The Evening Echo

Life would not be the same without my friend, Joe Egg's, carefully crafted compilations gliding through my letterbox every month, which I have received whether based in Berlin, Bielefeld or in Edinburgh. I was given my first compilation in tape form in 1997 which I took on my travels to South East Asia. He has opened my ears to bands I would have never heard of and I have gone on to buy many records and CDs by those artists because of him. I always love his approach to design, so I was very flattered to be commissioned to take the cover photo for the latest one. Unusually for Joe, this title doesn't relate to the music featured but is inspired by the name of the local paper where he grew up in Bournemouth, The Evening Echo. Apparently, I fulfilled Joe's stringent stipulations for cover artwork quite unconsciously. It was only after I had seen the finished CD cover on Facebook that I read in the comments that my brief had been "to evoke a lonely twilight of longing, the older gaze over the young oblivious athletes." Lucky then that I had been eyeing up my local tennis courts for some time, enamoured by the newly installed floodlights, and seduced by the romance of demarcated white painted lines on tarmac.

More Than This

For the past three months, I have been trying to write a post about the experience of hearing 'More than This' by Roxy Music at my local cooperative supermarket. 

Of course, I should have gone to see Bryan Ferry sing this song live in Edinburgh this month. I last saw him in concert in Berlin about ten years ago. It was an unlikely venue, a multi purpose sports arena called Max-Schmelling Halle, named after a heavyweight champion boxer of the 1930s.  The building was about as far away from the glamourous image of Roxy Music as I could imagine. Still, as we the faithful audience looked on, bathed in an unforgiving light more suitable for a snooker match than a concert, a woman standing behind me, who had seen him sing 20 year before was so moved she was in tears.

Brian Eno, who was in Roxy music with Bryan Ferry, later concerned himself with creating music that would be suitable to a particular place. His ‘Music for Airports’ for example plays homage to the architecture of Cologne Airport and the experience of flying as an existential experience. Ambient music was then created to enhance our experience of such places.

It is a shame then, conversely, when music that we care about or feel emotionally attached to becomes a backdrop to a totally mundane or inappropriate setting.

But what if those mundane places, supermarkets and shops, rose to the occasion of the music played there? Perhaps my experience of hearing a song by Roxy Music in my local supermarket would have been a bit more like this:

***

I lift my basket onto the checkout counter of my local supermarket, Scotmid. A man 15 years or so my junior scans the beer, kitchen roll, kid’s breakfast cereal and milk. Then just as our brief but insignificant transaction is about to come to an end, the opening bars kick in of a song I recognise. But could it really be that song? So often these days I hear the opening bars of something I recognise only for it to turn into an unrecognisable cover, a sample or stolen riff. But now those seconds seem to last an eternity. Is it or isn’t it that song? The checkout guy is about to ask me to pay.

But it is Bryan Ferry’s swooning voice singing “More than this” and unfortunately it is interfering with my ability to complete this transaction.

A minute ago I was just going down the aisles filling up my basket with the necessities of sustenance but now I feel myself being transported into Bryan Ferry’s anguish. Suddenly things that felt tangible a few minutes a go, the fabric of the walls, the strip lighting across the ceiling, have lost their substance, and worryingly Ferry doesn’t seem to know where things are headed:

“It was fun for a while, there was no way of knowing, like a dream in the night, who can say where we’re going”

Like tins of tomatoes on a supermarket shelf, we seem to be balanced on a precipice, our fate no longer in our hands.

I try to concentrate on what the checkout guy is saying but other thoughts start creeping in.  Like -Who knows when our expiry date will creep us on us? Could it be today, or tomorrow? And what about our sell by dates come to think of it?

Then comes a brighter note, a philosophical shift palpable at Scotmid as Ferry continues:

“No care in the world, maybe I am learning, why the sea on the tide has no way of turning”

So, are we to believe that we are just one of many stacked on the shelves of life? People seem to bear their trolleys down the aisles with a new sense of purpose, as if they are treading a meditation maze, turning tins like prayer wheels. As they near the checkout they appear to emit a glow of inner knowledge.

Now feeling quite fragile, I fumble for my debit card and make eye contact with the now somewhat impatient checkout guy.

But Ferry is unrelenting. In less than the four minutes it has taken for the song to play out, the whole shop, customers, staff, fixture and fittings have bent to Ferry’s will. We are all borne upon a rollercoaster ride of his emotions.

“More than this -you know there’s nothing

More than this – tell me one thing”

Suddenly life feels cheap, or rather reasonably priced, depending how you look at it at Scotmid, our local Coop.

I swipe my card, and at least one of us is looking into the void.

***

Postscript

Up until a month ago there used a rostrum of about ten people who worked the tills at Scotmid, until they were replaced with 6 self-service machines. I held out on the machines for a long as I could. I had enjoyed finding out, for example, that an Italian student working there was trying to learn German. I would exchange a few words in German with him each visit. Or the rather strange checkout lady, who would lean forward and tell me things about the other staff or customers in a conspiratorial way, but I could never understand what it was that she was saying but nodded anyway. As I spend most of my morning at home working on my translations I valued these interactions. But apparently the impatient customers of Tollcross, Edinburgh, didn’t. 

