Girl Crush Sunday #1

The first in an occasional series for those lazy blogging days when I can't be arsed to write much!

Mira Aroyo

from Ladytron

Plus my favourite Ladytron track:

But is it art? IV

I wish I could say I'd painted this:

....on an 8ft square canvas, on my way to The Big Fuck Off Picture!  Night, ash, flames, ship, sparks, smoke, heat, the excitement of danger, the thrill of lost control... or whatever you want it to be.

But it would be a lie, and I'm a crap liar!

...Take photo of randomly paint-smeared drawing board, crop pic in Photoshop, change to negative.  (S'not cheating, is it?)

On easiness, blogging and a missing song

There's a line from a song I used to have, and I can't find the track nor remember the title but this tiny fragment of a lyric sticks in my mind:

  “???? girl, at ease in this world...”

Without wishing to sound wilfully obscure I think it was off the Someloves cassette that I had years ago. I didn't know of this Australian power pop band (who've made an appearance on this blog before, here) until a good friend recorded some tracks for me in the '80s, but later when I'd saved up enough to visit Australia I bought the album there.  It was the only musical souvenir I came back with (I didn't get a didgeridoo) and I played it incessantly for a period. And then for some mad reason I gave it away...

All that's beside the point, though - the point is that lyric. It stayed in my mind 'cause every time I heard that line I smiled and thought, “Yes! That's what I want to be...at ease in this world.” I'd have this vision in my head of a new improved version of me, the me I aspired to be. 'At ease in this world' means at ease with oneself, I think. Isn't that the ultimate, just to feel like that? Don't most of our problems stem from lacking a sense of self...  self-esteem, self-confidence, self-worth?

Whilst there's loads about the tangible world I'm very uneasy with - the usual big issues like war (what is it good for) - I think I'm as at ease with myself now as I'll ever be, if it's about knowing and accepting yourself, shortcomings and all.  Must be an age thing!  No matter who accompanies us physically and partly shapes our experiences and personalities throughout life, we're still completely alone in ourselves, aren't we? - so it does help to be comfortable with the one and only person you spend your entire existence with...

This reminds me, I was talking to someone the other day who had a little bit of a snipe at blogging. (But please don't slag them off, I love them!) Their impression of blogging is that it's too full of people being navel-gazing or nostalgic, that it's really just the worst kind of vanity publishing and that it's pointless just posting music and pictures. I quickly sprang to its defence, naturally. I spend a lot of time working alone and whilst very happy in my own company, blogs help to remind me that there are so many interesting people and so much good writing, art and music that I mightn't come across otherwise (you can find some down the right hand side).  I miss real-life banter and stimulating debates with different people, so it's like my coffee machine conversation, a lunchtime mag or music rag, it's meetings of minds, sharing of memories, and trips to the gigs, libraries or galleries that I don't get to see.  Plus when I'm working I find I have random conversations with myself (but don't worry, not out loud), then as I've nobody new to discuss my thoughts with at the time I keep them 'til later, when I might write a post. Or leave a comment. The interactive side of blogging is a great bonus, an affirmation that there are others at the end of an internet connection with whom I feel at ease and I hope they - you - are at ease with me too.

Anyway I can't find the bloody song anywhere although I've searched lyrics sites and Youtube clips. Oh god, what if I imagined it all?!  Too much time on my own, navel-gazing.

Primitive painters

Oh, the eighties!

I was out before Christmas with friends - very lovely fellow illustrator friends, who understand the ups and downs and odd lifestyle that go with this career. Inevitably we discussed our common experiences:  the insecurities, both in our own abilities and in our finances, and more subtle strands of concern that run through the fabric of our jobs - compromise versus creativity, personal aspiration versus customer satisfacton.  I know "it isn't a day down the mines," as Mr SDS likes to remind me when I'm pulling my hair out about not being able to portray an aerial view of an elephant standing on one leg whilst juggling jelly beans with quite the success I hope for. But illustrators have to please others, and this means we're sometimes looked down on as safe and compliant in a world where fine artists run dangerously barefoot through the meadows of risk, freedom and cool. Still, inside me, as with many illustrators, there is another type of artist wrestling to get out but, in needing to keep the jobs coming, satisfy clients and pay the bills, I get so caught up with storyline, deadline and toeing the line that I rarely have time nor energy left to cross the line.

I wouldn't even be (just!) able to pay the bills as an illustrator if I hadn't had a lucky break when my mum died and I lost my job. Oh god, that doesn't sound right! But that's how it happened – the death of a parent and a redundancy payment provided not only an epiphany but also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (presumably?) to switch direction completely and take a massive, scary, slightly barking and utterly thrilling risk. I'm not sure I'd ever have managed it full-time otherwise; talk about "every cloud"... plus the worry of not having any new work never goes away (it happened last year).

Anyway, at the moment I'm fortunate. But I still harbour desires to occasionally run dangerously barefoot through the field of finer art, maybe even completely naked except for a raspberry beret – don't picture it. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with the illustrator David Hughes whom I was lucky enough to talk to several times when I was back at my old art school a few years ago. I liked him a lot because of his edge and his humour as well as his art. He was uncompromising, straight-talking, dry.  He probably wouldn't remember but I walked back to the bus stop with him one day and we chatted about music the whole way. However, it was on another occasion that I told him I just wanted to unlock a door and release my inner Artist, that one with the capital 'A',  but I didn't know where the key was. “You need to do a big fuck off painting!” was his advice and I've kept those wise, memorable words with me in the interim years, although I still haven't fucked off and painted it. Terrible of me. Perhaps I need to get a little drunk first? Is that what it takes? That and a very, very big piece of paper, I suppose.

