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Carry That Weight

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One thing I did not really think about the first time I read James Sallis, but that strikes me now on re-reading is the sense of memory being a curse as opposed to a blessing. There’s a moment where Lew Griffin is confronted about his predilection for remembering quotations. “You’re always quoting other people” says the character Verne. “Anytime something important happens or some thought logjams in your head, there you are, hopping up like a schoolboy, pick me! pick me! with what Dante or Camus or Thingamabob said. You think anyone gives half a damn? And half the time, anyway, you’re only using it to avoid digging in, avoid having to find out what you think. Or what you feel.”

I found those lines interesting when I read them in 2003, and I appreciate the irony of my quoting them here, twenty years later. Thing is, I only remember them because I’ve just (re)read them, and because I made a note of them at the time. Written down so I would not forget. Although I did, of course, because I forgot I had written them down. 

When I was a student at school I had a jealousy for fellow students who remembered things easily. Most of my classes in the first couple of years of high school were taught in mixed ability groups. Things were always leading towards setting and streaming according to ‘ability’ however, so of course everyone was ranked. Now I always suggest that I am not particularly competitive by nature, but that is doubtless something of a fib because I recall I was always frustrated to some extent not to be top in my group. It was usually between myself, a couple of other boys and three Fiona’s, one of whom was always on top, as it were. Everyone said the secret to this success was that she had photographic memory and I wondered what that would be like. I thought it must be a superpower, but I am no longer sure about that. Great for tests and exams of course, for the education system in the UK, as in most other countries, is built around memory tests more than anything else. But to remember everything? I’d much rather not.

The notion of ‘photographic’ memory is additionally interesting when one considers the photograph, for the photograph is by default selective. What is not within the frame is as important as what is pictured, or at least should be taken into account when thinking about the image. What has been left out? Why? How would the picture be different if the photographer pointed the camera in the other direction? Such considerations can, legitimately, be thought of as ridiculously fussy. My mother would say it is a case of me thinking too much, and she is probably right at that. However, even (especially?) with regards the photographs we make as vessels to hold memory, these questions are valid. What and who does the photograph not show? How does it, over time and repeated viewings, further erase awareness of the surrounding context? How true is it that, when we ask each other (and ourselves) “do you remember when…” we default to remembering the photograph of the when in question. The photograph becomes the memory and vice versa. Again, it is that enchanting dance between the real and imagined, the remembered and the invented.

When Penguin books published an omnibus edition of Chandler’s three key novels (‘The Big Sleep’, ‘Farewell My Lovely’ and ‘The Long Goodbye’) at the start of the 21st Century they chose a photograph by American Ukrainian photographer Arthur Fellig for the cover. Better known under the moniker of Weegee, his photographs made in New York throughout the 1930s and 40s have surely constructed much of our cultural memory of time and place. Weegee’s high contrast black and white photographs, particularly the ones of crime and accidents, feel as if they both inform and are informed by the Noir movies of Hollywood. There is a shared visual language going on here between the real and the fictional, and that feeds into the written texts of the pulps. The photograph on that Chandler omnibus cover is of men arrested for bribing basketball players, or so it is captioned in a book of Weegee photographs that I picked up in 1996 and that I have delved into on many occasions since.

It is probably true that I was not familiar with Weegee’s photographs when I first stumbled on the name as part of a song title by the group Felt. ‘On Weegee’s Sidewalk’ was a track on their penultimate album from 1988, the instrumental ‘Train Above The City’. The record could be a soundtrack to an imaginary Noir movie, the sound of the late Martin Duffy’s vibes evoking a smoky jazz atmosphere of sunlight catching blue smoke as it pierces slatted windows. Sometimes I wish the album had been titled ‘Naked City’ after Weegee’s own first book of photographs published in 1945. It was also the title of a film made three years later by Mark Hellinger, who bought the rights to the name from Weegee. The picture is a gritty investigation into the murder of a model. New York and its streets are the stars.

