Blasted Heath: A Treasury of Song and Laughter
I have always made music, since the age of fifteen or so anyway. Back then it was transformative, it was about forging an identity, a way of being. And I don't suppose it's ever stopped being about that. All art, if its done properly, is about gawping in the mirror and trying to make sense of what you see. I've always been more interested in the idea of what music means rather than in being than a musician. It is lucky, then, that I play nothing: I can barely shake a tambourine. I've long suspected that dyspraxia is lurking un-diagnosed in my nervous system, explaining the many broken bones I've accrued over decades, as well as the mocking laughter of studio engineers on my attempts to record hand claps in time. I'm not a musician but I make music and that should not be unusual in the modern world. I've always made music and I am still making it, even into my frail dotage.
While I am very old now - nearly 50 by anyone's standards - I'm not alone. A lot of musicians are old, most of them, in fact. We're in an odd period of superannuated youth culture and we're seeing the strange sports of evolution as people re-map the likely stations of rock and pop and hip hop. Chuck D is 60! How the fuck did that happen?
When I was young people used to say "Ooh, are we going to see you on Top of the Pops then?" Well, I've outlived Top of the Pops. I've outlived Sounds and the Melody Maker and the NME (the travesty that remains is not the NME). I have lived so long I have seen the very media we use to listen to music rise and fall: vinyl, cassette, CD, mini-disc, streaming and back to vinyl and cassette again. I've seen the landscape of music change in explosive tectonic shifts, so that the context and meaning of music has changed. Freed of imposed order by streaming, freed of cost , freed of exclusivity and difficulty - music's ubiquity is like water - and freed of its internal narratives - its safe to say that Pete Frame's day has come and gone - what are we left with? Songs. Music. Anonymous, featureless, constant music. Why would anybody add to that? Its like pissing in the sea.
Because you have to. Why do any art? The money? Allow me to finish gut laughing. This may take some time.
Because I'm from the twentieth century I come with those old codes. I still think of "records" and "albums" that have a classic shape, a narrative. You open with a big song on each "side" and finish "side two" with an epic. There should be about ten songs. That's the job.
I've been working under the banner of Blasted Heath, with a man who is actually a musician, on our new album. We have, after much tweaking, teasing and tinkering, completed two songs. We have perhaps eight more in various states of repair, some only requiring a second coat of wax, some up on bricks in a pool of oil with a mechanic shaking his head and sucking his teeth next to them. I've loved working on these songs. I've written some of my best words and I think I'm in my best voice. The songs are maximal-lo fi, but the intent is epic. With middle-age comes patience but also the fading of self-consciousness. I no longer care. I will sing as well as I can for as long as I can. Fuck it, you know?
My co-conspirator (and it is a conspiracy) is a former archaeoacoustic researcher, rambling dowser and pomade quality assurance officer. He shoves books on mythology off his desk in order to record the same five bass lines he's been practicing in different groups for twenty five years. But they are five good bass lines. He too is a man in specs with sticky up hair.
There are other members too, itching like phantom limbs, but their best efforts will have to wait - this initial foray is a two-hander. Morecambe and Wise, Sapphire and Steel, Rigby and Peller: the best things come in twos - that's why you have two hands and two eyes, and importantly two ears - so here are the first two songs by Blasted Heath, the opening digestif for our album: More Gallows, Less Humour. We will probably squabble about that comma. That's the sort of band we are. We are something that Bobby Gillespie could never understand.
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