Spirit

Most of the time, I can’t remember where or when I first heard an artist, regardless of how important they later become to me. There are a few exceptions, and Talk Talk are one of them. It was not an auspicious occasion. The night before my first encounter with them, I was out at my friend Simon’s then-girlfriend’s birthday drinks (I didn’t drink much there), and from there I went to another friend’s flat where I stayed until the wee small hours. This was about twelve or thirteen years ago. I had bought a bottle of Lidl own-brand vodka (at his bidding, I must add) which we polished off over the course of about three hours, mixed with supermarket brand orangeade.

The next day was not fun. Simon was coming over to visit me at my parents’ house (I still lived at home then) mid-afternoon and I managed to get myself out of bed about half an hour before he was due to arrive. I nearly renounced atheism when he texted me to say he was running late. I think I threw up about ten minutes before he turned up. So he was beckoned by my mum into my shamefully cluttered bedroom, and I lay on the bed, trying to entertain while feeling distinctly green.

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We did what we’ve done ever since, albeit with less and less frequency; playing each other music, listening intensely to some songs, disappearing into conversational tangents over others. One of the things he played me was a song from Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. If I remember correctly, it was the first track, ‘The Rainbow’, as he couldn’t choose between the songs. I wasn’t expecting anything at all, really, as I knew next-to-nothing about the band. We did not speak over the song. I can’t remember anything else he played that day. If it weren’t for Talk Talk, I’m doubtful that I’d remember any of the day or the preceding evening at all.

It didn’t take long to pick up a copy of Spirit of Eden of my own, and after the first full listen to the album, some part of me belonged to it forever. Alongside Laughing Stock and Mark Hollis’ self-titled solo album, that record was, is, the apotheosis of what popular music, rock, whatever you want to call it, can be. Those albums are emotionally potent, utterly bizarre, somehow dense and minimal, endlessly re-playable, endlessly mysterious.

Hearing yesterday evening that Mark Hollis had died caught me off-guard. I had never quite given up hope that he’d make another record, but it wasn’t that that made me find myself far more affected than I ever could have anticipated. It made me think about a former bandmate’s own story of hearing Talk Talk for the first time, taking acid down the park one night with a friend who played him Laughing Stock on cassette (beforehand he had thought they were still a sub-Duran rip-off group, and was an ardent convert after). It made me think of listening to Spirit of Eden while lying on the bed with the love of my life in her tiny attic room, six-and-a-half years ago, mere weeks after we first got together. And of doing the same thing in our own flat a couple of Sundays ago, our adored cats curled up next to us. I realised just how much Mark Hollis and Talk Talk’s music had meant and still means to me. And once again, I remembered the quiet magic of a friend passing on something amazing to you, the way that you carry music around inside you through life, and of just how precious that is.

Mark David Hollis, 4 January 1955 – 25 February 2019

Andrew R. Hill

Bowie, Blasted, 2016, the future

“Ground control to Major Tom…”

Is there anybody there? There was, once, we know that…so let’s at least pretend there is for now, and hope for the best.

It’s been a while, to say the last (since 15 March last year, to be precise) so allow me to explain our protracted absence somewhat (which is not to say I am excusing it). We need to backtrack, overlap with the time we last spoke to get to it.

“Oh no, don’t say it’s true.”

Monday 11 January 2016. Blasted’s editorial team is walking to work (not Blasted itself, sadly) on a cold Monday morning when we bump into a friend. The usual pleasantries, exchanged ‘Happy New Year’ greetings. Haven’t you heard? What??? Stunned silence. Surely not. No way. The BBC News is immediately consulted. Fucking hell. That is mental. We head to our respective offices and I jumble through it all, trying to work it out. I half-grin to myself in wonder at the audacious timing of it all. A final ingenious act. Life, death and art interwoven till the last. Possibly a coincidence but you can’t help but think he would’ve been pleased (if begrudgingly) with it.

The Channel 4 News that night and the inevitable reports and discussions - nothing new to anyone who knew anything about the man/alien already – and then the strangest thing happens. Over the end credits they play “Heroes”. And I burst into tears. I catch myself by surprise. I feel like a total idiot. A childish tit. It’s over in half a minute but it startles me. I’ve never done that before, not over someone I didn’t know or meet, not a real person at least (if he ever was ‘real’). I’m generally fairly cynical of outpourings of public grief (e.g. the fashionable and absurd hysteria that surrounded the death and funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in the autumn of 1997) – but on this occasion, I it happens to me.

I go back to that moment periodically over the following year, puzzling it out. Like many people do with such events, I’m probably redirecting some emotional expression or other relating to something else, and it re-emerges in less visceral ways through much of the other shite the year flings. But at that moment there is most of all the sense of some kind of an ideal, some kind of force in the word being irrevocably lost – something behind Bowie/’Bowie’, and that’s what really gets to me. It’s a portent of things to come, and it’s a nagging feeling that’s pretty hard to shake, pretty early on.

“Oh no, not again.”

