Month: March 2006 Page 1 of 3

I’ve been reading Sophie Calle’s “M’as-Tu Vue?” (“Do You See Me?”), a book that is entirely concerned with appearances & disappearances. The way that she tries to pin down chance, re-creating moments that never happened, taking the paths not followed, reminded me of Angela Conway, better known as AC Marias. Angela’s music took a similar approach —oblique strategies for a head-on world. Her haunting single, “One of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing)” has remained one of my favorite pieces of music ever since it was first released, back in 1989. The album continued her long-standing collaboration with Gilbert & Lewis of Wire, whom she’d worked with ever since her debut on their semi-legendary (and sadly out-of-print) collaboration P’O, back in 1980. She returned to offer vocal duties for the startling pair of releases the Wire compatriots completed as Dome (“1-2” & “3-4”).

She described her first single as “music to disappear to,” and she was enigmatic ever after, hiding behind the partially pseudonymous moniker “AC Marias” (Marias being her middle name) and describing herself as an “ex-babysitter, ex-girl, ex-traitor, on a mission to subvert the cretinous, moronic message of today’s music,” a statement she partially de-coded in a Melody Maker interview: “Ex-traitor I thought was quite funny, ‘cos there’s no such thing. Betrayal, whether it’s personal or political, sticks with you always. The ex-babysitter has two meanings: looking after somebody else’s kids, obviously, but it’s also spy slang for heavies who look after the defector in the safe house. I used to read that kind of John Le Carré spy fiction. I like the jargon. It’s intriguing.”

“Disappearance can be quite a powerful thing,” Conway said at the time of the title track, and later single. “To not be present can be more powerful than actually being present and proclaiming your identity as ‘woman’. That can be quite rigid, which is why people often say they don’t want to be categorised, because it can be confining.” The haunting video clip for the song (directed by Ms. Conway herself), followed a dancer through the countryside and far out to sea —an act of joyful abandonment that called to mind the bittersweet ending of Kate Chopin’s feminist novella “The Awakening.”

After that, AC Marias faded away, leaving Angela Conway the video director (who was responsible for clips for the Smashing Pumpkins, Nitzer Ebb, and McAlmont & Butler, among others). Whether she has any plans to return to music-making someday is a mystery, much like the woman herself.

AC Marias, “One of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing” [right-click-save-as, s’il vous plaît]

Dome, “Jasz”

Dome, “Cruel When Complete”

The Dome & AC Marias albums are available from Mutelibtech.

Photograph by Francesca Woodman.

Th’ Faith Healers
PA’s Lounge, Somerville
March 22, 2006

I don’t remember where I was when I first heard the hypnotic chaos of th’ Faith Healers. (Don’t ask about the ‘e’ if you know what’s good for you —it got traded early on to either thee Hypnotics or the Headcoatees, we’re not sure which.) But I’ve rarely fallen so hard or so utterly for a band after only one song. It was that immediate, as simple as singer Roxanne Stephen intoning, “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love.”

Repetition is one of the key ingredients of rock n’roll. Ask anyone from Gertrude Stein to Mark E Smith and they’ll tell you they dig it. Well, th’ Faith Healers honed repetition to a fine science. Over the course of four years, singles too numerous to mention, and two fantastic albums, the band kicked up a righteous racket —a furious, expressionistic squall. Their songs were built around monumental rhythmic codas, courtesy of the peerless rhythm section of drummer Joe Dilworth and bassist Ben Hopkins. Against this arresting backdrop, Tom Cullinan’s lead guitar held its own with a surprising amount delicacy, going into manic overdrive when need be but turning quiet and ringing when you least expected it.

I don’t know that I could tell you what they were “about” any more than I could explain why their gleeful, blistering brand of organic motorik stomp—a style that melded a kind-of angular, oddly articulate grunge to the clean, crisp rhythmic mantras of Krautrock— remains so compelling, more than ten years after their untimely breakup. Part of it was due to the fact that the band never once took itself too seriously. But credit also to the manic, charismatic energy of singer Roxanne Stephen, whose vocals could switchback from sweet and delicate to full-on shriek and back again.

I think my poor battered eardrums have only just now recovered from seeing th’ Healers, Band of Susans, and God Is My Co-Pilot all on one night, way back when. Which could only mean one thing: th’ Healers have reformed just in time.

I’m a little bit surprised to hear they’re playing at PA’s Lounge, way out in outer Somerville, rather than the more-expected Middle East (where they played their last time through Boston, a little more than ten years ago). The venue is a little hard to find and by the time we get there openers Bright are just finishing their set.

Luckily the band of the hour doesn’t make us wait too long. Once they start playing —ripping right into “This Time” with little fanfare— it’s like they’re picking right up where they left off, with the ineffable chemistry in place. Here’s where my critical brain shuts off, ‘cause I spend the rest of the breathless set grinning stupidly from ear to ear, screaming along to every word. And when I look around, I see everyone else is doing pretty much the same thing.

