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Twelve Hours Before

Robert Cochrane — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:22:59 +0000

Twelve Hours Before Robert Cochrane August 25, 2025 - 10:22

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Bridget St John - The Carlton Club

Manchester, England - 21^st August 2025

TWELVE HOURS BEFORE (A Poem for Bridget St John)

Twelve hours before

as night consigned that day

to where all days reside,

she'd stood alone in the spotlight

whilst diamonds from a glitterball

caressed her form,

embellishing her coloured cloak

as she sang afresh the songs

of brothers from her muse

she had outlived,

as love restored their words

from her crafted presence,

which time alone allows

to carve from within.

A voice of cello elegance,

resonant and unassumingly sublime,

stilled the room,

some gift from time.

Her own songs rose and swooped

as birds in evening do

between the light of day

and night's encroachment

and as her silence fell,

head bowed as indication of completion,

she left the stage beneath a rainfall of applause,

an emissary from another time

but of the now.

This morning as I wandered through

my local coffee shop

with its usual discretion of piped jazz

I spied her seated with a friend

which made me smile because

the evening had more punctuation

to extend into a Friday dawn.

As she walked by I said her name,

she smiled in gratitude

and whispered

'I remembered you from the dark last night'

as I thanked her for those songs,

but when I turned my head

a little later

her table had been cleared

concluding her brief vignette of reprise,

reclaimed by traffic noise,

the clatter of cups,

conversations heard,

but not discerned.

-------------------------

The Carlton Club lies tucked away in the leafy Manchester suburb of Whalley Range, mentioned and immortalised by Morrissey in his Smiths song "Miserable Lie:"

"What do we get for our trouble and pain?

Just a rented room in Whalley Range"

It played host the other evening to English export to New York, the legendary songstress Bridget St John, who captivated a considerable audience with an all-too-brief catalogue of her exquisite songs and those of those she'd known along the way, Michael Chapman, Nick Drake, and John Martyn. All sadly gone.

Her quartet of albums, three on John Peel's legendary Dandelion Records, beginning with Ask Me No Questions in 1969. Plus Jumble Queen on Chrysalis in 1974 marked her out as an innovator of English singer-songwriters, although she admits from the stage that the term "Folk" has never felt appropriate, nor accurately representative of her craft.

She was joined by her friend and occasional collaborator, Emma Tricca, who had proved a sublime support act, her own creations possessing gossamer-like elements, underlined by a profound certainty of tone. A talent of immense elegance, and one worthy of discovering if you wish to unearth a new repertoire of worthy gems, Aspirin Sun, her latest album, is a perfect place of modulated beauty to work backwards from.=

During her set, she had been assisted by Pete Greenwood, another remarkable and deceptively understated talent whose set of songs betrayed a deep intelligence and songcraft, aided manfully by his exceptional and refined guitar skills. His debut solo work, Sirens, from 2008 on Heavenly Records, remains a touchstone work that provides constant pleasure via its gently understated accomplishments.

It proved a magical evening, three individual talents under the same roof, something to cherish after the lights went out and the doors of the Carlton Club closed on its Victorian splendour.

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All Tomorrow's Karaokes

Robert Cochrane — Tue, 30 May 2017 14:00:31 +0000

All Tomorrow's Karaokes Robert Cochrane May 30, 2017 - 10:00

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John Cale

Liverpool Sound City, UK

Friday 26th May 2017

Fifty years on and it is time to remember one of the most innovative albums ever impressed onto wax. A delicious dark and jagged confection of nihilism and sulky sophistication unlike it's Liverpudlian counterpart Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, also now fifty, but which was sunny, funny and a bit vaudeville. Both represent a pair of wildly different bookends. The Velvet Underground and Nico was then a monumental, commercial flop, whilst the Beatles album sold in the millions. With half a century under its belt of shiny studded leather, the Velvets album now has an arc of influence that continues to reach into the hearts of those who wish to create a positive noise.

There is something incongruous about the weather, it is clammy and warm, and the sun is blinding, and yet the music we await really should be delivered in a thunderstorm with lightning bolts scissoring the sky and the rain. The security is airport-like in the wake of the recent Manchester atrocity. Things begin early with Marvin Powell, an eloquent singer songwriter whose efforts have that baroque sophistication of Arthur Lee's most sublime moments,"'Buried" being one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs I've heard in ages. As he finishes, his classy and well received delivery bodes well for the main event, but then the long wait begins, and after two and a half hours, something of a massive endurance test of everyone's patience, expectations become frayed, and rightly so.

