Album of the Month: FALLEN TREES by Lubomyr Melnyk

I only came across Lubomyr Melnyk at some point in 2015, when he released the masterly Rivers and Streams. The music felt fresh, intoxicating. I did not care what piano-playing records he held (something to do with Melnyk's extraordinary pace), but I absolutely loved the gutsy minimalism of such extended pieces as "Parasol" and "The Amazon". 

His playing is not especially subtle (though his melodies often are) but pounding and assertive. With Fallen Trees, his latest album, I expected to be swept away by the seamless torrents of notes I came to love on his earlier records (his back catalogue is well worth exploring). I was not disappointed.

Even if there was some slight surprise during the opening "Requiem for a Fallen Tree" that features atmospheric female singing that wouldn't have been out of place in a Henryk Goretski symphony. Melnyk's piano, though, is unmistakable. The singing would return later on, for the final suite, but mostly it's that piano that achieves otherworldly beauty on "Barcarolle" (I challenge you to name a 2018 melody as perfect as that) and equally otherworldly speed on "Fallen Trees, Pt. II: Existence".

This is charismatic playing, you won't confuse Melnyk's technique with anyone else's. Fallen Trees (I haven't mentioned the concept but that's merely because the music stands so tall on its own) is a great addition to his highly consistent body of work. A top 10 album of the year for me, easily.

The First Noel

One of the most transcendental moments in my life took place in Cambridge three or four years ago. It was Christmas time, and as I was walking through this fairly dark and gloomy city (having downed two great cocktails and being the right side of tipsy), I heard the sounds of a children's choir singing "The First Noel". I followed the sounds and at some point stepped into the open doors of St. Mary's Church. I had never been cynical about Christmas music, but this was beyond mesmerising. In the end, I stayed until the end... Merry Christmas!

Book review: GRANT & I by Robert Forster

'We were making music and living lives that demanded strings'


With time, you discover a certain homogeneity about the figures which have inspired you. Such homogeneity is comforting. It makes sense of the world and helps you be part of it. When Christopher Hitchens writes about his mother in the brilliant Hitch-22, it is this great advice which seems most prescient and hard-hitting: 'The biggest crime is to be boring'. Likewise, the closest that Robert Forster comes in Grant & I to the distillation of life's greatest lessons is when he makes the deceptively simple appeal of 'Don't be bland'. Now if only you would listen.

That Grant & I, Robert Forster's celebrated memoir, is such a great artistic achievement should not come as a surprise. The man is a full-fledged music writer who has written a fair amount of essays and reviews for various Australian publications (lovingly compiled in The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll from 2009). In fact, it would be true to say that Robert Forster writes this book the way he writes his songs. The lines are memorable, intelligent, charismatic. The lines stay with you.

Quite simply, Forster writes with great wit. His style is droll but never dry. There's a lot of emotional substance to Grant & I, and while my eyes carefully dissected those early pages about first books ('literature instilled a creative impulse not an academic one') and first records (John Fogerty was a childhood hero), it's the unassuming appearance of Grant McLennan after a drama class that resonates the most. Forster paints a poignant portrait of a life-long music partner, describing the charming detachment, the unabashed ways and the bohemian habit of lying at home in bed all morning, with cold milk and film magazines (Grant was a cinema connoisseur). The prose manages to be both beautiful and raw, poetic and precise. There is a great story about Grant driving the car for the first time and being genuinely surprised when it stopped at some point. As Robert puts it, 'he probably thought you could drive the car forever'. 

If you go into Grant & I looking for music stories, there are plenty of those. Continuous troubles with labels, recording sessions with Orange Juice, sharing a London apartment with Nick Cave, playing tennis with Dave McComb, etc. Most importantly, though, you will find fascinating tales of creative torment (didn't you always want to find out how on Earth he came up with "Draining the Pool for You"?) and even an odd songwriting master class ('you didn't need much instrumentation if you had interesting lyrics and hooky chord changes'). It's exciting to see that it was all there from the start, these shades of future songs, this desire to be both provocative and successful. All through the book, you can't but sense a certain undeniable consistency that only comes to the best of us. Quite a bit of luck, too, but mostly just wild desire and sheer songwriting talent. 

