I'm always happy to go a long way with James Nice. At the boundaries of our musical knowledge and taste, we all need a guide. Nice’s assiduous and scholarly collections of 80s esoteria for his LTM label have introduced me, with their painstaking liner notes and careful programming, to some of the best young music of the period. Even though I was apparently awake at the time I still seem to have missed so much and a lot of it was sparklingly good - too good (as is so often the case) to be hugely popular at the time.
Nevertheless, I have had one little run in with RICHARD JOBSON’s work before. The LTM "10.30 On a Summer Night / An Afternoon in Company" CD was a highly variable set of works of the heart. I wasn’t sure.
So here we are again. With the first ten tracks of "The Ballad of Etiquette" we have a more single minded and consistent release, originally put out on Bill Nelson’s Cocteau label. Being LTM we have additional material too. In this case, pieces recorded for the Disques du Crepuscule label with the admirable TUXEDO MOON, and live recordings from Richard Strange’s Cabaret Futura in 1981.
"The Ballad of Etiquette" was conceived as a set of JOBSON'S poems set to music. Knowing that poetry can stand among the finest things in life I am afraid to say that my experience of reading Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Hughes and other members of Jobson's could-be pantheon leaves me a little aghast at the weakness of his writing. Coming so long before US black urban street taunts and rhyming broke through into rap and hip hop, Jobson couldn't have measured himself against Eminem, Kanye West or Saul Williams. But the contrast is not in his favour.
For one thing, his delivery is what they call “portentous”. It has a vocal drama of distended and distorted syllables, a uniquely odd version of a Scottish accent and a tendency to repeat unrepeatable lines in the style of the punk rock frontman he once was. Unbalanced, empty lines are usually discarded by poets, not repeated for emphasis. Where John Cooper Clarke charges through his (usually) smart l lines with enough energy to carry the listener through any slight lacunae, Jobson forever hangs on the brink, drawing every critical fibre in this listener’s body towards the most abject lines, like a would be suicide shouting "Watch me jump!" from the top of a small building. Through a megaphone.
To really count as poetry, writing needs to have some sort of flow. The sounds and unforced rhythm of the words and phrases should make it difficult not to be swept along. Poetry has its own music, however mournful, that sings as well as speaks.
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But not Jobson's. If he isn't famous for his poetry, a theory about his being ahead of his time cannot stand up to lines like the following:
“The French Vice Council [sic], he stands in the garden,
He calls for Anne Marie.
He cries. He cries “Anne Marie! Anne Marie I love you!
I love you Anne Marie!
Anne Marie!”
And so on for over eight minutes in "India Song", a sub-E.M.Forster ballad of love and yearning in a hot colonial climate.
The tedium of "India Song" is not made any more bearable by a repetitive and rather leaden piano intoning the chords from "House of the Rising Sun" with unsparkling clarinet improvisation busking along beside. This is as close to unlistenable as I have heard on any recording. The Crepuscule version at least drops the clarinet, clarifies the piano part and moves the words along a little more briskly with a hint of erotic tension becoming nearly audible. The words, sadly, are not revised. The third, Cabaret Futura, version of the wretched tale has the virtue of being two minutes shorter than the original. However, the words are incompetently improvised into shapes that nearly become interesting but end up in a mess of embarrassing approaches towards spiritual possession. Raving would at least have offered catharsis.
The lyric to "Etiquette" (at tracks 4 and 16) is read out to the accompaniment of some inelegantly played Debussy on piano. Elsewhere, predictably, there is some Eric Satie.
So, be warned. This CD will elicit extreme reactions from anyone with half an education in poetry or music. Those who are so well versed that they have become interested in the naïve and hapless might want to listen again. Many of the artier people who I meet at mainstream gigs would offer to break things if subjected to more than short bursts of this.
A harsh phrase like "repetitive pretentious guff" is not an objective statement. But it would at least be a starting point for a brief discussion of the CD’s merits. Do extreme reactions indicate virtue in the art? Possibly.
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