Ever the Poptimist

Purple Pilgrims, Fatima Mansions, aprxel, Eye TV and Prokofiev

Illustration for Mayakovsky’s About This, Alexander Rodchenko (1923)

And the awful way their poems lay open
    Just doesn't strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
    No wonder we like them.

Kingsley Amis, A Bookshop Idyll


Purple Pilgrims: ‘Two Worlds Apart’ (2019)

I remember seeing Clementine Valentine, or Purple Pilgrims as they then were, at in store gigs and in support slots several years ago, and wondering how it worked. Two women, making witchy moves and soft incantatory music, with looped samples of their own playing. This was years before I was into such music as, so to speak, a genre, but even in its early state their work had a pull, was enjoyable and intriguing. I was reminded of the whispery parts of early post-Syd Pink Floyd, especially the soundtrack to Barbet Schroder’s 1969 account of druggy hedonism in Ibiza, More, songs like ‘Green Is The Colour’ and ‘Cymbaline’ (a reference to one of Shakespeare’s deeper cuts) which Hawkwind covered on their oddly folky first LP. By 2019’s Perfumed Earth, the Purple Pilgrims have perfected their sound - 2023’s The Coin That Broke the Fountain Floor includes other players and takes them in interesting shoegaze directions, but the purity of their combined vision is a little dispersed, like mist in the sun, by their wider sonic palate and increased activity. In my Kevin Ayers essay I discussed the relevance of the Jungian concepts of Logos and Eros to songwriting – Purple Pilgrims are Eros lyricists, writing about personal, emotional connections - love, friendship, spirituality, and eros stylists - the sound of their words transmits their emotion ahead of their distinct meanings; their voices weave together into one, like a rope in a fairy tale that’s as strong as steel tho woven from just two hairs. Perfumed Earth features one of the greatest covers of a Gordon Lightfoot song, better even than Nico’s 1965 version, in ‘I’m Not Saying’, the synths, and drum machine kicking it along, the original bridge insert winding and spiraling downward so magically it seems like up to me.

This is perfect pop that’s nestling in an experimental milieu; Roy Montgomery collaborates on ‘Ruinous Splendour’ and Audiofoundation stalwart Jeff Henderson plays a drifting sax on the ambient instrumental ‘Delphiniums In Harmony/ Two Worlds Away’, which introduces my favourite PP song, ‘Two Worlds Apart’, which, when the drums kick in and the guitar echoes back, surges along like a soft, feminine incarnation of a Joy Division groove.

Now the party's over
I felt there such a loner
We're driving now pull over
I'll sleep here on the grass
With the cars moving fast above me

Perfumed Earth is an album that’s easy to turn over, and great to fall asleep to, and the default album to put on whenever you don’t know what to play and aren’t even sure you want to hear music.

‘Thursday’, Fatima Mansions (1990)

There was a soppy R&B element to Cathal Coughlan’s work, even with the fiercely industrial Fatima Mansions, and he was a bit ashamed of it. The lovely ‘Give Me All Of Your Clothes’ on Microdisney’s  Crooked Mile has a lacerating voiceover from the object of his affections on the fade and no lyrics on the lyric sheet (instead, it says “ask the chemicals not the Cathals”), ‘Blue Rings’ on 39 Minutes is a violent threat against some despised and forgotten tormentor, and the bittersweet ‘Thursday’ that I heard on the cassette version of Viva Dead Ponies was a track that was left off the vinyl release. I had this cassette with me in Invercargill prison in 1991 and studied it as if it was a passkey. I later stole the title and part of the concept for a song of my own but for once that’s not important. It’s a electropop song, of its time, and probably parodying The Pet Shop Boys, but some obnoxious synth breaks remind us that Fatima Mansions were always a jarring mixture of sweet pop hooks and industrial transgression.
The singer waits, impatiently, for his lover’s return;

The windows watch me wait for you
Mirror mirror, mirror mirror
I've seen a world beyond their view
Mirror mirror, mirror mirror
Of course the night times are the worst
Of course I burn with an evil thirst
You exist so I am cursed

Note the fairy tale elements; the curse, the “mirror mirror” chant – Cathal is under enchantment, but what does relief look like?

