Sniffs

Exciting times are finally upon us in Leeds after what seems like an eternity of having no local bands about whom to become even vaguely enthusiastic. I've lived here for over two decades now and, in my view, those who can even be included in the marginally passable bracket are probably countable on the fingers of one hand ( I quite liked Mr. Peculiar, Sharron and Burgers if anyone remembers any of them and The Real Losers and Sexy Burglars were good, too, while they lasted). On this, like every other level, Manchester, Glasgow or Liverpool Leeds is not and never will be, even though it foolishly likes to think it's in the running from time to time.

Anyway, it's with great pleasure and pride that we can now shout from the rooftops about the adrenalin rush which is Rent Boys (more of whom very, very soon when they release their new single "Shoot Your Shot" on German Bite Records) and the more recently formed Sniffs who, after only two gigs, the most recent at The Hide and Seek Club last Saturday and their debut only a few weeks prior to that, have already got all the right tongues wagging. An extremely elegant duo who formed less than a year ago and who have only just recorded their first demos, they're no doubt set to cause quite a sensation over the coming months as word spreads and their following grows. 

Their sound is very sixties inspired - think girl groups like The Shangri Las at their most ballsy or The Whyte Boots' "Nightmare" or the tougher end of Lori Burton's solo output - but this is then refracted through all manner of clever gadgetry such as Kaoscillator, vocoder, occasional drum machine and a beautifully compact Roland SH-101 to give it an avant garde, space age and other--worldly edge. Meanwhile, layers of brittle guitar are looped through numerous pedals so that they build and repeat throughout to provide a foundation which smultaneously gestures towards  both surf and someone like PIL whilst never aping either. Last Saturday, I overheard two youngsters talking earnestly behind me and, having seen two people using electronics, they were rather glibly likening what they were hearing to Suicide and Silver Apples but, although I'm sure it's all in there in the brew somewhere, to make a direct comparison of this kind would be very misleading indeed. Someone else said they brought The Fall to mind and there is a bit of "Kicker Conspiracy" somewhere in the vocal delivery, I concede, but that's about as far as it extends. In actual fact, I think I can safely stick my neck out and say that their, as yet still rather chaotic, swoosh is truly unique and this is why it's so obviously going to have to catch on.

    

Exciting indeed! Next weekend they'll be up on stage again playing songs from their repertoire with titles like "Nous Sommes (Les Sniffs)", "White Jaguar", "Macho Bravo", "Good Girl", "Black Glass Floor" and "Big Bastard Biker Boys". This time they'll be in Newcastle, though, supporting the brilliant  Monochrome Set at The Star and Shadow Cinema and I for one shall be there. May I recommend that you are, too.

STOP PRESS: I've just been sent a link to where you can listen to a couple of their recordings. Plus, I found another photograph of them, this one from their Hide & Seek Club gig last weekend.

http://www.facebook.com/sniffspage?sk=app_178091127385

Planningtorock-W

Seeing as this was released a little over three months ago, it seems a bit strange writing about it now, especially as I intended doing so at the time but somehow never got round to it. However, the second album by Planningtorock (ex-Bolton resident and video artist/musician Janine Roston who has been living and working in Berlin for the past decade) has been such a highlight and constant companion over my summer months, alongside the new Andreas Dorau and Horrors albums and the recently released Ladytron and Depeche Mode compilation sets, that it doesn't seem right to let the moment pass and not include it amongst everything else on here that I've been enthusing about. In fact, it's such a powerful collection of songs that it stands head and shoulders above much that has been released in recent years so to miss it out would be very stupid and unrepresentative indeed.

In case anybody doesn't know, "W" is the follow-up 2006's "Have It All" which was released on Chicks on Speed's label and was supported by quite extensive touring around the world with the likes of Peaches, The Knife and LCD Soundsystem. It was around this time that I saw Planningtorock performing in Leeds when she and Kevin Blechdom rolled into town, her all white outift, including top hat and painted on white beard, assortment of masks and helmets, caveman bone which she shook in time to the beat and video accompaniment creating quite a memorable spectacle. In the meantime, as well as all this live work and the odd bit of remixing, Roston has also collaborated with The Knife and Mount Sims on "Tomorrow, in a Year" an electro-opera based on Darwin's "The Origin of the Species" which was first performed in Copenhagen in September 2009 and then in other European cities before being made available as a recording last year.

