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Hero worship

All the stones inside my head were carefully removed,
By the doctor’s perfumed scarlet hands,
She delved in deep for your savage teeth,
That sparkled diamonds fire blue,
Eating me and thrilling you,
The voices have now gone,
I’m looking forward to being alone.

Now that MySpace has become infested with shameless self-publicists trying to sell you stuff, it’s a rare, precious pleasure when you get an ‘add’ request you really, really want - like, for example, the one we got received recently from Stephen Hero, aka Patrick Fitzgerald, once of Kitchens of Distinction (the quote at the top of this blog is from their song Now It’s Time To Say Goodbye). He asked to add us, quite reasonably, because he’d spotted that Kitchens of Distinction are one of the ‘influences’ listed on our MySpace page (to be exact, they were an influence on me rather than Hamish; the point is they’re on the list, and they ARE getting in).

The greatness of Kitchens of Distinction is something I frequently shout about at anyone who will listen, even as they stare at me in mute incomprehension when I tell them The Death of Cool is one of the best albums of the last 20 years. Imagine if My Bloody Valentine and Spiritualized wrote passionate, poetic pop songs instead of swirling, echoey mood pieces for guitar pedal enthusiasts to wank over. KOD’s guitarist Julian Swales was, apparently, a big influence on Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead - listen to KOD’s Remember Me, and then Radiohead’s Knives Out, and you’ll hear this. Street Spirit and Just, from The Bends, are very KOD too.

But it was Patrick I loved. It was partly for his voice - gruff, very male, but vulnerable, imperfect but full of soul and heart; something, in fact, like the kind of voice I was trying to sing with - but mostly for the words he wrote. He sang about being a gay man in a way that I’d not heard before, not remotely camp or theatrical, not some cabaret version of being gay, but something much more real and everyday, daytime songs rather than night-time songs, which spoke with eloquence and wisdom and sadness about love, and tenderness, and partnerships, as well as alienation, isolation, and loneliness. And yes, I know Bronski Beat and the Communards were doing this kind of thing years before, but KOD did it better. One of their almost hits, Breathing Fear, from The Death of Cool, is about a gay man who has been beaten up, having to explain away his injuries to colleagues at work.

He’s half full of courage and stumbles to work,
Where they bitch about their babies.
They ask him where he got his bruises,
He mumbles excuses, he lies and lies.
He cannot allow them to finish him off,
Overheated, overwrought, he refuses to die like a saint,
Half-believed and always deceived.

It’s a song that’s haunted me for years. It’s not obvious whether or not the man’s workmates know he’s gay. The point is, the best he’s going to get from those people is a kind of condescending charity, which his pride makes him push away - what he’s not going to get is understanding, or any sense of equality. ‘You’re breathing this fear just once a year, we suffocate every day.’ the song says at the end. If that makes KOD lyrics sound like gay rights polemic, then maybe Breathing Fear isn’t such a good example, since it’s not typical. Mostly they just write very evocative songs about day to day life, which are both very distinctive and alternate poetic phrases with mundane kitchen sink detail, hence the band’s name, maybe.

One KOD song I really love is On Tooting Broadway Station. It’s about being abandoned by a lover, and the mix of loss, rage and helplessness you can feel at those moments. And there’s something about it, the violence of it maybe, that makes me convinced it could only have been written by a man about a man - ‘I cut him out, I lie here dry, I un-stitched the bindweed of love. Burn, burn his clothes… burn, burn it all, my John of Arc.’

This is all, perhaps, of particular interest to fans of our London friends Luxembourg, a few of whom have taken a liking to us, so might well end up reading this. Luxembourg, lyrically and in spirit, remind me a lot of Kitchens of Distinction. Like KOD once did, they play to a small following of devotees, who love them passionately, without (to date, at least) breaking through to the mainstream (that said, KOD did sell 100,000 albums in America, which is not to be sniffed at, but it was the wider indifference of the general public which finished them off). I have this lurking suspicion that homophobia is at work here. Not overt, gay-bashing homophobia, of course. But there remains a sense that gay people are not supposed to make this kind of music. ‘Gay music’, still, is camp, OTT, probably electronic, or sung by black women with tragic lives. Etc. It is not troubled white boys with guitars.

Bloc Party are, in some people’s eyes, a rare and honourable exception to this rule, except that Kele Okereke seems very reluctant to become pigeonholed as ‘a gay singer’. I can understand that. He’s sort of hinted that he’s bisexual rather than gay anyway, which would explain his reluctance to be labelled. And I can understand it even if he is uncomplicatedly gay. Being labelled is very reductive, and makes it much easier for people to dismiss you and your ideas, to put you in a box rather than actually listen. People are much more than their sexuality, after all. The Pet Shop Boys were evasive about theirs for a long time (Chris Lowe still is), reasoning that, although their songs were written from a gay perspective, they were relevant to a straight audience too (put another, more cynical way, they wanted to sell a lot of records).

That said, I still salute Patrick Fitzgerald for his bravery, honesty and uncompromising attitude to writing about his life and sexuality. He’s a genuine poet too, I think, and that’s exceptionally rare in pop music. If I ever write a lyric half as good as one of his, I’ll have achieved something. If you’re reading this, Patrick, I’ve ordered one of your Stephen Hero albums from HMV, and eagerly await its arrival. Everyone else, I recommend KOD wholeheartedly. Start with Cowboys and Aliens, proceed to The Death of Cool, then, if you want to hear more, buy their first two albums. And then get Hark at Her by Fruit, Patrick’s first solo project, which is quite brilliant. You can follow links to all of this aural pleasure via Stephen Hero’s MySpace page - I’ve put him in the Top Friends list on our own page to make it easy.

The sleeve notes to Cowboys and Aliens (KOD’s final album) include the words ‘No one played keyboards’. It’s a reference to the fact that cloth-eared critics frequently mistook Julian Swales’s ingenious use of guitar pedals for synthesisers, which annoyed him. I’ve been thinking we should put the words ‘Everyone played keyboards’ in the sleevenotes of one of our releases, as a homage to KOD - as well as to everyone else who defies stereotypes to make the kind of music they want to make, rather than the kind they are expected to make.

Andrew

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