Speakers Push Air

When I reviewed the Sleazy tribute gig for Narc magazine, I originally wrote a much longer piece which – understandably, at nearly a thousand words – didn’t get used. Bear in mind that it was written as if for Narc,  so it’s in the same sort of style I’d use to write there: nothing too florid, not assuming too much prior information from the casual reader etc. Anyway..

Wishful Thinking: A Tribute To Peter Christopherson – Tyneside Cinema March 17^th
Musick To Play In The Dark with Rob Young – Tyneside Cinema March 17^th
Radio Boredcast – A Tribute To Peter Christopherson – BasicFM March 17^th / 18^th

I should declare an interest here – I’ve long been fascinated by Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and his work with Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Coil, Threshold House Boys Choir and Soi Songs. I even have two tattoos based on Coil artwork. So when I heard that a whole day of the AV Festival’s programming was to be given over to a tribute to Sleazy, I couldn’t have been happier.

The day got underway with a significant chunk of Radio Boredcast – the internet station run by Basic FM and programmed by Vicki Bennett of People Like Us for the duration of the AV festival – being given over to Sleazy and his works. Friends and collaborators introduced often quite rare selections of his own material and music he was influenced by (and in some cases had on  his iPod at the time of his passing). So Leonard Cohen, Thai folk music, Arvo Part and Kelis all got played. It was interesting and exciting radio, and a perfect way to get in the mood for what was to come. NB: the playlists can be found here

Rob Young is a damn fine music critic and writer (his work in The Wire is always engaging and astute and his book about English folk, Electric Eden, is essential). So he was almost the ideal person to present a fairly brief talk about Sleazy’s life and work (perhaps David Keenan would have been even better, given that Young quoted liberally from Keenan’s book England’s Hidden Reverse throughout). In the Tyneside Digital Lounge, Young accompanied his talk with snatches of Sleazy’s music and a series of slides – artwork, press photos and the like. The technology seemed to be beset with glitches occasionally (Sleazy would have approved) but stopped proceedings being too dry and gave things a certain atmosphere. To be honest, although Young’s talk did capture some of the spirit of Sleazy – holy fool, digital mystic, village idiot, part ad exec and part shaman – I expected more analysis, more of Young’s impressions of what Sleazy’s music achieved, rather than an informative but fairly obvious biographical rundown. In a room full of people who probably knew all this stuff, it seemed like a slightly missed opportunity. It was a smart move to finish by playing Coil’s Broccoli in its entirely – a song that initially appears a little silly but actually touches on death, family, the quotidian versus the universal. It was also good to hear that Sleazy’s prolific promo work included Cliff and Van’s Whenever God Shines His Light On Me.

After a 2 hour gap which saw a fair number of Sleazy fans wandering around a particularly bleak rainy city centre (and largely settling into Wagamama), it was time for Wishful Thinking, a tribute to Sleazy in sound and film. Sleazy had actually been due to compose a piece for this AV Festival, to be performed at Durham Cathedral where his father had been Vice Chancellor and where Sleazy had been troubled and transported by the cathedral and its choir. While there’s no clear record of what he had in mind, the first half of the tribute was programmed in the spirit of what he might have come up with.

The performance (which ended with screenings of two Coil-soundtracked Derek Jarman movies and Philippe Garrel’s The Inner Scar) started with Attila Csihar taking the stage, a sombre giant, while a number of percussive sounds – bells, Tibetan singing bowls, chimes – were played from the balcony. Atmospheric and unsettling, they provided an ideal precursor to Csihar’s astonishing vocal performance. Formerly the singer in (in)famous Norwegian death metal band Mayhem and now a regular Sunn O))) collaborator, Csihar not only has a phenomenal, apocalyptic voice, especially effective when multi-tracked, but is also adept at overtone (or throat) singing. The second part of his performance involved the playing of backing tracks which were recorded in Durham Cathedral itself – a ‘silence’ manifesting as muffled voices, bells ringing, doors shutting, a distant telephone. After some time, a series of projected images (essentially the beauty of youth and the inevitably of death and decay) and some further vocals from Csihar drew the piece to a close, but not before a cowled figure covered in lights had appeared at the edges of the venue, moving in suitably spectral fashion. It was the sort of performance you could either mock for its portentous or lose yourself in – I recommend the latter: it was powerful stuff.

It’s strangely pleasing that Chris (Carter) and Cosey (Fanny Tutti) look so unassuming behind their laptops and effects units considering their CV  – ‘wreckers of civilisation’ who tweet about their cat Dexter. The music they performed tonight had a difficult gestation it would take the whole of this review to explain, but what we got was live remixes of tracks from the final, as yet unreleased, Throbbing Gristle album Desertshore – a cover of the Nico album of the same name which was a big influence on Sleazy. Initially things were a little disappointing, the first track a fairly unremarkable electro chug although with some really pummelling beats, the second – with recorded vocals from Blixa Bargeld – more of the same. But the next two – with Cosey adding gorgeous live vocals, cornet and treated slide guitar and an amazing recorded contribution from Anthony Hegarty – were fantastic. The short set concluded with an entirely new track, featuring the processed and overlaid voices of Sleazy’s friends and collaborators repeating the phrase “Meet me on the desert shore” to fairly heartbreaking effect.

 Postscript: It’s the curse of still being out in the sticks that I didn’t see a fraction of the things I wanted that went on during AV12: As Slow As Possible, but even so, in the course of about 10 days I saw or experienced amazing performances from Nurse With Wound, Chris & Cosey, Attila Csihar, Forest Swords, The Caretaker and Pye Corner Audio (all for free, thanks to Narc Magazine). Stuff like this reminds me that Newcastle is a great city and London isn’t necessarily the only place stuff like this happens.