Total Assault On The Culture – November 2021

This month has been multi-drop van delivery driving all the way in an attempt to turn mileage into music. A few days ago, I found myself loading bathroom supplies into a hire van at the back of a warehouse in pouring rain, whilst discussing abstract mathematics and the life and works of Robert Anton Wilson by phone as confused warehouse staff looked on wondering who on earth I was talking to? Sometimes I don’t understand how anything happens, and the only thing to do is climb behind the wheel and drive away before questions get asked. Work on Cosmic Trigger III continues at the new Framework Recording Studios, we are down to the last 50 pages. I’ve conjured up some music from out of nowhere by accident, at last. The phone has started to ring, the emails are flying back and forth again. Plans and plots are under construction. A big thank you to all Iron Man Records Patrons who continue to support the cause. Without you all work would stop. Here are a few things Iron Man Records has been invited to work on…..come and see…..you have to stay positive at all times. There’s work to do. I couldn’t possibly make this up.

World fusion pioneers Transglobal Underground will be performing live on stage for the first time since 2019. The first concert will take place at The Jazz Cafe, London, on Saturday, November 6th, 2021 with Natacha Atlas and the Dub Colossus Sound System.

The concert will be held in honor of original Transglobal Underground member, bassist guitarist and producer, the late great Nick ‘Count Dubulah’ Page, who passed away earlier this year. On what would have been his birthday, Transglobal Underground will be having a special celebration with original members Natacha Atlas, Goldfinger and Larry Whelan, who will join the regular Transglobal Underground crew to celebrate his memory, and debuting onstage one or two songs from the most recent Transglobal Underground album, “Walls Have Ears.”

In addition, members of Dubulah’s own band Dub Colossus will be playing a sound system set, with members of Transglobal Underground joining in.

Listen on Bandcamp:

John Murry is back with his third album and will be touring this side of the Atlantic. Support comes from the multi-instrumentalists Mostar Diving Club.

John Murry’s debut, 2013’s ‘The Graceless Age’, made many of that year’s Best Of lists. While it was his debut, Murry was already 34 and had recorded two albums with legendary Memphis singer-songwriter Bob Frank and an album of Waylon Jennings covers with Chuck Prophet.

List of tour dates in November:

Thurs 18 — Bristol, Hen and Chickens

Fri 19 — Brighton, Mid Sussex Hall

Sat 20 — Winchester, The Railway Inn

Sun 21 — London, The Grace

Mon 22 — Chester, St Mary’s Creative Space

Tues 23 — Nottingham, The Old Cold Store

Weds 24 — Liverpool, Outpost

Thurs 25 — Newcastle, Cluny 2

Fri 26 — Hebden Bridge, Trades Hall

Sat 27 — Glasgow, Audio

Sun 28 — Edinburgh, Voodoo Rooms

The tour showcases Murry’s new album, out now, ‘The Stars are God’s Bulletholes‘ which can be found here.

Full information and links to tickets can be found here https://www.johnmurry.com

Murry’s previous two albums had been responses to specific traumas: the centrepiece of his debut, ‘The Graceless Age’ — the astonishing ‘Little Colored Balloons’ — told of his near death from a heroin overdose; its follow-up, ‘A Short of History of Decay’, was recorded in the wake of Murry’s marriage failing. ‘The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes’, coming six years after Murry left the US for Ireland, is the result of a period of stability, though in Murry’s case it’s all relative (“I think a lot of what we call contentment is delusional,” he observes).

The result is a record that shares its predecessors’ lyrical ingenuity, but this time the sadness is shot through with humour, albeit a spectacularly black humour. “Of course I’d die for you,” opens the title track. “You’d watch me, wouldn’t you?” ‘I Refuse To Believe You Could Love Me’ has Murry venturing into the realm of unexplained disappearances — an English aristocrat and an Australian politician: “Lord Lucan, he could not tread water / Prime Minister Holt? He never came up for air.

The humour combines with seriousness, too. The album’s lead single, ‘Oscar Wilde (Came Here to Make Fun of You)’ is allusive and elusive, with Murry singing: “Tell me: what immortal hand or eye / Is gonna give a damn enough to cry / When every day is like huffing lighter fluid / Take me to Reading Gaol with Oscar Wilde / I’ll get used to it. / Lock me up in Clerkenwell prison / I’ll blow a hole right through it.” The playfulness is reflected in the video, directed by the actor Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones/Peaky Blinders/The Wire).