What follows is akin to a CD shuffle rendition of a work that deserved better attention and a modicum of respect. The songs aren't played in sequence, the sound is dire and the whole thing reeks of a school project with Cale as the musical director of a rather untutored and unruly troupe. A case of too many kooks spoiling the broth of nostalgia. In an ideal world there would have been one singer to represent Nico, and of sufficient gravitas and star quality to do so. Marianne Faithfull, P.J. Harvey or Anita Lane could have been contenders, and to embody Lou Reed, Nick Cave or Ian McCullough would have laced those shoes quite adequately. The proceedings are disjointed, lacking in vision and cohesion, and apart from Cale, any stars of note. "White Light White Heat" gets thrown in for good measure and all that springs to mind is a sense of absence and the haunting presence of ghosts.

Nadine Shah manages to bring as little class to the proceedings, but Clinic, a Super Furry Animal, The Kills, The Wild Beasts, and The Fat White Family are at best shambling karaoke, a rolling stock of pop-up appearances. Karaoke allows people near songs they should have an exclusion order from, and such is the case here. It didn't have to be an aural carbon copy, but it should have had some sense of professionalism and gravitas.

There is appropriately a minute's silence for those who were so brutally and stupidly extinguished in Manchester a few days before, and then we and they back to the business of the unusual.

The past on display here really is a foreign country. As it limps and shuffles to a cheap conclusion, the original line up appear in all their 1960s monochromatic glory through the mash up backdrops of light on the huge screens, unfortunately reminding the assembled of what we should have had, and what we have lost. John Cale has done his legacy no justice here. In fact the entire album played through the PA and accompanied by historic footage of the Velvet Underground would have better satisfied, and more adequately sufficed.

Most of the songs aren't even his to piss over, and Lou Reed is probably having a malevolent snigger at the lameness of it all with Sterling, Nico & Warhol in their art-rock and silver-lined heaven.

The Light Show

Jean Vengua Gier — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 16:06:58 +0000

The Light Show Jean Vengua Gier January 31, 2007 - 11:06

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A few weeks ago, I went to the Other World show, sponsored by CultureCatch.com and DLO, at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. The show featured my friend Gary Lucas improvising with computer/video performance artist Luke DuBois. I'm old enough to remember the "light shows" of the late 1960s/'70s, having lived in the hotbed of psychedelic visual/psychotropic/musical experimentation of that period. In fact, The Barn, promoted by psychologist Leon Tabory, (Neal Cassady's friend and psychologist) in nearby Scotts Valley (at that time a rather strange little place whose main attractions included an exhibit of strangely twisted "prehistoric" trees, several giant "dinosaurs" that could be seen from the highway, and an overly cheerful little "Santa's Village") was our town's very own cauldron of social/tribal experimentation via LSD and other substances, and a destination for such shamans of the eye and ear as The Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, Janice Joplin, Led Zeppelin (it is rumored), and Captain Beefheart (1965).

In my own writing, I turn obsessively to issues of time -- our immersion in it, and the seeming impossibility of grasping it. Attending this collaboration between Lucas and DuBois ended up being for me a meditation on past and present mind-bending experiences and temporality.

Light shows of the 1960s/'70s used overhead projectors, stage lighting gels, and various liquids and oils poured into glass containers set on the projectors, which were then rocked by hand and manipulated to go with the music. DuBois, however, uses state-of-the-art computer technology and software to create his "real-time phonography" performances. Differences between the two modes are obvious, but what struck me was the ability of the video artist and guitarist to evoke shifts in my experience of time. Both artists are composers, and I was curious to see how Lucas' music would play off of the visuals, and vice versa.

Lucas' guitar playing, hooked up directly to the computer, itself produced the imagery, with (apparently) some changes added by DuBois; the effects were immediate and spontaneous. Keep in mind that Lucas has played for Leonard Bernstein (debuting on electric guitar in Bernstein's "Mass" in Vienna), Rod Serling (that's right, Mr. Twilight Zone), and Captain Beefheart. One of my favorite pieces is his adaptation of Bernard Herrman's juggernaut soundtrack for Psycho. Unlike many musicians who utilize the psychedelic effect, Lucas does not necessarily "expand" one's mind in gentle ambient swirls, although he's quite capable of that; even playing solo, he is just as likely to shake things up, and he has the skill to do so in unexpected ways. When I walked in, he was playing a series of jagged, crunchy riffs that were peeling out angular shards all over the large screen behind him (his music has been described by some as tactile, almost chewy).