I'll be good 'till Thursday comes
The world will think I never had
An idea that could drive me mad
I'll be good 'till Thursday comes
Then burn all good away

Cathal’s alienation, even in the throes of love or lust, is only heightened by sensation.

I tingle at the thought of you
Is this what the humans do?

As so often, he’s working hard at sabotaging his own song, which is making him angry. But it would be wrong to call this artefact of a great Logos mind, wrestling with an overwhelming Eros concept, a critique, of the culture industry, the pop song, or of love in general, or anything so boring. There’s something wrong with this love, something monstrous, which is never made explicit, but has to do with its effect on Cathal’s sense of truth.

I'll be good 'till Thursday comes
It's such a lot of fun
To watch the liar I've become

aprxel, ‘cbd’ (2023)

I’ve been having this false epiphany once or twice a week for the past year. I’m in the mall, or a coffee shop, or the Warehouse, or Countdown, and I hear the pop music streaming where the musak used to play. I think I recognize slow jam trap beats and autotuned or naturally sweetened female vocals, and wonder, am I hearing something amazing, beyond the clatter and chatter echoing off the tiles? Ever the poptimist, I Shazam these sounds if I can, and, so far, have always been brought down to earth with a bang. I’ve been hearing the value-products of the culture industry, and without the muffling and distortion of noisy environments, the Fairyland pleasures I’ve imagined I’ve been reaching for have died in my hands with a Crystalman grin. The list of songs that have deceived me in this way is too depressing to share. The closest I’ve ever come to where I thought I was is Camila Cabello’s vocal on Bazzi’s ‘Beautiful’ over The Warehouse PA. I really should delete Shazam from my phone.

But somehow, the three songs at the pop heart of aprxel’s tapehumlucidum<3 - ‘benz!’, ‘cbd’ and ‘inanna’ - and the Mona Evie tracks with a similar feel – e.g. “D6/9: Tha Room’, ‘Jessie’, ‘Justin Bieber’, are exactly that fantasy mall music I imagine exists where it can’t possibly.
In his new book Freaks Out! Weirdos, Misfits and Deviants – The Rise and Fall of Righteous Rock ’n’ Roll, Britpop outcast Luke Haines explains how the oddball, wild card, outsider musicians who used to rejuvenate pop music have been squeezed out of the game by talent show judges, industry-trained technocrats, and the academic sterilizers of thought. No-one is going to risk a recording and advertising budget on Jim Morrison or Nico or Nina Simone or the Velvets or Microdisney these days, let alone Captain Beefheart, the MC5 or the Pink Fairies. If unspoiled and unruly genius can still come from anywhere, it’s from the ranks of socially disavowed genre artists, and from scenes so underground and experimental that their lack of commercial potential is taken for granted. Thus it is with Mona Evie, who hail from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, where popularity may not be the sole measure of worth yet, and who are hardball experimentalist enough that their Western press coverage to date can mostly be found in The Wire, Tone Glow, and other publications given up mostly to work that isn’t pop at all, or work that sabotages its pop qualities even more diligently than Fatima Mansions did. As with Purple Pilgrims, the experimental community is a safe place to hang out if you don’t want to sell out (but if you don’t sell out, how will I ever hear you in the mall, where you are most needed?) As with Purple Pilgrims, aprxel’s songs are pure Eros lyricism, every line making, testing, remembering, mourning, avenging a connection, to a person, time or place.
‘cbd’, probably the catchiest song on tapehumlucidum<3, and a masterclass in production and performance (Pilgrim Raid’s complex mosaic of samples and winding monophonic synth lines rewarding endless listening, aprxel’s phrasing the epitome of no-caps introvert charm), exists in 3 or more versions that show the working out; a short version of the tune in the middle of the acapella “Lover Rocx’ on Bandcamp, the original session file on Soundcloud, and the more tightly edited album release version, wherein only the most earworm of melodies remain. The video mix intro sounds further modified.

