End of the Road Festival September 2011: Friday Review

End of the Road Festival September 2011: Friday Review


Words and pictures ©Simon Bowcock 2011

End of the Road: like a bad accident

Located in quintessential England on the bucolic Wiltshire/ Dorset border, End of the Road with its Garden Stage is as pretty a festival as you'll find.  The organizers usually pull together a great bill, and this year's line-up has some top-notch quality.  A relatively small festival, there are nonetheless 4 stages running throughout its 3-day duration, meaning it is only really possible to see a small proportion of the acts on offer.  Here are some personal highlights from Friday, which starts off very gently indeed and slowly builds to a searing intensity.  Saturday and Sunday will follow in separate posts.

What music journalists call Americana is strongly represented at End of the Road. They may not be groundbreaking, but the acoustic guitar-backed, wholesome old-time Southern harmonies purveyed by T Bone Burnett protégées The Secret Sisters could have been made for lounging around on English grass on a slightly boozy, sunny lunchtime.

The Secret Sisters: wholesome

Caitlin Rose cranks things up (perhaps by one notch) with her full-band electric, down home and slightly less wholesome country music. A few people even stand up, but the afternoon still starts to slide by in an unchallenging haze of pedal steel, real ale and a faint whiff of spliff.

Caitlin Rose: less wholesome

Lo-fi powerpop outfit Best Coast shake things up (a bit), their sweet melodic Californian fuzz perfectly suiting the West Country sunshine. Clever, well executed, and easily the least wholesome thing so far.

Best Coast: least wholesome

Those who have dismissed Alec Ounsworth's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! as nothing more than the over-hyped sum of their obvious influences have reached wrong-headed conclusions.  Who isn't influenced by Dylan or Talking Heads?  Clap your Hands are a truly special, idiosyncratic band and they break the pastoral slumber hanging over the festival site, really hitting their stride mid-set with the insistent, captivating indie-dance groove of "Satan Said Dance", as well as delivering a "Details of the War" only slightly less ramshackle than the recorded version, but still just as affecting.  For an act whose charm relies in part on a certain tumbledown fragility, it all comes together surprisingly well in a big field, with the band managing to sound simultaneously rickety and professionally well-drilled.  The joker in the set is a cover of "Add It Up", accompanied by no less than the Violent Femmes' own Gordon Gano, wielding a fiddle.

Ounsworth: tumbledown fragility

Clap Your Hands: special and idiosyncratic

The mood gets much, much smoother but also much more intense with Joan As Policewoman.  The only thing more surprising than Joan's intensity is how hard Joan rocks, as she slips effortlessly back and forth from keyboard to guitar. Joan delivers a great show, but pretty and enclosed as the Garden Stage is, you can't help but feel this material is really made for darker and more intimate venues.

Joan: intense

  

Joan: rocks

And it's as darkness descends that things get really serious.  The Walkmen are among the greatest of all music acts, any genre and any era. I have been banging on about this for a few years now, but my ravings have been met so consistently with dismissive politeness I had started to doubt my own sanity. I did see Guy Garvey on the telly earlier this summer banging on about The Walkmen being the best band for a generation, which means either I was right all along, or Guy is mad as well. I'm sure you'll have your own opinion.

A certain amount of creative tension is apparently at work in The Walkmen camp. Singer Hamilton Leithauser tells us he managed to drive the van through a hedge on the way to the show, but there is something more than a little road rage at play. More than once, Paul Maroon deliberately cuts straight across Leithauser in the middle of talking to the audience, drowning him out with guitar.  Whatever nonsense is going on, none of it prevents The Walkmen from delivering their customary mindblowing set, by turns powerful and subtle, with Maroon's inventive and seemingly endlessly varied guitar work, Leithauser's superlative no-holds-barred indie-croon, and Matt Bauer's spellbinding drumming (which would probably make a decent show just on its own).

