In the sleepy town of Hay-on-Wye a banner swings in the wind. “People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading”. So, it seems, do the 100,000 people who will pass through the town for the 23rd Hay Festival this week. After years of threatening to come to the literary gathering, I have finally made it – but not without a journey of Shackleton proportions. Set amid rolling Welsh hills, the beauty of the landscape helps offset the sheer trauma of getting here. Arriving weary (three buses, one plane, one cab, one train but thankfully not frostbitten), it’s a question of poring over the 90 page programme, figuring out an itinerary and where to find the festival’s obligatory beverage, Pimm’s. Last Friday, Ian McEwan’s event was more stand-up than lit-lecture, as the crowd cackled along to his reading of Solar, which had just won the PG Wodehouse Award for comic writing. Afterwards, as is the prize’s custom, he was presented with a Gloucester Old Spot pig, forced to clamber into a trailer with the mucky beast for a photo op. There was almost an Orwellian segue from that scene to BBC’s Andrew Marr chastising corrupt politicians of old. The brown envelopes of Ireland’s ministers have nothing on Lloyd George, who according to Marr, “sold peerages as if they were on a menu”. Christy Moore played an excellent gig afterwards and the famously perspirant singer joked “this never happens” as he donned a sweatshirt and hat in the chilly marquee.
Even though 400 events take place over 10 days, people-watching, slouched in a deckchair is hard to resist. The festival’s demographic is “99% white”, according to Michael, a black Londoner with Irish connections, who proudly compared himself to Chris Hughton and Phil Lynott. It gives Hay a slightly homogenised air of clipped accents and men wearing cravats and Panama hats who wouldn’t look out of place at Wimbledon. Alongside the over 50s, there are a sizeable number of families, with cherubic children in eco- friendly clothes. Hay Fever, the children’s programme is dominated by authors, but there are craft and painting workshops, cookery schools and a book bus. Quintin Blake, Roald Dahl’s distinctive illustrator conducted live drawing of festival attendees, while Roddy Doyle was happy to chat to awestruck kids about his Rover books.
Traipsing between multiple events is hungry work. Festivals have upped their culinary game, and the days of the lone chip van are long gone. Certainly, there were burgers to be had, but they were of the gamey venison or organic lamb variety. Sheep’s milk ice-cream begged to be scoffed in the sun and the toilets were better than some hotels this writer has stayed in. The overall vibe is uber relaxed, interrupted only on Sunday by a police presence for the attendance of Pakistan’s ex-Prime Minister, Pervez Musharraf.
Hay has been called “the Glastonbury of books” (with superior loos), but Bill Clinton’s description is more accurate. In 2001, he dubbed it “the Woodstock of the mind”, because there’s far more on offer than bookishness. Music, theatre and art are well-represented and the night-time club venue is Baskerville Hall, one of the inspirations for Arthur Conan Doyle famous hound story. In the onsite bookshop, at barely 10am, a group of women shriek excitedly after a cookery demonstration with Yotam Ottolenghi. Queues snake outside an oversized dollhouse for a show that gives you a potted history of opera in 20 minutes (www.operaplayhouse.com). By sheer serendipity and the compact layout of the site, it’s hard to avoid famous faces. Harder still not to faint at the sight of Jon Snow in the flesh. Robert Winston strides past our B&B window; there’s a rumour Radiohead’s Thom Yorke is browsing in the book shop; Ed Milliband crosses our path so many times, I fear he may be stalking me. As festivals go, it’s a fantastic experience, organised with care, efficiency and thought. This veteran of music festivals has always been entreated to bring babywipes and toilet roll. You won’t need either in the impeccably lush surroundings of Hay, but do bring plenty of money. If the Venison burgers or the Penguin merchandise don’t vacuum up your cash, the 30+ wonderful book shops in the town certainly will.
The Guardian Hay Festival runs for 10 days every May/June in Hay-on-Wye. www.hayfestival.com
This article originally appeared in The Irish Times on Saturday, June 5th.
Just as Mountain Man’s moniker camoflauges its line-up of three women, there’s a murkiness as to whether Canadian band The Acorn is one man or a bunch of musicians. What started out as the solo platform of Rolf Klausener has expanded into something of a collective, fronted and helmed by the Ottawan singer. Ahead of the release of a third album, No Ghost, Klausener is on the phone, talismanically hoping that volcano ash doesn’t mess with his plans for a UK tour. Having started his musical career alone, he’s now more comfortable with the bulked-out presence of a band. “The line-up has transformed over the years and it’s never really been a very stable entity. I started [The Acorn] on my own and it took me two years before I started playing with other people. Initially it was a side project, because I was playing in several bands, but lots of them went on hiatus. Suddenly I found myself with very little to do, so I taught myself to record music. The first album was a solo record but I got bored of playing by myself, so I asked friends to get involved. I never intended it to go beyond playing a few shows here and there, but the response was great and we ended up sticking together.”
