Phonomancy Mixtape 3: The Holy Dark

Phonomancy Mixtape #3: The Holy Dark

1. Tom Waits - "Way Down in the Hole" - Franks Wild Years


AWHENYA WAWK THREW TH' GAHDEN! YEW GOTTA WAHTCH YAW BACK!

Nowadays best known as the theme to Possible-Best-Show-Ever The Wire, with a different version for each of its five seasons, the original version by demon-voiced troubadour Tom Waits was used to open Season 2, which focused on drug smuggling and was devised by the creator to be "a mediation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class". Fittingly, Waits's version is sinister and understated, with gentle tambourine rattles at the very back underscoring the slinky horn section, and features the man himself in fine voice, demanding his procession fear God and All His Angels like a preacher in a cheap white suit. No less is expected from Waits, the poet laureate of America's seedy blue-collar underbelly.

2. Peter Gabriel - "Come Talk to Me" - Us

I've already talked about this before with regards to Bon Iver's cover, so I won't go into too much detail here. The original does contain everything you need to know about Peter Gabriel - bizarrely beautiful lyrics that sound like an Eliot poem ("With reptile tongue/the lightning lashes/towers built to last", "The earthly power/sucks shadowed milk/from sleepy tears undone"), a massive arrangement that draws upon world music and overstretches itself (it opens with bagpipes, features an African choir, and somehow crams a duduk solo before the song's out), and a big emotional plea to ground it all. This is what saves Gabriel from merely being pretentious - he sings with genuine love and passion.

One final comment: the lyrics make more sense for this than Bon Iver's, considering it's about Gabriel trying to reach through to his daughter, rather than a lover as Justin Vernon appears to be.

3. The Rolling Stones - "Gimme Shelter" - Let it Bleed

There's probably a High Canon of songs associated with the Vietnam War by now, and I'd be very surprised if this isn't in there. Written and recorded during the American campaign, it's dark and moody like a gathering thunderstorm, with Jagger and Merry Clayton singing of an oncoming hurricane of bullets and napalm and screaming babes. It's just so...ominous and foreboding; I can almost smell the sweat and Agent Orange. The song really belongs to Clayton, who allegedly suffered a miscarriage after laying down the vocals. It's just so powerful and brilliant, the Stones have tried to fill the gap with Florence Welch, Mary J. Blige and (most bafflingly of all) Lady Gaga, but - as with so many things - the original just can't be topped.

4. Gackt - "Birdcage" - Crescent

A few years ago, I was crazy into J-rock. It was melodic, it was daring, it was grandiose; goddamnit, this is what rock was meant to be! The obsession petered out a while ago, due to a few factors: 1) My discovering the classics of rock and pop; 2) All those melodramatic ballads where the singer shrieks over an orchestra tended to blur together; 3) X Japan taking too fucking long with that comeback album. (Seriously, any day now guys.)

Gackt was one of my favourite musicians during this time, and while I don't listen to him that much, he still earns a place in my iPod. He's like the Japanese David Bowie - androgynous and artsy, capable of elevating films by his mere presence, and more than willing to try new things musically. Crescent, his 2003 masterpiece, is the best example of this, an eclectic mix of folk, prog, hard and art rock. "Birdcage" is unusual on its own merits - it starts as a gentle acoustic, and then, around the 2:20 mark, a squall of electric guitar enters, and it turns into a completely different song, all high-tempo drums and manic violin. It works surprisingly well and builds to a nice conclusion, guided along by Gackt's melodramatic lyric.

5. Scott Walker - "The Seventh Seal" - Scott 4

The doomed magnum opus of Walker's time in the 60s. Consisting entirely of self-penned material, Scott 4 failed to chart anywhere, despite its composer's status as pop music's premiere brooding artist; given that it was released under his birth name of Noel Scott Engel, it probably isn't that surprising. While I love this record, it does lean towards the self-indulgent a few times, and I can sort of see why the few who did buy it might have been jaded. There aren't any major pop hooks, the songs just kind of drift in their own little worlds. Scott was studying Gregorian chant and lieder (German romantic songs) while working on it, making them more European than his other work at the time, and hinting at his modern albums that lead the viewer into little universes of their own.

"The Seventh Seal" is in the same vein. The melodic structure of the verses remains constant throughout, with the accompaniment gradually unfolding into a more storming, rousing Spaghetti Western-esque backdrop. Not the one I'd have chosen for a song that's literally a re-telling of Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece, but hey, it works. This was the first Scott Walker song I ever heard, and it won me over right away. It's self-indulgent and ambitious, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

6. Gackt - "Mizérable" - The Sixth Day: Single Collection


Gackt's debut single, this version is from a 2004 compilation and was re-recorded to match his deepened voice (probably due to his smoking habit). I have to say I prefer this one over the original, since Gackt is better as a baritone with occasional bursts of tenor-ness, and it makes him distinct among the many, many, many J-rock pretty boys out there.

Goddamn do I love these strings. I've toyed with the idea of learning the violin for a while now, and I think this song is why - they give the song a strong opening, they're lush and romantic when they need to be and become crazy awesome at about 2:48, just as energetic as a guitar solo.

7. David Bowie - "Where Are We Now?" - The Next Day

I remember getting the news from this in the morning, checking Twitter then Facebook then the official Bowie page to confirm that no, this isn't a put-on, the Dame is coming back to music, he did it in a way that nobody saw coming, and you can get the new song right now. Having gotten used to the idea of Bowie never releasing new material after Reality in 2003, this was like Christ coming back on the third day for me. I was so happy.

Bowie's choice of a lead-off single, "Where Are We Now?", was an unusual choice - it's a slow-tempo ballad from an album mostly dominated by rock n' roll, it doesn't have obvious (or even any) commercial appeal, and his voice is frail and plaintive. Some assumed his fragile vocals were signs he wasn't up for a comeback, but he's been peddling that voice out for a while now. This one took a while to warm up to, to get used to and identify all the textures and layers within, but oh boy was it worth it. Poignant, sad, yet hopeful, it's a sign that Bowie has aged gracefully, and that his music has evolved and matured with him.

8. The Smiths - "How Soon is Now?" - Hatful of Hollow

Everyone has a Smiths phase when they're young. They just had this knack of encompassing the heartaches and tribulations of being a bright young thing within a series of perfect pop songs. Yes, as much as I dislike that pretentious miserable contrarian old sod Morrissey, his lyrics are some of the best I've heard. "It takes guts to be gentle and kind" is my creed.

"How Soon is Now?" is just the best synthesis of everything great about The Smiths - Johnny Marr's sterling vibrato guitar work, and Morrissey's artful, passionate writing. A lot of Morrissey's work has connections to gay culture, but this is so universal; whether it's a guy from Manchester bursting to come out, or a disenfranchised girl in Sussex wanting someone anyone to notice her, it fits together so nicely.

9. Kanye West ft. Lupe Fiasco - "Touch the Sky" - Late Registration

Kanye West is the idiot savant of rap music. In interviews, he has no filter, no little angel on his shoulder to stop him saying absolute clunkers and taking potshots at his contemporaries, and I don't think I'll truly get what he sees in Kim Kardashian and what makes him think, "Y'know what? She'll totally never leave me!" As a musician, though? He's one of the best producers in the game, more than making up for his weak flow and endearingly banal lines. Let me put it this way - for a while, I didn't listen to a lot of hip-hop, and I rarely bought whole albums. Come My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, I purchased the whole thing.

Late Registration is the second part of what's referred to roughly as the "College Dropout Trilogy" of Kanye albums, coming in between The College Dropout and Graduation. Kanye definitely stepped his game up for the sophomore effort - he brought in film composer Jon Brion to create a more intricate textured sound, got in some top players in music (Jamie Foxx, Adam Levine, Cam'ron, Nas and Jay-Z) to make guest appearances, and added some pretty funny skits about the fictional fraternity Broke Phi Broke (WE AIN'T GOT IT!), who take pride in having no money or girlfriends.

