Old England

I watched a couple of old movies this week. From this distance, they view like propaganda material for the austerity years immediately after the war.

"The Nanny" is set in 1960, and stars a painfully controlled Bette Davis as an ultimately murderous, insane household employee. It's very difficult to like this movie or any of the characters in it. The son is an impossibly spoilt brat, the father is a distant foreign office apparatchik, the mother a hysterically tearful bag of nerves, her sister a pill-popping casualty of the permissive scene. At the finale, the boy enthusiastically embraces this family, saved from the homicidal machinations of the nanny, who we (very late in the day, and in a clumsily inserted flashback) discover is motivated by the death of her daughter, who had been abandoned and was pregnant when she died, having fallen in with the 'bad crowd' of legend.

Credit to Davis for taking a role in which she not only plays an insane, morally decrepit child murderer, but also carries the can for the suffering in a toxically repressed middle-English family.

"The Blue Lamp" is watchable only on the back of an early Dirk Bogarde performance as an unstable desperado, trying to get a toe hold in London's early 50s crime underworld, and some interesting period footage of the Edgeware Road. Other than that, the film's main function is a unabashed publicity and recruiting tool for the Metropolitan Police.

Psychedelimetallurgy

Chris and Sean both knew that the Monarch and the Barfly are not the same place, so I pitched up late for our date with the makers of "Aqua Dementia". I'd been in a place peopled by Camden punks, paunchy industro-goth survivors, but smelling of furniture cleansing and new leather. "Indie rock smells better than it did in '94" I texted to Chris. "You're in the wrong pub", he replied.

Pithy to the max, as always.

I struggled to take nu metal seriously. If there's one thing that kills the necessary fantasy stone dead, it's self-regarding, histrionic moralising. The acting-out of autistic fantasies of Tolkeinish adventure or pseudo-sci-fi rebellion is very tedious as long as you don't need your fantasies shouted at you. So there needs to be a pretty brutal distancing and reimagining of the position of the metal sound to break free of the cliched dream.

And somehow, Mastodon manage this. Their sound seethes and roils like an invertebrate. The vocal is reduced to a purely rhythmic device. It's properly psychedelic, constantly altering and rolling over itself without anything as crass as doing the same thing twice.

Exile On Coldharbour Lane

It was all too sad that by far the best moment of Massive Attack's Brixton concert late last year was a take of Unfinished Sympathy with the same singer they'd employed at the same venue 10 years previously. There were a very small handful of moments that threatened to spray the crowd with magic, but these were lost in a welter of rocked-up guitar from a fearful arse in a platinum bleach haircut, or else completely poisoned by the self-aggrandising running commentary delivered by the couple in front of us. Thinking of the wonderful dub spaces opened up in their first record, and the sparse arrangements of their second, and the splendid paranoia of their fourth, this gig replete with every bit of sonic house-room stacked full with percussion and tasteful instrumentation was a real shocker. The hit-me-over-the-head-with-a-breezeblock-I-don't-think-I-quite-got-your-point sloganising on their back-projection did nothing to hold our attention either.

Birth, Suffering, Death... And Fluffiness

I had seen the Cinematic Orchestra some time back at

ATP, providing an unpredictable but well-manicured electro-acoustic backing to something that almost certainly wasn't Battleship Potemkin or the Bicycle Thieves, but might have been. It was definitely very old, in black and white, and in a very scratched-up print. This was extremely likeable and effective; a chamber group, carefully marshalled by someone who obviously has plenty of technical feel for soundtracks giving a room full of non-cinephiles a reason to see some cracking footage. It's therefore a very doubtful state of affairs to find the group expanded hugely, and fronting a preview screening of a Disney natural-world sob-fest about the (admittedly beautiful) pink flamingoes that inhabit one of the vast lakes in central Africa. The filming is very showy, like an emotional cattle-prod wrapped up in an airline commercial.

"Europa! Europa!"

