SMiLE

or: Juxtaposing A Man And His Mystery

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swathe and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'"
(Henry David Thoreau, Walden)

ACT I

The man stands on the windy foreshore, ruefully watching his colleagues rush in an ungainly fashion towards the newly-discovered, soil-rich land, impatient to tear it to saleable pieces. He is there as an impartial recorder; it is his role to observe history but not to influence it. Yet, unbeknownst to his fellow conquerors – for he would be burned at the stake if they knew – he is a seer. And standing on the rock which marks the edge of New England he is able to see everything that is to happen, everyone who is to live or die as a consequence of the arrival of the Pilgrims.

The man is not slender but his profile is thoughtful and perhaps even a little wistful. His curiously Oriental eyes catch everything. He is there to make up stories, to sing songs to sing with a flagon of ale around the campfire, but never to confuse them with worship.

Our Prayer
It is apt to herald their arrival in a new land, which they will endeavour to make look as much like the old land as possible, with a common prayer. His brothers are sceptical about the harmonies the singer has given them to chant. Some of them sound suspiciously like diminished fifths – "the Devil’s chord." But the singer is patiently adamant; these harmonies he has heard used by Herr Bach, and are audiences in Europe not already calling him "the Catholic Protestant"?

But even as they pray, he knows that they are already doomed…

Gee
…as they consciously shift from the sacred to the carnal in their plainsong, or he imagines them doing so. He hears every song that is to be written or sung in the next 200 years. An obscure doo wop ("doo wop"? Where did that come from? How did I know that?) group called the Crows sing "How I love my girl," and a dozen years later the singer remembers it, extracts it from the forlorn youth which he is condemned to live a dozen times over.

And then a trombone (Gershwin? Miller? Bill Harris? How could he have known about them?) comes in, plays a solemn fanfare and immediately follows it up with a decided raspberry to usher us forcibly into…

Heroes and Villains
…the singer 65 years hence, somewhere between an Indian reservation and the Mexican border, watching the "innocent girl" with whom he has fallen in love "right in the rain of the bullets that eventually brought her down." But her ghost survives to dance (albeit is laughed at and mocked "in the cantina"). The music is bumptious and upbeat, yet is continuously interspersed with a sadly rebarbative chorale: "Heroes and Villains: Just see what you done(-done)." Initially he thinks to make a sourly euphoric comment on his continued, inexplicable survival: "At three score and five I’m very much alive, I’ve still got the jive to survive with the Heroes and Villains," but by the time he actually nears three score and five he no longer feels the need to underline or underscore the already evident irony of the now unsung line.

The vision ended, the new conquerors get on their bicycles and begin their systematic hostile takeover of America.

Roll Plymouth Rock
But the music is now darker; ominous booming drums and bass sonorities, over which is laid a reproachful chant: "Bicycle rider, just see what you’ve done – done to the church of the American Indian!" Behind that chant are two supplementary ones: one Indian (conquer the people who inconveniently already live there) and one Hawaiian (our conquest shall not be complete until we have reached the other side of the ocean).

Barnyard
Even conquerors have to settle down, lay down roots, and, if necessary (or even if not necessary), act like kids "Jump in the pig pen – next time I’ll take my shoes off."

Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine
A gracefully descending artist’s brush of a ‘cello line leads into a quietly howling lament.

"How could you take my sunshine away?"

Perhaps the singer is already seeing how industrialisation will slowly reduce man to the level of an inconvenient red mark on an accountant’s ticksheet. A tenor saxophone laughs at him and the ‘celli subside into the dank, dark earth.

Cabin Essence
The conflict between pastoral idealisation and its dependence upon hard, unfeeling, satiating industry. A banjo plucks idly away, but the needling question "Who ran the iron horse?" will not vacate your mind.

Suddenly industry explodes into life; great undulating cascades of voices and instruments ("Have you seen the Grand Coulee workin’ on the railroad?/Oover and over, the crow cries uncover the cornfield"). The seer sees the underpaid, underfed Chinese workmen employed to build the railway down to San Francisco – those undulating cascades are like prototype cable cars careering through the newly-erected city. Note how the banjo has quietly turned into a sarod; note also the increasing impingement of Eastern tonalities and drones into the song. Above and beyond all, note how America will nurture and feed its new industry – by corralling all the available water from the Sierra hills and the Rockies, taking them down to fill the rich and needless, and how (implicitly) this will lead to the unshakeable belief that the need for water to make money will always take precedence over the human life.

It is hard for the singer to avoid crying, or shooting his fellow passengers before they can do any more damage.

ACT II

The singer realises, of course, that his passengers must be allowed to continue their passage, boring through this country America, because the singer also understands that his work may not be completed as and how he may have wanted it. It is now two generations since the man stood wistfully on Plymouth Rock. People have passed on, or changed. Two of his brothers, the two who seemed to understand his songs more than anyone else, have fallen in the course of their passage; others have drifted away, argued with the singer about the quality and true meaning of his songs, chosen to pursue parallel but unconnectable paths, tried to persuade or force him to abandon his impenetrable personal quest and come along with them. However, he has remained quietly but sturdily resolute, even when he feared that the last drop of his sanity might have been drunk. For he realises that children will be born and that it may prove necessary to enlist their aid in order to realise and complete his work satisfactorily - the issue of children, of course, being at the very cynosure of his work.