"Touch the Sky" opens with one hell of a bang - a slowed-down sample of "Movin' On Up" by Curtis Mayfield that gives the song the right amount of opulence and cool. The lyrics themselves are your typical rags-to-riches narrative, coloured by Kanye's trademark ego ("I was havin' nervous breakdowns/Like 'Man, these niggas that much better than me?'") - decent, but nothing remarkable. Then Lupe Fiasco swoops in and runs away with the track, referencing Lupin III, Thundercats and Mrs Butterworth's syrup in 16 bars, seemingly without effort. Awesome.

(Also, if you're one of those people who joke about how rap is spelt with a silent 'C', do me a favour and punch yourself in the face.)

10. John Cale - "Hallelujah" - I'm Your Fan

Ah, back before "Hallelujah" was touched by The X Factor and everyone grew really fucking tired of it. I'm willing to bet most, if not all of you, first heard this in Shrek, and were perplexed as to why this version wasn't on the soundtrack. John Cale's cover first appeared closing out a Leonard Cohen tribute album by French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles, and it's Cale's piano arrangement that has proved the most enduring - it formed the basis of Jeff Buckley's ever-popular cover. Where Cohen sounded beaten down and weary on the original, Cale sings with haunting sincerity. Where Cohen's moves at a funereal tempo, Cale's has a steady drive to it. The original is like a gospel, with percussion, choir, bass and keyboard; Cale's is a simple piano hymn sung by a devout believer.

Phonomancy Mixtape 2: Ladytron

Well, the first "mixtape" seemed to go alright, so let's try it again. In celebration of International Women's Day, and taking inspiration from Phonogram: The Singles Club, all the tracks featured are ones by female artists; all of you about to come in going "but where's international men's day jack you gender-traitor", go face the fucking wall.

Phonomancy Mixtape #2: Ladytron

1) Arianne - "Komm, süsser Tod" - The End of Evangelion


Another soundtrack choice, this one coming from The End of Evangelion, aka the Final Boss of Anime. An  alternate true well, definitely an ending of sorts to the apocalyptic mecha TV show Neon Genesis Evangelion, it's a feature-length animated film where the fate of the world rests in the hands of a manic depressive 14 year old and his godlike giant robot. Without giving too much away, it goes about as well as you'd expect, with all manner of lurid hyperviolent psychotic chaos breaking out.

And it's all scored to a pretty little pop ditty (unusually for an anime, this song is entirely in flawless English and is played in End of Evangelion with no subtitles for Japanese audiences). There's not much about this that's completely original - the organ at 0:24 is similar to Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale", and the big chorus sounds an awful lot like the singalong part of "Hey Jude" - but it works as a slice of morbid melancholy pop, given wings by Arianne Schreiber's gorgeous singing voice. Despite its pleasant piano-drums-strings backing, the narrator sings about a deathwish, a desire to fade away and for the world to end. Even the title, borrowed from Bach, translates to "Come, Sweet Death". Arianne wants to die, and she couldn't be more bubbly about it. It's really quite disturbing.

Now everybody sing along! "It all comes TUMBLING DOWN TUMBLING DOWN TUMBLING DO~OWN!"

2) Kate Bush - "This Woman's Work" - The Sensual World


It's a source of pride for me that one of the most influential female musicians of modern times (if not the most) comes from my hometown of Bexley. Despite all the legions of clones and imitators in her wake, Kate Bush still stands without compare, her crown still untouched. As ostentatious and "artsy" as her work can be, like Peter Gabriel, her music never comes across as pretentious because a) she commits to it entirely, and b) she's really, really damn good at it.

The Sensual World saw Bush continue to explore her artistic palette, what with songs about unrequited love,  Molly Bloom from Ulysses, and going on a date with a man who turns out to be Hitler. There's nothing like side 2 of Hounds of Love, but it's a solid album regardless, and comes with this rather beautiful track about childbirth. Featured in the John Hughes film She's Having a Baby (not one of Hughes' finest moments, admittedly), the song is unusual since, despite the female vocalist, it's from the point of view of the film's male lead, played by Kevin Bacon, as he waits for his child to be born and hopes his wife will be alright. Bush brings it home with an octave-spanning vocal that never feels forced or mannered. Sublime.

3) Yoko Shimomura - "Scherzo di notte" - Kingdom Hearts Original Soundtrack


Say what you will about the Kingdom Hearts series, like how it's stopped really being about Disney properties and how the newer games have appalling storytelling; the music has always been top-notch, and this is one of my favourite tracks. Having spent most of my childhood trying in vain to complete the Hollow Bastion level, the soundtrack is now ingrained firmly into my brain, especially the battle theme "Scherzo di Notte" (Italian for "Joke of the Night"). An elegant rousing melody with a dramatic string section and piano coming in at just the right time.

4) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds & Kylie Minogue - "Where the Wild Roses Grow" - Murder Ballads


This one's kinda pushing it since Nick Cave plays just as big a part in this as Minogue, being one of the narrators, but the focus is always on the woman, the tragic Eliza Day, so it gets in. The UK has Kylie as something of a patron pop goddess, so it came to a surprise when I learnt how adored she is overseas, particularly the States where - as a lesser-known pop star - she has the same amount of indie cred as European artists like Robyn and Annie.

Between her cameo in Leos Carax's bizarrely beautiful love letter to cinema Holy Motors and this song, Minogue has earned that cred. The song's parent album, Murder Ballads, is full of songs old and new about spilling someone else's blood, and like Komm, süsser Tod, the dissonance between its lovely cinematic musical backing and its dark haunting lyrics makes it all the more disturbing. A song about a mad young man beating his lover's head in with a rock to keep her forever beautiful doesn't deserve to sound so beautiful, and it isn't helped by how Minogue sounds so innocent and naïve here.

5) Hikaru Utada - "Passion" - Ultra Blue


More Kingdom Hearts, this one being the theme song for the seco technically third game if you include Chain of Memories. Japanese-American superstar Hikaru Utada recorded English versions of her songs for the international releases, and both "Simple & Clean" and "Sanctuary" are good songs, but they're trumped somewhat by the original Japanese.

Recently I've developed a taste for electro-pop, but I liked "Passion"/"Sanctuary" ever since I first booted up Kingdom Hearts II many moons ago, with Utada's ethereal vocals about moving on despite still clinging to the past complementing the militaristic drums and mournful strains of electric guitar. Maybe we can consider this Year Zero for "Jack's Sudden Weird Liking of Synth Pop". Both versions are very atmospheric: it opens with breathy backing vocals and spacy synths, then the guitar kicks in and it explodes into life, the near-constant presence of percussion adding weight and gravity to a track awash with airy synthesizer and pulsing guitar chords. The use of reversed English in the chorus and the bridge (with "Sanctuary" using it a wee bit more) is a delightfully weird touch and only adds to the idea that we're somewhere completely alien, yet beautiful.

What edges "Passion" out as the victor over "Sanctuary" for me is Utada serving as her own choir in the choruses through multi-tracked vocals; it just adds a little something extra.

6) Kate Bush - "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)" - Hounds of Love


More Kate Bush? Aren't you guys lucky?

Hounds of Love came out in 1985 when Bush was being a better David Bowie than the actual Bowie, who was out recording mediocre tripe like Tonight, and it leads with its best foot forward in "Running Up That Hill", a wonderfully atmospheric track with haunting synthesizers, a driving beat, and another typically strong Bush vocal about trying to further connect with a significant other. The couple are so scared of hurting the other during intimacy, the woman thinks about making the titular deal with God to swap their roles, so they can better understand each other - an inspired idea. A lot of Hounds of Love is inspired by Low, what with its attempts at crafting alien atmospheres and a second side of instrumentals, but as much as I love Low, it never had something as great as "Running Up That Hill".

7) Kate Bush - "Wuthering Heights (New Vocal)" - The Whole Story

This song is awesome, and I will hear no word against it. This is also the best version.