They play two sets (smoke break in the middle there). And, okay, I’m a little disappointed that they don’t play “Sparklingly Chime” (sigh) but they play “Heart Fog” (a joyful, poignant incantation) and their cover of Can’s “Mother Sky” (from whence record label Too Pure got its name & my first introduction to Can) so I can’t complain too much. It’s as sloppy and gleefully shambolic a set as you might expect (some wag in the front row yells out, “You sound like you haven’t played together in years!” after they flub a song), but their enthusiasm more than makes up for it. (And, really, you don’t go to a Faith Healers show looking for crisp, curt professionalism —the joy of their music is in its inherently exuberant, messy nature.)

Really, few things make me happier than the music of this band and seeing them again is even better than I thought it would be. I tell that to Tom afterwards and he looks a bit sheepish. Still tired from what must have been a whirlwind at SXSW, he remarks that there were enough British accents wandering the streets of Austin that, in his quasi-jetlagged state, it almost felt like home. (The sweltering, parched-earth, overrun-by-hipsters version of home?) I get the feeling he’d be just as happy to be back in London and I wonder if this is the last, all-too-brief re-appearance of th’ Healers. If so, I’m thankful I got to witness it.

***
Th’ Faith Healers Peel Sessions is out now on BaDaBing! Better yet, go see ‘em next week in NYC or Philly:

March 27th: Brooklyn, NY, Northsix
March 29th: New York, NY, Mercury Lounge
March 30th: Philadelphia, PA – The Khyber (w/The Nethers, The War On Drugs)
April 20th: London, England – 93 Feet East

For some fun reminiscing about the Sausage Machine club (where th’ Healers got their start), go here.Yes, I still have my membership card! For biographical background, visit Horst’s Faith Healers page, which has just about everything you’d want to know about the band and then some!

th’ Faith Healers, “Everything, All at Once, Forever (Dub Edit)” [right-click-save-as, s’il vous plaît]

th’ Faith Healers, “Curly Lips” (Peel Session, 1994)

Oh, the Fall. How can you not love them? Mark E Smith may have been spurred to form a band by seeing the Sex Pistols in Manchester, but you can’t imagine him pursuing any career path other than the one he’s on. (Although “career” sounds so …yuppie-ish, something MES is decidedly not. Pardon.) To paraphrase the late, great John Peel, the Fall may always be different (they’ve gone through more band members than Spinal Tap) but they’re always the same. MES’s intimidating presence is hard to live up to (to say the least), which may be why covering Fall songs is a dicey proposition. There’s the tricky diction for one thing, and the way it melds so unerringly with the angularity of the lead guitar. Thern there’s MES’s inimitable, splenetic delivery, which only the deeply foolhardy would try to imitate.

It takes a strong band to wrangle a Fall song out of the long shadow of the original. But it can be done, as Dymaxion and Terry Edwards prove here.

Dymaxion was a short-lived but fantastic NYC band whose songs had a marked Scwhitters quality of culling beauty out of junk —rarely has a retro-futuristic collage aesthetic yielded such playful, layered results. This Fall cover is from their marvelous Duophonic singles collection, “4+3=38.33.” The band does a brilliant thing here: they rework the song into a kind of 50s infomercial jingle for an alternate (possibly totalitarian) universe, taking the shambolic low-end pulse of the original and performing a most cunning feat of transubstantiation. “No cigarettes, no whiskey, no style.” intones a crisp voice, and the next thing you know, you’ve woken up on a tropical desert isle populated by smiling, blank-eyed faces, all of whom look at you with recognition but you’ve never seen them before in your life. Then you bump into Number 6 and you know something is very, very wrong…

I don’t know much about Terry Edwards other than he’s worked with Gothy divas Pinkie McClure & Lydia Lunch and improv genius Lol Coxhill; he was part of Blast First’s Disobey Club, and he was the band leader for the San Francisco premiere of the Tom Waits/Robert Wilson/William S Burroughs production The Black Rider (which featured Marianne Faithfull and Mary Margaret O’Hara in lead roles). I’m not even sure where this cover of the Fall classic “Totally Wired” came from (another bounty from the vast reaches of the internet?) but it’s become a favorite of mine. We all needed to hear the Fall tune as a dubtastic rave-up didn’t we? Surely.

The Fall, “U.S. 80s-90s”

Dymaxion, “U.S. 80s-90s”

The Fall, “Totally Wired”

Terry Edwards, “Totally Wired”

The Dymaxion collection is available from Duophonic Mail Order. You can order the Fall collections (including the excellent Rough Trade comp Totally Wired) via Other Music, the Rough Trade shops, and Twisted Village, among others. Terry Edwards CDs can be purchased via the Sartorial Records online store.