From what I've been reading, "W" had quite a long gestation period, stretching across the four years or so prior to its release and is the product of recording sessions at home in JR's own studio in Berlin, as well as collaborations in Iceland with percussionist Hjörleifur Jónsson and in New York with DFA's Pat Mahoney and, much as I enjoyed the last album and its sister release "Have It All Stringed Up", this one certainly taken things to a different level.

Many of the old elements are still recognisable, such as the textured electronics, treated vocals and plucked strings which create an atmosphere which is paradoxically both warm and unsettling at the same time - listen to "Changes" or "Think That Thought" on the last album or almost any track on the new one. Also evident is the sense of tongue-in-cheek comedy which was found on tracks such as "I Wanna Bite Ya" or "Bolton Wanderer" which is perhaps best exemplified now on the Hi-NRG stomper "Living It Out" (guaranteed to  blow away the cobwebs on any early morning journey to work, trust me!) which is beautifully orchestrated and structured and has lyrics possessed of some degree of profundity whilst seeming to simultaneously poke fun at age-old disco cliches ("We're living it up, we're living it down. We're living it in, I'm living it out") all this accompanied by occasional  grunts and similar exhalations which further add to a sense of partial pastiche.

However, there's a new level of drama and powerful emotional expression and appeal running through this album which was lacking on the last, this coming across most on a track like "The One" which has a Michael Nymanesque intensity, a smooth but not at all stomach churning saxophone break and lyrics which repeatedly claim "You are meaning a lot to me" or the album's closing track "#9" which is possessed of a perky melancholy courtesy of its thunderous drumming, electronic nips and lyrics which are both reassuring and vaguely threatening at one and the same time. Elsewhere, the instrumental "Black Thumber" has a sophisticated classical grace and lushness  to it, as does "Milky Blau", the music of which has the repetitive immediacy  of something from one of the soundtracks to a Peter Greenaway film, whilst "I'm Your Man" has an electro-pop potency whilst also being the most obvious example of the recurrent theme of gender identity and individual duality which seems to lie at the core of this work, as well as much of the last album, such as on a track like "Local Foreigner" - see also the album's title ("double you"), the gloriously rich blue artwork and accompanying videos where Roston has used theatical putty to reshape her nose and brow to appear more gender ambiguous, as well as her treated vocals throughout which achieve the same effect.

Two of the album's stand out tracks were released slightly preceding it in the form of a blue vinyl 11" single and with it came a video for each which I am now including for your delectation: the stately and slightly sinister, creeper "Doorway" on which Roston has been quoted as saying she unleashes her "inner trannie" and the highly accomplished "The Breaks" which has pizzicato strings and saxophone honks subtly layered over lush chords, this all combined with lyrics both cautionary and seductive. This latter is for me a perfect crystalisation of all that the album offers.

  

She's got quite a few gigs lined up over the coming months, too, including a couple in the UK, I see. Hopefully, she'll add a few more including one in Manchester or Leeds as I'd love to hear all of this in a live context.

Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943)

Here's an article about Oskar Schlemmer which was in the first issue of my magazine "German Bite".

          

When the Bauhaus first opened its doors in April 1919, its founder, Walter Gropius, stated its aim as being to unify all of the artistic forms in a “Cathedral of Socialism” and a number of workshops then emerged, specialising in areas such as metalwork, weaving, painting, cabinet making and so on. Shortly afterwards, a stage workshop was initiated, apparently the first ever at an art school, under the leadership of Lothar Schreyer and performance became an integral part of life at the Bauhaus, then situated in the German city of Weimar. However, in contrast to the progressive approach of the rest of the school, Schreyer’s was somewhat dated and still owed a great debt to the Expressionist style of the previous generation, exaggerated gesture and vocal delivery being key techniques in conveying strong emotions in compositions with titles such as “Crucifixion” and “Kindsterben” (Child Death). Then, in 1923, when the establishment staged its first major exhibition, under the title “Art and Technology – A New Unity”, the extent to which the theatre workshop was out of step with the rest of the school became glaringly obvious and the calls being made by staff and students for Schreyer’s resignation had to be answered. Directorship of the Theatre Workshop now passed to Oskar Schlemmer, who had already been at the school for about three years, overseeing sculpture and mural painting activities, but who also had a background in ballet in his home town of Stuttgart.