8) Arcade Fire - "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" - The Suburbs



One of those wonderful Arcade Fire tracks where Régine Chassagne takes lead vocal, "Sprawl II" is possibly the finest track on what is already a pretty damn fine album about trying to escape the stagnation of suburbia. The arrangement is wonderfully baroque, with burbling synths pushing it forward and I'm suddenly aware this is just one of many tracks in this post that includes mentions of synthesizers. In Arcade Fire's defense, they rarely use them. There's something retro about the track, from the odd disco feel of the music to Chassagne's Debbie Harry-esque performance; it's a time bubble of the past generation, where disco and New Wave were king.

Every time I listen to this, I'm amazed at how good Régine is. She starts the song singing timidly about her small-minded parents/neighbours/asshole high school classmates ("They heard me singing and they told me to stop/"Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock"), but as it goes on, she becomes full of energy and fire, laughing at them for being so stuck in the past, repeating the opening line with fresh defiance. For a while, I didn't get the hype behind Arcade Fire; then I heard this, and it all clicked.

9) Anthony Hamilton & Elayna Boynton - "Freedom" - Django Unchained



I love Django Unchained. I really do.

The soundtrack is one of many reasons, chiefly because a Tarantino film soundtrack is going to be 24-karat gold quality, both with his choice of existing film music and the original songs. "Freedom", a duet by Anthony Hamilton and Elayna Boynton, is one of the latter, and boy is it a beauty. It sounds like a 60s folk-soul ballad without feeling too much like a throwback, and both singers give powerhouse performances. In light of today, I'm going to single out Boynton, whose warm smoky voice sounds tired yet hopeful, but Hamilton's ace as well. If you don't have the Django Unchained soundtrack, or at the very least don't have this song, there's something wrong with you.

10) Metric - "Breathing Underwater" - Synthetica


And rounding off this post is yet another synth-pop song with a female lead vocalist! Gosh, my playlist sure has a lot of variety, right?

"Breathing Underwater" almost feels full to burst at times, opening with what sounds like a video game console booting off and bombarding the listener with synthesizers, keyboards, guitars, and probably a little bit of the kitchen sink too. It almost approaches stadium rock, the kind of genre U2 have been successfully cultivating for years (and often snidely referred to as "corporate rock") that relies on a big arena to get the most out of. Having not seen Metric live, I can't comment on its effectiveness, but this is the best kind of stadium rock, in the same vein as "With or Without You"; it's bursting with life.

Phonomancy Mixtape 1

Somehow, in the past year, I've become a massive music geek. In retrospect, this isn't too much of a leap forward; ever since I got my first iPod, I've always had a pair of headphones on me, and now the world without music seems so drab and dull. Now, I'm actively seeking out new bands and acts, and even went to my first gig on Wednesday (Chvrches at the ICA, and they were uh-mazing).

The result is an iPod that has, at the time of writing, 1694 songs. This translates to a couple of days worth of music, which is more than I can probably get through, like a smorgasbord the length of Oxford Street; sounds great, but there's a good chance you'll collapse before the end. Out of these 1694, I've gathered a playlist of 500 songs, constantly changing and very, very eclectic. Genres on here range from grandiose cinema soundtracks to slick electro-pop, from hip-hop dripping in braggadocio to rock of all stripes. As a writing exercise, I'll post ten songs from here every week on Friday - what the song is, why I like it, and why it's worthy of your time. Hope you enjoy.

Phonomancy Mixtape #1

1) Scott Walker - "Mathilde" - Scott

Oh, we're off to a good start. My last Phonomancy post was me extolling the virtues of dear Mr Walker, and as starting points go, you can't go wrong with the first track from his first solo album, an English-language cover of Jacques Brel's "Mathilde". What's so extraordinary about this is that Scott had just come out from a teen idol band whose repertoire mostly consisted of covers of lovelorn ballads given sumptuous Spector-esque orchestration. Then they disband, and the most beloved of them releases an album full of gloomy ballads about death, prostitution, the goings-on in a shared house, and - leading the charge - a grand charging number about a man in a sadomasochistic romance, who fears the titular Mathilde and yet, in a repeat of the first verse, embraces her, eagerly telling his mother "Your baby boy's gone back to Hell!" Hard to see any of the current wave of teenyboppers pulling that off.

The original French version is ace as well, but that's because Jacques Brel was a god and could do whatever he liked. The arrangement there is mostly piano-led with a horn section adding bite, but the arrangement by Wally Stott (later Angela Morley) opens with a timpani roll, segues into a triumphant brass section, and later adds Hitchcockian strings as Scott whimpers "My hands, they start to shake again/When you remember all the pain", his mental shell peeling away. Stott's arrangement work would always come closer to truly replicating the Wall of Sound better than the Walker Brothers' albums, which still did a sterling job considering they were comprised of British session musicians.

Scott believed his solo album would flop; John's effort, If You Go Away, had disappeared without a trace, and the doomy young Mr Walker always had the least desire to be a pop star. Somehow, a sombre baroque pop album by a troubled musician ended up being what the public wanted.

2) Japandroids - "Fire's Highway" - Celebration Rock



Canada seem to keep producing good alt-rock bands - Arcade Fire, Tegan and Sara, Metric, all of these have discographies worth your time. It's a bit early for me to say if Japandroids can join that Elite Indie Corps, given they have two albums and I've only just started listening to them, but they're definitely on the shortlist.

Really, if you name your album something like Celebration Rock, it needs to do two things: it needs to be about having a good time; and it needs to rock. And Japandroids succeed admirably on that count, not just on this song but the whole album, which opens and closes with the sounds of fireworks in the sky. This isn't just about a good night out, it's about every good night out. The guitarwork is so relentlessly energetic, you can't help but start dancing like a dork to it. The percussion keeps it surging forward. The lyrics are a call-to-arms to fuck everything else and just enjoy the moment, about letting it overtake you. It's elemental - the narrator's blown away by gale force winds, and finds salvation in a girl with "a soul of fire and eyes of flame that overwhelm her tender frame".

No, this isn't the deepest thing in the world, the lyrics are ridiculous, and an album about one's right to party does eventually get tiring. But goddamn it, this is fun.

3) London Music Works - "Requiem for a Tower" - Requiem for a Tower | Dream


The Music to Every Modern Film Trailer Ever™. The original version is "Lux Aeterna", composed by Clint Mansell for Darren Arofonsky's Requiem for a Dream, better known as Super-Smile-Happy-Fun-Time to those with a bitter sense of humour. I'll admit, that version will always be the victor: the Kronos Quartet give it the proper sense of discomfort, tragedy and of falling into a pit of despair that the film needs while still sounding full. The fact it isn't as overplayed as "Requiem" probably helps as well.

Still, this isn't to be sniffed at. It takes considerable arrangement to change a sad disturbing composition into a rousing blood-pumper, even if it was to get audiences excited about Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. If "Lux Aeterna" was the mental apocalypse, the ever-consuming black hole of depression, "Requiem", with its full orchestra and choir, is the actual apocalypse; that moment when the hordes of Hell are at your back, and you're the only thing that stands between them and all you hold dear.

Also, essay writing becomes a manner of life and death when you have it playing.

4) Plan B - "ill Manors" - ill Manors


This one had me hooked right from its opening frantic burst of strings, the musical equivalent of a pure shot of adrenaline, and which are sampled from Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. Shostakovich completed it in 1941 as a tribute to the city of Leningrad for holding out against the invading German forces, and is very much a middle finger to a giant faceless power looking to consume and assimilate all it approaches.

So you can see why Ben Drew, alias Plan B, thought it would be useful for a protest song (the strings were already appropriated by Peter Fox's "Alles neu", but I think Drew would have looked up where it came from as well). 2012 was a golden year for him - having gotten the mainstream's attention with his blue-eyed soul/R'n'B crooner concept album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, Drew switched gears back for ill Manors, the best-selling soundtrack to the film of the same name, which he also wrote and directed. An intelligent, perceptive young man, Drew wrote the title track in response to the 2011 London riots, viciously laying into Britain's failure to truly provide for its disenfranchised youth. He weaponises the idea of the chav, the estate kid, sneeringly telling the listener everything they read in the Daily Mail is true "so stay where you're safest/there's no need to step foot out the 'burbs", and for every chav to "be the joker/play the fool". Middle England doesn't care about you, so you might as well live up to the hype, right?