He has claimed at least one of his influences is literary: the Vorticists -- not so much Pound, but Percy Wyndham Lewis, of Blast fame, whose modernist journal was a product of the disorienting shocks of World War I, among other things. Lewis has written, "The New Vortex plunges to the heart of the Present; we produce a New Living Abstraction. Vorticist painting combines Cubist fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment, to create a highly effective expression of the Vorticists sense of the dynamism of the modern world." Lucas' guitar playing is astounding in his ability to produce driving, machine-like rhythms, drones, and hums--industrial aural landscapes--that melt momentarily into darkly disturbing, or sublime surreality: the heavy metal of the '70s recalling its literary roots in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and Henry Adams's "The Dynamo and the Virgin." His re-working of Kraftwerk's classic "Autobahn" is an example, morphing into "Flight of the Valkyries." Wyndham Lewis would be pleased. Lucas' intent, however, goes beyond mere shock. While he has claimed that "vorticism...was based on the still center...intelligently observing the chaotic flux all around you," he also wants "...To prick the innards of another nervous system and hopefully hotwire that system to feel total ecstasy or pain or wonderment. To give people an orgasm. To make rich and strange paintings in sound." I much prefer this painful/beautiful reach into strangeness, rather than the current crop of hyperrealism in the media and films that attempt to make the "strange" as mind-numbingly "real" as today's latest war-mongering polemic.

Poster owned by Ross Hannan

By the time Lucas began fingering the lush bluesy chords of "Bra Joe from Kilimanjaro", the screen had turned black and white, taking on the shadowy graininess of silent movies. Luke DuBois performed his own considerable magic, as time-lapsed images of the guitarist appeared like ghosts of old rock posters or film clips, gently solarized. My recall of the order in which these songs emerged is admittedly faulty, as I began to wander in the aural dreamscape. Somewhere in there, I remember the chords of "Grace," the beautiful music Lucas wrote for the late Jeff Buckley, once a member of Lucas' band Gods and Monsters.

Soon the image of the guitarist, behind the actual guitarist, deconstructed itself into multiples, creating a meta-perspective of Gary that was reminiscent of Andy Warhol's portraits, but conveying a broader sense of the artist existing in multiple time-frames, some moving slower than others (or at least that's the effect it had upon me), some sped up -- lending an bizarrely nostalgic sense of time escaping one's grasp. It echoed Lucas's own work with old modernist films, live performances of the soundtrack he composed for the classic silent horror film, The Golem, (based on Gustav Meyrink's gothic novel) as well as soundtracks for Rene Clair's En'tracte (1924) and Fernand Leger's Ballet Mecanique (1924).

A curious difference between the liquidity of the old light show and the new technology is the computer's ability to mimic the drawn line, so that many of the images take on a graphic, hand-written quality; imagine drawn lines moving across a page, speeded up in time-lapse. One of the recurring motifs that I experienced (and I suspect it was purely subjective) was that of a written gesture recalled from time, momentarily fixed, then multiplied hundred-fold, whether it was a line scumbled across the screen, or the familiar gesture of the guitarist drawing his hand down over the strings -- becoming many, part of the larger human act of creating and communicating.

With the looping, rippling notes of "Strong Seed" (from Lucas's CD Skeleton at the Feast), the music became more recognizably "psychedelic." Accordingly, the angularity of images began to scatter like raindrops, taking on a distinctively "liquid" appearance, glimmers of light flaring on a cosmic river, or circling around a whirlpool--seemingly coming full circle in my mind--touching upon those first liquid moments on the overhead projector's screen in The Barn, in Winterland, The Fillmore, or the Avalon Ballroom. Time folding back into itself. Similar, yet undeniably different.

The Rachels/The Clogs - Merkin Hall, 29 May 2006

Christine Back — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 10:11:45 +0000

The Rachels/The Clogs - Merkin Hall, 29 May 2006 Christine Back June 8, 2006 - 06:11

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It's rare to close your eyes at a show these days and not be able to distinguish one instrument from another, the sound so carefully constructed and interwoven that images get conjured under closed eyes -- backdrops of foreign places, evocations of heartache and old dreams, where the instruments themselves become almost incidental to the story being told. I'm not talking Enya or New Age meditation music. I'm talking skill, technique, concept and theme, all used to tightly harness in and breathe out sound.