If ‘Naked City’ had been set in Los Angeles it might have been the story of The Black Dahlia murder. The grotesque 1947 killing of Elizabeth Short has never been officially solved, although there have been any number of intriguing theories. A great book by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss called ‘Exquisite Corpse’ details the case and draws some compelling lines out to the Art world, particularly that of the surrealists, and Man Ray photographs in particular. It’s a crazy, crazy world, and I suspect that Lawrence of the aforementioned band Felt will have read ‘Exquisite Corpse’ being a bit of a true-crime fan. 

A single grim photograph pertaining to the Black Dahlia case opens the terrific outsize book of LAPD archive photographs ‘Scene Of The Crime’ and further into its pages can be found many others that are intriguingly captivating in their forensic matter-of-factness and their connection to the realm of popular culture. In one shot the word ‘PIG’ is smeared on a wall, a grim record of detail from the Cielo Drive murders carried out by Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ in 1969. Elsewhere is a collection of four shots from the scene of Lenny Bruce’s fatal overdose in 1966. The inclusion of a small LAPD ruler to illustrate scale in the two images of bathroom paraphernalia lends the still life arrangements a peculiar grim surrealism, whilst the absence of human presence in the two photographs of Bruce’s book and paper-strewn study is profoundly sad. The blank sheet of paper in the typewriter carries the poignant weight of derelict lost promise.

Author James Ellroy wrote an introduction for ‘Scene Of The Crime’ in 2004 and eleven years later expanded on that to pen a series of short pieces for the more focused ‘LAPD ’53’ book. In its afterward Ellory writes that it was “a stone gas to assemble and write” and his text throughout is full of hep cat beatific Noir flavour. Or flavor, if you prefer. It’s shoot from the hip sharp, and it makes me wonder why I never really investigated more of James Ellroy’s fiction beyond the ‘LA Quartet’ which of course kicks off with his own ‘Black Dahlia’ dance between fact and fiction, Elizabeth Short’s murder being notoriously conflated in the young Ellroy’s brain with the rape and murder of his own mother in 1958. That’s a lot of weight to carry and to process.

Don’t Blink

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The sight of the sun going down may no longer make me cry but the passing of things into darkness certainly brings a chill of melancholy. This is the inevitability of age of course, as inescapable as the cycles of nature. Things end. Things begin. Blink and you miss them.

Much of this is captured in ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’, the new, and perhaps the last, record by epic45, an artist I first came across back in 2002. The introduction was via Anthony Harding and his July Skies project, whose remarkable ‘Dreaming Of Spires’ LP I was fortunate enough to write about for ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ magazine. For me that record was like opening a doorway into a secret garden within a secret garden, a strange space inhabited by those eking out artistic existences beyond the reach of even the ‘underground’ never mind the mainstream. This was a realm of small country churches and derelict WW2 airfields. OS maps and the tracings of Beeching’s vandalism. Electricity pylons marching through forests. Ladybird books, Lone Pine paperbacks; the illustrations of Robert Lumley and Bertram Prance. Peculiarities at the end of the 20th Century.

Not quite so peculiar now, perhaps, as many of these infatuations have become more readily accessible in the intervening two decades thanks to the sprawl of the Internet and social media. Yet there remains something appealing and slightly Other about them. Profoundly analogue, perhaps, even whilst propagated and experienced in digital arenas. There is something of nostalgia at work, certainly, but equally certainly nothing so stultifying as a preoccupation with the past. This nostalgia is instead about drawing emotional strength, synthesising knowledge and experience into something new. The creative process (and the learning process) in a nutshell.

That nod to The Field Mice in the opening line here is apt too, for there are surely some shared points of interest and influence at work between epic45’s Ben Holton and Bobby Wratten of The Field Mice, Lightning In A Twilight World and others. Something to do with a certain kind of oddly assured fragility that casual misinformed cynics might wrongly classify as limp or fey. A fascination with the temporal distortions of liminal spaces, both physical and psychic. Spirits in their houses, ghosts in their machines. Usborne’s book on their childhood bookshelves. Things we all invent and project on our eyelids to make sense of what we feel around us. Music, photographs, words. Whispers or whatever.

