TUNNG
The
Old Market, Hove, Mon 22nd Oct
“We're
just a folk band, really,” deadpanned frontman Mike Lindsay at one
point.
“Discuss”,
he could have added. The vast majority of their songs feature the
great folk staple of monophonic choral singing. It makes for a
refreshingly direct, unperformative style, the very opposite of all
that over-emotive 'X Factor' warbling that so
often passes for singing nowadays. But, much like Lindsay's comment,
its a style you could also call deadpan. Like reciting a story
straight, it does little to clue the listener in on how to take
things and leaves more open to interpretation.
Dispassionate
in tone, it tempts you to take the singers as reliable narrators
rather than characters within the songs. And yet there's
simultaneously something disquieting about it. Notably, anachronisms
abound; magic spells coexist with bedroom TVs, horses clattering over
stones only to run into police cars, rivers and fields morph into
branches of Little Chef.
Musically
it's like the old Steve Reich device of a musician playing along to
recordings of them-self. However close together the singing comes, it
never quite hits the exact same notes at exactly
the same time. The ear hears the harmony but also senses the subtle
discords going on around it – edges are always blurred.
...which
pretty much sums Tunng up all round. Their songs are beguiling,
placid surfaces barely concealing murky depths. Their tunefulness
often draws the listener into quite sinister lyrics before they've
even noticed. Something terrible always seems to have happened which
is only alluded to, or to be happening but on the periphery of our
vision. 'Tale From Black', we're told, is about an
old lady who commits murders in order to use the bodies' blood for
typewriter ink. “Actually”, Lindsay concedes, “we've quite a
lot of songs on that subject.”
'Jenny
Again' comes on like a break-up number and only some way in
do you realise it's a victim's ode to their murderer. Yep, it's not
just the panning that's dead here – murder's a definite theme. That
great folk staple of the murder ballad is given a twist – building
on the model rather than merely duplicating it. And it is simply more
effective to hear Tunng gently cooing on the subject than it is to
hear Cannibal Corpse screaming and gurning and getting themselves in
an awful bother. It's the same relationship as 'The
Innocents' does to 'Saw'.
But
like those choral vocals the music also slips off-kilter. It's often
hard to work out just what its doing, to sound so
harmonious and so disconcerting at one and the same time. Songs
aren't broken or dispensed with, just given half a twist until
nothing sounds quite in the right place any more. As much as anything
from folk, it's reminiscent of John Cale's bleakly beautiful ballads,
such as 'Antarctica Starts Here.'
..which
is of course what's at the root of Lindsay's gag. Made of such
slippery stuff, they're hard to pin to any genre. The venue dubbed them nu-folk, but that alone merely suggests
the performers being pre-pensionable. Psych-folk
comes closer, but practitioners tend to the more brazenly psychedelic
and in-your-face. I thought of both twisted folk and folk noir, only (just as
whentrying to coin terms for the Physics House Band) to find
both to be already in use.
However,
while I can confidently say they didn't play a song I didn't take to,
I suspect after a decade of deadpanning time may have washed out some
of their lo-fi weirdness. It's the familiar story, as a band become
more accomplished they get correspondingly less interesting.
Certainly my stand-out favourite track of the night was the early
(and afore-mentioned) 'Tale From Black.' Perhaps
partly because it was the first track of theirs I ever heard, on the
much missed Festive Fifty,
from 2004.
But
it's not just that. Sampling and sound effects seem less employed in
their more recent fare, yet they seem to add much - lending
proceedings the feeling of a ghost story. Those so minded might even trace an overlap between Tunng's songs and the more ambient
Ghost Box scene. While hauntology has become something of a buzzword,
both can create music which feels in itself like the haunting –
leaving the listener trying to reconstruct some original event from a
series of spectral happenings. (“The ghost of an image/It's just
fleeting glimpses.”)
Tunng
are just a folk band, really. Not really.
Not
from Brighton but London, the now-twice-mentioned 'Tale From
Black'...
HALF
MAN HALF BISCUIT
Brighton
Concorde, Fri 18th Oct
The
same night Half Man Half Biscuit played, a friend told me she was off
to see Culture Shock. A chance event which duplicated with uncanny
accuracy the divide which hit music in the early Eighties. (Though
the bands weren’t formed until ’84 and ’86 respectively.)
Anarcho-punkers Culture Shock had songs about not liking governments
and nuclear war and animal experiments. While, in the post-punk
corner, HMHB had songs about not liking people who put peaches on
their cornflakes.
There
was no contest as far as I was concerned.
They
also wrote songs about converting their loft back into a loft, seeing
the Bootleg Beatles dressed as the bootleg Mark Chapman, and
replacement rail services which turn out on close inspection to
consist of buses. And they split up because being in the band was
causing them to miss too much daytime TV. Never did smalltown England
seem smaller, which is about the greatest complement you could give
them.
But
they since reformed and here they are…
(They
actually reformed in the Nineties and I've even seen them since then.
But then that makes the story less newsworthy.)
As
such tales might suggest, they were not a band to court success. In
fact, the responded to the limelight as a vampire might to sunlight.
With their rinky-dink sound, flat-pack riffs and default setting of
jaded, they worked best sniping at things from the sidelines.
But
it's a bit like what (of all people) Noel Gallagher said recently. In
the old days, politicians helpfully looked like nutters and you knew
where you were. Nowadays they're slick, smart/casual and, in his
words, “they walk among us.”
Similarly,
the limelight has come to prove equally slippery. Seriously, how do
you avoid it by not playing 'Top of the Pops' when
the show isn't even on? The old gag about being “differently
successful” now seems all too credible a fate.
Some now regard them as an honorary sort of folk band, and most
likley rightly. But what is true for good can also be true for ill.
Their first album was called 'Back in the DHSS'
and their second 'Back Again in the DHSS'.
Frontman and songwriter Nige Blackwell had been unemployed for years
before forming the band, and his writing wasn't based in the doley
lifestyle so much as steeped in it. An over-active imagination, fed
only on a diet of celeb trivia, music biz lore and childhood TV
memories, spun them into fantasies of obsessive contempt. With little
to actually rebel against, instead you cultivated sneery diffidence.
It was like you were on strike against the very idea of engagement.
But songs about signing on now feel much like songs about weaving, an
exercise in preserving what was once a way of life.
In
short, playing a sizeable venue, packed with fans who know all the
words, is that really the way it's supposed to be? Of course their
tracks ceaselessly aped and echoed football chants, TV themes and
nursery rhymes – they're based on a singalong source. But how
singalong can a gig get before it's just like 'The Rocky
Horror Show'? At times it feels like an acid gob grenade
aimed at the trivial and irritating. But, even with the ever-reliably
sardonic air eminating from Nige, all too often it feels like that -
a show.
Perhaps
it's pointless to compare gigs two decades apart. But a creaking
community centre in Southwick followed by a long bus ride home,
wasn't that the way it was supposed to be?
Something
else which happened the same day... Morrissey's autobiography was
unleashed, leading to the Guardian quoting his famous line - “in the days
when you were hopelessly poor/ I just liked you more.”
Just
saying, is all.
As I'm sure you're used to by now, not from Brighton...
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