The drive to and from work when I immerse myself in my music are some of the most pleasurable moments of my day. I usually have the music on Shuffle so that an element of surprise is added to the interestingness of random track sequencing. Not least in hopes of providing a fresh impetus to this much neglected blog, I am trying to chronicle some of those on-the-go musings in this series. Pather Panchali is named after the (Bengali novel and) Indian cinema masterpiece by genius auteur Satyajit Ray. It means 'Song of the Road'.
How nice is winter in warm places. December mornings in Dubai are a decadent luxury of cool breeze rippling through honey sunshine. As though the car electronics were aware of that and trying a sonic hand at sensuousness , the music today shuffled in a remarkable alternating warm/cold pattern. First up was Extreme's More Than Words with its warm and sweet-but-not-sachharine acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies, followed by Joy Division's She's Lost Control, then a long live version of The Who's You Better You Bet - hot,you bet! - and finally closing with David Bowie's Always Crashing in the Same Car from Low , the middle of the Berlin trilogy albums with Brian Eno's overcast-cold-and-muddy Seventies synthesizers ( no doubt chilled further with Bowie's own cocaine snow of that period)
Joy Division and Talking Heads were my finds of 2017, stuff I listened to almost obsessively through the year. Both are similar - Post Punk going on New Wave - and both are different - Joy Division were dishevelled Manchester street to Talking Heads' cerebral chic New York art scene. The Joy Division sound straddled the whole range from rough to polished, from hot to cold, from Black Sabbathesue Gibson distortion doom through to Sex Pistolish punk intensity and,indeed, all the way to the high-bass-note dance pop of New Order, the band Joy Division eventually became after vocalist Ian Curtis' tragic suicide.
The story of Ian Curtis (read here) , that partly mythical, partly tragic and wholly ephemeral poet-singer is a sad sad one. He killed himself at 23 (Bassist Peter Hooke's piece here), a victim of mental illness that included all sorts of demons - depression, epilepsy, drugs prescribed for his epilepsy and,yes, the sundry dark angels that generally tend to cloud over and fuck up so many of those poetic sensibilities. It happened just as JD were on the cusp of mass-scale fame and success - their only chart hit Love Will Tear Us Apart released days after the suicide. Saddest of all is that the suicide could and should so easily have been seen coming - not only were Curtis' pain-soaked lyrics dripping with the threat of imminent disaster but also , fucking hell, there had already been a previous suicide attempt!
She's Lost Control is about a girl confronting (unsuccessfully) the daymare of epileptic fits - much like Curtis himself did. In public, often on stage. Listening to it now as Sheikh Zayed Road races past me in a blur of swanky cars driven at reckless speeds, I see in my mind's eye a freezing-cold vacuum of a studio in northern England in 1979 , a cold blank universe of pure white, like some apocalyptic darker version of The Matrix white room scene. I hear Curtis' deadpan baritone booming from beyond a low profile, cult status grave, I hear the sound of a synthesized hammer knocking relentlessly at walls of ice, of electric whips lashing at hardened snowfields of sound. I can almost feel the last hot breath, condensed and clinging like invisible particles of ice in the vacuum, of a newly born cold corpse forty years ago.
Thankfully I only have to step out of my car to the present, to life in all its simple known pleasures, to the decadent luxury of a December morning in Dubai when the cool breeze ripples through honey sunshine. It's brilliant to be alive. Nothing else even comes close.
(Previously in the series : Joni Mitchell)
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