Wonderful
"She belongs there left with her liberty/Never known as a non-believer/She laughs and stays in her one, one, wonderful."

Is this the Statue of Liberty? Two gently ascending harpsichords sing a ballad, of innocence lost ("Farther down the path was a mystery") and a person giving herself to the proverbial "non-believer" who "bumped into her one, one wonderful." Ravaged (raped?) she retreats into a state of permanent childhood ("…all that’s left/is a girl who’s loved by her mother and father") and remain content with unquestioning, impersonal worship ("…she’ll/sigh and thank God for one, one, wonderful."

The ineffable indivisibility of the individual.

Song For Children
If all we want is to be an individual.

"Maybe not one. Maybe you too, wonderin’."

The music is now faster-paced, foursquare and poignant – a long-mislaid Christmas organ and a warily jaunty French horn and tuba – over which a piquant little clarinet motif is heard, and above that a choir trying to relocate a future. "Child – the child. Father of the Son. Where is the Father, Son."

What greater punishment is there to be had than knowing that you yourself are "the Father"?

Child Is Father Of The Man
It is time for the transference of authority. But the child has to be persuaded more than slightly placidly. The voices now multiply, all urging the "father of the man" to turn again, turn back…
…and save us?

Surf’s Up
Those maracas, delicately shaken like the last drops of sand gleaned from a polluted beach before the saviour can be drowned. The descending one-note guitar, its precipitous descent aided and supported by a warm underlay of glockenspiel. The baseline of the two mutually supportive pianos, counterbalanced by the softly guffawing horns. Childhood or maturity? Naivety or cynicism? Don’t we just want, or need, to pull everything down?

"Columnated ruins domino!"

In other words, bring everything crashing down in a deliberate and sorely needed wreck. Such an angelic manner of willing bloody destruction, even if it is all metaphorical. But so passionate was this singer to put across this specific message, he was once willing to leap octaves in order to do so. However, he is now getting on; his vocal cords are not as sturdy as they were, so he leaves it to his children to finish the syllable, and moreover do so by creating a new chorale chord to shine a light on the song’s original subtext: now he has lived long enough for his children to be able to convey the message for themselves. But the singer doesn’t forget the lullaby – "Are you sleeping? Brother John?" Or is he just checking anxiously that Brother John’s still alive?

One perfect choral chord – so perfect it could split the second it inhabits – leads us into a piano-led meditation on the decline of the old, and a plea for the rise of the new.

"A dim last toasting,
While at Port, adieu or die.

"A choke of grief, heart-hardened eye,
beyond belief, a broken man too tough to cry."

"The lights are dimming
The lounge is dark
The best cigarette is saved for last
We drink alone
We drink alone"
(from "Transit" by Fennesz; lyrics by David Sylvian)

Note how the singer is still able to reach the high C of "tough," as it is sometimes easier than crying.

But on "too tough to cry," one plateau of this song ends (as a life must end) and the piano then draws a path towards the new.

"Surf’s Up! Aboard a tidal wave…
I heard the word. Wonderful thing! A children’s song."

Upon which the "Child Is Father To The Man" motif echoes, joyfully, from every corner. Life pulled from the claws of death.

"A children’s song – have you listened as they play?
Their song is love and the children know the way."

Who, then, could deny the singer his inalienable right to be allowed to complete his work with the children of others when the concept of renewal of life is the whole point of that work? Is Chartres Cathedral invalid as a building of beauty and unworthy of worship because none of the original architects survived to see its complete and final state? The singer is lucky; he has survived long enough to allow his disciples to help him see the completed picture as it was always meant to be seen, and moreover he has sufficient life remaining in him to be able to bear witness to it.

ACT III

If the singer is to take the elements into account – and when defining a country, earth, wind, fire and air are as important, if not more so, than people in doing so – then he must complete his portrait of America by looking at what man is capable of doing with each of the four elements and how any of them can create or destroy that country. But it is paramount that he remain healthy while he is telling this story.

I’m In Great Shape/I Wanna Be Around/Workshop
He casts an indiscriminate eye over how America is building itself into its own assassin with simple industry cancelling out personal angst.

"Eggs and grits
And lickety split. Look at me jump!
I’m in the great shape of the agriculture!"

It isn’t quite American Gothic but the orchestra plays a Burlington Bertie-style vaudeville (how did he know about THAT?) accompaniment (with some strange, out-of-place echoes). Then quiet piano and vibes by which to sink poisoned cocktails as another song is fished out of the archive of future art: "I Wanna Be Around," a bitter and sneering song in its original form, as jilter turns into jilted; but even here the singer is extremely careful to avoid undue cynicism, so pours unquestioning faith and belief into his delivery of the words: "I wanna be around to pick up the pieces, when somebody breaks your heart." Reach out, he is saying, I’ll be there.

