Beware of Darkness

P.H.F. Suffer, Lou Hassles us again, and a bit more

Nocturne, John Holmwood 1965

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The ultimate environment in which to connect with music drug-free is at the wheel of a car. With my eyes and my will-to-survive focused on the road, my ears open wide, and I soon know the value and meaning of sounds. If I didn’t have a car I’d probably hotwire yours just to listen to the stereo, after ramraiding JB HiFi to pick up some CDs. Two nights ago I was on the road home after practice, a 45 minute drive, and I remembered hearing from Hayley that P.H.F., one of my favourite New Zealand acts, had new work out, so I looked it up and found a new album, Suffer. As the name suggests, this is real dark night of the soul music. I won’t be playing it at parties. Many of the hyperpop elements from Purest Hell - the drum ‘n’ bass sounds, the arpeggiated bubblegum synths - are no longer present. The beats are slow, and guitars feature more, and in many ways it’s a return to their pre-Purest Hell aesthetic, but not quite. The synths and autotune are still there, but they’re being used to generate witchhouse tones of great beauty and subtlety. I’m going to call the result hyperemo-doompop. It’s still pop, Joe Locke writes great melodies, you can hear songs that could be working in quite different ways, but his commitment to mood in the studio overwhelms them, and that’s a good thing, the best there is.
Here’s ‘For None’, with guest vocal from Austin of Slow Hollows, a Sparklehorsey thing, its melodicism gradually swallowed and metabolized by Locke’s production.

And here’s Suffer, the cold perfection of dark wave beauty.

This music makes me happy, is there something wrong with me.

There’s more goodness. ‘Sniper’s Nest’ sounds like the combining of guitar hardcore and happy hardcore, which might be a first. ‘Person’ might be the most uplifting number, with its universal sentiment.

I'm not a person, I'm a disease
I wanna be with
Somebody who loves me like you do
I wanna be with someone just like you

Joe’s lyrics are minimal, but no-one seems to write lyrics in New Zealand any more, at least not in English. The Silver Scrolls are being decided without them.

I was listening to Dave Graney’s Banana Lounge Broadcasting show yesterday and caught this song, “Telepathic Head’ by Machine Translations. It reminds me of everything I love about The Clientele, with an added shoegazey finish on guitar, racing drums, and what sounds like a theremin(!). The couple of their other songs I checked out didn’t take off like this one, but one great track is enough for me. I think they’re from Melbourne.

I was going to write about Lou Reed’s Street Hassle, which Hayley and I have enjoyed listening to over these past few seasons. Not the 11 minute title track, universally agreed to be one of Lou’s masterpieces. Not ‘I Wanna Be Black’, agreed by me to be another of Lou’s masterpieces, its late-Velvets lightness (in their final stages the VU were all about good times and dancing, though no-one wants to admit this and it takes some explaining) married to his wittiest and most universal lyric’. No, what I wanted to write about was the unloved rest of the album. Lou Reed’s 70’s solo career was a long series of Fuck You’s to faithful listeners, innocent bystanders, ignorant critics, and scum-sucking record company types alike, and his survival in the industry, and even a certain growing stardom (given that no-one had even heard of the Velvet Underground when he went solo), is even more of a mystery today, when someone like Lou would only be allowed to explain himself to Tucker Carlson or Piers Morgan, and then only after a public stoning.¹
Most of Street Hassle is crafted to offend. I don’t mean the lyrics. Here’s the opening salvo:

Hey, if that ain't the rock'n'roll animal himself, what you doing bro.
(Standing on the corner)
Well, I can see that, what you got in your hand
(Suitcase in my hand)
No, shit, what's this
(Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest)
Fucking faggot Johnson
(Jack, sweet Jane, I'm in a rock'n'roll band)
Well, I can see that

I mean the way the music is constructed, because you could see Street Hassle as (barring Metal Machine Music) the most experimental thing Reed’s done since White Light/White Heat. He’s putting on his most offensive “how dare you hear me sing” bleating vibrato, and no-one is enjoying this. And the music? I don’t know how many tracks state-of-the-art recording studios were up to in 1977 but there’s points on ‘Dirt’ and ‘Leave Me Alone’ where Lou and his band sound like they’ve used every single one of them, with no attempt to co-ordinate the different streams of what’s more-or-less first-take jamming. Personally I think this is brilliant, a soundscape that always rewards re-hearing, however bad it is, despite the horrible vocals, and is the main reason I wanted to retrieve this trashy album from the trash in the first place. And then there’s ‘We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together’, an actual Velvets good-time song, given the most experimental reading of the set. Its arrangement involves the kind of musical thinking that makes more sense in today’s world. You can’t deny Lou is getting some good use out of the studio. His self-indulgence is just sprawling out vertically rather than the usual lengthwise way.