The seriousness comes from the song’s opening: “I bought fertiliser and brake fluid / Who in the hell am I supposed to trust? / Sympathy ends in gas chambers / Oklahoma City shoulda been enough.” It’s one of the many moments on the record where violence — emotional or physical — rears up, but there’s a point to that: “All of the violence in the songs, it’s not to glorify it. Oklahoma City really should have been enough. These things are going on and on in the United States.”

There’s a reason for the volatility in Murry’s writing. “Violence has been a big part of my life,” he says. “It has been inflicted on me in ways that I was unable to control as a teenager, and as a child. I grew up in a place that was violent. I grew up in Mississippi. I grew up in a way that forced me, in order to survive in a culture like that, to posture. You don’t realise until later that that becomes a part of the way you see the world. The world becomes this intrusive thing and you’re protecting yourself against it. I also realised early on that if you don’t fight you’re just going to have to fight more.”

Key to this was his relationship with his adoptive family (“They didn’t adopt me; they bought me. I had a very abusive childhood”), relatives of the writer William Faulkner, which led to the final verse of ‘Di Kreutser Sonata’: “I will prune this family tree / Cause there’s nothing left but greed / Blood money and property / Love doesn’t mean a thing / When your last name is Murry / And / Should been swindle.”

With such lyrical vulnerability, the need for trust when they recorded at Rockfield Studio near Monmouth in Wales early in 2020 was total, and Murry found that bond with producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, Eels, Aldous Harding, This Is the Kit). “Trust matters a great deal,” he says. “All my mad ideas, John would facilitate those fully, and get the value of them.”

Together they brought out what was needed on ‘The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes’: the simple pleasures of playing guitar figures, of working with sympathetic people, of playing music that has the same ragged looseness of Murry’s inspirations and fellow Mississipians RL Burnside and Greg Cartwright (Reigning Sound, Oblivians). No one would mistake it for a blues or garage punk record, but there’s that same organic sense to its rumbling guitars and contained wildness, nurtured by Parish.

One of the record’s delights is a stark and subdued version of Duran Duran’s ‘Ordinary World’, and it’s not surprising, perhaps, that a song about someone looking for the ordinary world in order to learn to survive might resonate with Murry. Has he found his own ordinary world? “In a sense I have,” he says. By which he means he has accepted his place in life is to make music, and what is important is the making of it, rather than what results might be. “I realise now I can come back from things like trauma and the decisions I have made. Ordinary for me has become just a matter of accepting who I am relative to what I do. I’ve pulled out each and every one of my ribs at night when I sleep. I don’t need God to do it.

So, living in the ordinary world, does John Murry think he will ever be happy? “In everyday life, contentment is a goal. But William Faulkner said happiness is for vegetables. Is it? That would be incredibly bleak, and I don’t think it’s true. But is it not egoistic for us to seek contentment when we live in a world where we know there are children who are being paid to kill other people by American private corporations? I do think that as the world becomes a place that we look out into and see as being disrupted and as disrupting more and more of our lives, that we retreat into this idea of ‘find your bliss’. And I’m not sure how close that is to contentment or happiness. That’s the ordinary world.”

Iron Man Records works with Simon Reeves at Framework Recording Studios, a purpose built recording studio based in the heart of Birmingham. Simon specialises in recording, mixing and mastering.

Framework Recording Studios
UNIT 8A, Western Industrial Complex, Western Road, Birmingham, B18 7QD
Bookings: Telephone (UK+44) 07790 158210 email [email protected]

Iron Man Records works with Blotto, a purpose built rehearsal studio based in the heart of Birmingham. Music Rehearsal Rooms are available by the hour. Lock ups and Storage for musical equipment available by arrangement.

Rehearsals
Specially designed and acoustically treated rehearsal rooms equipped with full backline and PA allowing you to rehearse in a comfortable environment.

Lock ups
The lock ups are creative spaces designed for professional musicians that require a 24hr rehearsal space exclusively for their own projects.

Storage
Storage is available on request for all your musical equipment to save you having to bring everything with each visit.

Blotto
UNIT 8A, Western Industrial Complex, Western Road, Birmingham, B18 7QD
Bookings: Telephone (UK+44) 07877 680829

Best option: go to RadioFreeAmsterdam.org and click on the arrow at 24/7 Stream to listen like a radio station.

John Sinclair

www.johnsinclair.us
www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.org
www.theJohnSinclairFoundation.org