Sunday, September 20, 2009

#41- Nightwear

Some people would regard this as a footnote, but we're interested in different stories to most people. In his otherwise forgettable book "The Outer Rim of Bohemia" Joe Grayshot described one night at the edge-of-the-city-centre apartment complex he lived at:

"I was fumbling about on the settee, trying to move the remains of my speedball to flick the channel over. I didn't want to go all John Belushi but my head was fried and I needed to get away from Newsnight Review. Movement was not on the agenda. Bonnie Greer was shouting some spat about mother nature being a hobo in the Garden of Eden, I was trying to respond but she wasn't listening. The TV was -I had to remind myself- a one way device. A method for putting ideas in your head. A platform. I eventually made it to bed.

"There was to be no rock'n'roll in my room that night. Fisticuffs were off the agenda and I wouldn't try to sneak them in under AOB. But upstairs the Silentnight due, Senor Hippo and Ms Bird were going at it hell for imperial leather. They certainly weren't coming up clean."

Well, that kind of nonsensical Gonzo approach to writing certainly had it's fans at one point. Mainly people who thought writing involved vomiting on the nearest page and physically attacking anyone who dares to criticise them. But our concern is that Grayshot had inadvertently spoken about our next band, the next band you have not heard of: Nightwear.

It has to be admitted at this point that Bill MacGregor was not a thin man, nor was his then girlfriend overly large in any direction. Grayshot's snide remark was accurate, if hyperbolic. MacGregor was not one to take offence, especially as he has fashioned a whole career on sleepytime music.

As Nightwear, MacGregor detuned his otherwise well-tuned guitar and strummed gently to himself. The studio made him produce his own records as the engineers kept falling asleep. Perched on the edge of a rocking chair, guitar in one hand and mixing desk in the other, fat squelching out of all remaining crevices on the seat, MacGregor produced the kind of music whales would produce if they knew their "song" sent you to sleep. He had no time for reverse reverb or any tremelo nonsense. No. He favoured open chords on a an acoustic, with whispered lyrics about drinking Horlicks neatly fit into the background. Some say that MacGregor was capable of hypnosis; something he states is not only untrue, but offensive to real hypnotists who not only send people to sleep but also get them to pretend to be cats, think they are themselves aged 8 and stop smoking.

After two albums and a guest appearance on In The Night Garden, MacGregor was approached by a the makers of a branded promethazine. Testing on his music had suggested to them that it released a weak dopamine antagonist into the system, thus causing a lack of awakedness. His music was running them out of business. They told him they would either pay him to develop his music under laboratory conditions or would kill him. Sensing that Big-Pharma could probably get away with murder he decided to take the lab job.

A lab job is not as sexy as it sounds. We'd all like to work in a hair-dryer factory so when asked about the job we could say "Well, it's a blow job." Or indeed work in a household waste sorting site so we could say "It's a rubbish job!". Or indeed be an intern for Sandra Day O'Connor so we could say "It's a day job!". But "it's a lab job!" only works if you also breed large dogs and MacGregor lived in an inner rim apartment where dogs were banned, along with cats, rats, bats and smoking. It never stopped Grayshotbut that's because he's just the type of person who feels that rules don't apply to them. MacGregor, on the other hand, determinedly and studiously tried to experiment with his music and sleep patterns, discovering amongst other things that tube amps are a decent way of producing sleepytime happiness for all around. He also discovered that Barry White is not the thing to think about if you want to go straight to sleep. Conference followed conference and MacGregor had less time for his real passion of recording music that sent people to dreamyland. Eventually the company cracked his magic and he was released to make music once more.

Set free from his pharmaceutical captivity, MacGregor decided that Nightwear should enter an "insomniac phase". MacGregor and his supporters tried to stay up for a whole week in order to get really very tired. This allows them hallucinogenic experiences and also allowed fo rthem to experience the world as someone so permanently close to sleep. The resulting album "Why the heck did I do this to mysef" went straight to number 1 in the "Music for people with problems" chart, pushing OCD favourite Bo Anders Persson to number 2 for the first time in quite some time.

Confident in his legacy, both chemical and muscial, MacGregor now sleeps quitely at home with his short, thin, yellow wife. Joe Grayshot plans to punch different celebrities at book signings until they all give up and go home.

Monday, September 7, 2009

#40 The Great Grandfathers of Invention

We all remember the moment, July 7 2007, 19.42pm. The world watched the ad break of Coronation Street.

A smartly dressed but somewhat dishevelled looking Michael Barrymore came into view. He looked as if to speak, but he stopped himself, descending back into his own thoughts. Rousing his character he turned to the camera and began:

"Viewers, compatriots, [painful sigh] friends. I feel that I have a huge apology to make. I have shamed myself and am only now coming to the realisation for for years I have laboured under a very fundamental mistake. A known mistake. Something I should have admitted to earlier. I am truly sorry.

