A Momentary Lapse of DarqDean

 

The first album I bought with my own money was A Tangerine Dream by Kaliedoscope (in 1971) and my first real taste of prog was in 1972 Pink Floyd at the Wembley Emipre Pool (or Arena as it came to be known) ~ I rushed to the local record shop on the day DSotM was released to get my hands on a copy, since then I've owned 4 copies of that LP as I've literally worn them out over the past 30+ years. Still prefer the vinyl over the acrylic, even though Mr Gilmour's remastering of the anniversary CD is rather fine.

 

Floyd remain my most favorite band of all time, though as I have somewhat eclectic tastes I would number Porcupine Tree, Riverside, Pain Of Salvation, Ayreon, Bauhaus, Philp Glass, Emperor, Peter's Gabriel and Hammill, John Cale, Tori Amos, Amon Duul II, Gong and Le Orme amoungst my all time favorites.

 

From 2000 to 2005 I was manager of an English Symphonic Gothic Metal group by the name of Season's End and co-produced their first album, The Failing Light, which is still available on Amazon

 

My most recent concert experience was ProgPower last month, seeing Jon Oliva live for the first time was a real pleasure and I now regret not seeing Savatage on the few occasions they have been ot the UK. ho-hum.

 

In general I prefer european music, having amassed a vast collection of brit, italian, german, dutch and scandinavian CD's over the years, but I am not adverse to the odd US album from time to time.

me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me...

 

I had intended to bump this thread after being here for a year, then thought about doing it when I joined the Admin ranks (which made me a newbie of sorts again). Then life got in the way… as it often does. So precisely one year and one week after first joining the PA, it was back to Plan-A.

 

 

The purpose of doing this is to re-introduce myself to those who only know me as that weird old English guy who says really simple things in very complicated ways. The one who writes like he’s got one of those books of many words that groups them together in lists of similar meanings so you can pick all the longer ones to replace the simple short ones and make yourself look more knowledgeable, literary and well educated (though more often than not: unintelligible, pretentious and pseudo intellectual). The book in question is called a thesaurus, I know that, but I do not possess a hardcopy version myself; unfortunately mine is encoded in my brain and is called a vocabulary. I can’t apologise for that, it’s not my fault – I’ve never been able to express myself concisely, it’s part of the internal wiring that’s all messed-up: that makes spelling the simple words a blank for me; that makes telling left from right a chore and tying shoe-laces an impossibility. There’s a name for that too, but we won’t go into that here…

 

So I thought I’d elaborate on my previous life-before-PA and fill on some of the background here in this transitory thread that will be read by 3 people and then percolate back down the stack of threads, never to be seen again, (until I bump it one more time for seasonal prosperity and perhaps just for olde thymes sake), rather than clog my PA Bio with facts and thoughts that would otherwise cloud the contrived purity of its nonsensical nonsense. And maybe even get a “Howdy from Texas” this time around.

 

 

I live in a small village off a small market town in a small shire-county in the South of England, once known as The County of Southampton, or Southamptonshire. Which was later shortened to Hamptonshire, but that was still too much for simple country folk to cope with, so it finally became Hampshire, though efforts are a foot by displaced London-folk to shorten it further to 'ampshire, though often it is just called Hants so as not to be confused by Northamptonshire, which is another place all together and where they make boots. Hampshire, with its steam powered locomotives and crisp green fields as far as the eye can see, complete with a 1,000 year old forest that we still call “New”, with hops growing on the vine and bubbling streams overflowing with trout and peppery watercress interspersed with tithes and barns where rustic craftsmen whittle digital watches and pocket computers from roughly hewn loaves of silicon – a veritable bucolic idyll that is only enlivened by the occasional Chinook helicopter as it rattles overhead, no doubt ferrying a noble prince to rescue a damsel or some such tabloidal fodder.