One reason people assume The Acorn is a one-man-band, is due to their much-feted second album, Glory Hope Mountain, based on specific events in Rolf’s family life. His father (who died when he was a teenager) presented him with a family history started by his Swiss great-uncle, which goes back centuries. “He always intended to add our family story to it, and after he passed away, I wanted to continue this. In 2005, I mentioned to Howie in the band that I was going to interview my mom about her life and history, and he suggested I should write some songs about it. My mom’s stories were so incredible that I told the band I’d wanted to write an album about it.” Concept albums are a tricky beast at the best of times, but one based on the frontman’s mother? “I know! Initially, some of the guys thought it was ludicrous, but they eventually came around.” His mother was brought up in Honduras, and Klausener wanted this to be represented harmonically in the songs. As a result, the album is percussion heavy and is particularly influenced by Honduran Garifuna percussion, and features marimbas and ukeleles.
All artistic projects are personal, but convincing your band mates to participate in a project about a parent is a hard sell. With laying out so much of your family’s life, there could be a tendency for subsequent work to be less introspective, or worse, to impose self-censorship on it. Was it daunting to write No Ghost? “What was daunting was the idea that more people would be listening to this album. In some ways this record feels more personal, because I was writing about personal experiences. I’d like to get to a place where I could write in a very direct way. There’s definitely no self-censorship as I wish I could have been more lyrically blunt, but I like toying with metaphor.”
Glory Hope Mountain was a critical success and led Klausener to a crossroads. Until 2008, he was working as a graphic designer, with music “very much a hobby”. Touring would involve taking unpaid leave to and eventually he realised that a musical leap of faith was required if he wanted to give it a go full-time. “I never intended to play music as a career or expect to have the luck and opportunities I’ve had. In my mid-20s, I started to get confident in my own songwriter and thought ‘hey, I could probably record myself’.” Klausener regularly works with other acts, recording and producing local bands in Ottawa. He and Acorn band member Pat Johnson have been working on “an insane dance record” for the last six months. Really? “Yeah, it’s full on crazy, early ’80s New York style-slash 90s Eurodance music. The project is called Silken Laumann, after a famous female Canadian rower from the 80s, but we’ve got about 16 songs. I don’t know what we’ll do with it but it’s been a source of musical venting. As a music fan, my taste really runs the gamut and the Acorn seems to be the place that I put in my most of heart and soul, but I spend a lot of time recording other projects that help to exorcise my genre demons.”
To record No Ghost, they decamped to a small cottage in Northern Quebec, living in almost total isolation. “It was about a band holiday and spending quality time together as much as it was about making the record. That experience in itself fed the entire writing process. It was so isolated – no phone reception, no TV, no internet – that all of us felt instantly quite free.”
Describing what The Acorn do musically is difficult. It’s pop, it’s folk, but it’s full of percussion and instrumentation that hints at world music. To coincide with the release of the new album, Fourtet remixed Restoration, and musically the two acts share some common ground, as well as a contact: Acorn’s manager is Kieran Hebden’s sister. “We both get the cross-genre thing. On Fourtet records, there are jazz drums, horns and electronics but no one every asks ‘what’s he doing?’. We had this idea to get people to remix the songs and we compiled a LONG list. We wanted Kieran to do it, but didn’t want him to feel pressured, so we just sent over the album, with no instructions. He came back saying he loved it and picked Restoration as the song he wanted to rework.”
Physical abums now sell less than ever and online consumption of new music has reached a frantic pace. So much so, there is a danger for established bands on second or third albums to be cast aside in the search for newness (think of the Threadless’ t-shirt ‘I Listen to bands that don’t even exist yet’). “It’s definitely a question for the media, but there were times when I was constantly refreshing Pitchfork to learn about new bands. That said, someone like Smog just gets better every year and I love the idea that artists can change and refine their craft. It’s wonderful to be curious about new music, but it’s silly to be close-minded to existing artists. There’s a law about the power of consumption of computers doubling every 18 months, so maybe that has trickled down into an artistic by-law. For me, interesting artists, regardless of what number album they’re on, will catch the attention of peole who are interested in music.”
The Acorn have managed to do this themselves, with both Kanye West and Elbow’s Guy Garvey praising the band, re-inforcing the idea of their eclectic fanbase. Are they ever surprised by the people who like their music? “Yes, absolutely. I’m not 22 anymore, and sometimes feel that my songs are irrelevent to younger audiences. I’m mean, I’m not that old, but I wonder if the weightyness of the songs has resonance with younger people. The disparate ages at gigs always surprises me. You’ll see a 50 year old man with his wife – and even his with kids – but what makes me most excited is that people listen and get something out of what we do.”
No Ghost is out now on Bella Union. For more information, visit www.myspace.com/theacorn
This article originally appeared in The Ticket in The Irish Times on Friday, June 5th.