A revolution then took place over night, it seems, as Schlemmer began to put into practice the theories which he articulated in his essay “Man and Art Figure” which appeared in Walter Gropius’ book “The Theatre of the Bauhaus” a year later. “The history of the theatre is the transfiguration of the human form,” he wrote. “The materials involved in this transfiguration are form and colour, the materials of the painter and sculptor. The arena for this transfiguration is found in the constructive fusion of space and building, the realm of the architect. The manipulation of these materials, the role of the artist, the synthesizer of these elements, is determined.” This approach was, therefore, a lot more akin to Gropius’ proposal of a cross-fertilisation across artistic disciplines and workshops, all under one unifying ideology of exploring the essential elements of design. In the same essay, Schlemmer went on to write, “One of the emblems of our time is abstraction. It functions, on the one hand, to disconnect components from existing and persisting wholes, either to lead them individually ad absurdum or to elevate them to their greatest potential. On the other hand, abstraction can result in generalisation and summation, in the construction of bold outline in a new totality...a further emblem of our time is mechanisation, the inexorable process which now lays claim to every sphere of life and art...and last, but not least, among the emblems of our time are the new potentials of technology and invention which we can use to create altogether new hypotheses and which can thus engender, or at least give promise of, the boldest fantasies. The theatre, which should be the image of our time and perhaps the one art form most peculiarly conditioned by it, must not ignore these signs.” Thus, in August 1923, the tone was set when Schlemmer and his students presented “The Figural Cabinet 1” which, strangely enough, parodied “faith in progress”, using cabaret techniques to create what has been described as “a medley of sense and nonsense characterised by ‘Colour, Form, Nature and Art; Man and Machine, Acoustics and Mechanics” and in which flat, colourful figures on a travelator, operated by invisible hands, would “walk, stand, float, slide, roll or rollick for a quarter of an hour”.

As a painter and a sculptor, like his Bauhaus colleagues, Schlemmer was very much concerned with an investigation of space, form and colour and, whilst his paintings explored this line of enquiry in two-dimensions, his sculpture and theatrical experiments allowed an opportunity to experiment with the plastic. The “Gesture Dance” of 1926-7, for example, was one of his more theoretical pieces and sounds pure Bauhaus, as three figures dressed in the primary colours of red, blue and yellow followed paths of motion which Schlemmer had prepared in advance in the form of a mathematical graph, the resulting complex geometric gestures being mixed with banal counterpoints such as “pointed sneezing, broad laughing and soft listening.” Similarly, lessons given by Schlemmer involved stretching taut wires across an empty stage in order to describe the cubic dimensions of the space. Dancers would then move through this web with specially designed costumes which would emphasise particular parts of the body and employ chosen colour combinations. However, not all that Schlemmer and his students undertook was so academic and dry, as parties or “festivities”, were also an important part of life at the Bauhaus, both in Weimar and in Dessau, where the school was forced to move in 1925, the theatre workshop usually being at their core. At one of these, “The White Festival”, guests were required to wear costumes dotted, chequered and striped and at the Metallic Festival of February 1929 the school was decked out in metallic colour and substances. Guests accepting their invitations, which had been printed on metallic card, then entered on a miniature train along a metallic chute and were finally greeted by tinkling bells and a flourish performed by a four-piece band.

            

It’s for the amazing costumes and the striking visual appearance of his performances, though, that “German Bite” most appreciates Schlemmer, photographs of these still seeming modern and shockingly avant-garde nearly a century after they were first envisaged. In fact, of all the Bauhaus masters, Schlemmer was the one for whom the human form was most central. He actually went on to teach a course at the school titled “The Human Being” and, writing in his diary in 1915, he put forward his views regarding the elemental geometry of the human form which he then went on to explore in his later work: “the square of the chest, the circle of the belly, cylinder of the neck, cylinders of arms and thighs, sphere of the joints at elbow, knee, armpit and knuckle, sphere of the head, the eyes, triangle of the nose. The line that links heart and brain, the line that links sight with what is seen, the ornament formed between body and outside world, its relationship to it symbolised.” In “Glass Dance” which was performed by Carla Grosch in 1929, for example, the dancer wore a skirt hooped round with suspended glass rods, whilst her head was covered by a glass globe and she carried glass spheres in her hands. This costume, which obviously severely restricted her movements, then resulted in her moving in a necessarily mechanical fashion. Similarly, Schlemmer’s pantomime “Treppenwitz”(Staircase Joke) was performed on a staircase and included a Musical Clown in a huge padded costume, the left leg of which was dramatically transformed by a huge funnel-like sleeve. His right leg then had a violin hanging from it and his arms were impeded by him carrying an accordion, a paper shaker and an umbrella reduced just to its spokes. Colleagues in the dance wore face-covering metal helmets and carried large sword-like instruments and batons so that they appear more sculptural than agile in their demeanour.

