From The Archive by Clive Bell

Jun 27, 2023

Clockwise from top left: pages 50-51 of The Wire 318 featuring Chris Watson; pages 35-36 of The Wire featuring Hariprasad Chaurasia; pages 26-17 of The Wire 214 featuring Cornelius Cardew; pages 20-21 of The Wire 458 featuring More Eaze (left) and Claire Rousay; Stereolab on the cover of The Wire 149; pages 28-29 of The Wire 149 featuring Stereolab; Chris Watson on the cover of The Wire 318.

Contributor Clive Bell selects ten pieces of writing from The Wire’s back pages featuring Michael Nyman, Chris Watson, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Stereolab and more. All selected articles are available to read in The Wire’s digital library with a Wire print or digital subscription

The man who mistook his minimalism for a wet afternoon: Jonathan Coe interviews Michael Nyman, The Wire 70/71 (double issue), New Year 1990

Jonathan Coe, one of Britain's finest novelists (The Rotters’ Club, Bournville) hands in a lively and concise interview with Michael Nyman, who was 46 at the time and busy composing soundtracks for Peter Greenaway films. Nyman reminiscences happily about his days writing music crits for The Spectator magazine, where his thoroughly laissez-faire editor was UK Chancellor-to-be Nigel Lawson. Given a free rein, Nyman was writing about Stockhausen and The Fugs. Then (in 1968) he heard Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning at Wigmore Hall, London, which he found refreshing and ‘minimal’. And so the term minimal music arrived. Peter Maxwell Davies, who suffered in Nyman’s comparison with Cardew, then threatened to beat Nyman up – “I mean seriously.” We also hear how Nyman started composing for “the loudest acoustic band I could think of”.

Revolutions from scratch: Julian Cowley on Cornelius Cardew, The Wire 214, December 2001

In 1974 I heard Cornelius Cardew sing and play piano in York Arts Centre. To a bemused audience of new music fans, he performed muscular, evangelical political songs in a style from a century previous. His spoken introductions were along the lines of: “I just returned from East Berlin, where I had the honour of being invited to compose the following song for the miners’ union.” At this point Cardew was disappearing into a Maoist world of ever tinier splinter factions. And yet he had been maybe Britain’s most visionary composer. Morton Feldman: “Any direction modern music will take in England will come about only through Cardew, because of him, by way of him. If the new ideas in music are felt today as a movement in England, it’s because he acts as a moral force, a moral centre.”

If Cardew had not died in a hit and run accident in 1981, would he have returned from his Maoist labyrinths to dominate British contemporary music? In 2001, on the 20th anniversary of his death, Julian Cowley wrote a moving tribute and summary of Cardew’s extraordinary life. A great photo by Werner Bethsold shows Cardew at the piano aged 39, dog-end adhering to lip, dark rings around his eyes – new music’s James Dean.

Laboratory Secrets: Peter Shapiro interviews Stereolab, The Wire 149, July 1996

Shortly after their release of Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Peter Shapiro penned this pulsing portrait of “the perfect pop group”, Stereolab. Shapiro is clearly a fan, and though he does a spot of unnecessary mithering about whether the ’lab are too hipster for their own good, this is a valuable conversation with Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier about how they do what they do. Plus the acknowledged impossibility of ever fully explaining it (otherwise we might not be fans any longer). Gane talks about his process as essentially musical collage, and stresses how much he loves conflict between sounds. He’s open enough to admit that, “Sometimes I feel that maybe there are too many reference points, too many in-jokes in a way.” But Sadier has seen their audiences joyfully riding the groove: “I think we have achieved a music that will make sense to a lot of people whether they know about Steve Reich or not.” Good people, good writing, and good photos by Tim Kent.

The T-bone stakes: Mike Barnes interviews Alan Tomlinson, The Wire 413, July 2018

My favourite free improv groups? AMM and Alan Tomlinson’s trio with Dave Tucker and drummer Phil Marks. Tomlinson, a self-described “old trainspotter”, rides the train out to Mike Barnes’s place in Hampshire rather than have Barnes come to him, so as to have the chance to look up and down the track: “I’m quite happy sat on a railway station platform to see what happens – watch an engineering train go past.” In Manchester, a young Tomlinson played for the comedian Charlie Drake in pantomime, and learned Berio’s formidable Sequenza V for solo trombone. “I was surrounded by jazzers and was the only one who couldn’t play jazz, and [by then] I wasn’t that interested in it anyway, so I found something that I could do. I learnt to play those techniques: singing down the instrument, sucking notes, split notes. They weren’t developed by free jazzers, they were developed by contemporary music players like Vinko Globokar in Germany and Stuart Dempster on the West Coast of America.” Tomlinson has played in a skip, to Yorkshire fish and chip van queues and up to his waist in a river. How intentional is the comedy? “I’m very serious about playing the trombone. I don’t fuck about – well, I do fuck about, but I do take it seriously.”

Ragas against the machine: Clive Bell interviews Hariprasad Chaurasia, The Wire 166, December 1997

I wrote this one myself – so sue me. Spending a few days with the Indian flute maestro Hariprasad Chaurasia was a high point of my writing career. Chaurasia was “a fit, weather-beaten 59 year old” when I met him, the man who forced the hidebound world of Indian classical to accept that the humble flute could perform hour long ragas alongside the sitar and other more acceptable instruments. At the same time he dominated Indian pop and Bollywood soundtracks. That’s Chaurasia playing on “The Inner Light”, George Harrison's 1968 B side to The Beatles’ “Lady Madonna”. Before fighting the prejudices of the classical music establishment, Chaurasia fought a literal battle with his father over his love for music. Growing up in the wrestling-mad province of Uttar Pradesh, Chaurasia had a promising career as a pro wrestler from the age of 11. His father beat his teenage son for listening to musicians, even for whistling tunes: “And he was a wrestler, so he could do it properly.” Sheer determination carried him through, including a painful and hard-to-believe switch to left-handed playing: “And you get so much power from this! Like a murderer – he is a human being like me, but he has a special power.”