Vega-Tables
Out of the earth comes earthiness; the double entendres ("I’d jump up and down and hope you’d toss me a carrot," "I tried to kick the ball, but my tennie flew right off," "I threw away my candy bar and I ate the wrapper") nevertheless mix breezily with yet more calls to industry ("Cart off and sell my vegetables") and ambiguous calls to health ("Sleep a lot" followed seconds later by "never be lazy"). Happiness? Remember what that tasted like?

On A Holiday
But Hawaii is still in sight, like Lorca’s doomed horseman riding to Cordoba, and ahead of him the singer catches up with some of his former colleagues, who have now turned into pirates (as if they hadn’t been pirates to begin with, as the reappearance of the "Plymouth Rock roll over" motif confirms, interrupted by the singer frantically/encouragingly yelling "Child!"). Or could the singer be singing obliquely of other pirates, those who had been circulating earlier, inferior (because incomplete) versions of his songs?

Too much time may have elapsed for it to matter much now. As the foursquare beat – a vortex reflection of the "Song For Children" rhythm – gives way to sweetly embracing piano and marimbas, the singer lets a glimmer of his innate sadness become visible – "Long, long ago…Long ago." The marimbas recede to half-speed. The wind is blowing him towards another timescale.

Wind Chimes
Such quietude, such suppressed grief. "Though it’s hard, I try not to look at my wind chimes." Why does he not want to look at them? Is their mere sound sufficiently grievous for oppressive memories of an idealised past to be activated?

"Now and then a tear rolls off my cheek." On cue, one of the marimbas does a little downward onomatopoeic curlicue, and throughout the rest of the song both marimbas take turns at weeping, at least until a huge orchestra suddenly invades this most private of spaces, insisting that the singer must get back into the world and finish his work.

Mrs O’Leary’s Cow (fire)

Because behind his back, while he wasn’t looking, the world had begun to burn. The clanging alarms and slide-whistles – the latter so recently carefree in "On A Holiday" – are disquieting enough, but it’s too late; funereal and planet-sized drums plunge us into an abrupt and shocking inferno of ascending and descending strings, screeching and weeping, discordant and destructible. Deep within the music, voices harmonise, like families trapped in the corner of their soon-to-be-incinerated bedroom. This is what the Plymouth Rock has rolled us towards; this is also the sound of columnated ruins playing the roles of dominoes.

The strings eventually burn out to leave a solitary siren, a fuzzed guitar and drums which seem to be systematically and professionally disposing of "unmutuals" with a smart blow of the hammer to selected skulls.

In Blue Hawaii
And yet, of all four elements, the one which has loomed predominantly over this whole work, over the singer’s entire world, is that of water. You can travel thousands of miles for three score and five years and still feel you are on an island. Time, then, to conquer the final outpost; time, in reality, to die.

This climactic song starts with a basso profundo drone, over which the singer dwells in some horror: "Is it hot as hell in here, or is it me? It really is a mystery. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take my misery."

But the song soon picks up to become a more amiable jaunt as the singer comes to terms with his imminent extinction. But has he ever reached Hawaii ("There’s a promise we must keep – I’m wonderin’"), and if so, has he passed it without realising he was ever there ("Oh I could use a drop to drink right now. In a waterfall, back there in Hawaii – ")

And then we learn the first part of the awful truth:

"Down in blue Hawaii. So far away from blue Hawaii.
Aloha nui means goodbye."

He is nowhere near the sea. He could be in hell, or more likely he is stumbling through the middle of Death Valley, and can only dream of Hawaii, of water, of life.

We can’t leave the singer there like that to die.

Can we?

That prayer which comes back at the song’s end – the last rites?

Or just the final coup de grace up the sleeve of the artful magician?

Good Vibrations
Remember that stray line: "I lose a dream when I don’t sleep. I’m slumberin’."

What if the singer wakes up, grins maniacally yet seductively at his audience and majestically sweeps away his multi-pocketed coat as if to say to us: "Ah, but you only guessed the half of it. Now you know how everything fits into everything else…but what was the story I was really trying to tell?"

Because the point of his work may be one of no return; because this is a dream being dreamt by someone in an as yet unspecified future; because now we are thrust forward 200, or was that 20,000, years to a song which, even after two generations, still sounds as if it has been bolted to us, the singer’s audience, from the future? Those rotating ‘celli, that theremin (although it could now be a musical saw), the interface of jew’s harp, bass harmonica and discreet synthesiser; a record, a celebration of someone beyond description; a record whose lessons could well have been learned from another musician who stayed behind in the old land, yet a record which in the end could simply be a love song to America ("I don’t know where but she sends me there").

And in the final reckoning, the final chorus, it all makes perfect sense; the elements of the past are glimpsed through the futuristic music – the harmonica, the Indian/Plymouth Rock chanting, the jew’s harp – but they are now ghosts, and the final fade of "Good Vibrations" indicates that the future must be lived, but that history cannot afford to be neglected or ridiculed as irrelevant. For who knows when someone will need to stand upon that uninhabited rock again?

