The work if dull was easy and air conditioned. I smoked then and going out for a puff every hour or so meant stepping into heat so strong you met it with a shiver like standing near a bonfire. An admin staffer took me aside and explained that a man smoking and pacing outside a family planning centre was not a good advertisement so I went to the fire escape and talked with some of the doctors and nurses and learned more about terminations than I'd ever asked.
I was having some trouble finding some form in a play I was trying to write when I finally got round to watching a documentary about Robert Crumb I'd taped from the ABC. The morning after that I stopped at the shopping centre news agent and bought a sketch pad, pencils, rubber and sharpener. Instead of just smoking during the breaks and lunch I started drawing the troublesome story and it started working as pictures. The next point of trouble with it is that it wasn't any good so I started another one. By the end of the week I had a short comic.
At the end of the first week I was best man at a friend's wedding which broke things up but the heatwave ground on. Trains were cancelled due to the danger of overheated tracks. When the trains did turn up their windows had been opened and by the end of the day were like fan forced ovens. Forty-plus minutes of that and the swelter at Flinders St Station is a relief. On the way home one afternoon I stopped at the complex's record shop and did something I'd kept putting off and bought a copy of Dummy.
Train heat home. I was filling a small jug with ice and water and trying to do something clever by putting a fan heater with the heat turned off just above it. It was good if you put your hand into the air stream but failed beyond that throw. Eventually, I was so plagued by images of electricity generation in the La Trobe Valley that I just kept the room closed tight against the desert heat and sweltered, sipping on ice water. Then I put this album on.
From the first big boomy chords of the Fender Rhodes piano you know you can relax. By that I don't mean ease back on your pillow and close your lids with a big Mantovani beam. A few crow like turntable scratches and a big tom turbulance and we're on. A thin voice, female tells of a heartbreak or trauma but keeps the facts of the case to herself. A skeletal finger or two of tremolo guitar and theremin reinforce the secrecy, telling us it's there but refusing us entry. So we have to start imagining. Imagination on that level of intensity takes work, concentration. Soon, the heat is something that happens to someone else. So, before I know it, from those first cucumber cool arpeggios, I'm relaxing.
A sampled or real cembalo jangles over the big picked bass intro of Sour Times, like a John Barry scored spy movie from the 60s. Nobody loves me. It's true ... not like you do. The girl who always gets it in the third act of a Le Carre or Deighton tale is singing this. We still don't know what it's about which means we have to make our own pictures and they are not fun but explode with style.
After this song I can't reliably name any titles except for It's a Fire and the final two. The association of title to song works differently on this album to most. When you first learn that Led Zep's Black Dog is called that you don't forget because there is no obviously relation between it and the sexrock words of it or its massive cathedral of riff. The jarring difference between title and sound aids the recollection. But the titles of Dummy's songs like Roads, Numb or Strangers could equally apply to any of the tracks. I remember It's a Fire because the song opens with those words and I was obsessed with it for days. Glory Box I remember because it was the famous one from the album and Biscuit probably because it came before Glory Box. But the others are so vaguely related to their music as to suggest the titles were the last thing added to them and only when the cover art needed them.
But the titles don't shed any light on the meanings or themes of the songs any more than the lyrics themselves which contain no clear definition. If they did they'd just be songs. This is not an album of songs as much as atmospheres with entrances and exits. Some form tableaux and others have their own movement but few behave like pop songs with melodic tension in the verses broken by elating choruses. There's nothing to be gained by matching up song to title; this is more a muted freak show or ghost train: you pay and enter and later emerge, chilled, wiser.
I choose the term atmospheres carefully. I have a few of my own that can occur to me like real memories. They are event free but groan with mood, a collection of images and sensations that almost stand in for real settings where things appropriate to their moods took place. One is a kind of large European manor house in grounds so expansive that it is probably rural. It is very green. The air is cool to the point of chill. The light is bright overcast. Someone has got out of a large black car in the long gravel driveway. There is a sense that some family event is happening at the house, perhaps outdoors, invisibly on the other side of the house. There is a sizeable copse of trees in front of the house. That's where I am, watching without intent. I'm choosing not to go and join the festivities.
I recently thought to draw this and in planning the picture I reversed its construction and identified it part by part. It's an assembly of moods, memories direct and indirect. My first memory is from infancy. I'm lying on a blanket at a picnic in a shady park. There's a kind of event going on around me. I recall the sound of bagpipes which would have been military (my hometown remains one of the largest military centres in the country). It's cool and green. The mood of mystery movie comes from mystery movies I saw while young but also from any number of images from the kind of urban sophisticate magazines my mother subscirbed to. From this and a range of other sensations I have built a kind of fantasy memory setting. The mood has a sense of intrigue but no negative emotion.