Today, as I slipped into the section for self-service, the machine went on strike at my first purchase, a bottle of wine. I had to wait next to my machine like a naughty schoolgirl, and almost gave up and joined the queue for the two remaining humans. The problem is that every time you buy alcohol you have to get a member of staff to verify you are over the age limit for alcohol. As the young man who came to my assistance swiped his card over the screen I must admit I felt quite humiliated when out of the options he chose the rather insulting:

Clearly over 25

This was almost as humiliating as when I tried to pay with my debit card and it broadcast at a volume the whole shop and most of Tollcross could hear:

‘Your card has been declined’

What nobody heard, of course, was the assistant explaining that this machine was having a problem reading cards at that time.

Its a blast

I finally tracked him down. This is the man who had made my life so difficult when I joined the brass band in Bielefeld.  He insisted that I should relearn the way I read music.

If you can’t read music perhaps you can imagine this in terms of numbers. Think of your telephone number then dial it into your phone.  Now dial it again, but this time one digit up whilst saying the original number out loud: 0(1), 4-(5), 9-(er), oh well. Maybe you get the idea.

So with each note, I imagine it one higher than it really is in my head and change the fingering accordingly. What a bother! I must admit, I felt quite miffed at first.

After while, I discovered that my fellow band members had always read music like that as they had learned to play their instruments in the band. Very weird, I thought. This was the only place in the world to read music like that. So I decided to look into it.

Ute, one of the band members let it slip one day over a beer. She said the founder of this particular type of brass band, exclusive to this area of Germany, was a pastor. The reason for this unusual way of reading music was, she believed, to stop the devout brass band members from being led into temptation by joining military bands known for their drinking exploits and less than holy repertoire.

Another theory is that he wanted the brass bands to play directly out of choir books, which meant playing in that key.

Joannes Kuhlo, there I’ve said it, even developed his own instrument called, naturally, the Kuhlohorn (see picture above).  He deplored trumpets, which he found too bright and brash.  He thought that the perfect brass band should imitate a vocal church choir. Maybe he was right. At our last concert, we played in a church where the acoustics were so dire, there was a reverb of 7 seconds. A friend of mine said at one point it sounded like an electrical current was swirling around over her head.  Not bad, for unplugged brass.

Sometimes I sit in 2^nd trumpet, sometimes down in 3^rd and I am playing “King of the Road” just like I did in my school jazz band. Hey, how comes they let me in here, anyway? Hold on a minute, wasn’t that notation supposed to keep people like me out? Sorry, Johannes.

Like a Rolling Stone

Many months ago I put forward Keith Richards’ “Life” as a suggestion to an English book club I have joined here in Bielefeld.  I wasn’t really sure why I wanted to read it. I am not a big Stones fan.  Before I read the book, as a figure, Keith Richards was just a pastiche to me. I was more familiar with Jonny Depp’s interpretation than knowing anything about the man himself. The book is written in colloquial Richards, and when you read it, it feels as if you are sitting over your pint, and him over his Jamaican rum, and when you fall asleep and wake up four hours later he is still recounting his life story oblivious of your presence.  You can settle down cosily into your next pint knowing he is bound to repeat what you missed earlier. It is a charmingly hypnotic style, and the great thing is that it is not like some of those annoying books that you can’t put down because you’ve just got to know what’s happening next. In fact, I left it lying around for a few weeks before casually picking it up again and never bothered with a bookmark because precision didn’t seem appropriate.  Its opening chapter appears random and is beguiling. Why choose that particular drug bust (out of how many,five?), and during a time that doesn’t appear to be more relevant than any other before plunging into boyhood days? Is this, then, the rock and roll “life” style. In fact, Keith Richards doesn’t portray his drug taking as a means to induce extreme behaviour at all, or to reach a different level.  Instead, drugs have the function to bring him to a state of normality. He also shies away from mind altering drugs altogether, though he lets us know that he can handle those, too, of course. The extremes of drug portrayed here lay in the difficulties in supply and with the law, not with the drug taking itself. So, the opening chapter is beguiling because when you get past the weed smoke screen, you actually see it for what it is, a musician’s book. It pays homage to the music and the musicians who have inspired him, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters amongst others, not to mention countless session musicians. Even if you can’t play the guitar, then you are going to learn about open chord techniques and be told about the pleasure it gave him to finally discover the secret of a certain riff he had heard that had eluded him for decades. Sometimes it feels as if he is telling you all the other stuff, the stories about his relationships, affairs and near misses with weapon loaded military vehicles, so that he can slip in the musical education he really intended. It was impressive, and wasn’t what I had expected. I admit, I had underestimated "Keef". By the time the book club met, it wasn’t surprising though that no one had finished the book yet. Some were confused, myself included:”I can’t quite work it out, is Brain Jones dead by Chapter 5, or is that still to come?” , “Who is that man in chapter 6, he didn’t really explain, but here is his name again?” “Oh, isn’t that the third or fourth time he’s said that?”

Luckily the book is so long, and the chapters so few, that it is beyond any normal person’s capacity to answer those questions, so that Keith Richard’s can be given the benefit of the doubt.