The singer did reach the other side in the end. The West Coast hums with electrodes and gigabytes, new servants rushing in order to enable themselves to view "the rest of the world" through specially selected and filtered screens, eagerly force-fielding inconvenient other people out of their visual range. The crowds in the streets are rapid and fairly desperate. Over at the water’s edge you notice a man, stockily-built, middle-aged. He is not slender but his profile is thoughtful and even a little wistful. His curiously Oriental eyes still manage to catch everything. He has made up his stories and sung his songs. And, more than anything else, as a good and steadfast Protestant he is aware that his work ethic has been satisfied and that the drawing of his treasure map has been completed – a map in which he dares you to find him.

It may perhaps be apposite to end this story with a quotation from another story someone has had to tell – not specifically about America, but a similar story which, though it can only end, as every story must, with death and regeneration, nonetheless represents a parallel search for a land we are not yet wise enough to know:

"Sometimes people leave you
Halfway through the wood.
Do not let it grieve you.
No person goes for good.
You are not alone.
No one is alone"
(Sung by the ghost of the Baker’s Wife in the second half of Into The Woods by Stephen Sondheim)

RUFUS WAINWRIGHT: WANT TWO

"Once I could meet with them on every side;
But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may."
(Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence," 1807)

It begins with a scraping, atonal improvising solo violin. Momentarily you might think that you have put on one of the Clive Bell/Sylvia Hallett duet pieces from the new Freedom Of The City 2004: Small Groups CD in error – the opening couple of minutes of "A Skein" in particular are virtually identical, except in this instance the onomatopoeic function seems to be of someone struggling to climb out of their coffin. But soon a low-string drone and a cimbalom join the violin and a distinctly Eastern – almost Qaawali-like – minor key modality comes into being, now reminiscent of the opening section of Part III of Keith Tippett’s Frames (how close, the unanticipated links between Raga Bahar and John Dowland). And eventually a large-sounding yet essentially humble tenor voice proclaims the "Agnus Dei," the Christian mass for peace. The strings become larger in number, the violins’ commentary now becoming more urgent as if working towards a climax…

…until, at 4:10, the mole, the resurrected, emerges into the light and the orchestra shifts the perspective ever so slightly to reveal a major chord out of Vaughan Williams via Tallis. Now the voice flies, in the confidence that its plea of "Dona nobis pacem" will be heard and acknowledged, before the incantation bows its head and the prayer ends. Life has been restored.

"The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout."
(Kenneth Grahame, The Wind In The Willows, chapter I: "The River Bank")

What I have just described is "Agnus Dei," the opening track of Want Two, the new album by Rufus Wainwright. To say that this record is a quantum leap from 2003’s Want One would be a gross understatement. Whereas Want One was very much Wainwright’s Pet Sounds – cautiously adventurous but lyrically and emotionally rooted in a delayed sense of familial betrayal ("Dinner At Eight") – Want Two is his SMiLE; still accessible but now openly challenging the listener to keep up, to tune into and align themselves with what Wainwright is expressing and how he is expressing it. In musical terms, think a cross between Escalator Over The Hill (an audacious gallimaufry of eclectic yet umbilically linked tropes) and The Queen Is Dead (a procession of profoundly felt yet caustically hilarious lyrics; both records end with their protagonists left in a nearly empty bed).

"The One You Love" is the closest reference point to Wainwright’s previous work; one of those angular guitar-chopping power pop descendents of a song which Elliott Smith or Elvis Costello might have sung, but taken into a different and more intriguing realm by the devil in the detail; that runaway train of a piano figure articulating Wainwright’s confusion ("I’m only the one you love/Am I only the one you love?") and the unexpectedly sharp backing vocals from sister Martha.

"Peach Trees" is the abandoned widower of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s "Miss My Love Today" transposed into the sunlit graveyard of Brian Wilson’s "In Blue Hawaii." Over a slowly and deliciously unfolding pool of opaque slide guitars and vibraphones, reminiscent of kd lang swimming in her most luscious lagoon of persuasion ("Wash Me Clean"), Wainwright is pining for his former Other and declares that no one will take their place – "Under the peach trees/There I will be…until you come and get me." The alternatives – "I’m so tired of waiting in restaurants/Reading the critics and comics/With a waiter with a face made for currency/Like a coin in ancient Rome" – are uninviting, and eventually he crawls towards the resting place of James Dean, and will, if necessary, die waiting for the miracle (and that sudden, amplified wave of pedal steel at 2:40 sounds more like a tsunami than anything else).