The other notable setting has even less definite place to it but its mood is stronger. The entire thing is set beneath a thick, unbroken cloud cover. It's cold. I see tall tin windmills, abandoned wooden buildings, wastelands, lonely country roads harsh with crow caws, wire fences. I hear distant effects of wind, loose metal banging, blown foliage. The images have colour but it is that of new, wet mud. There is a formless malevolance here, something that never takes action but much that has. There has been cruelty and torture here.
This is easily disassembled by direct memory of the farmland and country around Townsville and the weather is typical turn of the year wet. The fear and malevolance arise from the atrocity case that affected the entire district when I was a boy. Look up the MacKay girls case along with Arthur Stanley Brown and you'll find the details. A double rape and murder of children left ineptly re-clothed in a ditch outside the city. It's hard even today to think of this locale and its muddy colour without that phantom reappearing. This is where I went when I first heard Dummy. Even now, so long after that first hearing and further experiences of the album as part of the urbanity toolbox of its time, I cannot avoid that setting. It's behind every door, through every window.
Dummy's scenes can gather like collages of instruments like It's a Fire or just pump away like machines as you walk past them. When there are riffs they sound sampled, clipped from other magazines and pasted. Other sample material is warped and stretched or squashed into a higher pitch so that it can sound like wild shadowy animals or exotic birdlife. Old Fender Rhodes electric piano, blackfaced Fender amp tremolo on skeletal guitar lines from the heart of espionage, string sections bursting into the room which might or might not be synthesised or especially recorded, muted trumpets from old jazz; a treasurehouse of musical scraps reassembled for the eeriest show on the carnival midway. Through it all Beth Gibbons wails, whispers, croons and coos fragments of messages or old letters, some of them sound like they've been found at crime or suicide scenes.
Despite this, and the mental landscape I described before, Dummy is not a gloomy or dour musically. Coming near the beginnings of trip hop and from its geographical centre of Bristol, U.K. it helped forge the musical approach of a generation and was as de rigeur to the young innercity consumer as Tricky's Maxinequay just before it and Sinatra's Songs for Swingin' Lovers had decades before.
Trip hop was the U.K.'s answer to the backings to American hip hop. For over a decade the rappers were backed by some of the most inventive approach to musical construction since the asoprtion by psychedelia of the experiments of Stockhausen, Harry Partch and John Cage. Electronically centred, its pallets were effectively infinite; from metal to bebop to classical to exotic, nothing was beyond the reach of a hip hop record and they took us of journeys to distant suns. And that's before you get to all that pesky rapping.
The Brit response was similar to when U.K. bands took blues and rock and added classical, music hall, noise and musique concrete in the 60s. Ditch the non-applicable gansterism and politics and put melody on the top of it. And slow it down, what is this, a washing machine convention? Trip hop is a Euro distillation of an American agression, a process which inevitably adds the melancholy that the local weather alone demands. Dummy outdid Massive Attack and Tricky at their own game by adding settings that would only have diminished by overdefinition. What was left was doggedly pursued whimsy held in check by Gibbons' often brittle abstractions delivered with either icy detatchment or what feels like accurately remembered pain and fear.
A friend of mine said it well once when he described hearing Portishead over his shoulder at pubs, venues and parties but not up close. That's the difference. When you do lie back and step inside this album it wastes no time in taking control. You are not always led where you would willingly go if spruiked in at various points in the middle of the walk-through but when you enter into their dingy light and shadow you emerge feeling a little braver. There is much scarier music than this but little of it has so much cinema and so little theatre as this. There's the difference. It's a movie set in a carnival show not the show itself. The latex monsters in fluid filled jars, the leering hybrids in straw and tableaux of cruelty are experienced at a remove which might involve more substantial monstrosity at the next cut.
Dummy is one of the most evocative albums I have ever heard. It has the power of an Eraserhead and the musicality of the record box in the best op shop in the world. No music outside of something that has known the suffering of a Shostakovich or the starscapes of a Nick Drake comes close to forcing its evocations upon its listeners as this. It never fails me, even when I don't willingly start its tour from the opening blue grey Fender Rhodes to the sudden dubby echo of Gibbons yelling this is the beginning of forever and ever near the very end as the even bigger drum sound leads over an abyss. It so completely outstripped its many imitators that not even Portishead could recapture its exact blend in their increasingly sparse following catalogue. With the kind of mercy that it never displays itself, Dummy is one of a kind.