Eye TV, ‘Worse For Wear’ (2000)

Eye TV (there’s an Audioculture profile by Gareth Shute here) were an Auckland group whom I first met when they toured Dunedin as the Nixons, when The Puddle or King Loser would be their support act. The Nixons were notable for their Hendrix guitar style and fun, punchy songs that made the most of it, and I liked their set more than that of most touring acts. At some point, in Auckland, they did what the Velvets did before their third album, that is, they had most of their electrical equipment stolen so decided to become a quieter (and somewhat darker) band, and that was Eye TV. Eye TV had a few hits, I mean I don’t know how they charted but they were played regularly on late night music TV and sounded like hits to me, like the catchy ‘Just the Way It Is’. But the track I want to hear most often today is ‘Worse For Wear’ from their 2000 album Fire Down Below. Over a quietly churning drum beat and some squeaky sampler that reminds me a little of Sparklehorse, the singer, supported by some angelic back-up vocals, gently consoles a mistreated, messed-up and exhausted girl.

Where have you been my darling
you look a little worse for wear
You’ve been out on the tiles again
Messing with your head
you don’t have to beat up on yourself
You only do what you need to do
So easily hurt by a few cruel words
You were bearing your heart but we only laughed
If it was a perfect world everyone could live with truth
As it is words got bruised and everyone is black and blue
You are not a plain and dirty girl
And the world is not against you
If I could only slip inside your skin
we only do what we need to do

While Simon Holloway’s production evokes the exhausted chemistry of morning-after city romances, Sean Sturm’s delicate melody picks its way through the ruins with heartbreaking tact. Emotional honesty of this sort is rare in New Zealand music, and ‘Worse For Wear’, and its excellent animated video (AKA ‘The Cleaner’) by Greg Page, should be better known.

Sergei Prokofiev, ‘Introduction’ (Act 1, No. 1), Cinderella Op. 87 (1945)

If the girl in ‘Worse For Wear’ has an archetype in fairy tales it’s Cinderella; of the four folk versions of this tale recorded by the Grimms, ‘Ashiepattel’ comes closest to the early adaptation by Perrault used by Prokofiev as the source of his most successful ballet. In ‘Ashiepattel’ (‘Aschenputtel’), the Prince can’t rescue Cinderella until he can recognize his once-magic enchanter in the “plain and dirty girl’ sleeping in the ashes. One wonders how the success of Cinderella (in which the heroine, like The Cleaner in Greg Page’s ‘Worse For Wear’ video, surely signifies the Workers) and its happy Royal ending played in the USSR, where all the princes and princesses had been turned into Ashiepattels. This was the period when Stalin was trying to claw back Imperial prestige, but still.
The opening scene of Cinderella finds the heroine mourning on her mother’s grave (one of the changes the brothers Grimm made to their source stories in the name of decency was to turn all the cruel or uncaring mothers and sisters into step-mothers and step-sisters; bad fathers and brothers, less shocking to bourgeoise expectations, were left as they were).
We hear one of Prokofiev’s most beautiful lyric themes, signifying the upwards longing of Cinderella’s soul, but also its weight, then the cellos, horns and basses carry us down into her sorrow. The effect is devastating, and Prokofiev liked it enough to try to replicate it in the introduction to his final ballet, The Stone Flower. The personal pain in this music was new to Prokofiev, and relates to his own entrapment and control by Stalin. There’s so much else that’s good in Cinderella; the delirious last waltz, the mechanical midnight chimes, the Winter Fairy’s theme, the grotesque scherzos and nimble dances, that it’s probably the only ballet score I’ve listened to in its entirety, and certainly the only ballet I’ve watched from start to finish.
I have an early British recording of the suite from Cinderella, by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Robert Irving, in which, though the themes can’t help but sound gorgeous, the conductor and orchestra miss the point completely. Understandable, if they were trying to learn the piece from the score without benefit of a recording or a piano preview from the composer, as the Soviet conductors would have had, but embarrassing.
If that’s the worst recording, and it probably is, what’s the best? Andre Previn’s version was the first I heard and loved, but I’m sure different conductors and recording engineers have found new ways to bring out its emotions; your suggestions are welcome.

Algorithmic TV: A new Microdisney documentary from the BBC lays out exactly what it means to be a ‘cult act’.

In other news, The New Existentialists have a new single out, with a wild party video directed by Andrew Moore of King Loser movie and No More Heroes fame. See what you think.