In Dublin, it’s unseasonably chilly for May, but Karen Elson is extolling the heat of Nashville, where she lives. “I have to be really careful though, because my skin just can’t handle the sun.” No surprise, given that the Amazonian model, with her flame red hair is also possessed of the palest complexion, both of which have made her one of the most distinctive looking – and famous – models in the world. Best known for striding down catwalks for Dolce & Gabbana, Versace and Gaultier and gracing the covers of countless magazines, Elson has just released her on another career, as a solo musician. To some, it was a logical step, perhaps because she’s married to Jack White, of the The White Stripes and The Raconteurs, but Elson was writing and performing music long before the two met. “I’ve been writing songs for about 10 years, but I never really told anyone about it. It was just something I liked to do, but I never really felt comfortable or confident enough to just do it”. It’s disarming to hear Elson use these words when she has spent over a decade having to exude both for a career that is predicated on them. It’s possibly a throwback to her youth, when she was bullied in school and didn’t want to tell her schoolmates that she’d be signed up as a model. “The Ghost Who Walks [the title of her album] is actually a nickname that they’d call me, because I was so tall and pale.”
These days, Elson sounds more relaxed, and still speaks with a warm Oldham burr. Her modelling career began at 17 and has taken her all over the world and in 2005, while living in New York, she was booked to appear in a White Stripes video. On set, she met Jack White and after a love-at-first-sight romance the couple married. Given Jack’s acclaim as a musician, was she nervous about playing her music for him? “Definitely. I squirrelled myself away – literally – to write the songs, and he really wanted to hear them. Eventually when he did, he was so supportive, but then Jack’s a wonderful husband. He was really encouraging.” White quickly steered her into the studio produced the album (“it was a really natural thing”) but the project is very much Elson’s own. Folky, country-ish, there are tinges of the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack, Nick Cave and Cat Power (who Elson once duetted with on Je T’aime). It almost doesn’t feel like a debut, but then she has been writing for years, and is co-founder of The Citizen Band, a cabaret performance troupe.
When models step out of their world there is often criticism, not least in the derogatory shorthand of ‘model-slash’ (usually followed by ‘actor’, ‘’singer’ or ‘author’), and Elson is wary of it. There is an assumption that a model will merely be a mouthpiece for a big producer, and won’t have written their own music. “Oh yeah, people make a lot of assumptions about you as a model. That you’re stupid, that you don’t read. That model-slash-singer thing is something other people label with you with, but there’s nothing that I can do about that.” Elson wrote all the songs herself, played guitar and has created something affecting and authentic. There is a sense that she simply couldn’t have made this album before now; as if it has taken her until her 30s to take the plunge. “Definitely, I feel as though I wouldn’t have had the confidence to this now. I loved my twenties, they were so much fun, but I’m glad to be over them and be 31. As a woman, you just feel so different, more comfortable with yourself, more relaxed and confident.”
Motherhood has contributed to this and Elson and White have two children, four-year-old Scarlett and two-year old Henry Lee. Despite the couple’s hectic schedules, they have a rule that they alternate work schedules, so that one of them can mind the children. When not making music or modelling, the model co-owns a vintage clothes shop in Nashville and says she juggles everything. Today, as she wades through interviews, her children are at nursery. “I love being a mum and it’s definitely my priority right now, but you have the busy day like this, but then I know I’ll get to pick them up later.” With artistic parents, Elson laughs when I joke that her children will probably rebel and become tax consultants. “Oh god, probably! They can sort out their me and Jack’s finances! They love music, but then don’t all kids like making noise?”. We bid farewell taking about the finiteness of a model’s career, something that at 31, Elson is very aware; but unlike her contemporaries who have attempted a detour into music, she’s got a very bright future ahead of her.
The Ghost Who Walks is out now on XL Recordings. For more information, visit www.myspace.com/karenelsonmusic
This article originally appeared in The Irish Times Magazine on Saturday, May 29th.
After last year’s Electric Picnic, with its Pitchfork-approved headliners, the post-gig ‘who was the best live act of the weekend?’ conversations were intriguing. A straw poll – regardless of age, musical preferences or how tired they were – was won by Chic, whose disco funk and sheer energy outclassed and outplayed everyone else. It’s also probably the reason they’re in Dublin next week for two gigs, with Friday night sold out. Nile Rodgers, is the mainstay of the band, but then Rodgers isn’t shy of telling you he’s not just Mr. Chic. He’s a sought after collaborator, the producer who steered David Bowie in a different direction with Let’s Dance and the man who recorded Madonna’s Like a Virgin. He has written, produced, or performed on songs which have sold over a hundred million records. It’s not hyperbole; simply put, he is a legend. A grand old man (almost – he’s 58) that has been credited with the rise of disco, cross-pollination with punk and the genesis of hip-hop. A recording device disaster (I have to resort to a mini-disc that could feature on the Antiques Road Show) means I’m ten minutes late for our phone interview slot. Expecting a ticking off, he shoos away my apology. “Hey, it’s cool!”.