    

A review of another piece, “Metal Dance”, when it was performed in Basle, Switzerland in April 1929 reported thus: “The curtain rises. Black backdrop and black stage floor. Deep down stage, a cave lights up, not much larger than a door. The cave is made of highly reflecting corrugated tin plate set on edge. A female figure steps out from inside. She is wearing white tights. Head and hands are enclosed by shiny, silvery spheres. Metallically crisp, smooth and shining music sets the figure to performing crisp movements...the whole thing is very brief, fading away like an apparition.” It could be Hot Gossip or Legs & Co. dancing to Kraftwerk, or even Dee D. Jackson, couldn’t it? Très modern! Finally, in a dance called “Game With Building Blocks”, three figures dismantled a wall from behind which they had crawled, throwing the discarded bricks in a chain formation across the stage. Having eventually built a small tower in the centre of the stage, the abstract performance then took place around their creation. Judging by the photographs, I think many of the more outré late seventies/early eighties pop stars learnt one or two of their poses from here.

    

However, the piece for which Schlemmer is most famous is his “Triadic Ballet” which was actually first performed at the Württembergisches Landestheater, Stuttgart on September 30^th 1922, although it has now become synonymous with the Bauhaus. Over a period of about a decade, the ballet which has been described as “a combination of dance, costume, pantomime and music” was performed on only a small number of occasions, both in Germany and a few other cities in continental Europe, and was seen by only a thousand or so people in total. However, it has become the stuff of legends with many of the costumes now being on permanent display at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (Some of them even crept over to London in 2006, too, for the V&A’s wonderful “Modernism 1914-1939 : Designing a New World” exhibition). The  “Triadic” element of the ballet stems from the fact that it comprises three sequences, made up of twelve dances, which were performed by three dancers (one female and two male) who worked their way through eighteen costumes which were riveted, soldered and reinforced with papier-mâché. It was Schlemmer’s belief that his dancers, or “figurines” as he referred to them, should be geometrised abstractions of the human form and that attempts to achieve verisimilitude were not at all what the theatre should be aiming towards. However, the triadic aspect also relates to: the three basic elements of form, colour and space; the three dimensions of space – height, depth  and breadth; the three basic geometric forms – the ball, the cube and the pyramid; the three primary colours; and three components of dance, costume and music. As the ballet, which lasted about an hour and has no plot, moved through its three sequences, it also developed atmospherically, progressing from the jokey to the serious. The opening sequence, for example, was performed against a yellow background and was intended to portray a “cheerful, burlesque” ambience. This was then followed by the “festive and solemn” second segment which was performed against a pink background and then proceedings culminated with the final scenes, performed against a black background, the intention being to convey an atmosphere both “mystical and fantastic.” A film of the “Triadic Ballet” floats around on the internet and what is described above is wonderfully evident, as you can see the dancers, who also represent types such as The Diver and The Turk, following geometrically plotted trajectories in just such a manner. Apparently, the ballet is occasionally re-staged today.

  

Even though The Theatre Workshop closed its doors in 1932 and Schlemmer died just over a decade later, his legacy and influence is massively tangible beyond the confines of the Bauhaus. Casting aside roughly contemporary pieces, such as Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”(1927) and Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”(1936) which must owe a direct debt to his work in places, would Kraftwerk’s “Man Machine” have been quite the same thing without his having pathed such a route before them?  Similarly, Grace Jones has owed a huge debt to Oskar Schlemmer and Bauhaus imagery in her time, most notably during the Jean-Paul Goude era of the late seventies and early eighties. In fact, when she played in Manchester early in 2009, she was still crashing across the stage with a huge cymbal strapped to each hand, highly reminiscent of the Türke character from “The Triadic Ballet.” And, did Leigh Bowery really stumble across his enlarged padded limbs and figure-altering costumes intuitively or was Oskar Schlemmer floating somewhere in his consciousness as he chopped away at blocks of foam in his council flat. I dare say Bono Vox even goes around saying Oskar Schlemmer has been an important influence on himself and that band of his, as he seems to do with everybody else, in an attempt to curry some degree of credibility and detract from the sorry reality of the “heroic” shit-rock he churns out. Anyway, that cretin aside, Oskar Schlemmer’s paintings and sculptures are very nice, too, and worth exploring if you don’t know them already and if you’re ever in Germany visiting the Bauhaus building in Dessau, a short walk round the corner will bring you to the Masters’ Houses where you can have a bit of a wander around Schlemmer’s old living quarters, as well as those of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Georg Muche. So, there you have him – Oskar Schlemmer. Wasn’t he brilliant?

