by: Mat Snow (page 22)
LOVELY BOATING WEATHER
Like a slowly deflating hovercraft, Lucinda Doubtless-Whom sinks to her knees in a billow of organza, taffeta and tulle.
Glittering earrings shadow into eclipse as her Pre-Raphaelite locks tip forward; and with a low, ecstatic moan she deposits a seething pool of youthful high spirits all overthe sward.
Twinkling around her, abandoned champagne glasses litter the manicured lawns, a 40-a- head obstacle course for the flower of the nation's youth as they stagger down to the riverbank, whimpering like hogs. Once there, the ballgowned, penguin-suited and even kilted jeunesse doree falI into punts in a flurry of giggles and rustle of silk, and proceed dodgem-style down the Cam. A costly firework display rages overhead, strobing the revellers an even greener shade of pink.
The scene evokes a drunken collision of Brideshead Revisited andApocalypse Now! Mmmm, I love the smell of banana dacquiri in the morning . . .
THOUSANDS GO MAD IN MAY
Like the football violence season, Cambridge May Balls extend well into June.
Tonight's is held in the 18th Century precincts of Clare College, a rich setting for even richer pickings. 900 green ones per band is a fat fee, even if you have as many mouths to feed as 10,000 Maniacs.
But this evening they more than earned it. Going on at pumpkin-hour, this sextet of American smalltown dreamers cut through the bubbles and blew away tomorrow's hangover even before it got its foot in the door. 10,000 Maniacs refresh the parts in the most peculiar way since.... hell, it must be a good seven years ago now. It'll come back to me who later....
SEE YOUR ANALYST
"You should see the people from where we live. There's a rodeo in our town, we have some real country music people there that are really authentic. We live at the foot ot the Appalachian Mountains, and 15 miles south of us over the Pennsylvania border they have bluegrass festivals in the summer. The Louvin Brothers are from half an hour away and David Bromberg's band are all from our town.
"Our state, where we live, is hicksville. You can drive through 80 miles of farms and in the middle of nowhere is this little Leave It To Beaver type city where we live."
Jamestown, New York State, is home for 10,000 Maniacs. Yet amongst all their twanging I haven't heard a single note that punches a cow or yells, Howdy, pardner. They love country, but the country in their own tunes is maybe Britain. Or Ireland. Or Jamaica. Or Nigeria. Or maybe even Greenwich Village, New York City. Or any place which makes records to capture the selective ears of six serious music fans stuck in a town where slick and empty HM bar bands rule the roost.
Starting off as Still Life around 1980, the frivolously named 10,000 Maniacs sprung from a music, dance and arts co-op based in a Jamestown warehouse. Fuelled by a record collection he started back in '57, guitarist John Lombardo writes most of thetunes.
Tall, swarthy and vaguely reminiscent of Lurch out of The Addams Family, he carries a torch for rock's rich tapestry, sharing his messianic burden with the almost equally fervent Dennis Dew on organ, accordion and spectacles, and the immaculately tailored Steven Gustafson on bass. On guitar, treatments and mandolin, let us applaud the yeoman figure of Robert Buck; and on drums we salute the magnificently handled Jerome Stanley Augustyniak, tenth and latest occupant of that stool.
Thus the setting for the gem. Natalie Merchant resembles a tiny, diamantine Janis Joplin, a perfect tension of waif-like fragility and incandescent power. When she opens her mouth I hear something pure and elemental, a fierce north wind, waves lashed, church bells ringing...
Once a depressed and introverted teenager heavily into poetess Sylvia Plath, she is now 21 years old, a non-preachy vegetarian who favours stage clothes of great-grandmotherly cut and colour.
"When I was 16 I took a writing course at college and this professor made us keep a journal. He never read it, but he told us to have 100 pages by the end of the semester. I'd never written just for my own pleasure, and after that I got into the habit of it, and any time I felt angry or saw something that I wanted to remember...
"Sometimes I just curse the notes because sometimes I can't enjoy things because there's this guilt that I have to record it. Now I have years of journals, stacks and stacks, and rather than sit down and write lyrics to the songs as a spontaneous activity, I have to go back to my journals and use random phrases.
"Just lately have we had any interest from magazines and critics like yourself. So for three years no one ever asked me, Why do you write what you write? That was perfect, I could write whatever I wanted. And then The Village Voice (their veteran rock columnist Robert Christgau) called it 'sophomore pretentious poetry', and that hit me really hard cos I'd never been criticised before for what I'd written. I hadn't written it to be criticised: I'd written it to go along with the music.
"So the last record I've been more concerned and tried not to use too many big words. I think there's more to be said for using concise words, that's one thing I've discovered. The lyrics on this record have matured as much as I have.
"Can you tell that I'm horrified of having you write something bad about me?"
Natalie's playful but opaquely compressed verbiage hints at keen intelligence - largely self-educated, she wants to use any money she makes to finance herself through school again - and a recondite frame of reference embracing the painter De Chirico, planned obsolescence, multiple personality, war and apocalypse. 10,000 Maniacs have adapted for song the war-poetry of Wilfred Owen, but Natalie's own angle, a satire on the WWll US Liberty Bond anthem Goodbye Mama I'm Off To Yokohama titled My Mother The War, highlights their repertoire both live and on record.
That song closes their 1983 LP Secrets Of The I Ching, self-produced for 500 dollars, which followed the previous year's debut EP Human Conflict Number Five. Now they're being produced by the legendary Joe Boyd with an upfront clarity which yet misses the atmospheric vortex of sound whipped up live.
Not since Husker Du seared the Camden Palace to its very foundations have I been so thrilled as tonight. 10,000 Maniacs merge the tributaries of British folk, African highlife, reggae and psych-pop into a clarion mindquake whose closest sonic match is the Cocteau Twins' oceanic trance effect turned on full blast.
Natalie is a folkie by preference, rating Sandy Denny, June Tabor and Dolores Keen, as well as jazz-bluesists Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Bessie Smith, and also haunting German chantoozies Nico and Marlene Dietrich. Of contemporaries she name-drops only Tracey Thorn and Liz Cocteau, her vocal resemblance to the latter enhanced by Robert Buck's physical and musical similarity to Robin Guthrie, chorus pedal and echoplex resonating amidst an extraordinary style which also incorporates the dappled sunshine lilt of King Sunny Ade's highlife picking.
AND THE NAME OF THE BAND IS....
Fairport Convention, Wilfred Owen, Cocteau Twins, Sunny Ade... on paper horrific but altogether magical shining from a stage where Natalie Merchant is in full wild-child flight, cutting a caper with jigs, reels and flings straight out of Whiskey Galore!
And just check out some of the covers they used to play in the days before they wrote their own songs, when they were merely Jamestown's resident rebellious jukebox...
The Melodians Rivers Of Babylon; The Cure Boys Don't Cry; Joy Division She's Lost Control; The TV Personalities Part-Time Punks; various Gladiators tunes; Roxy Music In Every Dream Home A Heartache; Eno Burning Airlines; Digital Dinosaurs Don't Call Us; The Beat Stand Down Margaret; Dandy Rudy, A Message To You; The Maytals Monkey Man; The Clash's Guns On The Roof and Guns Of Brixton with Gang Of Four's Armalite Rifle ("we used to do a gun medley"); Barry McGuire Eve Of Destruction; Peter Tosh Equal Rights; Talking Heads...
Talking Heads! That's it! The nervousness, the eclecticism, the intelligence and eccentricity... 10,000 Maniacs recall the frantic ice-water flush of Talking Heads when first seen back in January '78. To coin a tune . . .
10,000 Maniacs - qu'est-ce-que-c'est?