You can see some of David Hughes' work here.

Abstract moment of the week #4

All credit to the writers of Coronation Street for their brilliantly random and unlikely reference to Mark E Smith in one of tonight's episodes.  It was so casually delivered by shopkeeper Dev with regard to an event at the Town Hall for local business people "...with pre-dinner drinks in the Mark E Smith Suite"... that it could easily have been missed.  But if,  like me,  you were still laughing through the next few lines of dialogue on noticing it (in spite of another harrowing storyline going on!), you might have a sudden hankering to hear some Fall.

Puts you there where things are hollow

I was just paying the £16.50 to S at my hairdressers  for my regular dry trim today when she said, “By the way, I meant to ask you, C – did you illustrate 'The Gruffalo'? Only I was watching the film of it over Christmas and I said to my husband: I'm sure one of my customers did the pictures for this.”

“I wish!” I replied, laughing, although inside my head a cheeky little voice was saying, “...do you think I'd still be coming here and getting change from a £20 note for a haircut if I had?”  'The Gruffalo', as I'm sure you're aware, is a famous, best-selling picture book, plus it's won several awards and sold over 10.5 million copies around the world. Life for me would be very different if I was receiving the royalties from that.

Or would it? As I walked home, it set me on a trail of thoughts which then led me to the notion of fame in general and how difficult I'd find it to cope with recognition. All these kids that say they want to be stars and celebrities... I just don't understand. I won't deny that the money would be lovely, but I simply couldn't bear the pressure. The lack of privacy would be my biggest problem. Then there are all the expectations, the critics, and the judgements from people who don't know me about how I look or what I wear, what I say. Oh god and what about the gossip? The possibility that a boy from a very distant and very dim past might want to tell tales about the night I let him put his hands up my jumper in my parents' back garden, you know the kind of thing. I couldn't handle it (fame, I mean; I'm not talking about the boy now...).  It would be my idea of hell.

I'm quite happy to stay in the shadows of obscurity. Of course I wouldn't mind receiving the royalties on a best-selling book but, you know, I think I would still get S to cut my hair... I'd just be more generous with my tip.

(Thanks too to The Swede over at Unthought Of, Though Somehow, whose recent post was very timely!)

On loving Mark Hollis and people who confound our expectations

I know what you're thinking: oh god, she's not still bleating on about some bloody '80s synth-pop band. This'll be my last word on the subject, promise!

It's just that I had no idea. In the mid 1980s I was working in the record shop and getting into just about anything as long as it didn't make it into the upper reaches of the charts. I was listening to... hmm, let me think... off the top of my head: the Fuzztones, the Godfathers, the Pebbles albums, Mighty Lemon Drops, Rain Parade,  the Prisoners, Sonic Youth, the Jesus and Mary Chain....   Bands like Talk Talk were easily dismissed in my young mind as too commercial, too mainstream for my taste. We had to play chart music every Saturday in the shop, it was compulsory. It became like a factory soundtrack. So I was a musical snob, I felt contemptuous to a lot of it, and it's probably for this reason that I never paid any attention to the back story on Mark Hollis and his band.

The back story, which I've only just discovered (and I realise this may be old news to anyone more in the know, but in case you're like me....) was that Mark was really one of those true artists who, having had some success, still maintained the desire to express himself musically, with whatever natural, personal drive he had, and without compromise. After providing his record company EMI with a couple of hit singles, he was given financial and artistic freedom to work on a new album (Spirit of Eden). And the result was not what EMI wanted. I guess they'd been expecting a dozen It's My Life facscimiles, but what they got instead was jazzy, improvised, dark and introspective with several tracks exceeding 8 minutes in length. I can imagine the look on the executives' faces when they heard it for the first time. ...

So what did EMI do? They sued Hollis for being wilfully obscure and uncommercial.

The case was eventually thrown out of court, but the damage was done. Hollis left EMI and signed to Polydor – but then EMI released, without his consent, a remix album of earlier Talk Talk material and re-issued It's My Life - which was of course no longer at all representative of the band's sound. So Hollis sued EMI. And this is all why I am a little bit in love with him.

That, and the way he comes across on this classic TV interview, alongside the rather lovely film director Tim Pope, who strikes me as being thoroughly funny too. I love the way they just won't "play the game".

And there was me thinking Talk Talk were just a fairly unremarkable, somewhat inane product of the anodyne eighties pop world. I love it when my expectations are confounded, when there is so much more to people than we think at first. It's a lesson in never being too quick to judge.

Talk Talk II

More music.

I have unexpectedly fallen a little bit in love with Mark Hollis from Talk Talk... in a completely non-physical way... but more on that later perhaps!

In the meantime, on my ongoing voyage of discovery which started simply from digging out an old '77 punk album (see previous post), I came across this cover version of Talk Talk's song 'Inheritance' off their 1988 album 'Spirit of Eden'.  This take is from the tribute album 'The Spirit of Talk Talk' (2012).  Recoil is the project of former Depeche Mode member Alan Wilder, and this track features vocals from Linton Kwesi Johnson (takes me back to listening to 'Forces Of Victory'!) and Paul Marshall (Lone Wolf).

I dunno why, it's just moving me at the moment!

Recoil ft. Linton Kwesi Johnson and Paul Marshall: Inheritance