One aspect of British culture, folk and a little 'esoteric, that has always fascinated me is the mild yearning for the past vanished the desire to take refuge in nature and immerse themselves in almost medieval existence, away from the depredations of urban life. I remember the owner of the London house where I was host a summer many years ago, a man in his fifties, he worked full-in-bag, ironic, very lonely, he wanted to change jobs, and especially did not want to reach the host family in Tuscany do not know what nobiluccio local because his dream was different: to spend the holidays-if-not life in the old semi-abandoned family home, lost in the countryside of Somerset. His desire was both a geographical and temporal: a return to the past, the rural life, the summers of his childhood. In the evening we played backgammon in the living room, luxurious in the heart of the borough of Westminster, and I looked like a folly than a man who had a five-storey apartment of its kind in one of the most chic of the city told me about his bizarre desire to leave everything and go back to live in the house without white goods, no hot water, no comfort. At the time I thought English was the usual rich and eccentric, a bit 'a dandy little' radical-chic, partly because the signs were serious, precise and consistent: the unkempt , clothing "well shabby, "the taxi as the only means of transport, the carpet on the stairs full of holes, the pride of living in the only street in London with the lights still oil (sic), the unadorned room, next to the portrait of the '600 metal sculpture of contemporary art, the bathroom entirely covered with wood, a wife who went around barefoot football matches with employees in Battersea Park, Central butler. Only now I understand that it would be simplistic to call it that way, but in fact, his restlessness to experience the world differently, more simple, it was true, and he was just a person off season.
no coincidence Out of season was the title the year after my brief stay in London Beth Gibbons gave his solo album so beautiful and so out of fashion. A hard-and-interpreter of which I was in love for a long time (if I raise my head on the wall still stands the huge posters of its cover), the atmosphere is so autumnal, rarefied, dismayed, as well yet far-shades-so close to that of Portishead. Beth Gibbons abandoned for several years his group, the trip-hop, the glitter, the triviality of the music market, the city , noise, and retired to a world apart, the Devon countryside, in contact with the mysteries of nature, concentrated on writing songs slender, delicate and desolate as Mysteries , Drake (homage to an author whose echo is clearly detectable in disk) or Sand River . Just before, a hymn to the bucolic serenity of exile, with the sounds of the forest at the beginning, the words fade in the summer and the video introduces the listener in the mood of the folk album, taking it hands as if he were crossing a field abandoned beside a river, to see the sunrise:
" God knows how I adore life / When the wind turns on the shores lies another day / I can not ask for more / And When the time bell blows my heart and I have scored a better day, well nobody made this war of mine / And I enjoy the moments That / A Place of love and mystery / I'll be there anytime .
Out of Season is an album that reconciles with his life and at the same time makes you rise to the agony of change, life, because it is a disk memory, the past, on memories, which are not mere imitation of places and moments already lived, but suffered a simulacrum of experiences that continue to live. The voice of Beth Gibbons is changing as are the memories and leaves in autumn, funny time of year , and sometimes broken, sometimes clear, sometimes desperate ("there'll be no blossom on the trees / no blossom on the trees "), sometimes whispered, sometimes sweet, sometimes soul, always in chiaroscuro, and the music is dry, essential, terribly intimate, with flashes shades lit by solitary (woodwinds, strings, harmonica, a hint of electronics), always evocative. Listening to Out Of Season is uncomfortable, lonely and fabulous, as is ; live in a semi-abandoned house without appliances but with the forest, the river, the sky and the horses.
Beth Gibbons and my host in London are an expression of that taste everything English in the past, nature, nostalgia, freedom to escape, get lost, remember. Followers of dandyism that was a statement in coming-with-option by the company and get satisfaction from this desire. I think Gerald Brennan, the English writer who in 1919, at age 27, took refuge in Andalusia, in the small rural village of Yegen, in the sierra of the Alpujarras of Granada. A Yegen stayed there for quite some time, conquered by the simplicity of the people and of life, through his days to recover that education they thought they had lost for not having gone to university, and write. This experience, which now smells of farm families, but that time was a little fun, trace remains in the beautiful South From Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village , Brennan wrote in 1957, when he had already returned home.
In any case, who in the world of English music, has embodied this spirit in the most radical was undoubtedly Vashti Bunyan, who one day got fed up of being a promise of pop and started walking towards the north, to return to the scene after more than thirty years. In 1968, while the intellectuals with clams that still haunts us swelled the rive gauche (God damn them all), Vashti Bunyan misunderstood abandoned his pop career in London and began his pilgrimage through Great Britain, together with the boy he loved, a horse and a dog (and soon a child), sleeping in a van, with the aim to reach to the Hebrides, and stopped them in the north of the north Scotland, of civilization, of its time. His ethereal debut album in 1970, Just Another Diamond Day , also a long off season, was too fragile for the real world, shone for a moment but he died soon after. Its 100 copies were soon sucked into oblivion. Yet, shortly before his career was about to take another turn. In 1965 he was undefeated through an actress friend of his mother, in the most powerful manager of the Rolling Stones, who had put her under contract to replace the hole left by the sudden abandonment of Marianne Faithfull. A Vashti was served reputation on a silver platter, in the form of a (really boring) song written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Some things just stick in your mind , his first single , which would be in the had to carve out a place in swinging London. Yet, you could see a mile away that this fashionable dress from pop singer was not suitable for a girl who pursued a career as cantatutrice, a rarity in those days. And so, for the "skinny art student with an old jumper with holes in it and a guitar slung over her shoulder ," as describes a number of The Wire a few years ago, it came time to figure out who was away from London.
Thus began his journey to the land, forests, rivers, rain, wind, silence, people are forgotten, all those things that you call them, if want, emotions (song that could very well have written Vashti Bunyan), no money, no assets, no nothing, no thoughts apart from feeding the horse away from the city, from household appliances, by the people, a history, for me, so deeply English, a long way of abandonment and disappointment with happy nostalgia told Timothy Grub :
"They lay there and dreamed of the days
When they'd roam / Up and down the hills of the North
countryside / With the dogs eating buttercups on the
waysude / And they'd wave goodbye to the cities " .
Today, my host in London continues to make money on the stock exchange, to enjoy his wealth and his habits, although there probably is not anyone to play backgammon in the night. At most, if not take it anymore to soppportare appliances that surround it, the daughters of consumerism and the social life of London Fashion Week organized by his wife, takes refuge in the basement, his reign of stacked books, tools and abandoned confusion varies , and carried away by memories of summers spent some natural in the old country house. Beth Gibbons is back to doing what made her famous, infusing the hardness of his melancholy industrial, electronic and spectral beautiful new-disc- Portishead, Third . Vashti Bunyan, after wandering for 24 years between Scotland and Ireland in 1992 has stopped at Edinburgh, where he still lives with her three children and a new husband (that other one will be lost to the way, maybe in some pub). In 2000 Diamond Day was reissued, making them known, finally, the good success he deserved. A few years ago he released his second album enchanted Lookaftering , faithful witness of his life super folk.
The thing that surprises me is that despite more than thirty years have passed, no trace of bitterness ripples of Vashti Bunyan's voice whispered. But basically, if you choose to live outside the season, the weather is as if they never passed.
0 comments:
Post a Comment