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Kindred spirits, collaborators, and just stuff we like in general.
Salla Tykka
Salla Tykka is an artist from Finland whose work I first saw at the Tramway in Glasgow a few years ago. As I write this one of her short films, Lasso, is on show in Edinburgh, as part of the Fruitmarket‘s group exhibition Print the Legend. It’s one of my favourite things in the exhibition, which is a collection of contemporary art inspired by the iconography of Hollywood Westerns (there’s work by Gillian Wearing and Douglas Gordon in it too).
Not much happens in Lasso. A girl goes round to a boy’s house in an ordinary European suburb and rings the bell. When he doesn’t answer it, she goes round the back of the house to look through the window. Gazing in through the blinds, she sees him with his shirt off, jumping through a lasso again and again, working himself up into a sweat-drenched frenzy, until finally he collapses on the floor. As she watches him, she starts crying. Then the camera slowly pans away from the house; the final shot is a close-up of snow on the grass. The whole thing is soundtracked by Ennio Morricone’s stirring theme music from Once Upon A Time In The West. The effect is mesmerising, and enigmatic, and erotic, and beautiful, and very moving. Why is she crying? Is she in love? Is it just the overwhelming power of the moment? I think I maybe love the film because it has the same impact as a really evocative song (and is about the same length). It offers a powerful image, but leaves it to you to fill in the gaps and decide the meaning for yourself.
Salla’s website only has a trailer for Lasso, but someone has sneaked the whole film on to YouTube here. Go to the website anyway, though, because there’s some beautiful photography there too, as well as trailers for some of Salla’s other films, which you can probably track down on YouTube too.
Andrew
I am not the Beatles
I Am Not The Beatles is a very funny and oddly poignant music website. It was made by a man who spent his 1980s childhood building up a vast collection of seven inch singles, all of which he bought from his local record shop for eight pence each. These were the failed records, the ones that nobody wanted (hence the website’s title). The shop stuffed them all into brown paper bags, 12 records per bag, and sold the bags for £1 each. You bought the bag not knowing what you’d get, which was part of the fun. It was a musical lucky dip.
There was a similar record shop where I grew up in the north of England - The Pink Panther in Carlisle, now long gone - and I occasionally bought a brown paper bag just like this. Unlike me, though, the creator of I Am Not The Beatles became slightly obsessed with the idea and collected vast numbers of these failed records. Years later, he has set up a website on which he picks those records out at random and then reviews them on his website without knowing anything about the people who made them - in other words, he listens to them now the way he listened to them then. The result is an affectionately written tribute to fleeting fame, failure and the ridiculousness of much 1980s pop music. I love it.
One day, I hope that Swimmer One end up being written about on a website like this. I’d prefer us to be hugely successful, obviously. Then again, all success is fleeting. What comes afterwards looks a lot like I Am Not The Beatles.
Andrew
Unspeak
Unspeak is a blog I have just started reading, by the writer Steven Poole. You can read it here. Steven makes a living out of raging against people who abuse language, either consciously via propaganda or unconsciously via sheer laziness or lack of thought.
I don’t know him at all, and haven’t yet read the book that predated the blog (also called Unspeak), but I enjoy his writing. His mix of anger and precision reminds me a bit of George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, a formative influence on me. I assume Steven is a fan of Orwell too, given the title of his blog.
Andrew
Jane Siberry
Jane Siberry is my favourite singer in the world, and I never tire of telling people how fantastic she is. She is much less famous in the UK than she is in Canada, where she’s from, so I’ve become a bit of an evangelist for her cause here. I was thinking of one of her songs last night, so suddenly felt the urge to write something on this page in case it points anyone new in her direction. (I’m not sure if Swimmer One can really be said to be influenced by Jane Siberry, at least not obviously, but my soon-to-be-unveiled side project, First Minister, is quite Siberresque.)
I usually tell people she’s like a more knowing Kate Bush, or a sexier, more feminine Laurie Anderson. That’s shorthand, though, and doesn’t sum her up properly at all. She’s as brilliant as either of the above, though, and incredibly versatile. Her first album, from 1981, sounds like a more playful cousin to Blue by Joni Mitchell. By 1983 she was making something resembling synth pop (imagine if the Associates were a girl group). Then the songs got longer, more multi-layered and cinematic, especially on her album The Walking.
One of my favourite Siberry songs is The Bird in the Gravel, from that album, in which she plays multiple characters - a heartbroken maid, a truck driver, a servant and a kitchen full of noisy cooks. Then, just as people were getting used to this, she started making country music (on Bound By The Beauty). Then a jazz album (Maria). Then she recorded an album of simple songs she wrote when she was a teenager (Teenager). She’s recorded everything from a 25-minute odyssey about dragons and lost innocence (Oh My My) to a funny song about her dog (Everything Reminds Me Of My Dog). When I saw her play in Scotland a couple of years ago, she played a 12-minute musical poem about a dreamlike journey through a forest, a 30-second version of What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor, and then sang I Know My Redeemer Liveth by Handel. She was very funny too, in a completely random way.
