Bruce Lawson’s personal site

I don’t usually do these meme things (cos they’re just geekspeak for “Chain Letter” to show that we’re not the AOL hoi-palloi), but John Oxton tagged me and he’s a big scary bastard.
Continue reading Four Things

I thoroughly enjoyed my DVD of “The Yes Men” yesterday, because:

• It is a perfect example of detournement in situationist thinking: exposing the society of the spectacle via an even greater, more ridiculous spectacle
• It did so using poo and willy gags
• The activists could only have met, worked together and set up their pranks because of the Internet
• It reminded me that most Americans are not bible-thumping money-worshipping solipsistic buffoons (it’s been three years and the re-election of George Dubya since I’ve been to the U.S., so I needed reminding)
• Much of what they were saying is absolutely correct.

1. My Bloody Valentine

   My Bloody Valentine were the undisputed Kings of Noisy shoe-gazing rock. They fucked up the 1990s for me by releasing the best album of that decade, Loveless, in 1991 – thus making the rest of the decade a bit of a disappointment.

   The vocals were always buried in the mix, and were an interplay between Kevin Shields’ weedy whine and Belinda Butcher’s breathy “oohs” and “aahs”. I saw them live twice, and they were great both times – although one had to be in the “right frame of mind” for it. Ahem.

2. The Cocteau Twins

   Fey musical collages with Elizabeth Fraser’s deliberately non-language vocals multi-tracked. There were times when you could almost make out what she was singing – and times when there were unfortunate errors of comprehension. For example, my mate Nick ruined my enjoyment of one of the tracks on “Heaven Or Las Vegas” by insisting she sings “Sit on my face”. Check it out for yourself (290K mp3).

3. REM

   Once upon a time, REM were good, despite -or because of?- the fact that singer Stipe sang lyrics like “She’s a sad tomato” and “Singer, sing me a gibbon”. (Pippa saw them last month, and said they still kick ass, however.) Often, he was intelligble but meaningless, and thus got the reputation for surrealism and sagacity rather than someone who spouts nonsense instead of writing proper words. Yes, that is a note of envy you detect.

4. Loop

   I saw Loop live several times in the 80s. They were buttockclenchingly loud, and stood completely still, backlit, playing and layering riffs for sometimes up to 10 minutes, occasionally breathing something incomprehensible but menacing into a microphone, before all magically stopping at exactly the same time. Criminally under-rated to this day. (And if anyone has the album “the World In Your Eyes” they could send me, I’ll love you forever; some fucker stole mine, and even Kazaa can’t help me.)

5. Extreme Noise Terror

   Possibly, I’m cheating here, as E.N.T. didn’t really go for lyrics – more grunts and shrieks into a mic over furious grinding heavy rock. When I was a kid, there was a subterranean club in Birmingham (The Kaleidoscope?) which would host a 12 hour gig on bank holiday mondays, where I’d regularly see Extreme Noise Terror, Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower, S.O.B., Genital Deformities and other luminaries play live.

   I recall waiting outside to go in, in a line of crusties, punks and hippies, when some yuppie in a big car drove past, shouting “Get a proper job!”. As I was a pissed-off systems analyst for AT&T at the time, I took his advice and resigned to go travelling for 7 years. So, if you were a fuckwit yuppie in 1989 with a penchant for haranguing strangers, I offer my sincere thanks to you.

Disagree with this list? Leave a comment!

1. "Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols"

   Indisputably number one. The lurid, ransom note logo and album cover by Jamie Ried (cf my own at the top of this page). The sheer fucking excitement of the opening of "God Save The Queen" or "Pretty Vacant" makes this a fantastic album. The opening of "Bodies" still sends a shiver up my spine.

2. "London Calling" – The Clash

   I’ll never forget buying this double album in 1979 for £3.50 (the same price as a single album) and the first time I played it. It was the first time I’d heard political music. It was my first exposure to reggae; I know it was from white boys, but until then I’d only heard sanitised pop reggae. The Clash just melted down loads of influences into something amazing. The cover is great – and the Elvis reference is genius.

3. "Inflammable Material" – Stiff Little Fingers

   As I’ve said in my S.L.F. gig review, you can’t doubt SLF’s sincerity.This album is almost live, it’s so raw; "Suspect Device" as a single backed with "Wasted Life" is a double-A side that is Punk’s equivalent of "Penny Lane" b/w "Strawberry Fields Forever". Other favourites are "Barbed Wire Love" and a shapeless Bob Marley cover/ reworking: "Johnny Was". My only quibbles are "Closed Groove" which is pretty wank, and the production of "Alternative Ulster": what’s going on with the vocals? Quintuple tracking through a comprehensibility-removing device?