As a middle-class kid from a Kent suburb, I'm definitely not the target audience, but listening to this, I can't help but feel pumped.

5) David Bowie - "I'm Afraid of Americans (NIN V.1 Mix)" - Earthling



It was only a matter of time before Bowie showed up on here. The 90s are largely a forgotten period for the Dame, but then to the public, any time past 1983 probably counts as a lost period. People still remember the Let's Dance album, but have you ever heard "Blue Jean" on the radio? Following the collapse of Tin Machine, where he recharged his creative batteries and make us all suffer for it, Bowie began stretching his wings and adding new elements from the world of music, particularly electronica and techno, into his work, to mixed results. Earthling is one such offering, and is often thought of as Bowie's drum n' bass album even though not many of the tracks take after it.

"I'm Afraid of Americans" is a good example. Composed by Bowie and Brian Eno, and originally intended for his rock-opera album Outside, the original track is an aggressive slice of industrial rock full of buzzsaw guitars, synth-strings and white noise. This is a remix by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and where the original frequently goes off the rails, this is more like controlled, tightly controlled insanity; the bassline and synthesiser dominate, the chorus changes in intensity as the song progresses until all hell breaks loose towards the end and the drum machines come in DRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRR, before they all fall away to a restrained bass and Bowie numbly going "God is an American".

Even if you don't like Nine Inch Nails, this remix should leave you with no doubt that Reznor is a fantastic composer.

6) Björk - "Army of Me" - Post


One of the newer additions to the playlist. Björk is someone I've been meaning to get into, considering she's basically Kate Bush turned up to eleven, and "Army of Me" seems a good place to start. For someone who has a reputation as being away with the fairies, this track has a surprising amount of steel, opening with feedback and seguing into one hell of an industrial bassline, complemented by her deadpan crooning. It sounds like an outtake from the Blade Runner soundtrack, and it's icily cool.

7) Bon Iver - "Come Talk to Me" - Flume/Come Talk to Me


Peter Gabriel released Scratch My Back in 2010, an album where he covered various artists with no instrumentation other than an orchestra. It was a diverse range - Elbow, Paul Simon, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Lou Reed, and Bon Iver. Scratch My Back was planned to have a sister album, I'll Scratch Yours, where all the artists he covered would respond with a Peter Gabriel cover, but with some of the acts bowing out, the project dissolved into a series of one-off singles containing both covers.

In this case, Gabriel's cover of "Flume" was matched with Bon Iver's cover of "Come Talk to Me", a song about growing emotional distance set in an esoteric...nightmare-scape? References to "shadowed milk" and deserts transforming into jackals mean your guess is good as mine. In true Gabriel tradition, this becomes strangely beautiful with the right arrangement, and Bon Iver's suits that, being a lovely mix of banjos, synthesised chords, acoustic guitars, and voiceless chants. If anything, it makes the bizarre setting more mystical; it could be a hallucination from a desert in an Alejandro Jodorowsky film.

8) Yasushi Ishii - "A World Without Logos" - Hellsing Original Soundtrack - RAID


This may sound like English on the track, but it's basically just Japanese musicians scat-singing anything that might vaguely be called Anglophonic. The original Hellsing anime was not particularly strong, with a subpar horror script married to ugly limited animation, but soundwise? It was fucking ace. An English dub with actual British voice actors for a show set in London, and Crispin Freeman's delightful turn as everyone's favourite mass-murdering vampire assassin Alucard? What's not to love?

If nothing else, the makers were going for "cool", and there's not much cooler than the blues. A nifty Barrelhouse piano riff anchors the song, the ghostly wails after the first chorus are a nice touch, and then you have what sounds like a haunted organ breakdown followed by whistling synth chords. In short? This is awesome.

9) Scott Walker - "Farmer in the City" - Tilt

And here we are, back to Walker. Or rather, moving forward to latter-day Walker. Having outgrown the rich baroque instrumentation after years and years of doing contractually obligated albums that nobody bought, Scott moved to the sound of Bowie and Eno circa "Heroes" for a track on the last Walker Brothers album, which marked his beginnings as a modernist composer. Yet the ghost of 60's Scott still clings - the sound is as full as ever, but it's not a ray of golden light; it's funereal, stark, sorrowful.

As is par for the course with Walker, the lyrics are abstract stuff that feels like what would have happened if T. S. Eliot turned to songwriting: if you can figure out the meaning of "Can't go by a man/with brain grass/go by his long/long eye gas", you stand to win a major prize! "Farmer in the City" is loosely inspired by a poem by Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini for his protégé and lover Ninetto Davoli - the song's subtitled "Remembering Pasolini", the song's narrator drifts from Pasolini ("Hey Ninetto, remember that dream?/We talked about it/So many times") to Davoli ("Paolo, take me with you!"), and the chant of "Do I hear 21?", combined with the rest of the lyrics, suggest someone who was drafted into the army and then left. He's a country boy in the big city, but only darkness and torment await him, so he has to flee, being careful not to run into the wrong man.

The strings are hauntingly beautiful throughout, whether they rise and fall through the main body (that "dah-DAH, dah-DAH, DAH-dah, dah-DAH" motif), or when they reach a crescendo as Scott screams how he pleads Pasolini to come back for him. The song rests on the Sinfonia of London's playing, no mean feat considering it's just a few chords repeated over and over, and the result is a work of dark beauty.

10) Queen & David Bowie - "Under Pressure"

Dun-dun-dun-dadadundun. Dun-dun-dun-dadadun-DUN-DUN. God, I love that bassline.

Hearing that and trying to figure out whether it was Queen and Bowie being awesome or Vanilla Ice's bare-faced theft for "Ice Ice Baby" is this generation's Vietnam moment, at least until the gestalt horror that is Jedward mashed the two up and now the whole system's fucked. It feels weird to get defensive about this song because it's essentially a glorified demo. This really shouldn't work when you think about it - it barely changes key, the lyrics are abstract social commenatries about how terrible it is that people live on streets, and a good chunk of it is comprised of scat-singing. It's incomplete. Yet the two acts will this into being so much more than it is by performing these two-bit lyrics with real passion and emotion. The zenith of "Under Pressure" has to be the bridge when Mercury reaches a devastating falsetto, the calls for "love! (love, love, love, love...)" echo into the aether, and Bowie sings with ferocity "insanity laughs/under pressure we're CRACKING!"

From there, it becomes a hymn, Bowie and Mercury shouting "LOVE" at the heart of the world. It's cheesy when put down in words, but it's delivered with such sincerity, especially when they talk about how "love's such an old-fashioned word", that you can't help but be swept up in it. It's big, it's ridiculous - it's everything beautiful about pop music.

Spaghetti Southern (A Django Unchained review)

People have asked me many times, 'Why is Django so successful?' I tell them this: because Django was for the workers. He represents all those guys who've ever said, 'Let me tell ya something. I'm gonna go tomorrow and see my boss and say, "Things are gonna be different from now on..."' - Franco Nero

Released in 1966, Sergio Corbucci's Django is the blood-soaked tale of a lone drifter wandering across the Wild West, dragging a coffin behind him, seeking vengeance in the name of his wife. Often considered one of the most violent films ever made (the title character gets his hands crushed, a man is forced to eat his own severed ear), it found a global cult audience everywhere except the UK, where it was banned for twenty-odd years. Django as a "series" (for want of a better term) has been odd; there's only been one official sequel with lead actor Franco Nero (1987's Django Strikes Again), but characters named Django have appeared in thirty-one films, mostly played by different actors.

So Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's second blaxploitation flick after Jackie Brown in 1997 AND his first stab at making a Spaghetti Western, fits into this weird little canon. And, true to Tarantino form, it might be one of his best yet.