Rodgers started his musical career with the Sesame Street band, and worked as a house guitarist at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre backing acts like Aretha Franklin and Screaming Jay Hawkins, but when he met Bernard Edwards, everything changed. “The first time I spoke to Bernard was on the phone. I told him I was putting together a new act, and based on my description of the band and my personality, he decided that he never wanted to speak to me again”. Were they very different? “Oh, he and I are polar opposites… night and day, but that’s why it worked so well. We were the two closest people in the world – eventually – but at the end of that first conversation he said ‘hey man, can you do me a favour and lose my number?’” They met by accident a few months later working the same paid gig and Chic was born. Almost by stealth, their disco funk stylings tore up dancefloors. It was something fresh and radical, but Rodgers knew they could pull it off. “We didn’t know Chic would work on a grand scale, but we were positive it would work on a some level. I remember writing Everybody Dance and playing it for Bernard. It sounded really complicated so I sang the bit ‘Every-body-dance-do-do-do’. I’ll never forget that moment he looked at me and said, ‘yeah man, that’s pretty hip, but what does do-do-do mean?’ That was my audience of one. I knew that if I could move Bernard, I could move a lot of people.” And they certainly did. Hits like Good Times and Le Freak soundtracked the hedonism of late 1970s New York. The latter track was written after the duo were refused entry to the famous club Studio 54.
“Grace Jones had invited us to the club to discuss the idea of working with her, and they wouldn’t let us in. It was New Year’s Eve, we weren’t on the list, we weren’t that well known….even at our peak, we were quite faceless.” Rodgers is laid back, engaging, and even though he’s probably got rictus from telling the same stories, he’s fascinating to listen to. He speaks in sub-clauses, goes off on tangents, but is fiercely knowledgeable about his craft. Before he even finishes the Grace Jones story, he has casually revealed that he was working with Sister Sledge at the time and that ‘He’s the Greatest Dancer’ was nearly a Chic single instead. He returns to his point about the band’s anonymity by recalling an incident in the bathroom at a music awards ceremony with the BeeGees. “They had won everything the previous year with Saturday Night Fever, and they were like ‘who the fuck are these guys winning everything?’ People thought Chic were two girls. I loved the anonymity, because Bernard and I knew we didn’t look like stars – the music had to be the star. We always believed that Chic was a faceless opening act, who were trying to grab people’s attention while they were waiting for the big star to come out. It meant we worked twice as hard, and applies to my whole career.”
Despite a hugely successful career – working with Bowie, Sister Sledge, Grace Jones, Madonna – Rodgers maintains that it didn’t come easy for him. He doesn’t feel sorry for himself, but says he faced adversity from various sources and struggled to make several of his biggest records. “When I worked with Duran Duran on The Reflex, the record company didn’t want to put it out because they said I’d made the band sound ‘too black’. The Duran guys said ‘this is exactly what we want to sound like’. Same reasoning with Diana Ross; we had to sue the label to get the album released – how could Diana Ross be too black? Was it code for too funky? It didn’t make sense.”
When disco when kicking off on one side of the Atlantic, punk was having a messy birth in the UK. Rodgers found more affinity with punk than disco and hung out with The Clash and Blondie. “The politics that spawned punk were the same ones that spawned disco, even hip hop. The cultures had overlapped and it all germinated in the underground. In 2010, all the things that used to be underground are now in mainstream pop. In the old days, Lady Gaga would have been completely underground, or been in gay clubs for four or five years and broken through after she’d had a bunch of hit songs. The artistic evolution is interesting and I’m not sure there’s even an underground anymore.”
Rodgers constantly mentions Edwards throughout our conversation, and interestingly, still talks of his friend and band member in the present tense, even though he’s been dead for 14 years. After that infamous first meeting, he says that “physically, musically, we were never separated again.” Which is not entirely true. The post-Chic spats are legendary, but even when they weren’t speaking, they looked for each other. When David Bowie wanted to contact Rodgers about working together, he accidentally called Edwards, who dutifully passed on Nile’s number. Their falling out in the ’80s was probably not helped by the decade’s mood of indulgence, which was “way worse than the ’70s”, according to Rodgers. “The ’70s were exciting because something new was emerging; it was very political [he is former member of the Black Panters] and I was into activism and helping others. There were so many victories – gay liberation, black liberation, women’s rights and then it went from ‘it’s all about us’ in that decade to ‘it’s all about me’ in the 80s. The celebrations became the antithesis of the hippy movement and I got caught up in it. But I approached it with a selfless, ‘ 70s attitude – so I was the guy who gave AWAY all the drugs”. He embraced the excesses, which he calls the “Studio 54 mentality”. “I’d get on a plane and have sex with a total stranger while flying to Europe. It wasn’t unusual. Lots of people were doing the same thing, but it never felt uncomfortable. I used to have an office in the women’s bathroom in Studio 54; that’s where my drinks were served. Women would come and go and no one ever asked me to leave. I partied, did lots of drugs, I lived there.”