Invisible Jukebox: Claire Rousay x More Eaze, The Wire 458, April 2022

Thanks to the pandemic, writers couldn’t meet interviewees and play them Invisible Jukebox songs, so suddenly we got musicians interviewing each other. Perhaps the most fascinating result was this unfiltered, semi-hysterical exchange between two Texan musicians who had clearly just had far too much fun recording their avant pop album Never Stop Texting Me. The quick-fire backchat and overflowing enthusiasm for just about everything was infectious, and made me feel two things – 1: I was eavesdropping on excited smart-asses (always a pleasure); and 2: I know next to nothing about music. Typical exchange: “CR: This is my shit. How recent is this? [Unexpected glitch effect appears in the music] What the fuck? ME: We’ve both done that on our songs.” An Eberhard Weber track from ECM Records elicits the response, “It just makes me want to watch Lord Of The Rings, honestly.” Moreover, every record they hear seems to trigger plans for a future project. Brilliant.

Defying the wilderness: Ken Hollings interviews Chris Watson, The Wire 318, August 2010

There's more eavesdropping in Ken Hollings’s fine interview with the sound recordist Chris Watson. As a teenager in Sheffield, Watson watched birds feeding in his parents’ garden. He couldn’t hear them without approaching closer, which would frighten the birds away: “His solution to the problem was to hang a small portable tape recorder near the bird table and leave it running. The results were astonishing. ‘All of a sudden I was in a world which none of us is normally privileged to hear. I still talk about putting the microphone where you can’t put your ears. I love that sense of eavesdropping, of drawing something out that normally I wouldn’t have the privilege of hearing.’” This is a thoughtful piece, with an epigraph from 19th century art critic John Ruskin, but Watson's warm Yorkshire voice runs through it, from curating sounds for David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet TV series to Watson’s own series of albums on the Touch label.

Cathal Coughlan’s Epiphany, The Wire 330, August 2011 The Epiphanies column at the back of the magazine often produces a very personal tale, a haunting of a musician by some sound that won’t let him or her go. Cathal Coughlan (Microdisney, Fatima Mansions) died in May 2022 after a long illness. In this column from 2011 he recounts being pursued across four decades by Dagmar Krause and her colleagues, as he moves from a teenage holiday in west Cork, via a bad acid trip in Camden Town,London, to a job in musical theatre in Brittany. It all begins with Dagmar in her best venomous dwarf-voice mode, singing “War” from Henry Cow and Slapp Happy's In Praise Of Learning. Via other Krause songs, Coughlan moves on to Peter Blegvad’s The Naked Shakespeare, and finally Henry Cow bass player John Greaves’s solo work: Songs (1995) and Verlaine (2008). Movingly, Coughlan also assesses his own work in the context of these songs that he can’t shake off.

Daniel Spicer reviews Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground, The Wire 439, September 2020

After nervously checking the letters page, I often turn first to the magazine’s book reviews, aka Print Run. There’s always something to get your teeth into. A good example is Daniel Spicer’s review of Joe Banks’s multi-subtitled book, Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground: Radical Escapism In The Age Of Paranoia. Endlessly playing free festivals and distributing free acid to audiences, Hawkwind were favourites of The Damned, The Clash and The Stranglers. John Lydon named frontman Robert Calvert as a major influence. Hawkwind saxophonist Nik Turner died in autumn 2022 – by the time I played with him in 2016 (alongside Youth and Jah Wobble), his ability to play coherently was long gone. Or perhaps it was ever thus. Bass player Lemmy described their sound as “a black fucking nightmare. A post-apocalyptic horror soundtrack.”

Resetting the rhythm by Joshua Minsoo Kim, The Wire 433, March 2020

It's occasionally said (not by me) that The Wire lacks ‘concept pieces’, where, rather than interview one musician, the writer drills down into a topic. In this intriguing article, Joshua Minsoo Kim talks to four youngish drummers about operating in a contemporary environment. Eli Keszler’s thinking is affected by working with minimalist composers Phill Niblock and Tony Conrad. Tim Barnes deals in “muted gestures” and makes albums that dialogue with field recordings of the natural world. Will Guthrie likes to keep things “too weird”, but also composes for gamelan, while Claire Rousay is drifting away from the kit towards found sound and electroacoustics. Rousay is the one who has had enough of lugging around heavy gear: “Simply put, drums didn’t provide the right framework for the ideas exercising her now. ‘Rather than find a workaround, I thought jumping to other ways of communicating my ideas might be easier. Essentially, I’m lazy,’ she laughs.”

And once you've read that, in the same issue there's a review by drummer Greg Fox of a multi-authored book about the mighty Jaki Liebezeit, drummer for Can.

And then Greg Fox himself had a track on The Wire’s Below The Radar Vol 19 – you can hear that too. Read all these interviews and reviews in full by taking out a print or digital subscription and acquiring access to The Wire's full digital library of back issues.

By Clive Bell

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