FILESUM IMYCIN, part twelve
Blame it on the Bell boy...
From this point on, my personal musical history becomes part of the shared history of filk fandom in Britain, and so will not be news to most people who read this. Besides, I've gratified my bloated ego altogether too much already. (If anyone wants me to talk about any part of it, do email me a question and I'll answer it in a subsequent page.)
But what was Mike Oldfield doing all this while?
Well, he'd done his rebirthing, which I believe had forced him into an artificial state of "balance" that wasn't his own. He'd put out a succession of albums that were merely outstandingly good, which I had heard bits of but hadn't at that point been particularly grabbed by. (I wanted another Ommadawn.) He'd found out that the arrangement he'd had with Richard Branson, whether by design or simply because nobody had been paying much attention, redounded far more to Branson's financial benefit than to his own, and was still legally binding up to the next album. He had built up a nice head of angst. And he'd got fed up with twiddling about with computers, and he wanted to do some actual hands-on music for a change.
So he made Amarok.
Amarok is a journey from a bad place to a good place. I can't put it any more clearly than that. The opening, with those itching, scuttling guitars in 7/8, is obviously a bad place to be, a crowded, dirty, smelly place of depression and rage; the ending is pure joy blasting into infinite space in the greatest lightshow ever. I'm not going to analyse the whole piece section by section; that's been done already, at tubular.net. I might try and write the story one day, unless someone does it first, but the fact is it's already been told, in the music, and probably can't be told any better any other way.
It's not an easy piece to get to know, or to love. There are no clear breaks in it, there's no clearly discernible structural pattern, and there are an awful lot of extraneous noises, including Janet Brown being Margaret Thatcher (though that's worth it for the bit where she inadvertently dances out of what one hopes is a very high window) and a lot of miscellaneous clicks and whirs ("contents of aeromodeller's toolbox"). If you want to get close to it, you have to be able to turn (emotionally speaking) on a sixpence; up, that is, to the point where the African drums start. From then on it's a long, glorious run up to the final explosive climax, with two extra high points on the way.
My star sign is Sagittarius (pause for sceptics to groan) and so I have been interested in centaurs for much of my life. I like centaurs in general (apart from the stuff that got dredged up about the time that Order Of The Phoenix came out, about what might have happened to Umbridge when they dragged her off; classical roots or not, my centaurs don't do that kind of thing, thank you kindly). When I heard Ommadawn for the first time, the images it conjured up were of a centaur. In Amarok, he's forgotten what he is, and he's stuck in this world where nobody gives him enough room to move or time to think. By the end of it, he's found his way back to his own world and kind, and he's free.
But enough of this maundering. Oldfield is Taurus, if I remember rightly, not Sagittarius, and he thinks in pure music, not tawdry and derivative words. Amarok is a work that many of my friends either hate or simply don't care for. (Contrived, certainly, but a lot less tinkly.) And that's okay.
One more thing, though; a quote from the man himself:
I hadn't heard that quote when I told Talis that what I wanted to do was "kick-ass New Age music" and then floundered helplessly when she asked me what I meant.
Talis...this is what I meant. (I'd like to have found some of the ending, but there isn't one...oh, here you go. Try not to see centaurs...and don't worry about it if you don't. It's just a story, innit?)
AND THE REST...WHERE ARE THEY ALL NOW?
Classical music is still pretty much what it used to be, so I haven't found much new there. A friend introduced me to Carmina Burana, and I like that a lot, but I continue to find Mahler too...something or other, or else not...thingy...enough. I don't know. I think my classical tastes are pretty much settled.
Of the bands of my youth, Genesis have given up being Genesis. Mike and the Mechanics have done some good stuff, as has Tony Banks. Yes is still going, though their last album Magnification was a while ago, and they seem to have split and reformed again, possibly several times. Renaissance had a, er, renaissance a while back, but I think are probably no more. The Enid are still going, having gone through various phases, and I hope for great things. But these people are a lot older than me, and one can't expect them to keep going for ever.
But prog rock is not dead (take that, Johnny Rotten). There have been groups like Marillion and Pallas keeping the flame alive, and now there are loads. Tangent (managed, apparently, by a friend from the Enid days), the Flower Kings, Frost* (my brother likes them), Arena, Transatlantic and a host of others are still playing melodically interesting music, and a little way over in the metal camp there have been bands like Nightwish and Epica. Qntal, from Germany, have done some lovely stuff with mediaeval sounds.
And my tastes have broadened a bit more. The Countess likes Queen and Bon Jovi, and I've come to see that there's a lot more to their music than I had thought. Film and telly music is also flourishing, with people like Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer, and the best thing about nuWho was the second version of Murray Gold's reinvention of the theme.
Filk keeps on growing, with exciting new artists coming along in Britain, America, Germany and probably a host of other places, and the old guard continuing to develop their musicianship and lyrical genius. The world is full of great music, far more than one person could ever hope to keep pace with, though it's fun to try.
And I? I continue to trudge along in the shadow of these giants, the ones who make their living by it and the unjustly less well known ones whom I call friends, picking up odd scraps and doing my twiddles when I can. I have now, thanks to my Year Of Living Dangerously (another story), more musical resources than I could ever have dreamed of back when I was pedalling my heart out on that old harmonium; the inspiration to use them is capricious and fleeting and usually strikes when I'm nowhere near, but I haven't given up on it yet.
If anyone has any questions, I'll try to answer them in part 12a or thereafter. In the meantime, may all of us who are in a bad place find our way sooner or later to a good place.
