I will admit that I came to this album concept-first. There was a piece on French chanson music on SBS' much missed Eat Carpet showcase. Chanson just measn song but in French pop music it is equivalent to gentler, song-first fare. Former Dame Premiere Carla Bruni was a chansoner. So are Nouvelle Vague.
I was in before the first live clip in the piece. Why? Words. Nouvelle vague means new wave. New wave was the term used by journalists who though they were being moderne in their descriptions of punk and post punk music from the late seventies and early eighties. The duo at the centre of the project love British new wave music but are primarily into Bossa Nova, the Brazilian dance groove whose name in Portuguese means, say it with me, new wave. James Joyce would love this band.
The only thing absent from most of the commentary on the act and their album was its connection with the coinage of the term Nouvelle vage/new wave first came up in journalism to describe the films of a small group of French directors in the late fifties to the mid sixties. Figures like Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard were taking Hollywood conventions, cutting them up and collaging them to create a cinema both exciting of itself and directly adversarial to the old guard. As that was what happened with rock music in the UK in the late seventies, the term applied perfectly when taken off the shelf. Godard's erstwhile consort and Nouvelle Vague queen, Anna Karina was even on the cover art which looked like it had been through an injet printer whose cartridges were on low (just like the use of available light or still film stock in the new wave films back in the day). This band aimed to misbehave.
Misbehave they did, mining the rich sacred vein of punk and post punk and resetting all of it into chanson. But this was not the same thing as goofing around playing the Sex Pistols as reggae or Smoke on the Water as cocktail jazz. The local act Frank Bennet had recorded Radiohead's Creep as a big Vegas number which was a million times funnier that a bedroom guitarist's pisstake and was meant to be. Nouvelle Vague's purpose diverged wildly from this as they went in seach among the often belligerent material to look for the musicality in it and bring that out in a package that forced you to give the song a second thought.
Ok, so the version of Too Drunk to Fuck is fun and only meant to be fun. It sounds like a jokey afterthought in the studio. That was the track that the rougher necked and boganeering of the ancien regime latched on as evidence of the frivolity of the intent. But they weren't listening.
The track that shimmers out of the speakers and into your central nervous system is Tuxedo Moon's In a Manner of Speaking. The original is a self consciously forbidding number, a pressed metal cold synthesiser backing provides both the clanking rhythm and eerie curlew calls. A typically gorgeous-in-disguise male vocal describes a relationship in a cul de sac, even adding an emotionless spoken vocal for the final verse. The NV version starts with a nylon string guitar gently vamping the chords so fragilely they might collapse like a card house with nearest breath. Bass and percussion enter softly and take a seat by the door. Then the vocal in accented English begins in near stuttering inconfidence until the chorus lifts everything to clouds, taking full advantage of the melody of the original. This song tears your heart out. No joke.
See also, Psyche, Killing Joke's thrasher rendered more sinister here. The Sisters of Mercy's Marian passes clear of the old chorused bass and gated drums and stretches well beyond the horizon with a string figure that lowers you into a warm opioid bath which the original cannot match. The Cure's A Forest is not outdone but beautifully realised with less threat and more witness to something more chilling by the whispered straightness of the delivery. The Specials' Friday Night, Saturday Morning continues the oddly jaunty sadness of the original. And more and more and more, most of it serious as cats at play and like that often tearingly beautiful.
I was disappointed to find how much resistance this met with from the people I knew from the time of the originals of these songs, how conservatively they held to them and how dsigusted they were with the perceived travesty. The reaction seemed entirely based on the idea that it was a French pisstake on the superior British scene, the old do-Joy Divison as bluegrass turn. They were unresponsive to any argument that diverged from this, preferring the warmth of their exclusion.
These people who had smiled at Bananarama's drums and shouting version of the Pistols' No Feelings, the indy guitar retake of New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle, any number of synthpop reboots of soul or hippy like Tainted Love or California Dreaming frowned like old lawnproud pensioners at Nouvelle Vague's investigations. Well NV are now several albums into it and still exploring.
I saw them twice. First at Hamer Hall, set amid the splendour of the Arts Centre (just beneath the Awful tower) during the So Frenchy So Chic. There was a Citroen on display outside and staff in berets. The auditorium was full and the band played their record, it was fine until the encores when they ruined it by trying to rock out. One goose a few rows away yelled out a request half way through the set but was cowed by the more typically classical music opulence of the venue. "Too Drunk to F!" he cried, having paid a lot of money to do so.
I saw Nouvelle Vague again at the Prince of Wales. They stormed their own set without once trying to rock it. The crowd-participation favourite of getting everyone to yell "putain!" was presented like a staple joke but still funny. And then when they played In a Manner of Speaking, the singer clearly bristling and having to do it yet again relaxed into it and her voice filled the darkened room with pure aching light.
No comments:
Post a Comment