The good times eventually caught up with Rodgers, who says he knew it was time to stop, when he and Mickey Rourke ended up caned in the bathroom at 7am at Madonna’s birthday party. It wasn’t Rourke’s company or the amount of drugs consumed that actually made him quit – someone played him back a recording of him playing guitar that night and he didn’t like what he heard. The producer has been sober for 14 years and his productivity shows no sign of slowing down. While not involved in activism anymore, he takes an interest in politics. How does he feel about Barack Obama? “I’ve not met him, but when I was younger, I believed this would be possible. But I didn’t think we’d be in this place in 2010. Even though we have a black President, America doesn’t feel freer; it feels that we’re going backwards. The jubilance of that event was instantly quelled by the opposition and there is what my friends would call a ‘blacklash’. We’ve regressed a lot.” It’s the only down note of a fascinating interview. Rodgers leaves you wanting more, but we’ll have to wait for his autobiography which is due out next year.
This article originally appeared in The Ticket, in The Irish Times on Friday, May 28th.
How many people have you kissed this year? As of today, Philip Thiel has kissed 142. By December 31st, that figure will be 365; a different person for each day of the year. Why? Because of a project he’s engaged in called 2010: A Year of Kissing People. Thiel, who works for Melbourne’s Immigration Museum in Australia, engages in an annual artistic project that involves a daily ritual. “It came from a collective New Year’s Eve resolution. My idea was to write a poem about the year, summarising each day in a couple of lines and at the end of the year, I had a huge poem completed.” Thiel set up a blog as a way of documenting his work, and followed up the poem project with something more public – presenting a flower to a stranger every day. “When I started the flowers project, strangers, and even people from countries I had never visited started reading the blog, and I became addicted to the feedback aspect of it”.
His work to date has focused on the lives of Saints, lemons and a year spent randomly following people, but his latest kissing project has piqued much interest. “Intimacy is really lacking in my culture and community, so it’s about making a stand for intimacy, but also pushing myself to do something that’s very ambitious. The idea of kissing a person a day seems impossible to many. It’s an artistic challenge for myself, but I want people to think about the limits of what is possible,” says the 28-year-old.
Immediately I want to ask him twenty questions – who does he kiss? Does he tell them about the project? He first outlines the rules: the kiss must be on the lips and last for more than a second. “Initially, I invited readers of my blog to arrange to meet to kiss me, and I got lots of offers from people globally. Friends who hear about the project often want to be a part of it and offer to kiss me. I use online dating sites to propose kissing people, but I don’t tell them it’s a project. So I meet them, kiss them and report on that episode on the blog. Sometimes I randomly encounter people on the street or at events and it happens that way. I really enjoy not telling people about what I’m up to, if it’s possible to work out consent with them. I like them NOT having an explanation for my desire to kiss them.”
It’s probably quite easy for Thiel to convince people to kiss him. He’s funny, articulate, velvet-voiced, and – helpfully, for a project like this – a little flirtatious. He documents every encounter on his blog, encouraging regular readers, strangers and even the people he has kissed, to comment on the experience. The blog seems as integral a part of the project as the meeting of lips, and Thiel dubs himself a “blog artist”.
“I like the blog’s immediacy, that it’s not contingent on time and that it’s accessible immediately and internationally. The comments on work have become part of it. I want to see the responses I get, share them with others, even the negative, moralistic ones.” Thiel’s partner, gave him the title of “blog artist” and I’m wondering how his partner (he refers to him twice as his husband) feels about him kissing strangers. “Julien is French, so his culture has a radical understanding of intimacy. He hasn’t limited me in anyway, and he’s a storyteller himself, so he has a respect for things that come out of life. We don’t have a relationship where we have to reserve ourselves sexually for each other and if anything was to disrupt our relationship, it would be something much deeper than just kissing or sex. The kissing project is probably connected to my way of liking the kind of relationship I have with him.”
Another motivation for Thiel is that he loves kissing, and has noticed a difference in attitude to it between the sexes. “The men I meet always want more than a kiss, and a woman will be suspicious that all I want is a kiss”. The ratio of kisses has been 65:35 in favour of men, and the oldest ‘kissee’ was 65. He has kissed multiple nationalities (he attributes this to Melbourne’s multiculturalism), kissed on top of a Ferris Wheel and on the beaches of the Dominican Republic. .