I can't decide whether they are at their best when using sheer force ("In the New Year") or being gently persuasive ("Canadian Girl").  The fact that their music sounds equally astounding and at home in a big field as it does in a small church compounds the mystery as to why they are not among the biggest acts on the planet.

The Walkmen: the greatest

Maroon: cutting

Leithauser: superlative no-holds-barred indie-croon

The Walkmen: sheer force

Beirut arrive with some very small guitars (ukuleles, probably) and some truly massive brass instruments the size of a man (tubas, perhaps), showcasing material from their new album The Rip Tide. Zach Condon's first album Gulag Orchestar was a brilliant melodic stomp around Central and Eastern Europe of old, and these familiar songs sound amazing tonight, the band's flawless execution revealing a weight and longevity to the work, making it all the more incredible and improbable that they were originally written and recorded an American teenager. Via France (second album The Flying Club Cup), Condon seems to be moving toward his homeland with his new record, which on tonight's evidence is a simpler, more stripped-down affair. Condon is in fine voice, and his band in fine form, and I found them a pleasure to watch.

Beirut: very small guitars

Condon: former teenager of some genius

Condon: fine voice

My views are by no means universally shared, and I hear mutterings of discontent that people are not being grabbed by the set.

The Walkmen might be the best, but perhaps not the most interesting group on tonight's bill, as they are followed onto the Garden Stage by The Fall.  It's all a bit like watching a bad accident: uncomfortable yet fascinating.  With the band already well into the first of many mesmeric grooves, Mark E Smith walks imperiously onto the stage, his presence so commanding it is impossible to take your eyes off him.  He's a walking paradox.  He's angry, he's gentle, he's forgotten the words, and he can't find the right piece of paper.

Smith: the wrong piece of paper

He's thoughtful, he's raging, he's incisive and right, all in the space of a single tune.  When he approaches the edge of the stage, its the most uncomfortable I've ever felt in the photographers' pit (possibly because the last time I came across him was in a pub where he started a brawl).  Is he drunk?  Impossible to tell.  Is he in charge?  Very much so, not only of the audience, but also of the music, constantly twiddling the knobs of his bandmates' equipment and occasionally barking orders at them.  And as well as being the orchestrator, he's the random, unpredictable element fronting an otherwise precise musical machine which always hits the right note.  One minute it seems to be a madman shouting at random ("I AM NOT FROM BURY, MAN!") over a tight but unrelated rhythmic soundtrack, but the next it all seems to click together, you suddenly understand, and the whole thing is an unqualified triumph.  Not for the faint hearted, not like anything else, but you can't help feel it is all unquestionably true.  I'm no die-hard fan of The Fall, but all the same I hope we don't see the back of Smith for a very long time.

The Fall: incisive and right

The Fall: the back of Smith

All words and pictures ©Simon Bowcock 2011

Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs

Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs

Phillips de Pury & Company, Howick Street, London 7^th to 16^th  June 2011
Phillips de Pury & Company, 45 -47 Brook Street, London 28^th June to 31^st July 2011 (highlights)
Review by Simon Bowcock

Linda Eastman got started by snapping a Rolling Stones promotional party in her native New York in 1966.  She quickly established herself, and in May 1968 she became the first female “Rolling Stone” magazine cover photographer, only a few days prior to meeting Paul McCartney.  This exhibition of around 25 photographs coincides with the release of a wider retrospective in book form, and includes professional music work, as well as personal and family pictures.

Musical highlights include a resplendently spot-lit, white-suited Jimi Hendrix, isolated on black, serenely at one with his guitar in mid-performance, surely a superior image to some of the Hendrix photographs currently sold in great numbers by other more illustrious contemporaries.  That said, the music pictures in the show tend towards the safer, or more commercial choices, and for me don’t necessarily show the young photographer at her very best: the frenetically kinetic BB King you’ll only find in the book is as good a music photograph as you’ll find anywhere.  Similarly, the exhibition picture of a happy Paul and John working on a song is easily bested by the book’s much grainier and edgier image of just their smiling faces.  But perhaps this is an unfair criticism - this is a commercial exhibition after all.