     

Andreas Dorau-Todesmelodien

Yesterday was a brilliant day as Andreas Dorau's new album "Todesmelodien" dropped through the letter box and, today, I've had chance to give it quite a number of listens through in its entirety. As anybody who knows me will tell you, I've got a big thing about Andreas Dorau and have had for many years so the arrival of this, his eighth album depending on how you count, was very much highly anticipated and it hasn't disappointed in the least. In fact, I'd already stick my neck out and say that it's one of his very best.

The sound is, for the most part, the highly appealing, unadulterated  and unashamed pop which anyone familiar with his work will have come to expect, unchallenging verse/chorus song structures, Dorau's instantly recognisable and slightly childish voice, elements of electro-pop and disco basslines on some tracks, backing vocals straight out of the seventies throughout and a seeming disregard for the fact that the outcome never quite fits in with current trends. However, compared to his last album "Ich bin der eine von uns beiden"(2005) the songs on "Todesmelodien" seem a lot more crafted, with plinking pianos playing quite a significant role where samples last time were at the heart of a number of tracks.

The album might at first appear light, but, as the title ("Deathmelodies") suggests, the lyrical content is quite dark, pulling in a very different direction to the poppy and sometimes breezy surface matter and this is most obvious on the songs where Dorau has provided the lyrics himself, which is the majority of them, although it's nice to see that he has collaborated with Der Plan's Moritz Rrrr on one track ("Neid") and that Wolfgang Müller, he of Die Tödliche Doris fame, is still contributing lyrics as he has done for several of the last albums.

In fact, if we can read Dorau's words as autobiographical and if the level of my German hasn't led me to miss subtle ironies, he doesn't appear to be in a very happy place at all on this release as, besides songs about the unpleasant character traits of envy  and egomania ("Neid" and "Größenwahn"), on another he repeatedly tells us about the indescribable pain he feels inside himself as he lies on the sofa with his hands locked together in front of him ("Es Tut So Weh"). Elsewhere, he sings of a house which once contained a bright light which didn't burn for very long, it presumably being the home of the family whose journey on the autobahn got interrupted by heavy rain, this then leading to their car hitting a tree at high speed ("Es war hell"). Then, in another he describes himself as being positioned on a precipice between words and action in a world where nobody seems to hear or understand, telling us that it's all too late anyway ("Und dann"), whilst in "Stimmen in der Nacht" he describes being haunted by the voices which awaken him in the night, these stemming from a departed person whose semi-darkened room, double-locked from the inside, is now empty apart from a photograph on a shelf and the wallpaper which they once found so pleasing. Presumably they are dead as he tells us that their life was all wrong. It all sounds a bit worrying, actually, the more I trawl through it, a bit like the spirit of Ian Curtis may have slipped into our Andreas. 

As usual, there are quite a number of collaborators and contributors on this album as, besides those already mentioned, the majority of the music has been written with Tim Lorenz on some tracks and Mense Reents (Die Goldenen Zitronen) on others, both being new to the brew this time round, I believe. Long-term collaborator Justus Köhncke is also back, having co-written another, whilst backing vocals on "Schwarz Rot Gold" come courtesy of Francoise Cactus from Stereo Total and Inga Humpe, once of Neonbabies and, more recently, 2Raumwohnung appears in the same role on quite a number of others. It's a bit of an old school party, it seems, albeit a rather solemn one.