4. "The Undertones" – The Undertones

   I’ve got the original, but the reissue is better, as that contains the first two singles, "Teenage Kicks" and "Get Over You". The reissue occurred when the song "Jimmy Jimmy" hit the charts unexpectedly, and gave the record company a jolt. My Grandad Jim had given me £5, and I decided to buy an album: I was wavering between Abba’s "Voulez-vous" and this album. Thank god I made the right choice. "Jump Boys", "Male Model" and "Family Entertainment" kick ass.

5. "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables" – Dead Kennedys

   Conclusive evidence, when I was 15 or so, that America wasn’t only Ronald Reagan and mad Christians. Dead Kennedys: humour; intelligence, and an appreciation of world events ("Holiday in Cambodia") that isn’t generally associated with Uncle Sam. And "Kill The Poor" is a great song, even when Tim accidentally twisted his his cassette into reverse and played us "Lik lik lik the roop".

6. "Parallel Lines" – Blondie
7. "Going Steady" – The Buzzcocks (cheating, cos it’s a compilation; also, "Boredom" and "Breakdown" are great and not on that album.)
8. "Best before 1984" – Crass

   Another cheating compilation. Crass were angry and often unlistenable, but when punk was degenerating and loads of Nazi skins showed up, it was great to have a left-wing band who were hard bastards. Their album covers were great, too.

9. "Best of .. " – The Jam

   Pick your random best of, cos they were always a singles band. I loved "A Bomb In Wardour Street", "Strange Town", "Going Underground", even "Beat Surrender" – and (of course) "In the City".

   Talking of which, they must’ve been livid when they heard the Sex Pistols’ "Holidays In The Sun".

10. Aggghh .. where to start? Motorhead? Ian Dury’s "Hit me with your rhythm stick"? Some Joy Division? The Psychedelic Furs? The B52s debut album? The Ramones? MC5? I choose them all. (It’s my list and I’ll cheat if I want to).

On the other hand, Pippa’s just written to me berating me for forgetting The Stranglers, even though I’ve seen them live! So number 10 is Rattus Norvegicus, ‘cos I love "Hanging Around" and "Go Buddy Go".

This era of verse was what got me to university to do an English degree. I still love and read my 1911 copy of thirty of these plays, which was given to me by Bob Brush, an English teacher of mine.

1. The Alchemist – Ben Jonson

   "The Alchemist" is a great comedy – a cross between a heist movie and a farce (lots of people hiding, dressing up, almost getting caught). It opens with two of the gang fighting, and one taunting the other to do “thy worst! I fart at thee”. One character berates another character, "Thou look’st like the Anti-christ in that lewd hat" – something I’m always dying to say when I see people in headgear.

2. Dr Fautus – Christopher Marlowe

   A great tragedy of the over-reacher, Faustus is a man who wants more knowledge than his station as mere mortal allows. The play is patchy (the comic scenes are almost certainly a hack job), but when Marlowe is on form, the poetry is fantastic. Here’s Faustus on kissing Helen of Troy:

   “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? / Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss! / Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! / Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. /
   Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips,/
   And all is dross that is not Helena.

   The irony is that it’s not really Helen, but a demon dressed up: its kiss really does suck his soul away and damn him. His speech while waiting for the devils to take him finally into hell is a masterpiece.

3. Volpone – Ben Jonson

   Another vicious comedy from Jonson, with Volpone (The Fox), Mosca (the Fly), Voltore (the Vulture) and other, almost medieval-style allegorical characters, with the same comedy of misfits that was found in The Alchemist.

4. The Changeling – Middleton

   Beatrice-Joanna teams with sinister servant De Flores to murder the man her father has chosen for her husband. As a reward, de Flores deflowers her (geddit?), and implies she is a changeling – no longer belonging to her father or good family name:

   .. fly not to your birth, but settle you/ In what the act has made you; you are no more now./ You must forget your parentage to me;/ You are the deed’s creature.

   There’s a cool bit at the end when her father doesn’t know whether to call her Beatrice or Joanna, and alternates the names – as if to imply that the two names indicate two different people in one.