Does he enjoy it? “The dailyness is a real challenge, it takes commitment and organisation,” says Thiel, “but because it’s so interactive and social, I get a lot of energy from other poeple to continue. I really enjoy the feedback, it really sustains things. Kissing in itself is its own reward. It’s supposed to make you live longer, it burns calories and it’s stimulating to kiss different people. How could I complain about that?”
2010: The Year of Kissing People is at http://thiel.livejournal.com/
This article originally appeared in The Irish Times Magazine on Saturday, May 22nd.
In 2003, David Mitchell had authored two novels, Ghostwritten and number9dream, that had been favourably acknowledged. Then, in 2004, his multi-layered Cloud Atlas arrived and critical consensus erupted that here was one of the brightest new voices in literature. That Mitchell was adept at weaving multiple narrative voices and inverting the notion of genre was accepted as his literary nous; that he was such a prolific and engaging storyteller was a bonus. After his semi-autobiographical bildungsroman Black Swan Green, Mitchell almost has nothing and yet, everything to prove. Such is the Irish-based writer’s appeal, his latest book has been anticipated with the kind of zeal usually reserved for literary veterans. Fans – as varied as AS Byatt and John Humphreys to the thousands propelled in his direction by Richard and Judy’s bookclub – will not be disappointed. It’s a masterful story, told artfully, full of ambition, heart and captivating language.
Jacob de Zoet is a clerk for the Dutch East India Company sent to Dejima, an artificial island in the bay of Nagasaki. The eighteenth century is drawing to a close and the Dutch have a strictly-controlled trading relationship with Japan, an arrangement that is mired in corruption. Thwarted by his honesty, which buys him an additional stay in Dejima, Jacob faces moral, economical and cultural dilemmas. Betrothed to Anna back home, he must make his fortune to win her love, but she is eclipsed in his affections by a beautiful but disfigured midwife, Orito Aibagawa. Shogun laws dictate protocol, language barriers prohibit communication and trade is a bedfellow of bribery. And that’s without the danger of attack by the British.
Mitchell has also chosen to deviate from his preferred first person narrative. Instead, Jacob, nephew of a Dutch Calvinist, is related in the third person, and is as vivid as any Mitchell character. Appalled by backhanders, he soon realises he is not above barter and gambling, playing billiards with Dejima’s doctor, Marinus, to win a chaperoned encounter with Orito. He loses, and while making good his forfeit in the doctor’s garden, Orito approaches, translating his name into the Japanese, Yakobu Dazûto. “I wish”, remarks the love-struck clerk, “that spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket.” Their unconsummated connection is sublimated by etiquette and class, and Mitchell weaves its melancholic longing into the broader historical cloth of his story. When Orito is displaced to the Mount Shiranui Shrine – where literary allusions to Black Narcissus and The Handmaid’s Tale abound – the book moves from Dejima. These sections are fascinating, and highlight the limited roles of women in the society of the time. Its cloistered nooks share the same murky confines of Dejima, where Mitchell has created a non-country, comprised of rootless nationalities that have a nomad’s apathy for the annex they find themselves hold up.
It’s not the first of Mitchell’s peripatetic books with a Japanese backdrop, but this story remains surprisingly rooted in one place. While enhancing the sense of claustrophobia, cultural conflict is acutely observed. Jacob, Dr. Marinus and their co-workers discuss slavery, with the doctor refuting that “all empires are built on the institution”, and describing himself not as “colonial officer: I am a physician, scholar and traveller.” Mitchell gears effortlessly between the voices of Japanese interpreters and Dutch – “Europe’s most unprincipled race” – exiles. His panoply of characters, including a peripheral creation like Irishman Con Twomey, are all afforded a chance to tell their story; even if their place in the story is minute, they are as vivid and corporeal as the main players. Mitchell spent a number of years in Japan and partly set two of his previous novels there, but there is no doubting the huge amount of research involved here. The sights and sounds are palpable: of privies, mangy dogs, post-coital encounters with prostitutes, poor food, insect bites and “rats big as badgers”. Historically, there is an authenticity that while detailed, never comes across as forced. In the opening chapters, the story teems with names, places and characters, often requiring an unblinking concentration on the reader’s part. Quickly, we become accustomed to its rhythm and language, in the way Jacob’s embracing of Japanese script proves a source of justice in the end. As one of the monk’s at the mountain convent says: “Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm, but artisans, like dumpling-makers, if somewhat slower.” This novel took Mitchell longer than his previous works to complete, but its lyrical dexterity and a story that utterly immerses the reader make it worth it.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is published by Sceptre.
An edited version of this review originally appeared in Agenda, in The Sunday Business Post on May 2nd.