"For it appears that a hot spot is indeed a good spot. A hot spot can make your life a little bit better. So when you're in town next, do a search, find a hot spot and check the news, send some e-mails, watch Man to Man with Dean Learner. A hot spot is a good spot. A hot spot is. A. Good. Spot. I'm only sorry to have misled my people for so long."

Cut to black and, whilst audible sighs and sobs can still be heard in the background, the logo of TB Open Zone appears.

When the rioting ended and calm returned, many people realised how much modern society had descended into a pure stream of advertisements. Some took to consumerism, but Matthew Willows took to the past. Previously a member of the Velvet Trenchcoat Mafia, Willows decided to leave the world of 2 for 1 subculture and adopt a healthy 3 for 1 subculture instead.

The idea was steamprog. Previous media had made the steampunk sub-subgenre partially encompassing. The steampunk pioneers were interesting in making the mid to late Victorian period alive with the wonders of technology not as boring drawings and schematics but living, revolutionary concepts and machines that belched thick fog, made nasty noises and frequently blew apart. Often these machines and concepts had little grounding in fact or reality. Willows had no time for that.

Willows's aims was to create a band that was interested in boring drawings and schematics. He was interested in the way things worked and how that affected our everyday lives. He was a weird guy. The first songs he wrote focused on the way a cone lock nut is shaped after being tapped to create a helpful torque which is required to keep an engine together under high heat. In three songs he explained the engineering relationship from the point of view of the nut itself, the grease covered engine driver suffering under the pain of exposure to heat and haemorrhoids and the drivers mother, unable to claim assistance under The Poor Law Amendment Act, frittering away her lazy afternoons watching smoke trails on the horizon. The first song started with a small crack in the nut ("I think I'm cracking up, I think I'm going to spin out of control"), the last song ended with the engineer noticing and removing the nut ("ashes to ashes, carbon steel alloy to carbon steel alloy.") . The liner notes make clear that the nut now resides in the National Railway Museum in York, alongside a Beeching-era closure poster and a hip flash with GWR etched into it.

Willows himself compared the three song cycle to the realistic literature experiments of Emile Zola. Being dead, Zola could not comment but his family threatened to sue the pants off anyone caught comparing themselves favourably to their great granddad. Besides, the relatives said, nobody ended up dying in a painful and harrowing way, so it could not be anything like the work of the master himself.

Releasing the three songs as an self-issued EP, Willows had played all the instruments, done all of his own accounting and even acted as a groupie on more than occasion. When the requests for gigs started coming in, Willows decided to pull a band together. Eschewing the tradition of getting band members who can play instruments, Willows decided instead to hire people who looked the part and tried to teach them rudimentary instrumental skills in the weeks leading up the first gigs. To find a bunch of bearded train enthusiasts was not exactly the hard part. An ad in one of their journals of repute was enough to have two hundred fame-hungry, pie hungry, mutton chopped wannabe train drivers banging down Willow's door. The selection process was gruelling. Each contestant had to answer questions from one of the hardest tests known to man. At the end of the heat stages Willows asked the remaining steamers to compete in an eliminator challenge. John Fashanu was taken away for the important hosting duties on Deal or No Deal Nigeria to present and the whole thing was shown on Puff, the new UKTV network for men aged 45-90.

Eventually the band were chosen and Willows had to teach them some instruments. The washboard was easy and Cecil Parkin took to it nice and easy. Jack Skinner was given the harder task of playing Willows's cheap knockoff of Yuri Landman's Moodswinger. Let's just say he hit the instrument on occasion and no-one complained. Harry Lambert, the 'looker' of the group was given the ceremonial role of 'contributing to overall musical direction.' He also promised to cut himself on stage if anyone asked whether he was serious about his art. Nobody did. Whilst on stage he strummed a guitar that was not plugged into an amp and until the fifth gig was still had its cellophane pick guard protector on. Mr Orkindale rounded the line-up by trying to hit some drums. Denied drumsticks by Willows following a painful accident in practise, Orkindale took to slapping the drums and producing snare sounds by gently tapping the skin and side of the drum.

An early Willows-free performance on Later with Jools Holland did nothing to limit their reputation as acolytes and when a washed-up Willows finally decided to leave the band (following Lambert's serial womanising hitting the front of the Daily Record ("Fishwives! lock up your mothers!")) the band decided to carry on without the only person who could, you know, play music. Unsurprisingly, the music they produced was out of tune, out of key, in no particular time signature and the lyrics make increasingly less sense. They are currently supporting Sonic Youth.

Michael Barrymore is currently managing the internet advertising strategy for Mishka.