In 1970 no-one had heard of the Velvet Underground, by 1980 far too many people were in on the secret. Lou Reed was the first person to get this, and his 70’s career is pockmarked by acts of resistance to mainstream assimilation. The message we get, repeatedly, is “I’d like to see you hungry motherfuckers hold this down”. Of course, the artistic results of this are perverse and often remain unappetizing. When Lucinda Williams sings the title track of Lou’s Legendary Hearts (1983), we know instantly we’re in the presence of a great song, information I never got from occasional exposures to Lou’s version.²

Legendary hearts
Tearing us apart
With stories of their love
Their great transcendent loves
While we stand here and fight
And lose another night
Of legendary love

Legendary loves
Haunt me in my sleep
Promises to keep
I never should have made
I can't live up to this
I'm good for just a kiss
Not legendary love

Assimilation into the mainstream is a function of genius, and it can’t be prevented however prickly one is. When I was a youth it was promised that psychedelic art and music would give people psychedelic experiences without anyone needing to take drugs. This wasn’t true. Until now. In 1997, after Princess Diana, the former wife of our present King, died in a tragic conspiracy theory, Lou Reed, in an unforgivable moment of weakness, traded his song ‘Perfect Day’ for a chance at respectability. Creating, as I discovered, the first truly psychedelic song. It happened like this; Hayley and I and our friend Davina had enjoyed a nice evening, and smoked a few joints, admittedly, but things were stable. We’d played a New Existentialists album and were marveling at how cool YouTube’s algorithm became in the aftermath; usually you end up on The National three songs in, and I have never needed to hear The National. I am strongly opposed to landfill Americana. So it took a while for the algorithm to wander off its course, and not long after it did, we heard the first notes of ‘Perfect Day’, the Lou Reed song everyone loves. We turned up the boombox. But it was this, the All Star ‘97 version, and when Lou’s voice was followed by increasingly inappropriate readings of subsequent lines, with their widening variations in style and tone, we soon became disoriented. Space and time began to pull apart, and we, crying out “how could this happen??!!!” and the like, were sent spiraling into some non-Euclidian version of reality. It was all I could do to hold myself in this world till the song ended, when things quickly switched back to normal. We looked at each other and said with one voice “Wow!”. It was indeed a trip, a fast acting and not completely pleasant trip, like 5-methoxy DMT or salvia. Take care.³

As I said, I did want to write a bit about Street Hassle, even though I’ve already written about Uncle Lou (as the NME called him in my youth) and his fucked-up attitude here. Anyway, on the last cut of that album, ‘Wait’, we get something approaching a girl group sound, and I figured Lou, who hung out at CBGBs through the mid-70’s NY punk years, had been listening to Blondie (although, maybe it was there all along, in ‘Da Doo Run Run Run’). The fortunes of girl group music make an interesting lesson in music history; The Shirelles, the arguably first and definitely greatest girl group, formed in 1957 and had their first hit ‘I Met Him on a Sunday’ in 1958. This makes girl groups a phenomenon of the rock ‘n’ roll era, but one that survived longer in popularity than the men did. My original two-part rock ‘n’ roll hypothesis, delivered earlier in these pages (here, and here), was that, after the twilight of the idols (Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochrane were all taken off the stage between 1957 and 1960), the guitar instrumental acts held the avant garde position until the Beatles came along, but the girl groups were singing alongside them, and the interregnum was their time.⁴ The Shirelles toured the UK with the Beatles in the latter act’s early days and left their mark on that band, who covered two of their songs, ‘Boys’ and ‘Baby It’s You’, on their first album Please Please Me (1963).

Lesley Gore, who I mentioned last week, was a solo singer able to distill the girl group essence into one voice, helped at first by producer Quincy Jones. On ‘Treat Me Like A Lady’, produced by Bob Crewe, she’s joined by backing vocalists who sound like her. At what point did female pop singers start to regularly accompany themselves, in polyphonic arrangements, as they do today? Nelly Furtado’s ‘I’m Like A Bird’ (2000) being one of the great earlier examples of this.

‘Treat Me Like A Lady’ was released in 1966. Producer Shelby Singleton wouldn’t let Gore record ‘Groovy Kind of Love’ when she was offered it because singing "groovy” went against her image, so soon she no longer had a recording contract; she hadn’t evolved with the times. The Shirelles stopped having hits, Diana Ross went solo, the era was over. But even today, the alliteration ”girl group” connotes something a hell of a lot cooler than “boy band”.

Galgorithmic suggestion - Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine - The Supremes

1. Twitter, which used to be our public square for stonings and witch-burnings, no longer seems to serve this purpose. Can anyone tell me what it’s been replaced with?

2. Wikipedia tells me the critics loved Legendary Hearts, but what do they know. It’s the critic’s role to tell the artist how to do their job, and it’s the public’s role to tell the critic how to do theirs.
"The atmosphere was really uptight – it's impossible to be friends with him. When I got the final mix, I was really freaked out. He pretty much mixed me off the record. I was in Ohio and took it out in the driveway and smashed the tape into pieces... I have cassettes of the rough mix of the record and it was a really good record but he made it all muddy and murky." Robert Quine

3. You’ve been through enough, here’s Kirsty McColl and Evan Dando to make it all better.

4. When rock ‘n ‘ roll was revived by the glam bands in the 70’s the girl group sound was part of the mix, e.g. Wizzard’s ‘See My Baby Jive’. But girl group singers weren’t.