Musically, it is certainly possible to listen to the thirty two minutes of ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’ and to hear echoes of the likes of The Field Mice or Sarah labelmates Blueboy, more so perhaps than on any previous epic45 record. Album opener ‘New Town Faded’, with its humorous nod to a Joy Division title, could be the kissing cousin to something from the delicious ‘Unisex’ album, for example; ‘Be Nowhere’ an amorphous echo of the lilac 10” sleeved ‘Snowball’. If such comparisons make you shudder then that is most likely your loss. But then again we all blink and miss something sometimes.

There is also, in the music of epic45 and also throughout the nigh-on-20 year existence of Holton’s Wayside and Woodland imprint, a fascination with suburbia, for there are few more liminal spaces after all. Tracey Thorn has written eloquently about suburbia in her ‘Another Planet’ book of course, but she would likely agree that her heart was always in the city with the suburbs as something to escape, a place and a set of feelings to leave behind. Fond memories, perhaps, but only in hindsight and only with the weight of age to temper their adolescent frustration.

It is perhaps inevitable that anyone with a creative impulse would feel constrained by suburbia, its insistence on uniformity apparently the enemy of individual expression. Yet it is not necessarily the case. Artist John Myers spent most of the 1970s making photographs of the “garages, TVs, electricity substations, new builds and [his] neighbours” in Stourbridge. Collected in the 2017 book ‘The World Is Not Beautiful’, Myers’ photographs in fact suggest just the opposite. Beauty is in the everyday and God is in the mundane. In the work of epic45 there feels something of the same impulse. An embrace with suburbia where both parties naturally hold each other a little distantly. It wouldn’t do to be too familiar, would it? Holton, like John Myers is a recorder, making notes on the spaces he exists within and passes through. This is done musically of course, but in recent years it is increasingly also through photography, much of which finds place within printed books supporting the sounds, an excellent alternative means of giving physical artefacts to digitally distributed music.

There is an acceptance too, in the work of Myers and of Holton, I think, of the tension inherent in suburbia. These are spaces that by definition look both inwards and outwards, forever ripped and torn by duelling impulses that create a certain kind of neurotic anxiety. Agatha Christie recognised this in her 1969 Poirot novel ‘Hallowe’en Party’, a book which Kenneth Branagh made almost unrecognisable as the 2023 film ‘A Haunting In Venice’. Christie’s writing in the novel may be a long way from her finest, but although there is a distinct clumsiness about everything in the book, Christie does at least recognise the sordid repression of suburbia and the incipient mental health conditions it might generate.

It is this duality of existence that epic45 capture in the closing track on ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’. A six minute post-shoegaze, ahem, ‘epic’, called, appropriately enough, ‘Finality’, the song suggests movement and stasis at the same time. Travels to find “another place, another town” are plagued by both the disappointment and relief at finding them all the same. Suburbia being by default about uniformity. Everything is nowhere and nothing is everywhere. You can hear the echo of adolescent anger in the almost buried, shouted, vocal that counterpoints the same electronically treated sung lyric. It is both heartbreaking and oddly celebratory, like the work of David Lynch or the peculiar surrealism of Skids’ ‘Sweet Suburbia’ whose single sleeve oddly predicted New York anglophile band My Favorite’s ‘Detectives of Suburbia’. 17 years and an ocean apart. What was that about nods, whispers or whatever? Blink and you miss them.

‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’ then is a punctuation mark in the creative journey of Ben Holton and epic45. A period perhaps, but only time will tell. It may unfurl in the future as a semi-colon, an elongated pause for breath before another plunge. One certainly suspects that even if this record sees the ‘end’ of epic45 there will be future Holton projects. His ‘Twelve Months’ work of music and photography as Birds In The Brickwork for example is already at volume three and must surely promise more. I admit I have not purchased the accompanying calendars (like most of the limited runs of physical artefacts from Wayside and Woodland, they tend to sell out quickly), but the cover image for the 2023 edition is thoroughly entrancing, like a West Midlands suburban Todd Hido outtake from ‘House Hunting’ or Robert Adams’ ‘Summer Nights, Walking’ in Water Orton instead of the Colorado Front Range. Looking for the echoes of Lawrence and Maurice Deebank rather than Emily Dickinson. Crumbling the antiseptic beauty, indeed.

‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’ is out now on Wayside and Woodland. Don’t blink. Don’t miss it.