Thereafter Wainwright visits the world of the baroque. "Little Sister" is a Mozartian pastiche, its courtly strings cushioning the coded warnings about the world which Rufus gives (presumably to Martha). "The Art Teacher," recorded live in Montreal, is the record’s most immediately touching song. Over a cyclical Philip Glass piano line, Wainwright sings from an explicitly female point of view ("I was just a girl then") about a schoolgirl crush on a teacher who "told me he liked Turner/And never have I turned since then." Unfulfilled, the song’s protagonist goes on to marry "an executive company head" and is consequently now sufficiently well off to purchase a Turner painting – the CD booklet is illustrated with details from Turner’s "Luxembourg seen from the Fetschenhof," picturing an isolated, hermetic and seemingly unreachable citadel – but Wainwright’s choke of grief on the words "I own one" reveals this to be scant compensation for the loss of true love. There’s a nicely symmetrical balance between the opening verse’s "There I was in uniform" and the closing verse, mirroring her current status – "Here I am in this uniformish pantsuit sort of thing" – but hear the encased rage of Wainwright’s voice as it sings "any other man."

This Montreal live recording segues into "Hometown Waltz" in which Wainwright fantasises about torching his hometown, perhaps because of the "drummers and jugglers of Montreal" who "don’t even exist at all," more possibly due to the possibility of rediscovering his Other once more ("Maybe I’ll catch him on his way to the shop"), but most probably because of the intense frustration which he feels at never truly being able to break away from home – "Everything operates on the unattainables/Then you hear your mother laugh attached to the ‘phone." Behind him, his mother and aunt (the McGarrigles) are indeed in attendance, and the delicate accordion/violin-led Quebecois waltz ends slightly shambolically, as if to buffer Wainwright’s concluding question of "Will you ever ever ever go?/Ever ever ever find a way?"

"This Love Affair" is a tenderly wounding ballad – a farewell to everything approaching "life" – impaled between Schubert and Legrand. Walking away – to where? "I don’t know/Just away from this love affair." When Wainwright sings "Not that I don’t like cruising" he does so with a palpable, sopranino-pitched grief which could lead one to substitute "living" for "cruising" (or indeed for "waltzing" in the next stanza). Drowned in his grief, he can still fire off the jibe, "I don’t know why I’m watching all these white people dancing" – compare and contrast with his desperate, starving howl of desire in "The One You Love" of "Let’s fuck this awful art party/Want you to make love to me and only to me in the dark."

And then we come to the album’s highlight and doubtless the track likely to be its most controversial, the extraordinary "Gay Messiah." Over another gentle waltz, this time scored with a caressing Johnny Marr-esque acoustic guitar line, it might be facile to call "Gay Messiah" the song Morrissey has been too afraid to write, but the unprepared listener will be startled and tickled by the forthright Wainwright’s shameless and passionate wedding of the spiritual and the carnal. Indeed the opening quatrain of "He will then be reborn/From 1970s porn/Wearing tubesocks with style/And such an innocent smile" is a peak of which Morrissey remains occasionally able still to reach. "Rufus the B Baptist I be/No I won’t be the one/Baptised in cum" personifies this bold attack on stupid conservatism of all stripes which hopefully will get mainstream America – and by the current looks of things, mainstream Britain – self-righteously annoyed.

From the gleeful warning of "Better pray for your sins," the album then moves into its most emotionally moving song, the Jeff Buckley tribute "Memphis Skyline." With its carefully embracing strings and unhurried, out-of-tempo piano, as well as a vocal which trembles on the generous verge of complete collapse, here Wainwright approaches the seductively vulnerable genius of the Dennis Wilson of "Cuddle Up" and "Thoughts Of You." "Always hated him for the way he looked in the gaslight of the morning," Wainwright reminiscences before taking himself (a)back: "Then came Hallelujah sounding like mad Ophelia/For me in my room…living." The piano then twinkles with kisses of indecision before the full orchestra comes in to enable the sun to rise, Wainwright practically in tears as he blesses the departed drunk sweetheart – "So kiss me, my darling, stay with me ‘til morning/Turn back and you will stay/Under the Memphis skyline." Any listener not moved by this selflessly searing performance should make their way towards objects easier to deal with, such as Bloc Party, eager guitar-waving Alsatians who will lick their face and agree with everything they think.

For no sooner have the strings settled on "Memphis Skyline" than they divert into atonality as Wainwright ascends the roof of the world and surveys the dismal future awaiting all of us in "Waiting For A Dream." No doubt as a result of the production involvement throughout the album of Marius de Vries, this track enters Massive Attack territory as volcanic bass and desolately-ascending piano echo Wainwright’s treated (dehumanised? in outer space?) vocal. Moving from the internal frets of "You are not my lover, and you never will be/’Cause you’ve never done anything to hurt me" (and the entry of the bass at the first of these lines, coupled with Wainwright’s suddenly lowering voice, is a moment of punctum ominosity), Wainwright turns his gaze onto the incinerating planet – "There’s a fire in the priory/And an ogre in the Oval Office," and ruefully acknowledges the new onset of Aids: "Yesterday I heard the plague is coming/Once again, to find me." The song is a startling counterpart to Massive Attack’s "Antistar," and indeed the keeningly high entry of the strings at 3:20 provides a similar moment of global transcendence. Finally, never sounding more broken, Wainwright offers a more timorous prayer: "Now can I finally sleep again?"

