It’s Gone Pop Now: our new beat music column This week: we review the new LP by Croydon’s own psych-pop pilgrims, Spygenius
My name is Tom but that is what the house matron called me so it is no big thing, except that it is my name (and that of many another, such as Jones, Petty, Selleck, O’Connor and Of Finland) and I would like to say I was asked not to write the notes for ‘Pacéphale.
Now Tom O’Gormliss used to be the Spygenius presager and then, in the Charnock Richard Services he became the Spygenius former presager (them having driven off without him, to be fair I was having trouble with the locking on the toilet’s door) and now Tom O’Gormliss is the presager of Spygenius again so when he – and I’m using the third person here for my rhetorical effects – was asked not to write the notes for ‘Pacéphale he’d already spent three days writing a 30,000 word blog post about it, except it all disappeared when I spilled my – I mean he spilled his Complan in the laptop, him, that’s me, the bloke what did it.
So here and now, unsoiled, unverified, under-cooked, uncomprehensible, impure and favourably-immeasurable is a review of ‘Pacéphale by Evans Evanteen, a bloke I first met in Job Club and who has frightened me a few times with his behaviour but I owe him money, so there we are:
If there is still any doubt that rock and roll is an old man’s game (as observed by Schubert Schubert in the sleeve notes to You Are The Stillness, his 1974 masterpiece on the Harvest label), then next Friday – with the revelation of the new Spygenius LP – should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice, aesthetic bigotry and philistine bias, artistic chauvinism and middle-class jaundice, Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames, Ray Allen and Lord Charles, swept away in a deluge of joyborn muse’s making, which only Gavin (from Mill Hill) will not hear and only Trisha and possibly Pat (used to live in Fulham, think they’ve moved now) will not acknowledge.
Called simply ‘Pacéphale (‘Percy’s Fall’) it’s not wrapped in a plain white cover adorned only by the song titles and those four faces, faces which for some still represent the menace of variously-haired middle-age, for others the great hope of a headless horseman bearing a whip fashioned from a human spine, and for others the desperate, apparently endless struggle against desperate, apparently endless struggle (resolved by the satori state embodied in the mantra Get Over Yourself, which pictures a soul’s progress blocked by a wall of which it is itself composed, and from which a secular Humpty Dumpty rehearses a never-ending cycle of death, rebirth and suffering, to be released after eternity’s end by a solitary cuckoo’s hoot and the symbolic unwrapping of a Kinder Surprise egg at sunset).
In Spygenius’s eyes, as in their spectacles, you can see a certain amount of froth on the daydream, beyond which we glimpse the capering form of our old fiend Shock-Haired Pete, his nasty nails newly trimmed so as to effectuate the more proficient titillation of his gee-tar strings. He is attended by two kindly giants, Sir Adrian Huge and Sir Adrian Stout, who both interpret and make demands of him, and punish him by locking him inside a vast replica of HG Wells, forcing him to confront the wet, dark eugenicist inside the avuncular social reformer.
And a third there is who walks beside him, for she is everywhere.
‘Pacéphale, decapitant, ever-hopeful, his palm leaf basket stuffed with redundant dreams; Satchmo, his horn adorned with friendly stars, a copy of Ibsen stuffed down his mini-moog; Ubu, leaf-nosed, be-crowned, two left feet, two right feet, singing the Nobodaddy blues on a mandolin finished in finest kingfisher beak; Conundrie, everything, everybody, nothing, nobody.
It's not as if Spygenius ever seek such adulation. When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience. When three or more meet, it’s a pain in the arse frankly. The extraordinary quality of the 13 new songs is one of simple istigkeit. If a speeding car on a day of sunlit clouds can conjure the ineffable isness of awareness, so too can a whip-tight backbeat festooned with happysad human harmonies whizz a pilgrim through the woods of illusion to the rolling river of Ding an sich by sheer force of existential momentum, as is proved throughout ‘Pacéphale both algebraically and organically at the Level of Intrinsic Groove.
The skill at orchestration has mutated with infinite misprision. Full orchestra, brass, solo violin, glockenspiel, saxophone, organ, ‘Pataphysical mirror, Satchmo’s horn, the King’s mandolin, some cats, the lost Grail, Satchmo’s mini-moog, harpsichord, all manner of sea creature, are used sparingly and thus with deftness.
References to or quotations from Bosse-de-Nage, Boris Vian, Julia Kristeva, Fred Gwynne, Gordon Tracy, Mr Knatchbull Twee, Dr Asif Aziz, Embraceable Zombie Hegel, and Calvino’s Nonexistent Knight are decanted into an aural tincture that has become the Pazyryk Carpet of post-post-modern musics. It’s all there, even if you don’t listen.
At the core of ‘Pacéphale we find You and Me and Jiminy C, which accompanies Act 8 of the psychodrama, and which is designed by robot grasshopper. The aim is to effect within just three minutes a reprogramming of the listener’s brain comparable to several years of intensive CBT.
Components include: pre-hypnotic suggestions, post-hypnotic suggestions, psychedelic backwash, infant memory shadows, those stills of Emily’s shop at the start of Bagpuss, our first glimpse of sepia, our first hint of lost time, the nostalgia of the newborn for the womb, Professor Stanley Unwin speaking in tongues his alien visions to unfurl, a camera that pulls out through a doll’s house window to reveal we’re inside a larger doll’s house, The Fairy with Turquoise Hair, a transcendental signifier in the shape of a large ornate goblet, always becoming never being, sound effects, overheard gossip, backwards-tapes, janglings from the subconscious memories of a floundering civilisation, unmistakable clarity and foot-tapping beauty.
At the end, as at the beginning, all you do is glow and vibrate. Whatever your taste in Engelbert Humperdinck, then Spygenius have done it better.
This record took them five lustra to make and if you think that's slow going, consider that since its completion they've travelled another 15 light years. Not even Schubert Schubert wrote at that altitude.
Buy the new Spygenius LP here - cleans you, thrills you, may even stop you from getting drafted
All LP artwork reproduced by sexy permission of the artist. Click here to see the video for the Spygenius romanto-deconstructo classic Autoclave - it’s cool, aye.