RUINING AN EMPIRE WITH A ROULADE OR A RETORT: MUSIC, FASHION, FILM BY CHARLI XCX

 

 

"In the best modern works there is a unity of theory and practice. Listening to actual performances is likely to be the best way of determining whether a musician whose own assumptions lie some way behind the latest developments will thereby be debarred from an adequate appreciation. The recognition of frontiers implies the possibility of crossing them. It is just as urgent for musical theory to reflect on its own procedures as it is for music itself. It is the bitter fate of any theory worthy of the name that it is able to think beyond its own limitations, to reach further than the end of its nose. To do this is almost the distinguishing mark of any authentic thinking."

(Adorno, "Vers une musique informelle," 1961)

"If you stretch my love till it's thin enough to tear
I'll just stretch my arms to reach you anywhere
And like a rubber ball, I'll come bouncin' back to you"

(Bobby Vee/Marty Wilde, "Rubber Ball,"  1961)

She's a little thirty-three-year-old girl, and she never leaves her room.

"No, you don't get me," she retorts. "No, you don't."

The advance words about the new Charli xcx album did not prepare for anything useless, let alone useful. The words were about a "retreat" to rock. A backsliding to odorous old convention.

But the words have painfully missed the point. "Rock Music," the song which opens this briskly interminable (because no one lasts forever) thirty-minute album - Aitchison's Half Hour, which could equally have been titled Stone Me...What Is Life? - is a smeared photocopy of "classic rock"; not in the same way that the first Strokes album was a photograph of a rock record (and how ironic that the new Strokes album, also out today, has received little if anything in the way of recognition ["All the music, all the people...not a single goodbye"]) but in a way that signifies this record is going to be Rock As Hospital Nightmare, a twisted and distorted amendment of something that might have spoken to,or for the fourteen-going-on-fifteen Charli for whom the bedroom of "2007" represents her Holy Grail...something that has been lost and can never be returned to (like Limmy's Millport).

Nor can this record be dismissed as opulent frittering of a spoiled...well, you know the word which comes next; it was all over the globe two years ago...who self-obsesses as the world burns. The opening "Rock Music" makes it clear that this is relentless pain rather than any sort of liberation: "I'm really hurting my neck/The nerve damage is real/But it's the only way to feel somеthing."

We know she's hurting, not least because in the midst of "Persona" she observes: "I know that you're hurting." But is it too late for everything now to be alright?

Charli xcx is hurtingly aware that Music, Fashion, Film - oh, that title, some scoffed, very who-cares-about-your-Manhattan Millionaire-opulence - isn't really about any of those three things. It could serve as a requiem for, or memento of, a world hurtling towards a programmatically violent end. "SS26" - for "Spring, Summer 2026" - is a Click Clack Anti-Symphony ("Yeah we're walking on a runway that goes straight to Hell") for everything and everyone that is beyond saving. "Nothing's gonna save us," she announces, "not music, fashion or film."

On the musical clock ticks - bleakly stuttering reproductions of what "rock music" might once have sounded like, but cut up into pixels of beats and chants; Charli's own voice mostly numbed by quiet shock. The startling "Yeah" slams into the listener's body, almost in the fashion of the Penguin Café Orchestra attempting to reconstitute the atoms of "rock," while the voice frets over and over "no I don't wanna" until the accompaniment gradually slows down like an exhausted music box.

Does "Wink Wink" sound like "Homecoming" by late noughties MVE bargain basement perennials The Teenagers, and unless you were A.G. Cook burrowing around those same basements at the time - in which case we may well have unknowingly bumped into each other - does it matter? What does matter is that it sounds chattily self-aware, as the work of most girl groups of the period, from Girls Aloud to Northern State, managed. Not to mention the grandmother of hyperpop, Elastica's routinely laughed-at belated second album The Menace, which now sounds as though recorded two months ago. But this is subtle. Have I changed, she asks before rhetorically responding, no, not really.

"Card Declined" is a quite masterful essay in anti-capitalism. Nine of this album's eleven songs are brisk and swiftly done with - in the exact manner of side one of Low -  and this song could have said all it had to say in one minute and 27 seconds, but the music then collapses into hovering post-intensive care syndrome fragments before the music, and Charli's voice, reassemble themselves and deliver a slow, patient straight-to-camera lament: "I keep thinkin' about you every single day..." - remember "So I" from the album sometimes known as brat, and you may gather whom she is still, still remembering. If this bears any residual P.J. Harvey influence then it's that of White Chalk, one of her less immediately palpable albums from that bedroom-friendly year of 2007.