"Thou knowest all; I sit and wait
With blinded eyes and hands that fail,
Till the last lifting of the veil
And the first opening of the gate."
(Oscar Wilde, "The True Knowledge")

On the cover of Want One, Wainwright was pictured in armoured knight garb, as St Sebastian; here, on the cover of Want Two, he is clad in the flowing locks and dresses of the Lady of Shallot. And in the song "Crumb By Crumb," with its jolly wheezing Dixieland gait, both sides of him finally meet, unite and determine to follow the Hansel and Gretel trail "crumb by crumb in this big black forest" until he can come to terms with and recognise "the future of my understanding of love." Rufus and Rufus stroll off, arm in uncertain arm, into a glowing sunset of a kind.

But that is not the end of it.

"The sentence now passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death."
(Oscar Wilde, "Pen, Pencil and Poison," apropos the convicted Bank-forger Thomas Griffiths Wainewright)

It begins with a lightly picked acoustic guitar. Momentarily you might think that you have put on an old Bread album (how close, the unexpected links between the voices of Rufus Wainwright and David Gates), except in this instance the lyrical function seems to be of someone getting off in order to avoid getting out of his bed. "An Old Whore’s Diet/Gets me going in the morning." But soon an unexpectedly acerbic backing vocal (Martha my dear) and a distinctly oscillating major/minor key modality comes into being, now reminiscent of the priceless plastic shiny yellow two-step of Ze Records. And eventually a throbbing vibrator of a contralto voice – Antony, the frontman of Antony and the Johnsons, of which latter more anon – joins Wainwright in this prayer for self-relief. The two voices become larger in volume, the continuo commentary now becoming more urgent as if they are getting to the point of climax…

…but notice how the chords gradually shift to being played by a crepuscular string quartet until the rhythm eventually drops out, and a short Bartokian meditation by the strings is brutally evicted from Bluebeard’s castle by a demented Bavarian drinking waltz over which the lovers scream: "Hell! Either here or hell will do! Either here or Hell will employ you! SUICIDAL ASSISTANCE!!!!"

"Defenceless under the cobalt gun"
(BS Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry)

Now the ghost of David Gates flies back into the safety of its self-constructed cage, in the confidence that its plea of "To say I love you/Gets me going where I want to" will never be heard and acknowledged, before the victim bows his head and the orgasm ends. Life has been abruptly shut off with a caustic acoustic guitar chord bearing the unmistakable onomatopoeic meme: "fuck it."

"I have dealt with the theme of the open space we appropriate for ourselves, and of our temptation to let strangers look on our nudity like at a shop window. In these instances, we actually wear our nudity like a garment, and displaying it relates to the same sort of excitement we feel when, conversely, we prepare our bodies, dress them and put on our make-up to seduce. I emphasise the word excitement, the rising tide of desire waiting for a response from the outside world. It surely cannot be excitement that we feel when we recoil into the closed world of pain or in the immediate satisfaction of elementary functions: when the body doesn’t have the strength to occupy any other space than the sunken outline carved into a mattress, when the spew of vomit splatters the feet, when a dribble of shit trickles between our thighs. If there is any pleasure in this, it is not that the body feels struck by something greater than itself, it is that it feels bottomless, as if by exteriorising the activities of our entrails we could accede to our entire surroundings."
(Catherine Millet, The Sexual Life Of Catherine M., chapter 3: "Confined space")

1974: FIRST CLASS

FIRST CLASS
Beach Baby (15 Jun – 13)

"Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so."
(Philip Larkin, "Reference Back," 1955, stanza 3)

The intangible sound of static, just like the beginning of "Telstar." A fragment of a once-happy song emerges from this abstract mausoleum. A disc jockey who doesn’t quite sound American. "This is the summer sound of First Class and their record ‘Beach Baby," yeah man…" And then the strange nasal voice fades, giving way to a solemn organ chord, as though we had inadvertently blundered our way into a funeral service (it is the next chord after "Good Vibrations"), before that too is subsumed, or even drowned, in a sudden tsunami of drums, timpani, strings, brass and finally buoyant, boyish harmony voices bringing us back to…well, trying to bring something back to us. Trying to remember what it was like to live before the end of the metaphorical September which the record inhabits. The record is "Beach Baby" by First Class, and it was the culmination of the life’s work of its creator, one of the most extraordinary operatives in post-war British pop, John Carter.

Carter had spent the best part of a decade working towards this masterpiece, and had done so under a dizzying variety of pseudonyms, greater in number than those of Jonathan King, to whose UK label he was signed in the guise of First Class. As mainstay of the Ivy League in the mid-‘60s, he was responsible for the immaculate melancholy of rueful soft pop classics such as "Funny How Love Can Be" (but under the surface of softness, apprehend the polite sneer of "There she goes, with her nose in the air") and "Tossing And Turning."