(NOTE: This entry discusses racial slurs in a fair amount of detail, so this may be NSFW.)

Phonomancy Track 1: Scott Walker

In recent months, I've kinda sorta gotten addicted to Phonogram, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's fantastic comic about music and the power it has on our lives. Even if you don't normally read comics, it's very well-written and features lovely artwork; I'd start with The Singles Club, it's a good introduction. In the spirit of this, I'm doing an ongoing series of posts about some of my favourite musicians and acts.

Today, we'll start with one of the most influential, and one of the most enigmatic men in rock music.

It's difficult to talk about Scott Walker without speaking in hushed tones, without treating him as some sort of minor musical god, and shading his history in such a way to make him seem like legend. To be fair, the man has led a very interesting life. A Californian high school drop-out with a taste for European art and culture, this is a man who at one point was the most adored young singer in the United Kingdom, and now unwinds by doing interior decorating. His work nowadays is like the soundtrack to a Kafka story, nightmarish existentialist soundscapes laced with surreal humour, in between producing Pulp records and collaborating with Bat for Lashes. His music has influenced so many, particularly his records from the 1960's, he's like Year Zero for indie music: David Bowie, the Smiths, Neil Hannon, Jarvis Cocker, Goldfrapp, Damon Albarn, Radiohead (to the point "Creep" was informally dubbed "(their) Scott Walker song")

If you're into alternative rock, understand that Walker is probably your favourite musician's favourite musician.

Born Noel Scott Engel in 1943 in Hamilton, Ohio, Walker was nomadic from an early age. His father worked as a geologist, meaning the family moved across America, settling in California. Walker was kicked out of high school and says he spent his time hitchhiking around the States; this was the beatnik era, where hundreds of wide-eyed disciples of Kerouac set about hitting the open road on would-be spiritual journeys. These people are pretty much ten-a-penny nowadays with the rise of the gap year, but in the late 1950s, this was bold exciting stuff. And it was while playing bass guitar on the Sunset Strip that he and his friend John Maus got the call from Gary Leeds to come to "swinging London", a trip that would change everything.

Scott and John had been performing across California for a while now as the Walker Brothers; John was annoyed at people pronouncing his surname as "Moose" and so adopted a stage name. Scott also took the surname "Walker" - both tall, blond and handsome, they could be mistaken for brothers, and there was a nice ring to the name "The Fabulous Walker Brothers". Given that they never played their own instruments, instead using experienced session players - Gary wouldn't even play drums live - the sheen of plastic to the name is fitting. While they were regulars on the Sunset Strip, particularly Whisky-A-Go-Go, they never had any breakout success, but Gary Leeds, the soon-to-be third Walker Brother, had recently come back from a tour in the UK with singer P. J. Proby, and encouraged Scott and John to take a visit to the swinging scene. They ended up signed to Phillips Records by John Franz - and, conveniently, avoiding the draft for Vietnam.

In 1965, London was rapidly becoming the hippest place to be, daddy-o, especially when it came to music. The British Invasion had begun, with The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Who all making waves in the US, psychedelic rock was laying down the roots for the oncoming wave of prog (acts like Pink Floyd and Cream), and Radio Caroline was merrily broadcasting all kinds of rock music the BBC wouldn't play from its two stubborn ships in Felixstowe and Harwich.

It was the time to be young and gay and merry, but the Walker Brothers offered an immediate contrast. For one, rather than British musicians conquering the Colonies, they were three young handsome American gentlemen coming over to grace the Sceptred Isle, elegantly dressed and effortlessly cool, compared to the Stones' rugged sneering "don't give a hoot" attitude and the Beatles' cheeky fresh-faced teenybopper reputation. They sang of doomed romance and loneliness from songsmiths like Bacharach, Gaye and Newman, with a rich full Wall of Sound-esque comprised of big sweeping orchestras amongst tight rhythm guitars; a sense of melancholy hung about their work, one that resonated with a Britain that still had scars from the war.

More than anything else, though, they had Scott's voice. Back on the Strip, he'd just been the bass player while John was lead vocalist, and an early Walker Brothers cut, "Pretty Girls Everywhere", featured him as such, but failed to go anywhere. For the song "Love Her", a deeper voice was required, and it was this rather than "Pretty Girls" that got radio attention. Since then, Scott had become the de facto face of the group. And oh, what a voice, dear reader. Just so you know I'm not waxing romantic, listen to one of their best songs, a cover of Frankie Valli's "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore):

Those of you who watch The Walking Dead may recognise this from one of the first trailers. It's a cracking song in its own right, and Scott's voice is one of the main selling points, a smooth deep baritone that pleads with his sweetheart to shed loneliness and let him in, or else the celestial bodies themselves will cease to be. It's a sentiment so overwhelmingly romantic it sounds downright hysterical when put in text divorced from the music, but then everything about this is big and grand and clawing its way towards Heaven.

At one point, the Walker Brothers were the biggest thing in Britain. Their official fan club had more members than The Beatles' did, although this is not to say they had more fans altogether than the Fab Four. They were massive, is me point, and their concerts would last maybe one or two minutes before screaming fans would rush the stage. This didn't sit easy with the shy introverted Scott, who never got used to the wild attention and was always more interested in music. The resulting tensions, creative differences (for there are always creative differences, it would seem) and a reported suicide attempt by Scott led to the group splitting up, with Scott pursuing a solo career.

The first hint of Scott's ambitions as a musician lay in the B-side to the single "Deadlier than the Male", a baroque little number called "Archangel". Six months before "Whiter Shade of Pale", the Gothic organ refrain was recorded at the Leicester Square Odeon, using the cinema's in-house pipe organ. Inspired by Bach and filled just as much with images of kitchen-sink drama as it was the supernatural, the single failed to get further than the Top 30, and so "Archangel", with its Gothic depiction of post-war London, sadly went unnoticed.

The self-described "classic bore at the party", Scott's interests were cultural and intellectual, particularly classical music and European cinema, and so he got a kick out of seeing characters from Ealing comedies inhabiting the streets of London. It was while drinking at the London Playboy Club that he was introduced, by a girl who took him back to her place, to Jacques Brel, the Flemish chanteur who Scott declared to be "the most significant singer-songwriter in the world". A painfully shy man whose live performances always resulted in him sweating more than Lee Evans in a walk-in oven, and who sang of gonorrhea, sadomasochism, Amsterdam, sons lost in war and the cowardice of men, Scott identified with Brel instantly, and it was through English covers of his work that he began to strike out as the thinking man's pop idol. Breaking free of the teen idol image is always a tricky one, but I can't imagine a more violent attempt to burst out of that cocoon than by singing songs about "authentic queers and phony virgins":

"Jackie" remains one of my favourite Scott songs. Not because it features my name or anything, that's coincidence (and it's pronounced "Jacques-y" in the song anyway). It's how brash and bold and outright rude it is, how punk it is before "punk" even became a word (Julian Cope, of post-punk band The Teardrop Explodes, is a passionate Walker fan), yet it's set to such a storming, uplifting orchestral backing. Thank Angela Morley, then Wally Stott, for the fantastic arrangements, which she would provide for Scott's four solo albums. Any singer who claims influence from Brel, they were introduced through Scott; Brel sang as though he were terrified of the hurricane he was unleashing, whereas Scott sang with style and panache, like Apollo at the Royal Albert Hall.

The albums soon became dominated with his own compositions, and he began to emerge as a singer-songwriter more and more with every release. The common assumption is that there are two iterations of Walker: the intellectual crooner, like Sinatra for the Left Bank; and the modernist composer who came along out of nowhere. The division isn't quite that simple as people believe; you had the influence of Brel on tracks like "The Girls from the Streets" and "Montague Terrace (In Blue)", but what seems to pop up more often is the vivid, dreamlike fantastical imagery that would dominate his modern work. I'm going to try and let them speak for themselves,  so listen to the posted tracks, but I'll also include some choice excerpts.