"Persona" may or may not be about Taylor Swift and is probably much more likely to be about Sky Ferriera. In the self-lacerating "I'm Afraid," however, the newly-married Charli completely demolishes any magic wand tradwife fantasies by wondering if she's any good for this kind of life ("Take the ring, take the RING!"), even though, as in the touching, Stereolab-ish tribute to A.G. Cook that is "Magic Metal Montana," she can't imagine living without him. "I'm Afraid" is Music, Fashion, Film's "Be My Wife," the moment where the underlying emotional wound bleeds through the protective skin.

I am afraid that I am underselling and hopelessly failing to articulate the importance of this record. This tells us to our faces that everything we believe in and profess to love is, finally, not going to be enough to save us from a painful nothingness. People like RAYE may have the strength and courage to save themselves. But what Charli is arguing is that Manolo Blahnik shoes, cobwebbed or not, aren't a symbol of anything. What if the girl under the grey cloud saved herself, but it was already too late for everybody and everything else to be saved?

The closing "No One Lasts Forever" hurtles at speed towards a reassuring wall ("I don't wanna go home") - she ends where HOPE. began, in Paris, perhaps slightly drunk but certainly not alone. The song canters agreeably for a few minutes before the voice of David Cronenberg arises, out of a cried ocean of "forever"s, He is lying on the sidewalk, thinking in that curious peace about art and immortality, before concluding that, yes, although the art is going to last - just like Chartres Cathedral - artists don't, and won't. His words freeze in a loop: "They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever" over another oddly comforting electronic loop which is then systematically assaulted by random explosions, shots and other unclassifiable noises, as though humanity is being eradicated.

Remember how - or perhaps you don't - in 1998, Cronenberg appeared in a film called Last Night, set in Toronto on the last night before an unspecified apocalypse, playing a character called Duncan, who is later killed offscreen. As the new morning dawns we understand that this was never the world ending, but a chance for a new world to begin. Note that throughout almost the entire record Charli's voice has been Autotuned like the Earth's last surviving robot. But there appears to be no element of salvation at the culmination of Music, Fashion, Film. It is the horrible realisation that none of these three things, in the end, are going to count, or account, for anything.

It plays like the final album to be made on Earth. Yet so did Music For A New Society, made forty-four or so years ago by one of the gentlemen pictured on the cover of Music, Fashion, Film, which culminated in his screaming through an Ode To Joy mutation at the microphone "DEAAAAAAAD-UHHHH!," succeeded by a retrieved post-blast fragment of feminine recollection. And the world failed to end.

"and I a ball of blue light shoots into my forehead and bursts and I say reeling inside myself Ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora"

(Jon Fosse, A New Name [Septology VI-VII], 2021)

"You used to know me, now you don't."

(Charli xcx, "Used To Know Me," 2021) 

MUSIC FOR A LESS THAN IMAGINARY UPRISING

FERG’S IMAGINARY BIG BAND: The New Atomic (Trash City Records TCR/2026/006)

 

J Surfing On The Saturn/Theme From ‘The New Atomic’/Love Sick/Do The Right Thing/Playing The Names/Besszilla/Same Sky/I Shall Not Be Moved

 

Fergus Quill (MD, vocals, “various”); Dan Coulthurst, Emyr Penry Dance, Ernie Moore, Fee Buckton, Olivia Cuttill (trumpets); Felix Burling (trumpet, trombone, tuba); Sam Ehret’Pickett (trumpet, marching baritone horn); Aidan Ruffle, Benji Arnold, George Murray, Peter New, Adam Chard (trombones); Nat Martin (tenor horn); Flo Taylor, Saul Duff (alto saxes); Sophie Speed, Will Gibbon, Harvey Parkin-Christie (tenor saxes); Bess Shooter (baritone sax); Alex Fisher (bass and sopranino saxes); George MacDonald, Nico Widdowson (keyboards); Hamish Dixon (“noise”); Will Lakin (guitar); Connal Mulvenna (guitar, vocals); Joe Cross (guitar, bass, vocals); Aby Vulliamy (viola); Woody Hayden (bass); Josh Ketch, Theo Goss (drums); Jonathan Lodder (drums, percussion, vocals); Richard Moulton, “AJ” (percussion); “The Imaginettes” [Amy Clark, Sunday Lendis, Rebecca Herrington, Rosie Miles, Laura Kindelan] (vocals)

 

With extra “Spiritual Advice” credits to “Poppy” and “AJ,” there are over forty musicians present on the first full-length studio album by Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band, which by default makes this the most ambitious British big band since Centipede. Nominally steered by Fergus Quill but very much a democratic enterprise, these are all new names to me, which is hardly surprising since this band is based in Leeds (as is the Ancient Infinity Orchestra, which has a personnel overlap with FIBB).