I LOVE her. Cannot emphasise that enough really. She’s whimsical or ironic one minute, heartwrenchingly sincere the next. Sometimes she’s both in the same line. Ultimately she sounds like no one else in the world. And, years before Radiohead thought of it, she started selling her music on a ‘pay-what-you-like’ basis. You can get LOADS of it on MP3 from her website, for whatever you can afford (go to STORE, then follow the links). Some you can only get if you live in Canada or the USA, but there’s plenty available worldwide too.
In 2006, in a typically eccentric Siberry move, she sold almost all of her possessions, including her house, changed her name to Issa Light, and set off around the world, to live as a wandering troubadour, finally liberated from material possessions and concerns. I interviewed her for the Scotsman newspaper just as she was setting off, and she seemed nervous but happy. I hope she’s doing ok. You can read about her continuing adventures at Issa’s MySpace page. I often do.
Andrew
Laura Lewis and the Tea Dance Orchestra
Laura Cameron Lewis, who has been playing keyboards and singing backing vocals at our more recent live shows, has her own band too. They are called Laura Lewis and the Tea Dance Orchestra, they have an online home here, and will be playing a few live dates this year.
Interesting fact: the portrait of Laura on the page is by the artist Kirsty Whiten, who I have enthused about elsewhere on this website. Kirsty is in Laura’s band, as a sort of artist in residence.
Andrew
Cora Bissett
Cora is one of our favourite singers. She can be heard on two Swimmer One tracks - How Could Something Like That Be Love (we have recorded two versions, one with Cora doing backing vocals and one with her doing the lead vocal) and our cover of Cloudbusting. We first met Cora when she was fronting a fantastic Scottish band called Swelling Meg, whose songs sounded like a cross between Throwing Muses and Eastern European gypsy music. More recently she’s focused on acting (Scottish theatre mainly, including The Wolves and the Walls by the National Theatre of Scotland and various shows at the Arches, the Royal Lyceum Theatre and elsewhere,, but TV and film too, including an award-winning Glasgow-set drama called High Times). This year she directed her own show at the Arches in Glasgow.
During this time we have been pestering her to keep singing, because she sings like no one else. So we’re thrilled that she has recently started writing songs again. You can hear some of them on her MySpace page. The plan is for us to produce, remix or generally help out on some of them at some point soon. Meanwhile, go have a listen, because she’s brilliant.
Andrew
Glasvegas
And particularly a song called It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry, which has one of the best pop lyrics I’ve heard in ages.
How have I not heard this band before now? They are brilliant, like all the best bits of loads of Scottish bands all mashed together, and produced by Phil Spector. Timeless, familiar but completely fresh, straight to the point, full of passion and honesty, and with a really strong Glasgow accent too. I must have been hiding under a rock.
Another newish Scottish band I really like is the Twilight Sad. They remind me of one of my favourite bands ever, Kitchens of Distinction.
Andrew
Postsecret
www.postsecret.blogspot.com.
I’ve loved this site for years. If you’ve somehow missed the international blaze of publicity it’s now had (which has led to a book and a regular slot in a British newspaper), it’s a collection of confessional postcards anonymously sent to the site’s creator, Frank Warren. I did an interview with him for a magazine once. “One reason I feel people trust me with their secrets is they feel that I will treat their admissions with respect and understanding,” he told me. “PostSecret is a community where people know that what they share will not be judged and may help someone else.”
Warren describes Postsecret as an “ongoing community art project”, but doesn’t take the darker confessions lightly - his site includes the number of the National Hopeline Network, a phone-line for people contemplating suicide. It’s just possible he has saved one or two lives. Everyone has a different secret, but you can’t help noticing that certain things come up again and again - childhood abuse, self-harm, unrequited love, infidelity etc.
Other confessions - a lot of them, in fact - are just silly and funny, locker room sniggering scribbled down. But the appeal, arguably, is the same in each case. It’s about being granted a glimpse into other people’s private worlds, the same voyeuristic thrill we get from Big Brother or tabloid horror stories. It’s also about the absurd fact that it can be easier to make a connection with another human being across continents via the internet than to strike up conversation on a bus (one of our songs, The Fakester Genocide, was probably partly inspired by Postsecret).