While doing Poetry last semester, I looked to Scott's lyrics an awful lot, particularly for Romantic-era poetry. I love the way he gives abstract images and concepts weight and sensation - "thoughts like shattered stone", "scent of secrets", "fist filled with illusions", and a salesman who "smells like miracles" (from "Rosemary").

Also from Scott 3, we had "It's Raining Today", and people wondering how modern Walker came about need listen no further than the first couple of seconds and its unearthly string section - not quite discordant but not really musical either, it hangs over the record and sets the tone so well.

His first few solo albums were top sellers, but that run of good fortune came to an end with Scott 4, which failed to chart and was soon deleted, with Walker slowly fading from the limelight in the process. There are many theories as to why 4 failed to chart while Scotts 1-3 did; the most common is it being released under the name "Noel Scott Engel", while Scott attributes it to most of the songs being written in 3/4. Personally, I think people were just getting tired of this particular brand of chamber pop dripping in syrupy orchestrations. Musical tastes were changing: King Crimson, Deep Purple and Procol Harum were leading the charge of the Progressive Rock Brigade; the Stones had their legendary Hyde Park concert in tribute to Brian Jones; and so there was no real want or need for his brand of velvety ballads.

A shame, as some of his finest work is on Scott 4:

Now entering a period of recording covers of other people's songs to earn a living, Scott had - culturally speaking at least - fallen by the wayside. 1975 marked a Walker Brothers reunion, more out of desperation if anything; their brand of MOR charm appealed to their new demographics of housewives and mothers, and they achieved some limited success, including a UK Top Ten single with a pretty nice cover of Tom Rush's "No Regrets".

And then Nite Flights happened.

With their record label about to collapse and nobody really caring one way or the other what happened to them next, Scott, John and Gary decided to go all out on their final release, the experimental rock album Nite Flights. The album is more like a set of three solo LPs bundled together than a coherent album; Scott writes four tracks, Gary follows it up with two of his own, and John closes it out with another four. Scott's compositions received the most attention: they're darker, punchier, more foreboding, and full to the seams with abstract dreamlike images and creations made flesh, indebted to David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy with Brian Eno. I still have no idea what the "sunfighters locked in right angle rooms" are, neither do I know what a "nite flight" could possibly be, but damnit, it's arresting and striking. The masterpiece has to be "The Electrician", an eerie menacing ode to sadism and torture that sees Scott mutilate his baritone into something jarring and angular, and may be familiar to viewers of Bronson:

I still haven't heard anything quite like this in recent memory.

After Nite Flights, Scott disappeared. Well, he might as well have, there's little to no information available about what he got up to in the time between then and his 1984 album Climate of Hunter, which was somehow even more ambient, spaced-out and disjointed than any of his four tracks on Nite Flights. A cult following had sprung up around this time, spearheaded by Julian Cope re-releasing twelve of Scott's original songs as an LP called Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker. Climate took a while to release; a notoriously slow writer and composer, Scott hired a cottage in the New Forest and spent his time trying to capture the resulting isolation in music form. It's a very odd, polarising album, with "Sleepwalking Woman" and its gentle orchestra being the closest to a "traditional" Walker piece.

This is about as "pop" as Scott would get after a while, working with contemporary musicians like Billy Ocean and Evan Parker and bearing some resemblance to New Wave and post-punk. But even as poppy as these songs sound, they're still pretty strange, with a kind of spaciness about them that would seem out-of-place anywhere but here. Half the tracks didn't even get names. Reportedly the lowest selling album in Virgin Records' catalogue, time will no doubt be kinder to it.

It would be another eleven years before the release of Tilt, an avant-garde nightmare of an album filled with bleak modernist imagery and a synthesis of classical, industrial and electronica. If Climate of Hunter was ahead of its time, then Tilt is the kind of pop music that would probably be made around 2105. Scott went through the underworld of his own depression and nightmares and emerged, like Orpheus, bringing dark new treasures with him. I listened to it in full a while ago with some trepidation, as every review of it indicated it was full of doom, doom and new caffeine-free doom. I actually quite liked it, but it isn't something I'd buy and you need to adjust to it; Tilt isn't here to entertain you, it wants you to shut up, sit down, and get lost in the dreamworld.

There's a palpable aura of menace around it; you'll start singling out individual instruments and sounds thinking they sound nice, but there's something...off about them, not quite discordant but not sounding right. Tunes and melodies are stretched to breaking point, as though your enjoyment is being tested, and the bizarre stream-of-consciousness lyrics only add to the unsettling nature: "halo(es) of locust", "Lemon Bloody Cola", "a man with brain grass", and the weird reference to To Have and to Have Not - "Ya know how to whistle put ya lips together and blow". It's like the soundtrack to a Samuel Beckett piece, or a Francis Bacon painting; maybe T.S. Eliot, as there always seems to be a method to his madness. (Plus, American living in London, seems like a natural fit.)

"Farmer in the City" is still an achingly beautiful track, though:

He released another album in 2006 called The Drift, but I can't really comment on that one. I had enough trouble listening to Tilt, and The Drift is, if anything, much more uncomfortable. Just listening to a couple of tracks is draining, so I'll leave that task to stronger bloggers than I. His newest album, 2012's Bish Bosch, is a bit easier, and the absurdist humour shines through more. One track, "SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter)", has the narrator listing off some simple but effective one-liners at random intervals, which are welcome relief from the tight tension in-between - the song is mostly acapella, and no that doesn't make things easier. I'll admit to getting a grim chuckle from the final track, "The Day the 'Conducator' Died (An Xmas Song)", with the execution of Ceaușescu followed by the opening bars of "Jingle Bells". Because nothing spells Christmas quite like a dictator and his wife meeting death by firing squad!

I'll freely admit, his 60s stuff is more my bag. Tilt and The Drift require a certain mindset to listen to/appreciate, and even though I enjoyed the former more than I expected, it's not an easy album at all. I do have to respect a man who can remain so enigmatic even in modern day, where I can look up every cough I've made on Google PhlegmWatch, and who can afford to do his own thing musically, even if it's not my thing.

But the 60s albums, Scotts 1-4, they feel timeless. I don't know anybody else who can sing about heartbreak quite so beautifully and yet not feel self-indulgent. Bands like The Cure cry and scream out their frustrations and worries to whoever and invite you to have a good old wallow in darkness. I never get that with Scott Walker. It's like stepping into a bath, or a baptismal font; you just let everything negative and horrible wash away into the aether, chased out by angelic strings and heroic trumpets. Scott invites you to get lost in his dreams, worlds where boys fly away on balloons, where you can shake hands with Charles de Gaulle, reminisce about train window girls, and follow two young soldiers limping their way back home. His is a voice that still manages to sound hauntingly beautiful no matter how sharp and tortured he makes it in Tilt or Bish Bosch.

It's the voice of an archangel - magnificent yet terrible.

My Clique Should Be Cancelled

So there I am, having a nice day in Winchester with Nana Connell, and I check Twitter and what do I find? Tony Harris, comic book artist of Starman and Ex Machina fame, has caused a furore on the Internet for this baffingly misogynistic post about female cosplayers:

I'm not replicating the full text, because both the content and the atrocious grammar make my head hurt, but you get the idea, right? Harris has appointed himself Guardian of the Nerds, and those harlots shan't get past him to poison the well. According to royal decree by His Harrisness, the vast majority of female cosplayers are all posers and whores who love getting to walk around convention halls half-naked and pray upon the weak frightened little virginal nerd, soaking up adulation like Babylonian storm-witches. But they're also unattractive, as they only have "Big Boobies", not "GREAT Boobies", so truly they are the deadliest kind of female, sirens to geeky sailors.

You know, shit like this is why it's so difficult being a part of nerd culture sometimes. The roots of nerddom stretch back to the high school rejects - the sci-fi fans, the horror aficionados, the computer whizzes, basically everyone who probably got stuffed in lockers, had their lunch money stolen and never went to prom. Rejection was the seed from which nerd culture sprung from. Nobody liked you in high school? Fear not, there was a whole sub-society you could go to, one that would accept you whoever you were.