This article was originally published by Caught By The River: https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2024/02/epic-45-youll-only-see-us-review/

Click, Click, Click

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Wasn’t there a Global Beatles Appreciation Day recently? I’m sure I saw a message online somewhere to that effect. I’m sure too that somewhere someone made one of those Batman slapping Robin memes about it. Robin saying ‘So what are you doing for Beatles Appreciation day…’ and Batman coming back with ‘EVERY day is Beatles Appreciation Day’. Anyway, it made me laugh, but that’s Capitalism for you. The machine must be fed. The beast is never sated.

So did I do anything for Global Beatles Appreciation Day? Does leafing through a few pages of Paul McCartney’s ‘Eyes Of The Storm’ book count? My younger self just spat in my face for saying that, but what use is the ageing process if one cannot thoroughly disgust one’s younger self? Sure, some things are Worth Holding On To, but in truth not much, and probably not the things one once thought to be the most important. Anything to do with music or Pop Culture in general falls into that category for me. Sacred Cows, global or personal, are there to be challenged I think. Casually discarded, even. So The Beatles? Yeah, they’re okay.

The truth is that I’ve rather enjoyed poking around a little in the realm of The Beatles. Barely scratching the surface of course, but that’s okay because frankly the depths of obsessive forensic research that some (many?!) like to go in for is a little bit scary. I mean, it’s fine, it really is. Whatever floats your boat, and it’s really just more evidence of my own relative shallowness and/or spectacular mediocrity with a bit of mild ADHD in the mix. So I’ve dabbled. Paddled in the shallow end. Listened to a few things and read a few books that my Texas Correspondent William Crain has prodded me with over the years. He likes to joke he’s made me into Devon’s Number One Beatles Fan. Man, I wouldn’t even get admitted to the fan club meetings and I’m still wearing THAT badge with a little perverse pride.

But what about Macca’s photographs? 1964 and all that. I admit that although I just said that Pop Culture in general is no longer as big a deal to me as it once was, there is something lastingly seductive about certain periods of time, and that early 1960s period is one. I just watched an old Éric Rohmer short about ’Nadja à Paris’ which is charming and hugely evocative. Everyone looks smart and stylish and you cannot smell the Parisian sewers, or all the cigarette smoke, which is a bonus. I’m glad you cannot smell the cigarette smoke in McCartney’s photographs, because there are a lot of fags in them. Cue period ‘joke’ about the number of homosexuals in the Entertainment Industry. Boom Boom.

The photographs are great. Surprisingly so, perhaps, but then again perhaps not, because it does seem that McCartney was a fairly gifted multidisciplinary artist from the off. There is a high degree of visual literacy in the photographs, much of it no doubt sub-consciously developed from an immersion in the form that he’d have consumed through the fledgling Youth Media of the 1950s and of course from being within the milieu of those bohemian German artists, notably Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer. Ah, the crucible of youthful creative surges. Soaking it all up and letting it seep out again in new forms. Click.

There are, of course, a lot of photographs of McCartney’s fellow band members in the book . There are some lovely shots, many of them with an intimacy only someone like McCartney could achieve. Yet such is the ubiquity of imagery of the characters that none of these photographs feel particularly, ah, newsworthy, as it were. Do they add anything to the Story? I’m not sure. It’s a question for a much more devoted and educated person and you know I’d probably tune out the answer after a couple of minutes.

So my favourite photographs in the book are not of members of the Beatles but the ones of the supporting cast, if you will. Brian Epstein in shorts in Miami. Mal Evans looking straight in a suit and tie, strangely appearing much older than he would just five years later in the ‘Get Back’ footage. George Martin and Judy Lockhart-Smith poolside, also in Miami. Paul’s ‘Miami date’ Diane Levine looking a little shy and bemused, Lennon fuzzy from the shallow depth of field sitting cross legged on the marina pontoon in the middle ground. Also notable are the shots of other artists. Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, Cilla Black, The Vernon Girls, Billy J Kramer looking tortured and exquisite on stage, a moment of light in a sea of blackness. Click. Johnny Halliday and Sophie Hardy. Sylvie Vartan bleached in the spotlight. McCartney showing a genuine interest in the artists surrounding him and also, in these kind of shots, in the art of photography itself.

