.

Just got a press release from my friend Symon, who works for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. At the end of 2006, BAE Systems had been in a bit of trouble for allegedly bribing the Saudis to buy their bombs. There was going to be an inquiry, but it got cancelled, because it wasn’t “in the National Interest.”

So CAAT took them to court, not for bribing the Saudis, but for ending the inquiry… and the result came out today. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, the crazy April Fools hilarity we had yesterday.

Anyway. A lot of people know this story, but I’ve been down about freelancing recently and I need to remind myself why I am doing this.

So for a while, back about seven years ago, I was the in-house writer and publicity designer for this one-horse business software firm.

The Boss calls me in. They’re getting ready the new brochure for the upgrade and he has some ideas for the design. In short, he wants the cover to have a flowchart on it.

Sorry? A flowchart? Are you insane?

And he wants it to look like a breast.

I forget my response, but it went something along the lines of: For a second there, I thought you said you wanted it to look like a breast.

Yes, he says, a breast. Like on a lady. With a voluptuous curve here and a fulsome curve here and a pointy bit here. With aspects of the software written on the arrows.

I am somewhat direct in my expression of what I think of this.

He tells me that sex sells. And that he is selling to people who own factories.

I spend the next week trying to make the flowchart look artistic and stuff… and not look much like a breast. After about three days of trying to compromise, the Boss (who shall forever after in my mind be Mr. Breast) comes in and looks over my shoulder, and says, “Can’t you make it a bit more pert?”

I went freelance not long after that.

It could get so much worse.

Actually, I was wrong. It’s pretty good.

Yeah, I’m big enough to admit that.

Page 14

Originally uploaded by carissabyers.

Not long ago, I was invited to take a small part in what may amount to the greatest birthday surprise in the history of the world. And being a small, vain, pathetic creature, and also being someone who needs to get more of his writing on his blog, because that’s what it’s for, I thought I’d show you my bit, as laid out by Carissa in the birthday book.

Hope they don’t mind.

Anne Primavesi is a feminist/ecological/radical theologian. On 23rd February this year, she presented a talk to the SCM conference. I’ve been transcribing it so that I can put bits in Movement. It was a really long talk, and very little of it is making into the magazine. But these, I thought, seem appropriate for Easter, where we remember violence and dispossession, and the act of making something good come out of the worst of things.

Very few of the people who really need to read these three excerpts will read them; those who do will not take them seriously. But then, that’s the way with all this stuff. You only preach to the converted on the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

Moriya, by Dean Paschal.

A short story which deals with a lot of the themes I like to write about, about a boy and a metaphor mechanical doll, and about how things that are beautiful and fragile get broken forever with only a moment’s carelessness.

This is where all this is coming from. Over Christmas, I took the family down to Plymouth to stay with my mum, and being widowed, she lives alone now, and so, as you would expect, she finds ways to make her home less lonely. She watches a lot of telly. And she plays loud music. Her music. Connie Francis. Russell Watson. That sort of thing. Anyway, her current favourite is the recent greatest hits package by Tony Christie, that got released off the back of the successful Peter Kay-promoted reissue of “The Way to Amarillo”.

This is where all this ultimately ends: Elvis. Read the rest of this entry »

Gary Gygax died on Monday. He was the bloke who invented Dungeons and Dragons, which is a big part of the reason why I have a steady job. That’s all. Moment of silence and all that.

AMORC stands for the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross. Now don’t get me wrong, but I thought the Rosicrucians were a secret society. Do secret societies advertise?

This one did, in every issue of Prediction I have between 1979 and 1985.

I worked on a game book called Requiem For Rome last year. I won’t go into the difficulties and frustrations involved, but suffice to say that I wasn’t as happy with the end result as I could have been.

Anyway. Most people seemed to like it. And it got reviewed on a blog about world history. The guy really liked it. And didn’t criticise my history once (although he does give the title of my history chapter, including the error inserted by the idiot proofreader who didn’t know Latin - in the draft it was, correctly, Ab Urbe Condita).