5. The Duchess of Malfi – John Webster

   Death, murder, despair and unremitting gloom: the quintessential Jacobean tragedy. A sort of video nasty of the early 17th century.

Bubbling under were Ford’s "Tis Pity She’s A Whore", Tourneur(?)’s "Revenger’s Tragedy" (blood and black comedy – like a 400 year old "Evil Dead"), Dekker’s social comedy "The Shoemaker’s Holiday" , Peele’s pantomime-like "The Old Wives’ Tale" and Beaumont and Fletchers’ play-within-a-play "The Knight of the Burning Pestle."

Everlasting thanks to Robert Brush for firing and nurturing my enthusiasm for this era.

It’s my thirty-eighth birthday, and I’m in Holland without the family, though had a really great time. You’d think that being of such advanced years, I’d recall many past birthdays, but only a few stick in my mind. Most notably, these were:

• 13/11/82: my sixteenth: I got laid. By a red-head.
• 13/11/84: my eighteenth: likewise, by Helen, of the fabulous figure.
• 13/11/87: my twenty-first, at university in Hull, when my brother and best mate Matt came to visit and we tried to drink 21 beers that day. I believe we succeeded, although were not pretty sights. I certainly recall proposing marriage in a crowded bar to a gorgeous Indian woman named Dhillum with the best breasts I had ever seen. She declined with a good deal more politeness than I deserved, give that we’d never spoken before, and I was slurring my words so much it took three attempts before any degree of coherence could be achieved.
• 13/11/91: my twenty-fifth when I woke up next to the barmaid from my local pub, and the listened to one of my presents: a CD of My Bloody Valentine’s "Loveless", one of my all-time top 5 albums.
• 13/11/93: in Istanbul, with Lucy, Yeşim and other colleagues. That night, I met Zeynab, my first muslim girlfriend, who was so gorgeous and intelligent she was breathtaking.
• 13/11/94: (See photo) In India, on the roof of a hostel in Sudder Street, Calcutta, smoking giggly weed and drinking Rosy Pelican beer. (I always swore I’d call a daughter of mine Rosy Pelican Lawson, but Nongyow vetoed that.)
• 13/11/95: in London: seduced by The Big Boss’s secretary, 10 years older than me and a busty Mauritian hindu. Hurrah!
• 13/11/96: in Bangkok; my first birthday with Nongyow and having recently had my diagnosis of a brain tumour retracted (though the next year revised to MS). Nongyow, me, Stephanie and Richie went to an enormous restaurant where the waiters came round on roller skates, and we gorged ourselves on seafood and Thai curry.

This birthday, on a trip round the Twente district of Holland with cool people, beer and some weed has proved pretty cool, too.

A reader wrote to ask about the only three people I don’t like that I mention in the list of unfascinating facts about me.

Now I don’t mean that I’ve loved everyone I’ve ever met, and want to garland them with homemade daisy-chains while hugging them and crooning "Imagine", but generally the people I meet are flawed but decent – as I hope I am. Here’s the three people whom I genuinely felt were a waste of oxygen, having no redeeming qualities at all:

• A guy who went out with an ex-girlfriend of mine, and beat her up regularly. This guy’s answer to anything was violence; look at him wrong – punch. Remain friendly with your ex – punch. He was nicknamed "Captain Caveman" because of his retarded evolution. Staggeringly, women loved him. Sylvia Plath, anyone?
• A woman I worked with in Thailand, who lied about everything, no matter how trivial. Her boyfriend told me that, a couple of years before, she’d told him that her brother had died of cancer and took him to see the grave. Afterwards, he discovered there had never been a brother – the surname on the grave was co-incidental. She’d lie about things she was bound to be discovered on; why? Desire to be centre of attention? Just plain deceitful? Schizophrenically oblivious to the difference between fact and fiction? I’d be fascinated to know, as long as I never had to meet the woman again.
• A guy who worked at an infant’s school in Bangkok who suddenly died of "pneumonia", which is Thai code for AIDs. I felt really bad about it – even thought I’d only met him twice. Then, one of his ex-colleagues told me that, after having been diagnosed, the guy would weekend in Pattaya (a famous bargirl beach resort near Bangkok) and pay unsuspecting bargirls extra for unprotected anal sex. He’d come back to Bangkok and tell his disgusted colleagues "Got another two of the bitches this weekend". No-one from the school attended the funeral.

Let’s hope this list doesn’t get added to in my next 37 years.