At the risk of over-cooking the significance of the Fall, the synthesised, bricked-up, unforgivingly-lit landscapes of "Code: Selfish" could be the songs playing on the radio as the Poles drag Our Hero out of the car in the middle of a frozen mud-heap after his 'escape' from the West. Songs like "Birmingham School of Business School" and "Free Range" hint at exactly the tawdry horizons that surround the post-Cold-War figures with which Kieslowski populates his harsh, depthless world.

It's a bitter and relentless lesson; getting on and growing up are a direct function of reducing everybody else to the plasticised level of the manipulated. The story here generates its (chillingly plausible) momentum from a sequence of greedy land deals, in which ignorance, naivete, and lack of ambition are flushed down the u-bend of empty-eyed investment. There's an echo of all of this in the deals current in Spanish football at the moment: talented and promising youngsters are bought out from under their clubs by Real Madrid, not because Real have any use for them, but to prevent their rivals developing a player who might threaten their control of the means of televisual (re) production.

It's a minor miracle that we really care about the romance, because the plot and the characters give us no reason to.

Rock is a Zombie

There's something about economies of scale and lost definition at high volumes here.

Rock is a zombie. It is upright and moving about, albeit slowly and with a shuffling, aimless gait. It stinks dreadfully, and hangs about with its mates. The zombie's sound is a desperate grunt, a moan of pure need, barely articulated. It's been dead for a few weeks now, and is looking very ugly. ("Oh, they're lookin' ugly to me now" as Lambchop sang).

Rock is a Vampire. It can look momentarily like a handsome devil in a certain light, but up close the reek of panstick and lipstick and facepaint leaves an emetic yeasty miasma up the nose. It lives on and on, unable to bring itself to hibernate such that it might be able to revitalise itself with a period of underexposure. But no, it's a hammy, preening, self-regarding old hack. It's been technically, medically, culturally dead for a very long time.

Rock is a ghost. Insubstantial, invisible in the light. Chilly and clammy. Leaving only Kirilian images, strange smudges on negatives, a drop in temperature.

Rock is the Dead and the Undead.

The Drones are a fierce group, unpredictable and wiry-of-sound. There's a slightly dashing desperado-ism about their widescreen dustbowl songs. But there's no mistaking them for anything but ghosts of metal-prospectors, Walkers-about, refugees from the now-abandoned City of Rock.

Not From Bury

Scenes come and go. Fashions and fads fly by in the post-everything breeze. Holes in the ground open up, and are filled by Landfill Indie. Empires rise and fall.

Camden remains a ropey old place, on a chilly weekday evening, 7.30pm. I wait at the World's End for Mark, as pale characters and hurried youngsters drift and rush at the junction of Camden High Road and Parkway. There are plenty of people about, but nobody really wants to be here. There's an echo of an echo.

So when better to be seeing the Fall?

The support act at the cavernous (though eye-poppingly full) Koko is the band that MES harvested the 2nd- or 3rd line-up ago of the Fall from. Darker My Love. Yes, it's a shocking name, and their charisma-free Doors & Byrds lite is teeth-gnashingly uninspired. Going through the (bowel) motions. The sort of group that tribute bands think is pinching their audience.

I don't think that I've seen anyone in the Fall look more worried than the new guitarist did. Even in the days of Steve Hanley (who looked almost permanently on edge; the first time I ever saw The Fall, with Vanessa back in '92 at the Brixton Academy, I couldn't even begin to understand how performing with this creature could be so anxiogenic) there wasn't a brow so figuratively furrowed as this one.

Smith is back on form. We know this, because he is now noticing enough to want to faff about with the controls on the amplifiers. We also know this because he tolerated his partner, um, guiding him away from her keyboard with a gentle hand, without so much as a scowl. We also know this because a lean and muscular and very well-organised Fall punched through the (almost entirely new) material for an hour and more with little ceremony and just a hint of gruff, gritted-jaw panache; Smith was with them every step of the way.

"Unseen Facts" indeed.