Forster doesn't try to romanticise anything and he can be brutally honest on occasion (those Geoff Travis pages have a lot less glamour than some of Robert's dresses from the late 80s). But equally, there is little false modesty about the music. 'The Go-Betweens were a rare thing', he writes, quite truthfully, 'a faberge egg, and had to be treated as such'. But there is bitterness, too, and Forster can't suppress that sense of unfulfilled potential that always hovered about the band. Intelligent pop music. 'Striped sunlight sound'. Verlaine plus Byrne. As he asks, quite rhetorically, about a missed chance to break America, 'How do we sell this to Idaho?'

The beautiful lines abound. My favourite comes early in the book, and has to do with Robert's fixation with his looks: 'When I hold a hairdryer, it's the only thing that feels as natural in my hands as a guitar' (actually, there was an early dream of becoming a barber). Also, this: 'The Godots (an aborted idea for the band's name) - a band everyone's been waiting for'. And this: 'The months dragged on a cabin-fever diet of Brussel sprouts - the vegetable, like the work of Dickens, another thing I can never go back to'. Elsewhere, this gorgeous one-liner: 'Never hurry a woman applying makeup'. File alongside such well-recognised classics as 'Never love a man who has no sister'. 

But running through the heart of this book there is a relationship of great love, frustration, intensity. 'We created the most romantic thing two heterosexual men can, a pop group'. It sounds both whimsical and deadly serious, and not any less so than when he compares Grant to a Chagall painting at the end of the book. And his spirit, 'blithe, blind, full of self-possession'. And those heartbreaking final pages, the most horrifying being the one which contains the description of an empty house following Grant's death. Bizarrely, it so happened that I was reading these pages on a bus, going out of town, just as Grant's "Threshold" started playing in my headphones. Could be a miracle. Could be a great work of art. But having finished this book, I think it was both.  

travelling notes (lxxviii)

Money isn't worth anything when you travel. You spend it and you don't look back. Because if you do, those sinister foreign cash machines could easily kidnap you right from the street and demand no ransom for your poor soul. 

Fatwa and Roald Dahl

You can have your hobbits and your underage wizards all you want. Roald Dahl was the writer of my childhood. Not even Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. Not Matilda. Not BFG. Rather, it was "Man from the South". "Pig". "The Great Switcheroo". Come to think of it, My Uncle Oswald was where I got my first sexual education, and "Lamb to the Slaughter" was where I learned about the craft of writing a short story. 

A childhood that was seriously compromised years later, the day that I found out about fatwa against Salman Rushdie. This despicable act should have put an end to human dealings with any form of religion, but in fact it had its vocal supporters not just among Muslims but in the western world, too. And while I never cared for John le Carré (The Little Drummer Girl made little impression on me), Roald Dahl was a different story altogether. Here was someone who shaped my formative years a lot more than I cared to admit.

Yet what was I supposed to make of him, in the post-fatwa world? Dahl endorsed this vile condemnation (which was basically an incitement to murder) of an artist whose guilt consisted in writing a novel. It was a huge blow, and I had no idea how to reconcile this shameful fact with my love for Roald Dahl the writer. Later on, I would learn to separate biography from work (I would enjoy some of Ezra Pound's poems and I would rewatch those early films by Nikita Mikhalkov), but at the time the defence mechanisms just weren't there.

The question of how to treat an artist's work in view of their life remains a key one. And I think I did get to the bottom of it a few years later, in a London bookstore. I found the Salman Rushdie section (being a fan of Midnight's Children as well as his short story collection East, West), and saw one book missing. It was of course The Satanic Verses. By that time, Mohammad Khatami had spoken about the fatwa being 'finished', and yet the novel was nowhere to be seen. I kept looking and in the end I dug out The Satanic Verses from under a few layers of other books. 

I read it soon afterwards, and loved it so much that years later, when I finally had the courage to reread "Galloping Foxley", I did so with ease. The short story did not produce any fresh stirrings inside (none of Dahl's work ever would), although I did admire the twist at the end. It was a good twist, but it only remained relevant within the context of my first encounter with Roald Dahl.

Pete Shelley (1955-2018)

Pete Shelley was a great songwriter. In my world, Buzzcocks were everything that was good about punk, and I could never forget those long months that I obsessed over Singles Going Steady and Another Music in a Different Kitchen. "What Do I Get". "Why Can't I Touch It". "Orgasm Addict" on repeat.

Whatever happened to twin sets?

Whatever happened to hi-fi?

Whatever happened to TV sex?

Whatever happened to you and I?

Effortless, melodic genius - Pete Shelley was responsible for some of the greatest punk songs ever written. It's a sad day, and he will be missed.