Out From Behind The ApronStrings

"Coldplay's keyboard player". Sends a trickle of cold, shivery sweat a-tricklin' down the spine, don't it? A ghastly world of emotion-by-numbers piano plonking, distinguished from Elton John only by being less camp and less fun. So we were not completely sold on this being a winner. Chris had waxed effusively about the winning electronica and atmospherics that this guy produces, so on the hottest night of the year, we pitched into the black hole that is the ICA concert room to find Jon Hopkins a gawky, geeky, bony individual swigging from a Beck's bottle and putting gaffa tape over the manufacturers' logos on his equipment. So far, so home-for-sandwiches-at-mummy's-place. However, his opening gambit was a wide-eyed euphoric techno workout that went on for far too long to be an accident. Increasingly the music got glitchier, acidic, Acidic, and clearly made by repeated pressing of the button marked "Autechre". Better, in other words. Even the three occasions he switched off the software and played the piano, the tunes were obviously a nod to the total uselessness of his paying job (anodyne sub-soundtrack doodles), and only threw the excitment of the computers into sharp relief. It was hard not to be wearing a smile at the end.

The People's Choice

Chris and I were at Dingwalls in Camden for my much-delayed first (and maybe last, by the look of the health of their guitarist) experience of the mighty, unquestionable NoMeansNo. They are practically progressive punk, with none of the archness that this might imply. Relentessly aggressive, in an inclusive and cheery fashion. They churn, accelerate, stutter and plunge on the head of a pin. "The Night Everything Became Nothing" and "Every Day I Start To Ooze" flash by in a torrent of gurning, precision-tooled sludgerama, and terrifyingly well-organised drumming. Seeing guys who are 10 or 15 years our senior belting this stuff out with no hint of a second thought is inspiring and disquieting. We should also mention the very dysfunctional support act, 'Todd' but only because of Chris's pithy-to-the-max assessment: "Like Unsane, before they started rehearsing".

Now that's no way to be.

"Hotel! Hotel!"

So, it's Sunday morning and we have some time to... watch 'Psycho'. It occurs to me that the individual humans who come into contact with Bates are defenceless and doomed; simple inquisitiveness, vulnerability, are barely registered on the scale of his libidinal drive to erase relations inimical to that with his mother. The crucial moment is the arrival of the couple. Despite it being an asexual pair, the sororitous fearlessness and knuckleheaded masculinity are contriving to protect each-other without even realising it. (The figure of the married hunk is a pitiful one; he is by far the most directionless, tw0-dimensional, easily-led character in the movie). So the murders and explanations are simply 'events' to stage the real film around: Bates scrubs ineffectually at the blood on the tacky plastic bath panel; his neck is gruesomely exposed as Arbogast asks to see the handwriting sample. The dread-ful and fore-boding, fuelled with a painful-to-watch psychical unravelling. Almost too good, even now. Shame on Gus Van Sant!

Cut To Silence

Tonights movie has been "Blow Up" by Antonioni. Quite how this has become a touchstone for the Schwinging Schtixies I have no clue. It's a barren, brutally stage-managed, parade of manipulation and blank-eyed ciphers. Completely brilliant of course, but nothing to do with any kind of retro Carnaby porno. Just occasionally a phrase will echo through the hall-of-mirrors: "Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out". As always, I'm a sucker for films that won't let ontology lie. The scenes in the park ("Fantastic! They're fantastic! In a park!", as if he is describing some barely-believable skin-flick confection) are almost choreographed, a dreadful danse macabre into scenes that only become... more real. It's the most cynical and unforgiving movie I've seen in ages. Was this London there at the time? Or is this film an aggregation of many people's dreams of London, reality seeming ever as far away, the more snaps are taken, the more fantasies are added. Awful. Awe-ful.

Through the Bathroom Window at ATP

Welcome to the news.
All Tomorrow's Parties at Minehead, Somerset, England is a music festival, in a cultural time-warp of a town in the southwest of the country. The fun is mostly in being gobsmacked by groups you hardly believed could exist, let alone thought could be any good. M83 provided shiny, propulsive Europop of a kind that is usually edited out of the strictly regulation rebellion. The drummer had a hygienic perspex screen separating him from the rest of the group. Chris says this is to prevent "spillage". Health dispensed constructions of very controlled and tightly cut noise, rhythmically dense and mutating. They had very little body fat. Liam Finn was an Antipodean guitar songwriter with properly psychedelic ideas about structure and instrumentation. His lady sidekick appeared extremely drunk but in command of events. Killing Joke were a dreadful spectacle of phoned-in performances, red golf visors, contract-fulfilling stances and barely manageable paranoid ideation. Soulless, with no redeeming features. Anti Pop Consortium were technical rappers, built by electro-committee. Devo made everybody laugh ("You have chosen to attend a Devo concert"), and balanced cleverness with cartoonishness perfectly.

"Under the influence of fright and terror"

Tonight's movie has been 'The Testament of Dr Mabuse'. The people are virtually puppet-like, and the more hollow they are, the more believable. The likeable police commissioner seems to belong in an entirely different film, as he is humane, irascible, an 'instinctive' copper. Mabuse's sheer drive, undiluted motive is far too powerful to permit anything as presumptuous as a personality among the criminal gang or the flunkies, turnkeys, petty officials and guards who populate the film. Mabuse's plotting is the plot. The fact of a relentless, undead destructive force is the engine and chassis of the film, and it's as compelling as hell.