It was with the final Ivy League single, 1966’s "My World Fell Down," that Carter ventured to cut the Merseybeat dummy loose. Suddenly the harmonies are dappled in minor oceans of echoing miasma; there are baroque strings and a quietly sobbing solo violin to end. Clearly he had been listening acutely to Pet Sounds, but he had not yet made the transition from artisan to visionary; it was down to America’s Gary Usher, under his studio guise of Sagittarius, to amplify the song’s otherness, with a careful lead vocal from Glen Campbell, Bruce Johnston taking the topline harmony of the chorus and an otherworldly "middle eight" of a seemingly random sound collage abruptly terminated by the slamming of a coffin lid (incidentally, the apocryphal story that said sound collage was an outtake from the "in the cantina" section of "Heroes And Villains" is not actually true – though heavily and naturally influenced by Brian Wilson, Usher came up with it
all by himself).

Nevertheless, in between innumerable session singing and production duties – including the uncredited lead vocal on "Winchester Cathedral" and writing "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James" for Manfred Mann, as
well as several Herman’s Hermits hits and even that other Nuggets staple, "A Little Bit Of Soul" by the Music Explosion – Carter continued to refine his peculiarly but specifically British vision of post-Wilsonian pop; via 1966’s "I Couldn’t Stand Another Day Without You," where the Mersey template dissolves in petals of acid ("I can’t tell day from night"), details such as the quarrelsome guitar line on 1967’s "Time And Motion Man" and the gorgeous, if still derivative, "Am I Losing You," this phase of his art culminated in "Let’s Go To San Francisco," credited to the Flowerpot Men (his preferred soft-psych moniker between 1967-70) and widely derided at the time as a cynical flower power cash-in, but actually an intelligent, heartfelt and enterprising record, particularly when heard in its full six-minute length (complete with "Good Vibrations"-style breakdown halfway through and its ending of a whirlpool of piano feedback). Indeed the Flowerpot Men seemed to be the harbour under which Carter could express otherwise inexpressible emotions – consider the half-hidden "Say goodbye to mother" refrain in "A Walk In The Sky," and the sad wisdom of 1969’s "White Dove" (hear how oceanic Carter’s production had become by this stage, with its tolling bells and pre-Cocteau Twins guitars) and 1970’s moving "Say Goodbye To Yesterday." Or the Flowerpot Men records which ended up being released under other names – "Tahiti Farewell" (Haystack, 1969) is "Cool, Cool Water" with a didgeridoo added. The amazing "A Night To Be Remembered" (Dawn Chorus, 1969) takes a basic (but tremendous) Ivy League song and subjects it to a melee of primitive Moog bleeps, banjo picking and Bach organ chorales. And above all there is "Mythological Sunday," released in 1968 and credited to "Friends"; a stunningly beautiful and limpid technicolor dream with vocals which sound strangely like Robert Wyatt and an innate melancholy which places it somewhere between People’s "Glastonbury" and Traffic’s "No Face, No Name, No Number." But the clue is in the title; four-and-a-half minutes in, as the song appears to be coming to its natural end, its space is gradually invaded by synthesised gunfire and a mournful military march ("When Johnny Comes Marching Home" redone for the Vietnam era) proceeding from channel to channel. The dream is broken by blood; thus "Mythological Sunday" is also a forefather of "America No More" by the KLF. And this from someone who, virtually in the same breath, was writing cheery little McCartney-esque ditties like "Knock, Knock, Who’s There," Mary Hopkin’s 1970 Eurovision entry - a "Those Were The Days" variant, but kinder and gentler to itself.

As the ‘70s dawned Carter moved into a curious mixture of bubblegum and CSNY-type introspective folk-pop. As Stamford Bridge he was happy to indulge in unapologetic post-"Sugar Sugar" candy pop, though under this particular pseudonym he sneaked in some songs which were noticeably close to someone’s bone – perhaps his then principal co-writer and former schoolfriend Ken Lewis, about to quit the music business, beset by depression – such that songs such as "First Day Of Your Life" and "Move Out Of Town" take on an additional if inadvertent poignancy, as did 1971’s brilliantly panscopic "Hello Hello Hello" (released as Stormy Petrel – I hope that you are managing to keep up with all of these names) with its urge to you to come out of
your bunker. On the other fist there was the greatest Eurovision song we never had, Kincade’s "Dreams Are Ten A Penny," a huge hit everywhere in 1972 except in Britain. And, as First Class, he was able to make the well-worn template of "feel sorry for the lonely rich superstar" sound fresh and affecting in 1974’s "What Became Of Me," which, in between its Surf’s Up balladic structural peaks rapidly flicks through klezmer, heavy metal and Sousa marches as the protagonist regrets a wasted life ("What became of the girls I went for/And the same cheap scent I bought them all?").

But "Beach Baby" was the five-minute peak of Carter’s art. The lead vocal was not Carter himself, but his former Ivy League colleague Tony Burrows, he of Edison Lighthouse, White Plains (essentially a de-weirded Flowerpot Men) and the first incarnation of the Brotherhood of Man. Burrows’ faux-naif contralto (sounding exactly, and appropriately, like a British Mike Love) is ideal for a song which is about bewilderment, and also about imperfect perceptions of a reality which may never have existed.