2016’s litany of tragedies is well known enough for me to not bother listing them. Some cut deeper than others. There are two in particular of which we’ve barely even scratched the surface, but their mere possibility being entrenched was enough to turn the snowballing year of tears into an avalanche of slurry. On a personal front, 2016 is particularly hard for us with a close family loss. Other non-public issues are tarnished. It’s tough to keep going. So Blasted vanishes from our thoughts, if not the net. Cinema visits become rarer in our lives, new music rarer still. There are a handful of properly new(er/ish) things (Ela Orleans’ Circles of Upper and Lower Hell, Exploded View’s self-titled debut, Jenny Hval’s Blood Bitch) but precious little else. Some new-to-me corners of old artists (Eno, Talking Heads, The Blue Nile, LCD Soundsystem, Arthur Russell, Scott Walker, The Associates, Roxy Music), but mostly just stuff I already know. And Bowie, of course. Blackstar, yes, but a lot of coming to appreciate albums and songs I’d given less time in the past (e.g. ‘Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)’, ‘Bring Me The Disco King’, Young Americans, Outside, and a lot else besides), as well as the extremely familiar (Station to Station, Low, etc.). It’s a comfort blanket (a fairly obsessive one, I’ll admit), familiarity (with novel aspects, reassuringly ‘new’) in a world that seems - at the worst points of the year - to be falling apart beyond repair. Maybe, to one with no religion, it also makes all of that seem okay - Bowie might be dead, but we’ve still got all that great music (with new aspects to uncover still), and that’s all most of us really ever had anyway. So I realise that while it’s not the grieving of a man, but the grieving of an idea, really, and that all this has been an attempt to remember that it isn’t really dead, and there’s so much left to find.

“Just turn on with me and you’re not alone”

So it’s not all bad. 2016 isn’t completely beyond redemption, for a start. Blasted’s other project, Dora Maar, get to record at the Green Door in Glasgow, and release the results on a great label, and some good people are into it; Scotland’s arts scenes are thriving against all odds; I’m still alive and breathing and have a brain; good friends have children; and I still have the privilege of sharing my life with the best person I’ve ever met.

Frieze: What is art for?

Sue Tompkins: To make us love life.

You have to believe that new ideas can exist (or at least, new perspectives) to ever have a hope of finding them, so that’s what we’ll do. I hope we can share our thoughts on music, cinema, literature and visual art - old, new, and new-to-us - and hopefully have a conversation with some of you about it. I don’t know where Blasted is going, what form it will take, or how often you’ll hear from us, but I get the sensation that, in its own very small/niche/modest way, it’s as essential to do this as much as ever – that is, we must keep on finding the world anew. We must - all of us - keep seeking, searching, and looking onward (and upward).

After all, it’s what Bowie would have wanted.

Andrew R. Hill

Welcome to the Cinema of Childhood

Edinburgh's Filmhouse and Blasted favourite's Mark Cousins have just announced a UK-wide film season that will launch April 11th at Filmhouse, BFI Southbank, and other key venues across the UK. 

Cinema of Childhood, inspired by Cousins' own A Story of Children and Film, will include 17 films (mostly new to UK audiences) from China, Iran, Latvia and beyond. They aim to explore depictions of childhood that are universal, but also different from the Hollywood formula audiences have become so accustomed to.

 The full list of films is available of the Filmhouse website. 

Songs They Never Play on the Radio: The Happy Family

In 1981, a young Nicholas Currie handed a home-recorded demo cassette to Malcolm Ross at what would transpire to be Josef K's final Edinburgh gig. Ross was impressed enough to put a band together with Currie including Davy Weddell from Ross's former group. Ronnie Torrance, also late of Josef K, would eventually join on drums and so, although Ross left to join Orange Juice prior to any official recordings, comparisons to the Postcard band were and are inevitable. Their solitary album The Man on Your Street is a bit of a lost classic and the song above marks the point where the album really takes off. There's no denying the scratch and shuffle of Josef K is present, but there's a brightness of tone that renders The Happy Family somewhat less gloomy, despite a rather grand 'plot' centring around the son of an evangelical detergent salesman and the daughter of a fascist dictator set in Switzerland and the north of Italy. It wasn't to last long in any case and the band would split up shortly after 'in a spirit of apathy and aversion to the force of habit'.

Currie recommenced his university studies and would later transform into Momus. He will release a second collaborative album with former Orange Juice bass player David McClymont in the next few weeks and will also perform at Neu Reekie at Summerhall on 28 February.

Lou Reed: 2 March 1942 - 27 October 2013

Lewis Allan Reed died today, aged 71, in Long Island. Our thoughts go out to his friends and family. His music has been a source of inspiration to many (including us here at Blasted- to an absurd level, in fact) and will continue to be so for a very long time. If you don't have the The Velvet Underground & Nico, White Light/White Heat,  The Velvet Underground, Loaded, VU, Transformer and Berlin, get them all tomorrow and learn them all back to front, you may well find some of your favourite records. R.I.P. Lou.

From Loaded (1970).