Every confessor has a different motive, of course. Some are using Warren’s site like a church confession booth, and would undoubtedly be traumatised if identified. Others are desperate to be discovered. The postcards are art too, as Warren says. He calls them “graphic haikus” - they remind me a bit of David Shrigley and Tracey Emin.
That said, sometimes I can’t help but be suspicious of Warren’s “community art project”. Does he himself have a secret, one about a 41-year-old frustrated artist withering in an unexciting job, who finally made a mark on the wider world by making thousands of postcards and pretending they were sent by other people? (Many of them are undoubtedly real, given the number of hits on the website, but all of them - who knows?) But that’s the beauty of the internet. You can never completely trust anything that you see there - which is why it’s best to view Postsecret as a work of art. There would be truth in it even if it was based on a fiction. A secret I spotted once on the site seemed to understand this. “I know that sending in a stupid postcard to share a secret with a bunch of strangers won’t do a damn thing to change the loneliness and unhappiness in my life,” it says. “And I sent this anyway.” The point is to participate, by posting or just looking.
Andrew
Found
Lots of musicians claim to be influenced by visual art, usually in order to make themselves look clever - Found actually are visual artists, who happen to make pop music too. Based in Edinburgh, they’re a kind of environmental art pop band, maybe, sampling sounds from the world around them and then cutting and pasting them into songs. They’ve done a show at the Royal Scottish Academy where they got the audience to throw paper aeroplanes at beams of light and turned the sampled noises into music; they’ve made music with sewing machines too (don’t ask me how) and done an eccentric, absolutely brilliant multimedia show with the comedy duo Noble and Silver for the BBC Electric Proms. But they’ve also done ‘proper’ gigs, at T in the Park and Connect, so you never quite know what to expect from them - but you always know it’s going to be worth seeing or hearing. They’re releasing their second album in November; I can’t wait to hear it.
In short, they’re the kind of band that constantly make me think ‘Bastards, I wish WE had thought of that.’ And make me want to raise my game. Which is healthy.
Andrew
We’re all doomed! No we’re not!
www.climatedenial.org
Nothing to do with music, just my new favourite blog, by environmental campaigner George Marshall, writer of one of the best critiques I’ve seen of Live Earth. Although that’s not actually on his blog - you’ll need to go here to read it.
Andrew
The Truck Driver’s Gear Change Hall Of Shame
http://www.gearchange.org
Not often you get an entire site dedicated to a songwriting technique, but when it’s as excruciatingly bad as The Truck Driver’s Gear Change, you can see why one appeared. You’ll recognise it when you hear it. The chorus is repeating at the end of a song and then it shifts up a semitone or two and repeats again. Recent offenders include Oasis’ All Around The World and Robbie Williams’ Old Before I Die. Basically an attempt at holding the listeners attention whilst saying nothing new. There must be a good conversational equivalent to describe this same technique.
As the man says: “No new interval relationship exists between the chords; therefore, to the extent that there is no other harmonic, melodic or rhythmic development, the trick is seen as a cheap, tacky way of generating artificial momentum
Hamish
Luxury Car
www.myspace.com/luxurycar
One of our favourite bands. They released an album on our Biphonic Records label last year. You can find out more about them here‘
Daniel Warren
http://www.youtube.com/danielwarrentv
Daniel has made four films featuring Swimmer One music, and designed the cover art for our first two singles. He also worked with Hamish on Public Private, a film commissioned by Scottish Ballet and the National Galleries of Scotland. You can watch all of his work to date here
Astrid Williamson
www.astridwilliamson.net
The fact that we know Astrid is, I’m guessing, the reason why so many sensitive singer songwriter types with acoustic guitars keep pitching up at our MySpace page, wanting to be ‘friends’ with us. For the record, I’m not really very interested in sensitive singer-songwriter types with guitars in general, just Astrid (and Roddy Frame, and Fionn Regan, and Lloyd Cole, but that’s about it). It’s something about that voice - she’s lived in Brighton for years but you can still hear Shetland in it. You can hear her breathing when she sings, and it’s like a wind blowing over the islands. Lovely.
Ages ago we did a remix of her song Never Enough, which has been almost finished ever since. One of these days we’ll finish it. We made her sound like Kylie, a result she was slightly ambivalent about (although she was very nice about it). It could be a huge hit, really.
Andrew
SL Records
www.slrecords.net
Our friend Ed’s record label, ten years old this year! Think Domino or Wichita are indie? Pah. THIS is indie. Ed has released records by the Starlets, St Jude’s Infirmary, ballboy, Desc, Khaya, Misty’s Big Adventure, Thomas Truax and numerous others. The Starlets’ second album, in particular, is wonderful. Our early gigs were on stages shared with a few of the bands on the above list. Daniel Warren, who has made several films for us, has also made films for Ed.