 

 

In days of yore, before digital watches and Pods that went “aye”, Hampshire was originally part of Wessex, ruled by King Alfred the Great (great king, lousy baker) from the county-town of Winchester, named not from the rifle (nor the now ancient disc-drive of IBM fame), but of a White Fortress in a long forgotten tongue, once the capitol of all that was Albion and the home of a (but not the) round-table and other knightly things on a daily basis (some clad in black, others in white satin). The county also boasts the portly delights of Southampton and Portsmouth (the birthplace of gentle giants and home of the recent winners of the football cup they call the FA); the candy-floss seaside splendor of Bournemouth and the concrete horror that is Basingstoke, (though other towns in the county have lesser fame and greater charm, which makes the occasional blot on the landscape slightly more tolerable, but Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Liz Hurely and Tanita Tikaram make it difficult to justify all that is Basingstoke in any form what so ever.) And of Alton (nee: Aulde Towne in that long forgotten tongue), that is home to such luminaries as Jane Austen and the less slightly frumpy Alison Goldfrapp and scene of the notorious murder of Sweet Fanny Adams way back in the century before last.

 

 

 

Yes, I like all that stuff: I'm a longhaired Floyd-loving, neo-romantic, head-banging, hippy-Goth, throw-back clad in black with a penchant for the more exotic and esoteric – equally at home to the extremes of metal played at light speed by a twelve-fingered axe-manic mechanic and the post-haste avant-garde sub-audible drone of three notes an hour as I am to the predictable delights of the acceptably safe and predominately dreamy symphetic and the down-right rootin’ tootin’ complex self-indulgent noodling woodling.

 

I also have a predilection for home-grown, clean and honest-to-goodness, wholesome, free-range Pop.

 

Not the plastic variety formed in a factory by a committee to a formula carved in acrylic from recycled past glories and served up in fatty fast food portions, but the intelligently crafted three-minute one hit wonder that a seasoned ear can recognise as being “Art” in its purest form – for the people by the people of the people to the people with the people music – erm, modern-day folk music for modern day-folk.

 

Not that I'm open and receptive to all music in all its guises, there are genres I dismiss with a flick of the wrist and without the eyeing of a bat, styles that leave me unmoved and unchallenged. I have enough taste and discernment to cherry-pick what I like from that which I don't – even in Prog I may like something from all the subgenres, (and indeed I do), but not everything from each.

 

So some 45 years after I use to tune into Radio Luxembourg to listen to the Beat groups and Psychedelic Pop late at night when I was supposed to be asleep, I still get excited when bands release new records, or when I find an artist I've never heard of, who makes music that pleasures my aural pleasure receptors or confronts my preformed preconceptions of I Know What I Like (wardrobe optional).

 

 

Some people said I was mad for joining the Xover team, (and some people say I’m just mad, then some people say that Mad was Alfred E. Neuman, so how far can we trust the judgment of “some people”), but I think of Xover as the front door of Prog - the lure that drags people into this nefarious world of strangeness and wonder. You know how it goes – you hear something just a little bit different on the radio or TV and think, 'Hmm, sounds curiously interesting this, it's making me think and I rather like that. Oooer, I need to lie down for a bit...'

 

Once you're suckered into this Universe of Prog, you discover other delights more exotic and off-the-wall and maybe you'll leave the Crossovers behind as leftovers, a fond memory, only to return to when the hunger for nostalgia bites, but it will still be there, edging up to a boundary that no one can draw with any measure of accuracy.

 

A paradoxically thin ill-defined line that is simultaneously a wide blurry fuzz buffer zone, meandering between progressive music that needs no explanation and radio-friendly mainstream music that your mother would listen to and perhaps even like – it's like trying to drawing a line in a flowing river with a 4H pencil.

 

Argue all you like and keep moving the line until something indefinable and un-indefatigable says: 'That's far enough, I'm comfortable with that', it only adds to the fun when something else comes along that questions your newly placed boundary, when something envelope-pushing raises the bar and forges a new frontier that forces you to readdress and reassess your preconceptions and prejudices.

 

Things change, it is what makes mere humans capable, adaptable and resilient, if everything were fixed and carved in titanium we could all go home early.

 

 

Erm, I’ll get back to you on this one… maybe next year.

 

It’s not all premier cru champagne and smoked salmon sandwiches with the crusts removed and cut into neat triangles, that’s for sure.

 

 

A failed musician...

 

Not that it ever stopped me trying:

 

I got my first guitar when I was 7 or so – anyway... after a long and frustrating afternoon of trying very, very hard, I didn't sound like George Harrison or Hank Marvin so to the back of the closet it went.

