Inside the Haunted Box of Switches: the keyboard player's lot is a far from simple one..
Leaving to one side -only for the moment- the densely textured and fibrillating tale of Shriekback, I want to talk about the vexed topic of keyboard-playing in rock bands which was what I started out doing, before the demon of Self Expression possessed my ass -XTC, of course, Fripp’s League of Gents and the troubled Iggy Pop album: ‘Soldier’.
After that, apart from the odd session, I only played keyboards on things I had some aesthetic control over. Which meant I almost stopped playing keyboards altogether. By the early 80’s (My Spine, Lined Up etc) I didn’t even own a keyboard anymore (had to borrow Ian Caple’s £30 Casio). Interesting, eh? You bet.
But you need some background. Many keyboard players start out as piano players as I did. The transition is an awkward one, I think, since you necessarily have to metamorphose from a classical music creature to a rockn'roll one.
Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t -oh and Garth Hudson- they went from gospel to rockn'roll which is not such a leap but that is rare (in the UK anyway) in my experience.
Usually, your young pianist (who knows their way round the Moonlight Sonata et al, maybe had lessons) decides they want to be cool (un-coincidentally when the shagging hormones start kicking in) and tries to work out how to join a band. It’s tricky, or it used to be: keyboards and their amplification are more expensive than drum kits and way more expensive than guitars and amps. So there is, straightaway, a class/privelige scenario that colours things: Q. ’are the sort of bands led by the keyboards always going to be a bit poncy, lacking in that hungry, streetwise edge, because only kids from comfy backgrounds can afford keyboards? Discuss, mentioning prog-rock and concluding with Acid House..’
Rick Wakeman and Baby Ford (similar keyboards -very different heads -and dress-sense)
And there’s the question of motivation. Guitarists typically have to save up for (or steal) their first axe -they have to really want it. Piano players tend to slide into the role because -ever the big, intractable, heavy lump of furniture- the piano is just there. Once you’ve hidden inside it, slammed the lid down dangerously a few times and made the cat walk over the keys you might as well learn to play the fucker. As you will see, my story was a bit of a hybrid of these tropes but is, I think, far from unusual.
In the spirit of gaining, then, a deeper understanding that will, I hope, transcend the (admittedly absorbing) personal psychodramas of Barry Andrews and ripple out to immerse some Universal Themes, here is an abridged preamble to my piano album of a few years ago “Haunted Box of Switches’ which sets the terribly awkward scene…
This is an album of piano pieces -songs and improvisations- which represents, for me, some kind of summation of nearly a lifetime’s relationship with that instrument. My, there’s portentous, but there it is: I feel towards the piano the kind of uncomfortable emotional ambivalence that characterises most people’s relationships with their families, and, in some ways the piano feels like just that: a family member.
almost the whole gang south London 1956. I’m the very small one
You could say that this record is like going on holiday, after a long absence, with a relative I knew well as a child. The feelings are deep ones but there’s no way of knowing what we will mean to each other now. It will probably be a holiday fraught with Mike Leigh-style grisliness; snapshots that tell more than you want to know; maybe some tough home truths will emerge that only those who know you best can impart. Perhaps there will be wonderful things too. It will definitely be intense.
I use this comparison advisedly, since, as I will explain, the piano and my family have always been inextricably linked, and -families reliably being sources of both comfort and pain- it’s not suprising that my personal pianistic voyage has covered similar territory. It was, initially, not even an instrument I wanted to play.
First of all, in my I-want-to-be-a-classical-composer days (6-7 years old, yeah I know, I am Lisa Simpson) I thought a violin would be the way to help me write those vast orchestral panoramas I saw as my destiny. Parents weren’t keen. SO unfair.
And when it was time to Rock -well you want to be the killer axe-man, don’t you? With mighty power chords blazing from your electric pseudo-phallus as you prowl the stage, not some nerdy, site-tenacious furniture stroker. That wasn’t going to happen either. It was too late: I could already play piano and I was in a hurry.
An aside: I remember reading somewhere Tom Waits talking about the piano ‘taking things indoors’. Very true.