Some of the personal work is also of a very high standard.  For example, 1982’s “Paul, Stella and James” offers pleasing geometry, surreal tension, decisive moment dynamism; and hints at complex inter-relationships between the subjects.  Not bad for a family snap.  My personal favourite, though, has to be “McCartney album cover, Scotland 1970”: not only because it is a wonderfully idiosyncratic portrait of a relaxed, happy father with his baby daughter in his jacket pocket; and not only because it has appealing elemental qualities, with the light blue of the sky, the deep blue of the sea, the lush green of the land, and the golden glow of the magic hour sun; but also because, in a cheesy “soundtrack of our lives” way, I grew up looking at this picture every time I pulled the album out of my own family’s record collection.  Paul McCartney may be one of the most significant cultural figures of the entire photographic age, but Linda has made her contribution to the culture too.

While her music photography doesn’t approach the range or depth of, say, Roy DeCarava’s, and her family pictures don’t possess the gravity or piquancy of, say, Sally Mann’s or Larry Sultan’s, Linda McCartney nonetheless produced some very fine photographs in both arenas, something I hadn’t previously fully appreciated.  I’d certainly recommend checking out the show, not least because the technical standard of presentation in the airy Howick Street space was nothing short of vertiginous.  The conventional prints were so exquisitely lit they manifested a lightbox-like luminescence, and the printing itself was extraordinary, with prints of acceptable quality of up to ten feet tall ostensibly produced traditionally from smaller-format film stock.   Open to the public and free of charge, this was a welcome change from one or two of the overly long and poorly presented special exhibitions I (and many thousands of others) have recently been charged a small fortune to see in our hallowed public galleries.

Link
http://www.phillipsdepury.com/exhibitions.aspx?sn=EXUK0511

©Simon Bowcock 2011

Low at Manchester Club Academy, 19th May 2011

Low, Manchester Club Academy, 19^th May 2011

Review by Simon Bowcock

Words and pictures ©Simon Bowcock 2011

Although many of Low’s songs are among the most beautiful you’ll ever hear, their dark musical overtones and unsettling lyrics mean they can also be disturbing.  While many other acts try a similar approach, Low’s idiosyncratic work often has that ineffable feel and moving quality which set great music apart from the rest.  And if husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, the band’s core members, have a relationship anywhere near as harmonious as their vocals, they probably have the perfect marriage.

 

Low: pretty and sinister

The range of tonight’s audience, from indie kids to middle-aged folksters, is testament to the band’s quality.  The early part of the set is devoted to new album C’mon: its opener Try to Sleep could be either a simple lullaby or a paranoid meditation on a dystopian surveillance society; the controlled cacophony of Oh Majesty/ Magic is a masterclass in the art of noise making; the musically smooth Nightingale is lyrically heartbreaking (and dedicated by Sparhawk to DJ Marc Riley, clearly a genuine fan, who hot foots it from work to catch the last part of the show); the power riffs and compelling, harmonic mantra of Nothing but Heart reach for stadium rock nirvana; and $20 is the lilting centrepiece of the show, if not the tour (it’s refrain,“my love is for free” both hypnotizes the crowd and adorns the t-shirts for sale at the back of the room).

Alan Sparhawk: power scuzz

The latter half of the show alights at various points in the band’s back catalogue, including the sweet, sweet Sunflower, the ominous Murderer, the simply beautiful Laser Beam, the majestic, soaring Two Step, and the violent scuzz of Violent Past (if something’s too pretty, Sparhawk tends to want to mess it up).