Except that's not quite true, is it? From my experience, nerd culture has proven just as insular and unwelcoming as any high school jock or cheerleader; probably more so, actually, because at my old school, I got along with the "popular" crowd pretty well. (It's worth noting the speech marks as they never actually saw themselves as the "popular" crowd.) I've lost count of the amount of times I've been told my opinion is worthless because I haven't watched 20+ episodes of a show beforehand, or I wasn't familiar with the collected filmography of Guy Maddin or whoever. I'm aware that people don't often act on the Internet how they do in real life, and it may be some kind of defence mechanism like a puffer fish inflating its body, but it doesn't help our reputation as a bunch of self-indulgent misanthropic pack of jackals.

John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory from Penny Arcade. Pay close attention, class.

To be fair to Harris, and to the scores of followers trying to keep the "barbarians" at the gate, I get where they're coming from. Nerddom is very much their little niche, and they don't want to see it dissolved away to nothing. That's a sentiment I share; I'm really annoyed by The Big Bang Theory and how it's considered something freaks and geeks. Here's the thing, though - the nerds have won. San Diego Comic-Con has become a major event the world pays attention to. David Tennant's tenure as the Doctor made geeks acceptable, even fashionable. People buy DVD boxsets and eagerly discuss Game of Thrones in public. Good Lord, a movie about the Avengers is one of the highest grossing films of all time! These are glorious days!

And you know what? As a culture of rejects, freaks and losers, we have no right to behave like we're still in high school, and excluding people from entering the clubhouse. Nerddom is not some sort of ivory tower we need to keep the proles out of - a guy from my school, a rugby player no less, is getting into mainstream comics because he loves The Dark Knight. This is a good thing. Christ, sports fans are pretty much the biggest examples of nerds there are. This is no longer exclusively our domain, and that's okay. We are not misers, jealously hoarding our secrets. If someone wants to dress up as a superhero and stomp about the convention centre, why not? Cosplay is just one gateway to geekery, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone that for the world. So is The Big Bang Theory, The Avengers, Game of Thrones, whatever it is you're interested in, please come in and don't be shy.

If you're passionate about fiction, about dressing up like fiction, discussing it and proud of it, then you're my brother and my friend, and I love you. Wave that geek banner high.

Veni Vidi Vici (A V for Vendetta review)

Artist unknown, found at PosterGeek.

Part of my November 5th tradition is to re-read V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's seminal work on the clash between totalitarianism and anarchy. Others have their bonfires and fireworks, and those are lovely sights, but I don't have much in the way of winter clothing at the time of writing, so give me a warm room to curl up in and read the delightful tale of a masked psychopath declaring war on Britain. This marked the start of Moore's dense writing style, with plots and themes and allusions and wheels within wheels. What makes it so definitive is how human it is. The politics and intricate narrative are a backdrop to a smaller story. It has a sprawling cast of characters, but everyone involved in V's plots has an arc: Evey Hammond, Adam Susan, harangued police inspector Eric Finch, the widowed Rose Almond. Just from a storytelling perspective, it's one of Moore's definitive works.

The comic's profile has been significantly raised, for better or worse, by the 2006 film, directed by James McTeigue and written by the Wachowskis (of The Matrix and Speed Racer fame), and since then, the main character has become the face of the protester, and the unofficial Bible of the Occupy movement. Unlike some fans of the comic, I really like the V for Vendetta film, and I think it's a decent adaptation. That said, however, there are problems I'd like to address.

For the uninitiated, the film takes place in the near future in a dystopian vision of London that's about one-part Orwell to two-parts Nazi Germany. Security cameras are everywhere, the streets are prowled by the government's secret police, and the vox populi is forced to swallow the jingoistic bullshit of Lewis Prothero (Roger Allam), the Daily Mail-tastic "Voice of London". Into this picture comes V (Hugo Weaving/James Purefoy in some shots), a masked terrorist who wears the cloak, stovepipe hat and face of Guy Fawkes, and blows up the Old Bailey on November 5th, a day the country forgot. He declares war on the government, and announces he will attack the Houses of Parliament one year from now; in the midst of this, he rescues and recruits Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), a young woman who starts to wonder whether her masked saviour is vindicator or villain...

In recent years, V for Vendetta has become the number one favourite film for anarchists and libertarians, and V the poster child for the hacktivist organisation Anonymous - how many protesters have you seen wearing that Guy Fawkes mask on top of ordinary clothes? This is as much a reincarnation of Guy Fawkes as a symbol of freedom from repression, and here's the first problem I have with the film. In the comic, Moore and Lloyd devised the story as a battle between the two diametrically-opposing forces of anarchy and fascism, and made clear there was no right side to choose - V was depicted as being insane and ruthless, almost psychopathic, torturing his apprentice for weeks with the intent of making her his successor ("because I love you, and because I want to set you free" is never a good excuse, fellas), and not caring one jot for any innocent lives that got in the way. He pretended to have emotions but he was as hollow as the Guy's painted grin - broken by the government's experiments until he was both more and less than human.

The leader of the Norsefire party, Adam Susan (this is a question I wondered about in both the comic and the film - what sane person would elect a party calling themselves "Norsefire"? At best it conjures up image of men in their late-thirties casting +2 Magic at each other. I also wonder how they managed to get voted in since their election rallies are so obviously Nazi-themed it's not even funny), was also shown to have a sympathetic, more pitiful side - he installed a fascist government because he honestly believed that was the best for his people, even denying himself the usual comforts they themselves would be denied, and at the end genuinely wants to reconnect with the public.

"Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste."

So the film's decision to cast it as a basic good vs. evil story rings a bit false. It's all simplified, no real moral ambiguity to speak of - Adam Susan is now renamed Adam Sutler after the most direct of war profiteers (former Winston Smith John Hurt now playing Big Brother), and is a tyrannical despot with Hitler's hairdo, barking orders from behind a screen  and importing comforts by train at the expense of the public. The more direct antagonist is Peter Creedy (Tim Pigott-Smith), head of the secret police and "an ice-cold sociopath, for whom the ends justify the means", just to highlight how eeeeevil the government is. Likewise, V is a more romantic ideal of a freedom fighter - cultured, intelligent, excellent swordsman, and made more human (he makes Evey breakfast, he has a mock swordfight with a suit of armour and acts embarrassed when Evey sees him, he appears to be romantically attracted to Evey in an utterly pointless romantic subplot). He more resembles Edmond Dantès from The Count of Monte Cristo, an intentional comparison, having V's favourite film be the 1934 version with Robert Donat. We're given a clear protagonist and antagonist, and not to say Norsefire wasn't harsh in the comics, but that moral ambiguity between the two figureheads of fascism and anarchy has been virtually swept away.

This makes the decision to keep Evey's torture at the hands of V all the more questionable. Don't get me wrong, I actually like that this scene made it intact. It's a real gut-punch viscerally and emotionally, both the punishment Evey goes through, and the sad story of Valerie Page (Imogen Poots). The reveal still hits like a slap to the face, but it rings a bit false. Prior to this, Film!V has not exactly come out smelling of roses, disguising innocent people as himself and using them as decoys, but he's still somewhat honourable and noble. So seeing Film!V do something this monstrous is a contrast to what we've seen before, and raises the question of why Evey continues to associate herself with a man who tortured her physically and psychologically - at least in the comic we had the possibility of V being psychotic and Evey having her will broken, and Evey as a naïve ingénue. Film!Evey is a smart, opinionated young woman essentially having her personality being rewritten by a masked madman.

This also links to the problem of self-professed freedom fighters and anarchists using Guy Fawkes as a symbol of fighting oppression. It's true that Guy Fawkes was the last man to walk into Parliament with honest intentions, but not many people know what those intentions were. Fawkes wasn't trying to overthrow a totalitarian theocracy; on the contrary, he wanted to introduce another one. A devout Catholic who believed that England was under threat from Protestant occupation, Fawkes and twelve others sought to destroy the House of Lords and with it restore Catholic domination of the country. It was David Lloyd who decided on V wearing the Fawkes mask, both for visual impact and for the moral grey-area this created - he and Moore are clever men, and would have known about this. The film? Less so.