As mentioned earlier, Moritz Rrrr features in the procedings which fits quite nicely because, as we all know, several of Dorau's earliest releases came out on Der Plan's Ata Tak label, something that's being referred to in some of the imagery that accompanies this album's release, the download single ("Größenwahn") having a "sleeve"  which revisits Dorau's debut "Tulpen und Narzissen" from 1981 and I'm not entirely convinced that the "Todesmelodien" cover isn't an homage to Pyrolator's "Inland" which was released on the label in 1979- see what you think. (Talking of Pyrolator, he's got a new album out very soon, I've just heard.)

      

Well, there you go, some quick initial thoughts on another great Andreas Dorau album. To round things off, here's a couple of tasters which were put out prior to its release. I hope everyone reading this is as enthusiastic about them as I am.

Stinky Toys-Birthday Party

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was French and so were Stinky Toys. This is for some of my most beloved friends who have all had their birthdays in the last few days or so and for another couple who have theirs coming up. If I'd have known how to, I'd have made them all a Chinese birthday cake.

Savage Messiah(1972)

Blink and you'll miss it but Leeds has gone a bit Henri Gaudier-Brzeska mad of late, this stemming from The Henry Moore Institute's joint project with Kettle's Yard in Cambridge to republish "Savage Messiah", H.S.Ede's 1931 biography of the sculptor. Gaudier had been killed sixteen years prior to its publication, when fighting in the WW1 trenches at The Somme, and still lay in relative obscurity when, apparently, the author found a number of his works gathering dust in a store room at the Tate Gallery when he was looking for some picture frames. To tie in, the Institute is also staging a small exhibition - on until the end of July - which includes Ede's original manuscript, various other books written about the sculptor over the decades, including one by Ezra Pound who is also represented by one of Gaudier's busts - you'd be forgiven for mistaking it for a work by Jacob Epstein, in my view, though - and various bits of ephemera relating to Ken Russell's 1972 film which he based on the book. Last Thursday, they also hosted a one day study symposium on the sculptor's life and work and, that evening, this tied in with a rare showing of the film at The Hyde Park Picture House. As it's an old favourite of mine from the days it was never off the TNT movie channel, I went along with a fellow admirer for whom I bought a ticket as a birthday treat.

          

Now, Ken Russell was supposed to be in attendance to introduce his work, which really would have been quite something,  but, unfortunately, having recently suffered a stroke, he was under strict orders from his doctor not to make the journey from Hampshire, sending instead a dictated introduction which was read out by Michael Bradsell who worked as film editor on this and quite a number of other Russell productions. And, in amongst various other snippets of information, it was very nice to hear that he holds this as his very favourite piece from amongst his oeuvre, a view with which Bradsell also concurred. A bit of further research - dipping into Russell's 1989 autobiography "A British Picture" - offers some evidence as to why this may be the case, the most obvious being the inspiration the director had drawn from the sculptor's determination to express himself and forge new ground in spite of prevailing popular trends ("...I felt I owed Gaudier something. It would have been so easy to have  gone into my father's business and opted for the easy life but Gaudier taught me that there was a life outside commerce and that it was worth struggling for. Long live Gaudier!" /  "Savage Messiah was about passion and sweat, it was about a poverty-stricken artist who stole a tombstone from a cemetery, sculpted it into a nude and, when the dealer who commissioned it refused to pay, threw it through the window of his Bond Street gallery. It was about revolution and fuck  the art dealers of Bond Street and Madison Avenue and fuck Pinewood and Hollywood, who have never made a proper film on an artist yet!"). Secondly, "Savage Messiah" represented the grand climax of a series of television films he'd made during the previous decade or so about other artists: "Two Scottish Painters" (Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun), "Pop Goes The Easel" (Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, Derek Boshier and Pauline Boty), "Always on a Sunday" (Henri Rousseau), "The Biggest Dancer in the World" (Isadora Duncan) and "Dante's Inferno" (The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood). He so believed in the project that he double mortgaged his house in order to help finance it. I'm very glad he did, too, as it's truly marvellous.