Before tonight, I had been confident that 1999’s Secret Name (most of which is, of course, not played tonight) is the band’s best album by some distance: the dark trip hop of I Remember; the steep uplift of Starfire; the grace and majesty of Two Step; the religious mystery of Weight of Water; the dissonant frustration of Don’t Understand; the sweet relief of Soon….surely unbeatable.  However, seeing them select career highlights here has unexpectedly forced me to reconsider.  Is 2001's Things we Lost in the Fire a better album?  Or 2007's Drums and Guns?  Could the new, not yet fully digested offering C’mon be a contender?  Perhaps for the first time, this criminally underrated band with their pretty, sinister songs has made me re-evaluate my opinion of them, revisit my relationship with them, and made be realize more than ever that they are a band to be treasured.

Low: ineffable feel

Words and pictures ©Simon Bowcock 2011

Nadav Kander Portraits 1999 – 2011

©Simon Bowcock 2011

Nadav Kander is a photographic powerhouse who moves quickly and consummately between styles and genres, from Prix Pictet-winning Chinese landscapes to New York Times Magazine-filling portraits of the entire Obama administration.  Having long been at the top of the corporate/ advertising tree, Kander is nowadays garnering a solid reputation in the art world, which this exhibition of recent portraiture aims to cement. 

The portraits themselves reveal Kander to be an inventive risk-taker, constantly pushing the boundaries of technique.  There might be a lesson here for other successful but less illustrious commercial photographers who play things much safer, but I suspect Kander only manages to pull this off through an extremely rare combination of talent, inquisitiveness, market savvy, courage and hard work.

Highlights of the show include a wonderfully dark and dreamy Sofia Loren, an ethereally dead-looking Morrissey, and a brooding and dynamic Michael Stipe (which says more about his band REM’s music than many a magazine article).  In each of these and many other apparently simple portraits, Kander eschews sharp and static exposures in favour of a much looser approach using subject movement or long shutter speeds, which is refreshing and brave in the normally risk-averse field of celebrity portraiture.  The work in this style probably reaches its climax with the recent “phoenix” portraits of the now grown-up boy band Take That, which are a good example of Kander’s ability to produce much more daring and interesting results than the conservative output such a mainstream commission would generate in lesser hands.

The more static pictures yield only slightly patchier results: Richard Ashcroft stirring tea may come across as a little forced in a slightly generic broadsheet supplement style, but many of the images do deliver something out of the ordinary.  For example, the much-photographed and perennially fearsome Nick Cave looks astonishingly vulnerable in perhaps the best portrait of the musician since Anton Corbijn’s cover for Cave’s 1997 heartbreak album The Boatman’s Call.

Over a decade ago I bought one of those sweeping histories of photography which surveys several dozen of the medium's greatest ever practitioners.  Kander was already of sufficient stature to warrant inclusion, but none of his portraits were to be seen, underlining this undeniably mercurial photographer’s ability to amaze across a wide gamut of styles and subject types.  While even the pickiest critic will find it difficult to dislike the work on show here, there is a risk that the exhibition could aggravate Kander’s artistic Achilles' heel: the sheer variety of his virtuoso output is a problem for the art market, which likes artists to have an easily identifiable, if not instantly recognizable style.

Venue: The Lowry Centre, Salford

When: until 4th September 2011

Links:

http://www.thelowry.com/event/nadav-kander-selected-portraits-1999-2011

http://www.nadavkander.com/ (a photographic tour de force where you’ll even find some ambitious and compelling portraits of Richard Ashcroft)

©Simon Bowcock 2011

Deutsche Börse Photographic Prize 2011 Exhibition

©Simon Bowcock 2011

As is customary, the predominantly post-modern Deutsche Börse Photographic Prize has four nominees on show.  Thomas Demand’s exhibit consists of a single photograph of what looks like a bizarre store room for church organ spares (it turns out he makes paper sets and photographs them, and that this particular work is about comradeship and memory).  Roe Ethridge’s oeuvre is to some extent photography about photography, and he seems to be making a point about our perceptions of art and commerce with his series of seemingly disconnected objects (a wood lattice, a ballerina’s feet, a painterly bowl of mouldy fruit, etc.)  The double-exposed eyes of Elad Lassry’s Man 071 2007 is an interesting update of Man Ray’s Marquise Casati 1922, but otherwise his pictures (e.g. a bloke on a beach, a lipstick) are highly unremarkable, which actually turns out to be the point.