A man flops facedown on a sea of supermarket trolleys. A body lies horizontally inside a Deli meat counter. Three bridesmaids and a bride are prostrate on a nicely carpeted floor. No, not the aftermath of a Zombie rampage in a schlocky horror film, but a phenomenon called Facedown. Thankfully, no relation to Facebook, the idea is simple. Lie face down somewhere, arms by your side and get someone to take a photo. Ta-da, you’re now part of an ongoing underground project. Go you. Some say it’s art, others say it’s sport, but everyone agrees it’s funny and insane. Over the last couple of years, people in Ireland have clambered on to hoardings, lay down on airport tarmac and perched precariously on bridges (don’t try this at home, kids) all in the name of Facedown-ing it. At first glance, it has all the trappings of most internet fads and memes (thankfully people have stopped badgering me to be a vampire or pirate on Facebook), but has gathered momentum since kicking off in 2006. Three American students – Amy Mihyang and brother and sisters Michael and Lynn Chealander – decided to mess around with the concept of the “tourist photo”; you know, the ones where you pose uncomfortably in shorts, next to Big Ben/The Statue of Liberty/a gold Buddha smiling with all the naturalness of Gordon Brown. Although the trio’s blog only features images of them, hundreds of people have taken their idea and run with it. Irish fans have FD’d (too soon for abbreviations?) on top of Garda cars, road signs and goalposts.
Miyhang has said that there is a focus on the locations and the relationship we all have with those cliched holiday snaps. Born in South Korea and adopted in the US, one of her Facedown photos features her with lying in front of a soldier on the Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone. There’s also a shot of her on the ground at Obama’s inauguration, with two tense police officers looking on (they were about to move her on apparently). The friends have taken pictures in over 24 countries and various American states, lying corpse-like in front of Time Square, The Vatican and The Giant’s Causeway. Location is everything. Facedown-ing in your sitting room/office/driveway – fascinating places they may well be – misses the point. People want craziness. Maybe even famous faces. They want politicians performing facedowns in front of Dail Eireann; Ryan Tubridy lying motionless across his Late Late Show desk; World Cup footballers all face-downing on the pitch before kick-off in South Africa. Perhaps we should have a National Facedown day, where everyone duty bound to Facedown in unique places and then upload it to the internet. It’ll be like 1984 meets that Radiohead video. So the next time you see someone lying on the ground in Stephen’s Green or on the floor of Abrakebebra, don’t assume that they’ve had one sherry too many – and look out for the camera.
See: http://facedowns.wordpress.com/ or follow them on twitter.com/facedowns.
This article originally appeared in The Irish Times on Saturday, May 8th.
PEARLY GATE MUSIC
Pearly Gate Music
Bella Union ****
Apart from being bookended by songs entitled Golden Funeral and Rejoice , there’s nothing distinctly religious about Zach Tillman’s solo debut. Tillman is possessed of a voice that segues from sonorous to chipper in a matter of chords. Gossamer Hair starts life as a folked-up love song, before transforming into a 1960s pop rant. I Was a River has its own hymnal rhythm, but Tillman is concerned as much with what he’s saying as how it sounds. There is huge fondness for harmonies, with his brother Josh (of Fleet Foxes) turning
up on I Woke Up . Willfully retro-leaning is no bad thing; 1960s pop and 1970s folk dominate, mixing up quieter moments of storytelling with lush arrangements led by a full band. Not all albums are instant, but Tillman’s wonderful songs – infectious, occasionally melancholic – thankfully linger. See myspace. com/pearlygate music.com
Download Tracks: Golden Funeral, If I Was A River, Gossamer Hair
This review originally appeared in The Ticket, in The Irish Times on Friday, May 7th.
Ask any music journalist about the pitfalls of interviewing a new act, and you’ll get eyerolls and a story about the hipster band who only answered questions with monosyllables or grunts. The flipside to this is the boundless enthusiasm musical newcomers have for talking about what they do. They’re gauche, gushy, friendly. They want to talk to journalists about music in a way that is diametrically opposed to how bands that have been around for 20 years don’t want to be asked about their “influences”. Sometimes they’re on their best behaviour, not wanting to mouth off because their record company has warned them a) not to say anything that is ‘bad’ controversial as opposed to profile-raising ‘good’ controversial or b) to remember that this all shows up in a publication somewhere. 15 minutes in to talking to Zach Tillman aka Pearly Gate Music, he makes a casual remark that immediately has me rewinding the recorder in my head to see if he’s been making up the whole interview. “Playing music and making records is great, but it’s also fun to have the ability to fuck with the media.”