        

Although being about the sculptor (played by Scott Antony - who seems to have appeared in little else film-wise, although he had a part in "The Mutations" which is another favourite chez moi), the main focus is his relationship with the Polish writer, twenty years his senior, Sophie Brzeska (played by the late Dorothy Tutin who is otherwise best known to me for her role as Cecily Cardew in the 1952 film of "The Importance of Being Earnest", as well as the rather thespy appearance she made on "This is Your Life" somewhere in the blur that was the 1990s). At the beginning of the film, we see the pair meet in a Parisian library where he sketches and she writes and, from this point, a platonic love affair develops, as they visit The Louvre together, he helps her scour the ground for discarded vegetables for her stews and they travel to the country to visit his family who, along with the local residents, are scandalised by their unconventional relationship. Banished from the neighbourgood but undeterred, they decide to combine their names in an act of unity and to emigrate across the channel to London where he works by day and sculpts by night, sketches prostitutes for which she has paid, believing him to be relieving troublesome urges, and slowly begins to make connections in the art world. The most supportive of these is the dealer Angus Corky who is played in deliciously camp fashion by Lindsay Kemp, who is always extremely good value whatever he does and certainly doesn't disappoint here as he rather ineffectually assists with the aforementioned theft, chokes politely on a revolting bowl of stew, is pulled forward and backward like a rag doll on the end of a two person saw being controlled by the driven Gaudier and tries to calm the tension between our hero and heroine and the snobbish Bloomsbury inspired clientele at one of his dinner parties by offering "more cider". Oh, it's all such good stuff! I could go and watch it again, right now!

       

Another absolute star of the film is Helen Mirren who plays Gosh Boyle, an aristocratic Suffragette whom he meets during a period of separation from Sophie - she has gone elsewhere to work as a governess. Walking along the street at night, she asks him for a light which he then unwittingly applies to a fizzing bomb which, for reasons best known to herself, she throws at a postbox. Her then accompanies her to The Vortex nightclub (presumably based on The Cave of the Golden Calf which opened just off Regent Street in 1912 and was decorated in a "Ballet Russes" / Vorticist style by people like Spencer Gore, Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis and Eric Gill) where she takes the stage and performs a routine that ranks amongst one of my favourite scenes ever in a film. Amongst a gloriously coloured set (designed by none other than Derek Jarman, as were all the film's sets), she begins by slashing away at a talking canvas resembling Goya's "Naked Maja", shouts "Old masters exploit young mistresses" and then launches into a hilariously badly sung ditty, the chorus of which repeats the words "Votes for women! Votes for women! Tra-la la-la la-la lee". The guests from the aforementioned dinner party are all in attendance, dressed and acting suitably outre for the occasion, whilst Gaudier roars his appreciation - "show us your knickers!" Unfortunately, there isn't a clip of this on You Tube to share so here are some stills I managed to capture as a poor substitute.

              

As the film draws to a close, Henri and Sophie are re-united after he visits her by train and they rekindle their passions amongst Portland stone, he telling her that his first solo show is due to take place and she later agreeing to marry him after the exhibition. However, fate has a cruel part to play in proceedings, as Gaudier, who had at first dismissed going to war, sees a picture of Rheims Cathedral damaged by the advancing Germans and decides to enlist. Then, back at The Vortex, where the face of a wildly metallic looking performer is thrust repeatedly into the camera in order to evoke the violent idiocy of the war, Corky reads out a letter received from the trenches in which Gaudier tells of sculpting using found rifle butts and his delight at going out at night and killing the enemy. The response of one of the Boho crowd is "Whoever wrote that should be shot", to which comes the reply, "He was. Last Thursday," and the film ends beautifully and poignantly, cutting between shots of the grieving Sophie, photos from the trenches and actual pieces of Gaudier's sculpture at the now posthumous exhibition, his Modernist style causing stifled amusement amongst several of those attending. Then the tragic loss is rammed further home as she solitarily views an unfinished piece whilst in the background others celebrate the end of the war.

       

As with a lot of Ken Russell films, "Savage Messiah" is a bit of a romp and a good deal of irreverent anarchy propels the film through its ninety minutes or so, as he avoids the slavish adherence to fact which stifles more stereotypical and cliched biopics. However, at the same time, all the powerful ingredients remain steadfastly at the core: Gaudier's obvious talent and conviction; the incredible relationship he shared with the remarkable Brzeska; a sense of the milieu in which he operated; and the terrible loss and devastation brought about by WW1. Along with John Maybury's "Love is the Devil" and Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio", "Savage Messiah" is my favourite film about an artist and, let me think now, I'm sure there's a continuous link which connects the three, I believe.

Here is a ghastly American trailer which adds a gravelly voice and equally dramatic music to make the film look melodramatic and crassly worthy which, to me, competely misses the point. Turn down the sound and enjoy!