The work of the final nominee, Jim Goldberg, is imaginative, collaborative, wide ranging and (at times) beautifully executed.  Its simplicity and directness makes the other nominees’ work look feeble and contrived.  Seemingly the most traditional, Goldberg is in reality the most daring of the four.

Goldberg could be described as a concerned photographer working in the documentary mode, although his style favours the poetic over the prosaic and factual.  His subject here is the migration of people, often in the direst of circumstances.  Formally, the photographs are a mish-mash, from large format to tiny polaroid, monochrome to colour, even colour negatives to black-and-white contact prints, with production values ranging from the highest to the very lowest.  Some (mostly polaroids) have writing on or around them, sometimes with a translation, sometimes without, ranging from simple messages (such as I am a whore, or We have only seen father once in life) to a complex scrawled map of a long, multi-country journey.  On a few images, faces have been obscured or even obliterated.  You can make presumptions, but it is often not explicitly clear who wielded the pen, or even who took the photograph.

Many photographers claim their work involves a deep collaboration with their subjects, but in reality this seldom comes across at all to the impartial viewer.  Goldberg's dynamic photographic approach, and use of text, means many of his photographs are truly collaborative.  Even the title of the project, Open See, is a collaboration (ostensibly written by one of his subjects on a photograph), with meaning on many levels: a simple exhortation of “open and see” the photographs in the 2009 book of the same name; “hope and see” how things turn out; “open sea” without borders (which is what the subject intended); etc.

However, there is a cost to Goldberg's mercurial style.  Firstly, the formal incoherence of the photographs is consistent with an overall lack of clarity of information.  We learn that the world is a terribly brutal place, but the scale of Goldberg's subject is so vast and complex (and the information in the images inevitably so relatively scant) we do not really learn that much about how or why things are this way.  While some of the images work extremely well artistically and emotionally, the work is much less strong if viewed as documentary photography in the conventional sense – perhaps surprising for a member of Magnum.  Secondly, even acknowledging the gargantuan scale of Goldberg's project, the sheer mass of the material presented dilutes its effect, and a tighter edit may actually prove significantly more powerful.

But perhaps these criticisms don't matter so much.  I have to admit to being stubbornly agnostic when it comes to concerned photography, mainly because it often just doesn’t work for me: still images seldom convey social issues well, especially compared with other media such as the written word or moving pictures.  Goldberg’s collaborative approach overcomes some of photography’s usual shortcomings in this sphere, and occasionally cuts straight to the very heart of the human stories. Here and there, the hand annotation adds so much weight to a photograph, it elevates it from the particular to the universal, revealing Goldberg as a much greater artist than many of his more precious and more famous peers.  For me, the most affecting photograph is hardly a photograph at all: a small scrap of near total pitch darkness, save for a barely perceptible, haunting face and the translated words: My life is sick because of what they do to me.

Like all great ideas and much great art, Goldberg’s work is occasionally so simple and effective it seems obvious.  Of course it has its problems, but it is nonetheless original, brave and at times moving, and wins the 2011 Prize by a country mile.

©Simon Bowcock 2011

Link:

http://deutsche-boerse.com/dbag/dispatch/en/kir/gdb_navigation/about_us/30_Art_Collection/25_photography_prize

Venues:

Ambika P3 London 5^th April to 1^st May

C/O Berlin 13^th May to 19^th June 2011

The Cube, Eschborn, Frankfurt am Main 2011 dates to be confirmed

Cave Nick

(or, Why is Grinderman 2 so Good?)

