But seriously? Where'd they go? Nowadays I feel like gay men must have felt in 1979. Glam had melted all those boundaries down and Bowie was confessing to liking blokes on the side and cross-dressing was practically de rigeur. I saw that terrible TOTP2 the other night and there was this bloke from Mud who looked like a miner………in a pink chiffon dress. The Gays must have found Punk OK, get to dress as a cockatoo, that’s nice. But circa 1979 and mid-Joy Division miserabila, long grey overcoats and the cold-war fetish they must have been like: Where did all the queers go? OK I’m wheeling out the clichés, (smacks own wrist) but you know I’m making sense.
So where DID the nutters go? When I was a little smug bastard I used to like the alternative (indie) press (Melody Maker and to a lesser extent NME) and the bands and the scene because I identified with this picture of society in a mirror. I looked up to and sought out people like Thomas of Pere Ubu (who I introduced myself as a 16-year-old, in a T-shirt with my name on it), Wire (ditto on crutches!), The Butthole Surfers (aged 17 at Brixton Academy when someone tried to sell me a passport), Alex Chilton (who I gave my illustrations for The Lovesong of Alfred J.Prufrock aged 17), World Domination Enterprises (aged 17 brushing past Flea of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, asking him for directions to the World Dom dressing room, ha ha still makes me laugh) and Mark Stewart (19 backstage at Glasgow Barrowlands, Keith LeBlanc taptapping on his digi-pads beside him, Mark head-in-hands unable to look up, tangled in some shockingly intense mental trauma, greeting me without looking up) These people all seemed to openly endorse INSANITY as a perfectly (un)acceptable means of being. Crazy was cool. It was wild. It was interesting. It was fun.
I used to love those larger than life stories, you know, Skip Spence crossing the US on a motorbike in his pyjamas, before proceeding to attack his manager with a chainsaw. Al Green shooting rats with a sawn-off mid interview. Brian Wilson making his band record in a sand-pit wearing firemans helmets. Er......I was going to say Phil Spector, but that didn't have a happy ending. These tales make me laugh, although I'm quite aware they sometimes shear off into tragedy.
On reflection things had started to get a bit tidier in Indie by the time I tuned in. The insane element was mainly a hangover from the nutters of the late 60s and 70s, those times when it was almost fashionable to ingest vast quantities of drugs, and when the already edge-of-losing-it folks went off the edge. You know the folks; people like Syd Barrett, Wild Man Fischer, Captain Beefheart, Brian Wilson, Lee Perry, Iggy Pop and all the Krautrockers. This is Sunday Supplement shit nowadays. Tee fucking Hee. Many of the above figures who I introduced myself too (what was I thinking?) were 70s figures still trucking their shit around. It always amazes me that in 1987 Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance (a big touchstone for me) was 10 years old, that seemed like a pre-historic recording to me. Look back 10 years now, 1993. Feels like the other day (wink).
Actually for the nutters Dance music was the way forward. There the outsider values of LUNACY got a big thumbs up. We all had friends who lost it on the cocktail of LSD and MDMA. Nutty was just fine with Ardkore. Actually I never trusted my fragile psyche with the hard drugs. I WATCHED raving happen to my mates. I only did MDMA once (didn’t like it) but hijacked the party by smoking copious amounts of dope. Funnily enough I only truly interfaced with rave culture much more later on when the party decelerated and the zeitgeist itself was stoned (Jungle, Tricky, the RZA). Some of the truly important figures of Rave/Techno wore MENTAL like a badge. The KLF for one. I met Jimi Cauty with Ken Downie, post-million quid burning, at the Olympia exhibition centre in his tank equipped with sonic stun gun, which he’d used to incapacitate cattle. Nuff said. The Black Dog too, Ken’s first photo-shoot he did in a straight-jacket and that’s just scratching the surface. Tricky. And madness wasn’t just at the polite end of things. Ray the bass-player from AR Kane, who now runs a stall in Spitalfields market selling Drum and Bass (he said “Hi Simon”) told me, that Danny Breaks told him, that Winston “Run Tings” Meikle is in an asylum now- that’s a fucking shame.
We all know that music and madness are pretty much horse and carriage. Mozart NUTTER! Stockhausen NUTTER! (Read his brilliant Towards a Cosmic Music). John Coltrane NUTTER! (Sorry Jazzniks, there’s no getting away from it). Some of my fave writers have tackled the subject really well. Simon Reynolds in conversation with, I think, Achim “Mille Plateaux” Szepanski on the subject of auditory hallucinations induced by the white noise in Ardkore. Also David Toop, who explores the subject in tremendous detail in Ocean of Sound with regards to the musics of Brian Wilson and Lee Perry, suggesting of both of them that they were driven crazy by the quest to materialise the music in their heads. It seems like the symbiotic relationship between music and madness could only have been accelerated by the disembodying effect of the record-player (that’s Wireless for the older readers). You’re literally hearing voices.
Some of the greatest writers on music have also walked this thin line. Ben Watson, who runs the interesting Militant Esthetix site, and who was Frank Zappa’s official auto-biographer also runs an organisation called M.A.D. (they throw punky gigs, have a manifesto, lobby parliament) which to be honest with you I feel has the whiff of Bedlam about it. Madness as an organisational principle, are these people crazy? But you know, good work I guess! Another very famous writer on music (not mentioned beforehand in this article, who will remain nameless, but has written openly on the subject in the press) talked of “taking a walk on the Moebius loop to the soundtrack of John Martyn’s One World” Nice choice of music mate.
Anyway, I ain’t bonkers. I’m a little crazy (yee-hah!), but there’s plenty of it in my family I can tell you. I bet there’s a little in your family too. An uncle who’s swept under the rug. A cousin no-one mentions. But that’s just it with culture right now. It’s so squeaky-clean. Unreal. The figures for people on Anti-Depressants these days are shocking. I bet madness is bigger and badder than it ever was, and I’m sure this “pretty picture” society we live in only makes it WORSE for people. They don’t feel like they have a home, no little culturally-endorsed backwater. They feel their craziness is UNACCEPTABLE. If we’d all only open up and BREATHE. It’s more healthy like that.
That Dizzy Rascal though, he’s reassuringly "edge-of", and maybe D.E.E from Nasty Crew too, who’s gaining the reputation of being the Biz Markie of UK Garage (you can’t hear it on the records yet). Reynolds pointed out the Glossollalia thing a while back, this speaking-in-tongues on the pirate airwaves, that could be a promising thing. Lets hope everyone can hang on to their hats. A bit crazy=Good. Too crazy=Winston Meikle.
Posted by Woebot at May 2, 2003 12:01 PM