 

Given that the city also boasts the likes of KOG, Plantfood and the Awen Ensemble – all of whom feed into FIBB’s arteries – as well as bands like Yard Act, it has obviously been beneficial for Leeds to develop its strongest musical scene in over forty years, since the days of Xero Slingsby and the Three Johns, completely out of the metropolitan radar. This is exciting and thrilling music which couldn’t have been imagined in London, where a generation of excellent improvisers have been corralled by plantation-eared A&R types into producing vacuous New Age comfort trifles.

 

FIBB also sound a good deal more fun than even Tippett’s most venerated large ensembles; as intermittently great as Septober Energy and Frames were – though both were far more dynamic when performed live (I was there at the Lyceum and the Roundhouse in November 1970 and May 1978 to witness) - neither can escape the impression of an austere extended church sermon.

 

Many names have already been banded about as influences on The New Atomic but on an overall couple of listens the names which leap out at me are two Michaels from the sixties – Gibbs and Mantler. Like Mike Gibbs, FIBB’s music tends to be emphatically rhythmic and melodic in nature – and like some of Gibbs’ records, the mixing does tend to favour the rhythm section and obscure the fine detail of what is going on elsewhere (e.g. the cop show theme gone slightly wrong “Do The Right Thing”). The brass and saxophone voicings, which tend to double up in agony or slide mournfully between bar lines, are highly reminiscent of what Mantler was doing with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra in 1968.

 

But there really is no precedent for something like “J Surfing On The Saturn” (arranged by Sam Eastmond) which combines strong melodic and harmonic elements with rhythmic flexibility and a degree of unrest in the general ensemble. The initial theme statement leads to some fine alto playing from what sounds like Flo Taylor taking turns with Saul Duff – unfortunately my CD copy did not come with what Tippett routinely described as “a guide to enable identification of featured soloists,” and while I recognise the ensemble’s totality outweighs individual elements, ancient folk like myself still like to know who’s doing what. There follows a comparatively restrained dialogue for harpsichord and piano, before the main theme picks up again and leads to insolently explosive work from guitar(s) and an Eno-style wheedling random synthesiser which I presume represents Hamish Dixon’s “noise” before the piece concludes with large-scale free form freakouts, alternating with mordant pauses of quietude. There is a boldness at work here that has been absent from most British-based big band jazz of the last forty years or so – only Mike Westbrook’s Devon-based Uncommon Orchestra, Tippett’s Tapestry Orchestra and the various Improvisers’ Orchestras from London, Glasgow etc., veered towards this territory.

 

The album was apparently edited down from about five hours of music, recorded in the presence of an audience whose cheerful whoops rear their head now and again, and as with the first, eponymous Loose Tubes album really represents a “this is what we do” sampler. Other than a very obvious political subtext – “Theme From ‘The New Atomic’” and “I Shall Not Be Moved” are performed as Mantler might have arranged Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, although the furious and enraged drumming which climaxes the latter is very reminiscent of Laurie Allan’s onslaught in Robert Wyatt’s 1975 version of “Song For Ché,” while part of the proceeds from sales of this album will be donated to War Child – The New Atomic is, perhaps paradoxically, quite a relaxed album, given the eye of its intensity.

 

Some of the work here is simple and cautiously gleeful; the unintelligible vocal quarrel which thrusts us into the tumult of “Playing The Names” made me think of early Rip, Rig and Panic, while baritone player Bess Shooter has great fun doing her best Peter Brötzmann impression amidst corny B-movie trailer voiceovers and speed metal thrashouts on “Besszilla.” There are also two actual songs – a cover of Dylan’s “Love Sick,” sung by a singer whom I could not identify but who sounded stranded between Phil Minton and Kate Westbrook, and punctuated by plaintively ululating horn lines, put me in mind of no less a forgotten ensemble as Manfred Mann Chapter Three, the free jazz/fusion experiment which briefly flourished between the pop group and the Earth Band (and for whom Mike Gibbs also supplied arrangements).

 

Perhaps the record’s most surprising moment is “Same Sky,” a ballad, or possibly a photograph of a torch song, performed and arranged absolutely straight (and with patient elegance) by singer Amy Clark, who sounds rather like RAYE in places – let’s hope a copy of this record finds its way to her! But overall The New Atomic is possibly the most refreshing large-scale British jazz album in half a century – as with Tippett (and indeed Carla Bley and Westbrook – these form my holy trinity of musicians) the overwhelming urge is to make music together and become more powerful as a consequence of that combination, rather than to make A Point. It stands with Westbrook’s Release and the early Brotherhood of Breath in terms of unrepentant newness (and nowness). It must not be ignored or overlooked.