How would the Devil appear if he walked among us?  How about male, tall, very pale skin, very black hair, in extremely snappy and slightly gothic clothes?  How about ridiculously talented and unable to keep a low profile, seeking the adulation of humankind?  In summary, he might appear something like Nick Cave.


Male, tall, pale, black hair, snappily dressed, ridiculously talented and receiving adulation

Sounds far fetched?  Bear with me on this.  It has repeatedly occurred to me that Nick Cave may be the Prince of Darkness himself for a number of reasons.  Let's look at some evidence.

1) He's called Nick and he's been around for a while.  So the day is fast approaching when he'll be "Old Nick".

2) He's also called Cave, which is Latin for "Beware".
"Beware of the dog" = Cave canem.
"Beware of Old Nick" = Cave Nick.
So he has a much better moniker for Satan than "Louis Cyphre", and he's a much more convincing Lucifer than Robert de Niro, don't you think?

3) Sometimes he even lets his guard slip and fleetingly appears as Mephistopheles on stage.


Fleetingly appearing as The Devil on stage.  Cave Nick.

4) His "home" on earth is the closest thing to the inferno beneath - the fiery deserts of Down Under.  However, he's rarely there as he needs to travel all over the place performing his dark work.

5) So Mr. Cave (as we'd now better call him) moves around the world, setting up home on one continent before moving on to another: Australia, Germany, Brazil, Britain....  This is what you'd expect of the Devil, who naturally needs to roam the entire world to perform his diabolical deeds.  Obviously, being a touring musician of global renown would help the Devil enormously in this regard.

6) Mr. Cave has written very many Murder Ballads.  Everyone thinks that Mr. Cave has either borrowed these stories or made them up.  Yet they drip with such verisimilitude that they may well be autobiographical.  Check out the sheer detail in the song O'Malley's Bar and you'll see what I mean about more than a ring of truth.

7) Mr. Cave's darkest incarnation to date is Grinderman, whose horrifically alluring music is seared with the blackest and most morbid of imagery.  For example, who (in heaven's name) might say:
The spinal cord of JFK wrapped in Marilyn Monroe's négligée, I give to you... ?
The Devil, that's who.  In fact, The Devil might find it easy to come up with such lines, as he may have the items in question in his possession.  Think about that.

8) Mr. Cave is obsessed with God, religion and spirituality.  His songs have titles such as Cannibal's Hymn, Heathen Child, God is in the House, Death is Not the End, Hallelujah, and Evil.  I could go on.

9) Mr. Cave was already famous in his early 20s and very cool, fronting The Birthday Party.  Thirty years later, he is even cooler.  This is not achievable for mere mortals in the music industry.  Paul McCartney was the coolest cat around once.  So was Elvis, and look what happened to him.  Even Neil Young and Bob Dylan have not managed to become even cooler with age, and Neil and Bob are very cool cucumbers indeed.

10) Mr. Cave has a band called "The Bad Seeds".  They even look like guys Satan would happily hang out with.

11) The quality and consistency of Mr. Cave's musical oeuvre is suspicious.  How can anyone constantly take the risks inherent in making such edgy, spellbinding music - steeped in tradition yet constantly pushing the boundaries of form and taste - and yet never make a bad record?  Even Neil and Bob occasionally make bad records.

12) As Mr. Cave's Wikipedia entry says, he is a "musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, and occasional film actor".  It is not possible for a mere mortal to excel in all of these fields (and he does excel - for example, see the film The Proposition if you haven't already).  Even Tom Waits cannot do all of these things (for Christ's sake), and Tom Waits can do almost everything.

So perhaps the towering, dark tour de force that is Grinderman 2 is so awe inspiring because it was, in fact, orchestrated by the Devil.  Designed and directed by his Red Right Hand.


The orchestrator/ designer/ director of Grinderman 2

Words and pictures ©Simon Bowcock 2011