Thankfully, he’s not talking about me, but a recent interview he did with an American website. Asked about how his music career began, he told an elaborate story about nearly dying in a childhood fire at his family home. When he came to, according to his tale, he could “sight read any piano sheet music” he was given. “Oh, I was just having fun with that”, laughs Tillman. He is quiet spoken, slightly mischievous and ridiculously polite whenever a time-delay pause requires him to ask me to repeat a question. “I wanted to make a point about the cut and paste internet blog culture where music is concerned. You can illustrate a lie so easily these days. Anyone with half a brain knows that you shouldn’t believe everything you read about a musician.” The reference (in the same interview) to crystal meth being one of his vices is a probably a giveaway. Tillman is a breath of fresh air as interviewees go. Initially shy, he gets into his stride as we talk, spouting opinions. After a childhood spent in Maryland, he migrated to the west coast, towards Seattle. For many the city was, and still is, a musical Mecca thanks to the holy trinity of Sub Pop, grunge and Nirvana, but the singer hasn’t been caught up in the lionising of it. Few young musicians based there wouldn’t dare knock its musical heritage, but has the hangover worn off?
“It’s funny that you say hangover, because it’s a term my friends and I frequently throw around about Seattle. I gripe about this a lot, but realistically, it’s a good thing, because there’s a vast amount of music – of all styles and genres – in this city, but a very tiny percentage of it gets out of the city and is heard nationally or internationally. Where the grunge hangover comes into play is in the over-styled, hipster clique that live in Seattle and came here because it was a thriving, relevant place in the 1990s and now it’s not because grunge is over. People make such a big deal about it, but Seattle has had its turn in the spotlight and now it’s just another city that’s trying to be relevant with the handicap of having this weird self-importance based on something that happened years ago.”
It’s not hard to see his point, especially when grunge seems like an anathema to the kind of music its demographic is listening to these days. But he is adamant that music is in the blood of the city and that it’s “so easy” to get involved in band (he currently plays in four bands there, when he’s working on Pearly Gate Music). Unlike his elaborate story about sight-reading Mozart piano concertos, Zach Tillman’s entry into music is a conventional one that seems to populate the music CVs of many contemporary musicians. After playing bass and percussion in his High School band, he decided he wanted to be a guitarist. So did everyone else, it seems, and he soon realised that playing bass would be a faster way to land band membership. Various bands beckoned and he played on and off, taking a break for university, until he got an interesting phone call. “My brother Josh called and asked if I wanted to play bass in a band called Saxon Shore. That was it really. I dropped out of college in 2002 and started touring with them.”
“Josh”, just happens to be J Tillman, who has released six fine albums of his own. Most of these albums were under-the-radar releases, until he started playing drums for Fleet Foxes. Curiosity about his brother and his very famous band are an inevitable question, but it must be difficult for Zach Tillman not to be wearied by the connection. Given their profile and the critical kudos they’ve had, does he mind the tenuous association? “To me, it’s just cursory biographical information, which is really boring, but I can understand that we all want to know where something comes from. It’s very different for Josh, because he had made all those records before he joined them. This is my first record and I feel lucky to be doing this. It only bothers me when people start saying I sound like Fleet Foxes.”
The umbrage is expected. You invest everything you’ve got, emotionally, musically in an album, and then the media glibly say you sound like the band your brother happens to drum for. Worse, is that he sounds nothing like them. His debut rolls through styles and decades, the conflicting moods a little disconcerting at first. Take opener The Golden Funeral. If iTunes hadn’t given the game away, you’d swear it was Adrian Crowley. Before you get a chance for chin to rest pensively on knuckle, he’s off with The Big Escape, a strummy, shiny bauble of pop. All the vocals are his (except some “oo-ing and ah-ing from Josh on I Woke Up and Rejoice”) and the harmonies have a peculiarly old school charm. Not quite Everly Brothers or Simon and Garfunkel, although he admits that a lot of what he listening to growing up was older music. Even though the songs sound modern, there is something that veers between slickly retro and quaintly old-fashioned about them. “I think I picked that up from listening to way too much Leonard Cohen. He’s a master of that idea that it isn’t about what it sounds like. One of my favourite records of his is Various Positions. It’s full of midi and all that John Cage stuff that now sounds kinda cheesy. But the songs are so powerful that it doesn’t matter.” I mention there’s a similar feel to lots of great 80’s albums that are lyrically and musically brilliant, but hindered by production techniques of the time and an overzealous use of dodgy keyboards and vocal effects. Reverb was once a benchmark of 1980’s vocals, but became a dirty word until recently. Now, it’s de rigueur again, slathered on to every vocal like the musical equivalent of fake tan. “I drenched this one in a bunch of reverb, but I think I’ll take a different approach next time”. Before we part ways, he talks a little about his teen years. About how his strict Christian parents didn’t approve of his musical choices and the irony of his Pearly Gate moniker. He also mentions how much he loved Pavement in his teens. The band is due to play an upcoming local festival but the singer says he’s torn. “I despise it [namechecks festival], I’d just feel trapped.” Zach Tillman: non-sufferer of fools, religious rebel, knocker of Seattle and maker of one hell of a debut.
Pearly Gate Music is out on Bella Union.
For more information, visit www.myspace.com/pearlygatemusic
This article originally appeared in The Ticket in The Irish Times on Friday, April 16th.