"Or, better yet, Dumas does not exist; he is only a mythical being, a trade name invented by a syndicate of editors."
(J Lucas-Dubreton, La Vue d’Alexandre Dumas Pere, cited by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project – section: "The Streets Of Paris")

"Do you remember back in old LA?" asks Burrows, wherein follows a series of disconnected signifiers - "Chevrolet," "the boy next door," "The suntanned, crewcut All-American Male," "the high school hop," "the soda pop" - which don't so much signify Roy Lichtenstein as Philip K Dick, as is evident in the couplet "I didn't recognise the Girl Next Door/With beat-up sneakers and a ponytail," with the emphasis on the "beat-up." Life has beaten her up. We are now in someone's autumn.

In a desperate attempt to resuscitate dead memories, all the record's voices unite, propelling the music
forward like a subaquatic JCB digger trying to pull the Titanic out of the seabed - "Beach baby! Beach baby! Give me your hand! Give me something that I can remember!" - but note how the chorus oscillates between major and minor, ending on the ambiguously augmented major of "Surfin' was fun! We'd be out in the sun every day."

Four drumbeats, like the spluttering of a pacemaker trying to emulate a heartbeat, and then Burrows' voice lowers with the orchestration: "Oooh, I never thought that it would end/Oooh, and I was everybody's friend." Then, heartbreakingly, a distant Leslie Cabinet-modified high-pithced piano tinkles in the background, a remnant of psychedelia (but also an accidental precursor of Ultravox's "Vienna") as Burrows in choirboy mode considers "Long hot days," "Blue sea haze" (which on the record sounds more like "boozy haze") and "jukebox plays," before his voice doubles up in suppressed agony: "But now it's fading AWAY!" And there's one last desperate flourish from the piano before the Fairchild compressors and natural echo of '60s pop are swept away by the harsh, Mazda bulb-lit, two-dimensional reality of London recording studios in the mid-'70s. For this is an English fantasy on a concept of "America" known only through second-hand observations. The voices make one final C major harmonic foray before a cross-channel, tripartite "Do do do" (the third one of which seems to be swept away into the sky) gives way to a rhythm section stomp compatible with the Bay City Rollers which reminds us that, sadly, this is indeed 1974, before the tympani and orchestra re-enter to underscore the song's tragic final verse - "We couldn't wait for graduation day/We took the car and drove to San Jose"

("Do you know the way to San Jose? I've been away so long, I may go wrong and lose my way" - Bacharach/David, via Dionne Warwick)

("Didn't time sound sweet yesterday? In a world full of friends, you lose your way" - Scott Walker, "Big Louise")

"That's where you told me that you'd wear my ring."

Without a break or emotional collapse:
"I guess you don't remember anything."

What exactly happened to the Girl Next Door to make her lose, or deny, her memory? Of someone she was going to marry - at least from his perspective?

Or is there a more sinister cause?

"Take a walk along the beach tonight? I'd love to. But don't try to touch me. Don't try to touch me. 'Cause that will never happen again. Shall we dance?"
(Shangri-Las, "Past, Present and Future")

Four ascending string chords seem to cry on the singer's behalf. And then the music stops, and a solitary French horn plays the climactic thematic motif from Sibelius' Symphony No 5 - written in 1915, and a deliberate attempt by the Finnish composer to reinstate unapologetic Romanticism as a protest against a world then, as now, being slowly eaten up by war (it is significant that "Beach Baby," though an English record through and through, was a far bigger hit in America than it was in Britain - it reached #4 in Billboard in the summer of '74, and in that context seemed to symbolise reassurance for, or subliminal protest against, an America being rapidly gobbled up by Watergate and the ashen remnants of Vietnam). The lead trumpets take up the motif while Carter's harmonies multiply in a manner more akin to 10cc than to the Beach Boys (those bass voices especially are far closer to Kevin Godley than they are to Dennis Wilson) before another triple "do-do-do" fanfare announces a repeat of the Bay City Rollers rhythm, but this time with orchestral accompaniment, before the closing mantra of "beach baby" is, if Carter can manage it, set to repeat for eternity, luscious in its foregone decay.

And the single most heartbreaking and poignant moment of the record comes at 4:50, when the song is nearly over, and the same French horn comes forward in the mix and starts to play the tune of "Let's Go To San
Francisco." So Carter's intent is made explicit; this is a eulogy for a funeral, the burial of a future never realised, the optimism and good nature of 1967 dying to be replaced by the three-day-week, grey, bleak 1974. It's a reproachful goodbye to psychedelia - from a man who almost simultaneously nearly appeared in this list again with "Please Yourself" by the Tots, an expanded version of a TV advert for Rowntree's Jelly Tots - now you are on your own, preparing for the purgatory which punk will make necessary. Rationalism might never have seemed colder, as blank and as ultimately dead as the waves of radio static, with now indistinguishable words and syllables, into which the song recedes forever.

"’Then, what is Life?’ I said…the cripple cast
His eye upon the car which had now rolled
Onward, as if that look must be the last,
"And answered….’Happy those for whom the fold
Of"
(Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 1822-4, unfinished, as the author was drowned as compensation for failing to reach Hell. ‘Tis in the nurturing waters that we are thus, and thus)