Then there are the fans. Lots, and lots of fans. The long haired beatnik girl captured as she in turn takes snaps of Lennon biting his nails. Fuzzy, noisy, cloudy and quite perfect. There is a mirror in the dressing room that looks just like the one my grandparent’s had. The one that now hangs in our own bedroom. Time glitches and bends through the walls. Click. Or the Parisian fans on the street looking kinda non-plussed as Parisians are wont to do. And is that Rohmer’s Nadja sitting it that terrace cafe idly smoking a cigarette? Click. Americans in Europe are one thing, but the ones in their native land are another matter. Hysterical. Everything bubbling and ready to burst. Click! Pow! Crash! And click again.

The book’s cover shot is perfect. Lots of noise, literally. Kids pursuing The Beatles’ car down West Fifty-Eighth in Manhattan. Chaos. Mayhem. It’s a cinematic shot so no surprise to learn that the chasing crowd scenes in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ were based on moments like this. My favourite though is another one taken from inside the car looking out, this time at just a few faces eagerly but politely peering in. The car window makes the perfect frame with a foregrounded arm (a fellow Beatle?) making for a barrier to the right edge of the shot. The torso of a police officer (from the 83rd Precinct?) lurks to the right, his badge gleaming. There is something strangely humble about this photograph. A gentle hopefulness.

Then too there is, simply, America. Okay, it’s no ‘The Americans’ and McCartney is no Robert Frank (and nor would he pretend to be) but there are flashes of Franks’ America as McCartney shoots police officers in the snow and the exterior of a Washington ART cinema advertising ‘Christine Keeler Goes Nudist’. Most startling, perhaps, is the high key close up of a motorcycle police officer’s handgun gleaming like the chrome on his engine. A reminder that this country might ostensibly speak the same language as the one McCartney grew up in, but is still peculiarly alien and Other. And, indeed, vice versa.

Now as already pointed out, I’m no aficionado of The Beatles and am quite content not to be so. In my limited exposure, however, McCartney would be my most favoured Fab and Lennon my least with The Quiet One and Ringo hovering somewhere between. I mean, I certainly never laughed when he got shot, but equally I never warmed to Lennon. He has always seemed like he’d have been the kind of kid who’d have bullied me in school, and ‘Imagine’ remains one of my most detested songs of all time. But you know what? I have zero interest in any lengthy debate or argument about it. My mantra in recent years has become ‘everyone is damaged and everyone has their reasons.’ And I’d have thought that not particularly digging John Lennon is hardly the most defining aspect of one’s personality. Or ought not to be. And, indeed, vice-versa.

There is an element of this in McCartney’s written reflections in the book too. Not specifically about Lennon, although there is perhaps a shiver of that, but more a reconciliation with The Past. The book feels like an attempt to enforce a partial reclamation of personal history from the furnace of endless public consumption (whilst inevitably, paradoxically, feeding those very flames). There is a strong sense throughout the book of these photographs being an inversion of the media process, a rebuttal if you like to the clamouring juggernaut of Success and Industry and Commerce that one fundamentally senses will overwhelm (or is that Hindsight infecting my reading of the text?).

So ‘Eyes Of The Storm’ feels like a gasp for breath in the exhilarating white heat of the moment; like fighting in the maw of the beast into whose grip one has gone willingly and to whom one knows one must ultimately surrender, but fighting nonetheless. For one’s identity? For the naive insecurity of Youth? A barrage of imagery, certainly, yet no apologies for that because McCartney’s photographs are also a barrage of questions, answers, possibilities and blind alleys. They capture a hinge point between the beforetime and the yet-to-be. Some things are ending and others beginning. Blink (or have been born a few years either side of X marks the spot) and you might have missed it. Click.

Me? I don’t mind that I missed it, and certainly don’t mind having held The Beatles in such low regard for such a long time, just as I don’t mind that I’ve now mellowed enough to dig a lot of what they made, both as a group and as individuals. And whilst it is easy to say that we no longer need a constant re-affirmation of their position within the Pantheon of Popular Culture, equally it’s easy to forget that there were certainly periods when the opposite was true and that it might yet be again.

So for now, it’s thumbs aloft.

Click.