The other albatross around the film's neck is the 9/11 parallels. The comic operated under the politically naïve assumption that a near-miss from a nuclear weapon would be enough to drive Britain to the arms of fascists, or at least the far right. Can't you tell this was written during the Thatcher years? It doesn't show a great grasp of politics or the public by the authors' own admission, but it's preferable to this. To elaborate: Inspector Eric Finch (Stephen Rea) is summoned by V, who claims to be a whistleblower under the name William Rookwood (Rookwood being another Fawkes collaborator. You'd think an experienced detective would pick up on this, but whatever). What follows is a massive exposition dump where V helps to outline the real reason behind the St Mary's Disaster - Sutler, then Undersecretary for Justice, and Creedy ordered experimentation on political prisoners, including V, secretly to develop a virus potent enough to kill thousands. They dropped the virus at St Mary's Primary School, whereupon it spread across the country, killing 80,000 people. In order to seize power, Norsefire then blamed this on supposed Muslim terrorists, and those of you who've had to deal with the Truther movement can probably see the metaphor here.

SO HAVE I MENTIONED YET THESE GUYS ARE EVIL BECAUSE THEY TOTES ARE

Ignoring the fact that this is a massive stinking expodump, it's very easy to draw parallels between this and the long-standing conspiracy theory of 9/11 being a false-flag operation, and it sticks in my craw. I get that the Norsefire party are meant to be Nazis by any other name, but seriously? Are they all a bunch of moustache-twirlers who get their jollies by forcing tramps to fight to the death in secret thunderdomes? Yes, Creedy spearheaded the operation, but there's bound to be many people in Norsefire who would raise their hands and go "Um, isn't this a bit...evil?" Humans are fallible; if Norsefire consisted entirely of emotionless robots, maybe I'd believe it, but humans do have morals. Someone would object to this. No, not some"one"; most of the party would probably object to the slaughter of innocents, much less an entire school of children, and they most definitely wouldn't keep shtum about it. It's not like Norsefire could keep it hushed up with their iron fist over the media, this was before they came to power.

A character mentions the Milgram experiment as the ultimate proof that humans are bastards, and that's apparently proof enough that politicians will be on-board with their children being subjected to agonising deaths, disregarding the fact that it can't be applied to everything, including - what started the experiment to begin with - the Holocaust. Professor James Waller, who holds the depressing title of Chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College, points out how Milgram's parameters clash with those running the concentration camps. For example, test subjects were told there would be no permanent damage to the shock victims, while the Holocaust perpetrators knew they were killing people. The subjects didn't know anything about the victims, and weren't motivated by xenophobia. More importantly, the subjects had no clear goals, no aims other than "do the thing", and even then, some of them still objected to what they had to do. Even those who persisted felt stressed or nauseous afterwards, while the architects of the Final Solution were very aware what they were doing, and what they hoped to accomplish, and had years to reflect on what they did, rather than the hour the subjects were permitted. If anything, Milgram proved that humans wouldn't willingly torture a human subject; they'd have to be cajoled into it.

V for Vendetta creates visual and thematic parallels to the Holocaust: mounds of bodies are seen outside the "resettlement camps", the subjects are all minorities and political prisoners, and, well, Norsefire itself. This "people will do whatever authority tells them to do" belief that the film is clearly shooting for is a bunch of Nihilism Lite bullshit I'd expect from the high school notebook of an angry Marilyn Manson fan. For all the many faults of the Matrix sequels, Reloaded at least got the audience to think about how unreliable belief systems can be. Even if everyone involved with the plan had no moral quandaries whatsoever, we're still left with a bunch of cartoon villains right out of fucking Captain Planet. The Wachowskis make a habit of uncomplicated Manichean conflicts in their work, with brave rebels standing up to The System. Speed Racer had its lead fighting against a decades-long system of corporate race fixing. Cloud Atlas had several of these stories: Sonmi~451 in Neo-Seoul, Timothy Cavendish in Aurora House, Adam Ewing and his wife in pre-Civil War America (his father-in-law opposes their decision to become abolitionists, saying "there's an order to things"). The Matrix movies even had it in its most literal form with the System being actual machines trapping humanity in a neverending saga. This has its place in those films, but V for Vendetta is more complicated a source material than that, so the clear-cut moral dichotomy just seems naïve and, worse, reductive.

What Creedy does in his spare time. He also drinks wine made from the blood of puppies. ADORABLE PUPPIES.

Despite my frustrations and these glaring flaws I've raised, don't think that the V for Vendetta film isn't worth your time. It's well-shot, there's clearly a lot of love for the comic there (jingoistic TV show Storm Saxon makes a background appearance), and the set design looks great - all throwbacks to 1950's England with posters for both Prothero's Voice of London program and Gordon Dietrich's (Stephen Fry) vaudeville comedy in that art deco-ish look. Even the font of the slogans and underneath the cameras seems authentic - probably because if you live around London, you've undoubtedly seen these about, on buses, trains, the Underground, and on government adverts. Portman's English accent ranges from South London to South Africa, mostly settling on RP, but she's still sympathetic and likeable as V's erstwhile protegé; and while the villains are evil stereotypes, they're well-acted stereotypes, Hurt giving the right mix of bluster and righteous thunder as Sutler, and Pigott-Smith cutting a sinister figure throughout. Roger Allam in particular should be singled out for how utterly smug and detestable he makes Prothero, despite having little screen time and being depicted mostly as a talking head. I wish Stephen Rea had more to do as Inspector Finch; he's Javert to V's Valjean, who works within a corrupt system to do all he can to help, but take him out of the film and you wouldn't even notice he's there, other than as someone for V to blab out the plot to.

V himself is suitably theatrical, blowing up the Old Bailey to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, quoting Macbeth as he enacts his vendetta, and of course the V speech. On paper, this comes across as pretentious and smug, like the Wachowskis were showing off their vocabulary. Combined with Weaving's charismatic baritone, however, it has its own pleasing rhythm when spoken. The film captures his look so perfectly as to be instantly iconic - a devil in black raiment with a ghoulish porcelain smile and silver daggers at his side, introduced standing in the middle of a stone archway. Director James McTiegue states in the commentary he chose this because it made for a startling introduction, framing him clearly for the viewer, while also throwing him in shadow, indicating he's a darker saviour than Evey accounted for. This trait is fumbled about in the film, but it's a hell of an introduction, and one that has cemented V as something of a modern cultural cornerstone.

(Yes, this is incredibly ostentatious. It is also really really cool.)

The human element, above all, endures. Dietrich, while so completely different to how he was in the comic (a closeted gay television presenter as opposed to a low-time criminal) that it's another case of Stephen Fry playing Stephen Fry, talks about how the government has forced him to hide his true self, and how he has "become the mask". It's quiet, it's understated, but there's weight to his words, and to his conflict, and speaks to the larger theme of becoming subsumed by another identity. To say nothing of how heart-rending Valerie's story is; despite her being virtually unknown until then, her suffering is made clear, and her refusal to surrender her dignity, "the very last inch of me", really does hit as hard as it did in the comic. I am so, so glad this scene made it in.

Above all else, however, I recommend this film on the grounds that it was the first real Alan Moore work to be adapted for the screen with a considerable degree of success. Moore's works are notoriously difficult to film (the author even considering Watchmen, his magnum opus, unfilmable), being very dense and layered in such a way that requires re-reading. His comics are designed to show off what the comic medium can produce that no others can, so to capture the spirit of his work in film is a tremendous feat in and of itself. From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were so far-removed from the source material they might as well have been different films altogether, but V for Vendetta maintains some of Moore's DNA. It's a film that still raises questions in the audience's mind, that forces them to ask: "What price, freedom?" It's the rare kind of action blockbuster that dares to challenge the viewer to think, to ponder, to stimulate new thought; and if nothing else, that's most definitely worth a watch.