29 years later, I still have no idea what this man was advertising.

I have runs of Prediction magazines ranging from 1979 to 1985. And Katrina is on the back of every single one of them.

It combines the symbol of Christianity with the monument of the Pharaohs. You can’t really argue with that.

Take a wild guess.

The only thing about this that isn’t solid gold is the merchandise. Apparently, G. Patrick Flanagan is still in business, although he’s not selling medallions anymore.

“…and it is pierced.”

Hmm. American evangelical youth not all crazy right-wingers. A sea-change or a blip?

I’ve had to edit out the shop’s name and phone number. They’re still going, you see, although apparently they’re mail order only these days. No shop anymore. Which is a shame, really. I’d check out their shop in a shot if it was still there.

I like the bit about “lady followers”. It creates pictures of robed acolytes manning the phones, a kind of witchy pagan version of that Lent helpline that was staffed by nuns that was in Father Ted. I also like the idea of clip-on talismans.

When I was a kid, my dad used to get Prediction. Then billed as “The Magazine of Astrology and the Occult”, it contained some crazy, crazy things. Stories about Rasputin, the Golem of Prague, fairies, the Philadelphia Experiment, psychic self-defence, rune magic for beginners and loads of other stuff, all presented as if it was Completely True. Now my mum threw a pile of them away, leaving about thirty issues or so, which I inherited from my dad along with his sizeable collection of mass-market occult books.

Those articles were great. I remember not being allowed to read my dad’s copies of Prediction, but doing it anyway. I think they go a long way towards explaining who I am now, actually.

But the best things were the adverts. Recently, I scanned a few for a project I was working on. And on Saturday, entertained some of the SCM crowd with some prime examples. Because of that, I thought they bore sharing.

Submitted for your approval, then: an advert from the back cover of Prediction April 1982. Note the newsagent’s mark on the bottom with our surname. Dad had it on regular order. Stuart Bray, the man at the newsagent’s shop down the road, which is now a convenience store, put back a copy for Dad every month for years.

Someone appears to have hit upon the the simple fact that if you just delete Garfield the cat from those Garfield cartoons, it suddenly becomes surreal and hilarious and surprisingly, a bit touching.

I meant to post this on Tuesday, but my blog got hacked. The mighty DavidK spent far too much of his own time fixing it.

1. Movement
Image budget sorted. A lot of copy in.

2. Supplement 2 (Slasher)
Done.

3. Splat! (Shadows in the Night)
Done.

4. Supplement 3 (”Darren McGavin”)
Was 35,000 words by 15th February, 2008. Now, thanks to a writer having to drop out, 47,000 by the end of March. Not started yet.

5. Supplement 4 (”David Naughton”)
Taken on because of situation above. 25,000 by 15th March. Will probably get an extension.

6. Supplement 5
Yes, another one. 20,000, May.

7. Other things on the table
A book I am going to call “Mrs Adams” which is still a game book, but a bit different to anything I have done for this client, and another book about nasty vampires and things which I am supposed to have editorial control over. I hire the writers and turn it into a book. Could be fun, could be a headache.

1. I don’t want to eat meat anymore. When the meat in my freezer’s run out, I’m going vegetarian.

2. There isn’t a TV show, or a film I need to watch, or an album I need to hear, or a book or game I need to buy. I don’t need more stuff. Besides, most of it is actually stupid.

3. I am too good at writing really unpleasant things (and I am really good at it - check out pages 29-30 of the document you can download here), and it is starting to frighten me.

That’s all.

Apparently, in my line of work (no, not that line, the other one, the one that I’m not embarrassed to talk about), yes, I’m supposed to have an opinion about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks on optional Sharia Law for Muslims (to parallel the optional outs that the Jewish community have, remember).

Sigh.

OK. My only observation is this: my internal headline-translator has been working on overdrive recently, not only on the Daily Mail and the Express, but also on actual newspapers.

Recent headlines, therefore, presented in translation:

And

That is all.

Not liking kids is a sign that you need a slapping.

That’s all.