The Clogs, opening for indie chamber-darlings the Rachels, did just that at Merkin Hall last Thursday, proving that ideas can be nudged into big open spaces, by songs that flutter and fold on the dash of a note. Unlike the Rachels, who tended to hover on the same sonic ground, the Clogs stretched out sounds into images with startling versatility, a tall feat for a four-member ensemble.

The Clogs seemed intent throughout their entire set on being precise: drums, bassoon, marimba, piano, air organ, guitar, steel drum and violin working in tandem, constantly inching toward full, unified sound. "2-3-5," the opening song, served as an apt warm-up, setting up rhythmic patterns and pairings of instruments that the four would continue to return to as the set progressed -- syncopated rhythms that pitter-pattered on the bright-belled steel drum against rhythm guitar, and deep low violin playing off an alternate, not parallel, melody. All of this was done with measured restraint, leaving room for expansions into fuller crescendos that would close in again with a certain suddenness, like underwater plants pulling quick retreat upon a slight touch.

When I speak of the band's ability to create imagery, though, I really mean songs like "Canon" or "Death of the Maiden." And by ability, I mean skill and control, the band ever conscious, occasionally to a fault, of placing architecture over emotion. In "Canon" guitarist Bryce Dessner (also of The National) strummed a rhythm line that framed the rest of the instruments' sounds. Building within and on the guitar, percussionist Thomas Kozumplik, using four mallets, two in each hand, hit intervals on the marimba to carry "Canon"'s melody, adding a subtle, vulnerable tremor. The bassoon let out a deep wail that undergirded the song, its sound billowing open and closed, like wind blowing through loosely hung drapes on an open window. Then the violin made its tip-toeing entrance, violinist Padma Newsome moving the bow in light swishing strokes that barely made contact with the strings. Pausing, the song shifted. Guitarist Dessner added sudden brightness, nimbly playing notes in downward steps while Kozumplik moved from marimba to drums, tapping almost imperceptibly on the cymbals and then gradually louder, adding the bass drum to a steadily shaping crescendo. The momentum felt like something ballooning from inside, the melody pushing and growing outward against a malleable border, until it propulsively -- stopped. Meanwhile, the listener was able to sink into the sound, and as with a good novel, let the story unfold on its own.

In "Death of a Maiden," loosely structured around the Schubert composition of the same name, the band once again showed how its versatile use of instruments could translate into one seamless arch from the beginning of the song to its end. With the guitar line again acting as frame, the cymbals layered texture, while an atonal tension sifted between the bassoon and violin, then between the guitar and violin, in alternate melodies that moved -- aware of each other -- and yet in separate directions, only to converge. With a tempo change and quickening mood, the drums thumped out big sounds while the violin and bassoon rat-a-tat spoke and interrupted each other. Some of the song's overtly architectural quality ended up sounding stiff at times, but the craftsmanship, the incisive listening to each other while playing -- so rare in the indie-rock context -- was easy to appreciate.

If the Clogs got burdened by the architecture of their music, the Rachels, another indie chamber-collective, had the opposite problem -- too much emotion and not enough structure.

With two computers, a keyboard, piano, cello, acoustic guitar, electric bass, and drums, the Rachels also belong to the school of big sounds and orchestration. The sound, though, couldn't be more different in character. While the Clogs' music emphasized ideas, the Rachels' music felt more cinematic than image-crafting, more appropriate for a soundtrack than story-telling, moving like feeling rather than ideas. Which is why it made perfect sense that the band projected visuals as part of the performance, band member Greg King's Super-8 films onto a large white screen behind the band. The music supported, but did not define, the image.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is limiting. And because the songs drove more on momentum and emotion, a lot of them sounded the same, the cello and two violas lingering too long in low registers while the drums thumped out big, echoing bangs on the bass drum in nearly every song. The images also felt a bit hackneyed and amateurish -- cityscapes and rooftops -- not venturing into territory more experimental or story-based than that. If the images had been more provocative or character-based, or structured around phases of a story, maybe the music would have adapted itself to more of a narrative mode. But surges in loudness and softness, fast and slow, can only go so far without a theme to hold it all together. Feeling needs idea, or simply evaporates for lack of substance.

In the end, maybe it's just a matter of preference. The Rachels and the Clogs are musical kin, and putting them together on the same bill was a savvy move. But, like siblings often do, despite family resemblance, they assume different postures, styles, and aesthetics. If you like ideas, you'd have clapped harder for the Clogs. If you prefer emotion, you'd have cheered more for the Rachels. I clapped for them both, of course, but it was the Clogs I was hoping would do the encore.