The Horrors / Toy : Manchester Academy 3 - 16 June 2011

I completely love The Horrors and have done since the very first day I heard their "Sheena is a Parasite" single in 2006 and then all those that followed, "Death at the Chapel", "Count in Fives" and "Gloves", in the run-up to their exhilarating first album "Strange House". They were a complete breath of fresh air which seemed to come out of nowhere and their instant success was a real joy to experience when everything else being raved about at the time was such dross. Although a lot of people said they were derivative and over-hyped, they were very welcomely received round these quarters and quite a few others by the looks of things.

In some respects, they remind me of Depeche Mode, not least because they achieved their first fame very quickly and whilst still in their late teens, or thereabouts, and so have had to do their growing up in public, evolving away from their early Birthday Party / garage punk style in much the same way that DM outgrew their early ultrapop sound and teenybop image. Both bands also strike me as being real lovers of music, constantly broadening their listening horizons and soaking up influences along the way. So, just as Depeche Mode started experimenting with sampling and taking on board ideas they were hearing in Berlin around 1983, The Horrors released a landmark album characterised by a more textured and electronically experimental sound also around the three year mark. "Primary Colours" sent a thrill through me when I first played it in 2009 and is still a delight from start to finish. In the two years or so that they had been away a new, more sophisticated yet equally exciting style had developed.

The Horrors always put on a very good live show, too, and I've been fortunate to see them quite a number of times along the line, again experiencing their evolution from the days of "Jack the Ripper" and Farris walking into the audience to streak the faces of unsuspecting attendees with the dreaded black grease to a more serious and musically considered stage act, Rhys having swapped his Farfisa for the bass and Tom becoming the electronics boffin with his banks of vintage synths at the edge of the stage. Although the crowd surfing seems out of place now, the live impact is still riveting but for completely different reasons of a much more sonic variety. 

Last week, they played their first UK shows of 2011 and I jumped at the opportunity to catch them in quite a small venue in Manchester University's Student Union. As anticipated, they didn't disappoint and what was glaringly obvious is that, once again, things have moved on to another level. Gone was anything remotely thrashy fom the set list - nothing at all from the first album and things like "New Ice Age" and "I Can't Control Myself" from "Primary Colours" also being absent - the gaps being filled by songs from the new album "Skying" which is due out in a few weeks' time. Like all things of depth, I'm sure that this as yet unfamiliar material is going to prove itself to be a collection of real growers and, on first listen, I'm already greatly optimistic about what lies just around the corner. This said, though, there was still plenty on offer from what we've already grown to love and it was great to see hordes of teenage boys who couldn't get served with beer at the bar a few minutes earlier thrashing around to songs as intelligent as "Mirror's Image", "Sea Within A Sea", "Scarlet Fields" and "Who Can Say". It kind of offers hope. 

Finally, another reason why The Horrors remind me of Depeche Mode, at least in the early days, - and Siouxsie and the Banshees, for that matter - is that I get the distinct impression that they insist on choosing their own support bands who reflect their own impeccable tastes and, therefore, manage to expose their mainly young audience to something they might not otherwise have come across in the process. So, just as early(ish) Depeche Mode audiences were warmed up by people like Palais Schaumburg,  Fad Gadget, Portion Control or Hard-Corps, last time I saw The Horrors in Leeds they had Factory Floor on before them and, on this occasion, they had Toy, a new group with no releases to their name yet, in support. They were superb. At a first glance, you could be mistaken for thinking they'd churn out some kind of stoner rock but this wasn't the case at all, as they delivered an obviously sixties inspired pop  but with a degree of complexity built into it, this being achieved by not too obvious song structures, appealing guitar effects and hypnotic keyboards - nothing laboured and dreary, though, just highly effective, catchy but not superficial tunes. In some respects, their sound reminded me a little of Felt which is no bad thing at all, although it was much more contemporary than that at the same time. They're certainly a name to watch out for and were well worth making the mid-week journey over to Manchester for alone.

And talking of things to watch out for, The Horrors have put their forthcoming single on You Tube to get us in the mood for the new album. I was right. It is a real grower. Every time I listen to "Still Life", which was one of the highlights of last week's show, it sounds better than the time before and I want to go back and listen again. Maybe it will be single of the year. Roll on July 11th (release date) and their next big tour in October. I've got my ticket already, tucked behind the telephone.