 

The next arrived 7 years later, from the Littlewoods mail-order catalogue, it wouldn't stay in tune because the neck was broken, but I didn't know that, age 14, so I took it to pieces and took measurements from the pile of scraps and splinters to make a semi-acoustic from scratch – I learnt a lot about guitars and the joys of cutting slots for fret-wire, but bugger all about playing it and, yet even after another afternoon of earnest trying, I still wasn't Steve Hackett or David Gilmour so to the closet it went.

 

I've bought a few more since, (though no longer on a seven year itch cycle thankfully or I would have 7.28 guitars by now and I don’t), but I never became Phil Manzanera or John McGeoch or Steve Vai, so they all end up in the same place – closetville. One day it will finally dawn on me that I will never be able to play the sainted axe, but I’ll keep holding the dream for as long as hearing a beautifully played guitar can bring a lump to my eye and a tear to my throat…

 

 

Then in the 70s Synths arrived, not that I could ever dream of affording one – they took up half a house at the time and cost practically as much, but I could make bits of one: an oscillator or two, some filters, a ring-modulator and a whole world of music without notes opened up to me. Unable to make coherent music I discovered the delights of incoherent music: of blips and scratches, of the fttz of blue atmospherics, of constructed and manipulated sounds, of tape recorders and loops, of circuitbending and butchered radios tuned to short-wave that captured data-streams from the ether, wild and wide-band whispers from solar-winds in the Van Allen Belt and pink-noise hiss from far off galaxies far, far away. I also taught myself the rules of music theory so I could break those rules, only to discover that the axiom was a lie spread by musicians protecting their profession – you can break the rules without knowing them, it is no less a valid art-form just because you cannot justify what you have done in composer-speak and muso-babble.

 

One weekend I constructed a facsimile of Alvin Lucier's Long Thin Wire in my parents back yard and gave the world my first (and only) public performance to a random collection of stray animals and some kids on their way home from school – ‘what'cha doin' mister?’ (thus spake Zarathustra: the only talking cat in the village). The tapes are lost, a pity. No great loss, just a bit of a shame.

 

 

Time moved on, I met six real musicians, (in a band called Season's End – ‘Ah, Marillion’ I said knowingly – they looked bewildered and mystified, ‘No, Season’s End’ they replied in that stoical manner gothic types are prone to); musicians that knew music and could play real instruments, ones that knew the rules and could still break them, and who could stand on stage before a paying audience and entertain with a symphonic blend of Death, Gothic and Doom Metal. I wanted an ‘in’ to the world of music and they wanted a manager, the pairing seemed ideal. Fame by surrogacy was fame enough, like Peter Grant, Tom Parker and Peter Jenner – those guys were famous, right?

 

Five years later, after a couple of home-made demos and a box-file over-brimming with rejections, after hundreds of underpaid gigs in sweaty clubs, after much hard work and graft, filled with several disappointments and few elations the band imploded, six became four, faces fell like stones in a deep and muddy pit of dark and murky despondency and shoulders slumped like slumpy shoulders would. So began the reformation and renaissance, pulling ourselves up by the laces of our Newrocks we made a full-length CD (and even credited Tara P-T's dad on the liner-notes … after all, we were using one of his cow-sheds as an impromptu rehearsal and recording studio) and with a borrowed second guitarist and a loaned bass-player we set off to play it live, but by then I was finished, burned-out and a little bored... I walked away just as they got signed. No worries, the deal included management with a capitol ‘M’, so all were happy and they never had to face the problem of having to fire me… (again, but that’s another story)  …bigger and better things beckoned for them and they embraced it with open arms, I stood back and watched with a modicum of well deserved pride.

 

A non-failing non-musician…

 

So I made music instead:

So. Yes, I made music. Lots of it: 51 albums, encompassing a total of 48 hours 10 minutes and 56 seconds of music in 255 distinct tunes to be precise. (Which I invariably am, though seldom with any degree of accuracy).

 

But is it any good?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(What do you want? A happy ending? This ain’t Hollywood.)

 

However, I did get an electric violin for my 51th birthday…

 

http://www.myspace.com/cacophonyoflight