In a Simple Minds video in the 80’s the chaps were standing on a cliff, presumably in the Scottish Highlands, emphasising -rather too literally I feel- their affinity with with things unspoilt and windswept and Mick Macneil has his electric piano up there. Game Over as far as I was concerned. True, it would have been worse had it been a concert grand but, even so, pianos aren’t wild -they don’t live on cliffs -they’re about bars, concert halls, drawing rooms -about Civilisation with all it’s codes and constructs.
It’s fucking furniture, man- it’s got history -and not very cool history either- born of the cerebral, Imperialist West with all it’s precocious technology (and with all it’s unforeseen consequences). Synchronous with, and dependent upon, the rise of organised capital. Exploitation, class and racial hierarchies intrinsic in it’s construction and it’s cultural deployment ('ebony and ivory’, already!). That’s a whole other story and well worth telling, though probably not by me. Let’s keep this personal.
On my Mum’s side everybody seemed to play piano -it seemed to be something like driving is today: something you just did- no big deal. Grandad -who showed me- both Mums’ brothers, my cousin, even my Mum (albeit covertly*). They were the 'We had to make our own entertainment Roll out the barrel Spirit of the Blitz’ generation. People 'got round the piano’ had 'a good old sing-song’. It seemed to be a sort of campfire substitute. The comforting sound of those sentimental 40’s popsongs bashed out on the old Joanna was the necessary counterpoint to the air-raid siren and the eerie whine and eerier silence of the Doodlebug.
*Extremely rare shot of my mum at the piano. I only heard her play twice ever. She was alright. I think it was a working class woman thing. Musn’t make the blokes insecure..shame.
I heard all this as bed-time stories and saw the vestige of this culture growing up in the early 60’s but the piano was now exiled into the 'front room’ (the shrine-room/museum of working class English culture)and the songs now emanated from the Radiogram: Max Bygraves often ('SingalongaMax’ no.s 1 thru 1,712) -same songs but with a smooth orchestral arrangement and Max’s consoling, relaxed voice which even then I found insufferably bland but then I hadn’t just survived the bloodiest conflict in the History of the World -I guess a bit of blandness sounded pretty good to them.
Max Bygraves -how can you stay mad at him?
The other shift that this mass-media post-war moment seemed to produce was that the piano turned from a friendly convivial anyone-can-do-it machine to a High-ish Cultural Endeavour. By the time I was at school it had become 'clever’ to play the piano in my family like it would become 'clever’ to go to University or to quote things from books and that was the time when I first ran into it -in the Front Room at my Nan and Grandad’s in West Norwood, South London. The fusty damp of that mausoleum; the big scary Victorian sculptures of cherubs killing dragons (payment in kind from old ladies Grandad had done decorating work for) and the W.H.Barnes Upright painted by Grandad in shitty black stain inexplicably covering up the high quality polish visible under the lid. Grandad was perverse in many ways, as it goes -he always called me 'Bill’, despite my protestations, (as indeed he also called my cousin Brian and my cousin Malcolm).I never found out why. He was a big grizzly old geezer who was a sergeant major during the first World War, inveterate card-cheat, slack carpenter, smoker of tarry and unstable roll-ups, German hater even up to the 60’s -he gave me (aged 6) a good talking-to for my traitorous pleasure in a Fokker Triplane Airfix model- and, of course, old skool pub pianist. He passed on his wisdom to the kids in a fine Patriarchal way -Brian got snooker and I got the piano- 'Oh daddy wash my dirty shirt’ (just the black notes) and 'Old man River’ (one finger two octaves below middle C -mmm growly).
Grandad at the races. Total geezer.
That was it -all downhill from there on in. We moved to Swindon and I played whenever I could- in the backrooms of Dad’s working man’s club, and, transgressively, on the out-of-bounds school piano which taught me two things: 1: that some pianos are much better than others and 2: that The Man doesn’t like you getting your hands on the really good stuff. I need hardly add that this prohibition made the school piano a subject of almost sexual longing.
I would have to wait a few years until Mr Keen. 'Beaky’ (enormous nose) Keen who, with genuine magnanimity, allowed me in the music room after school to play their fine instrument. I would sit there every night until the caretaker threw me out. Mr Keen also taught me as much as he could about orchestration which was the begining of me thinking properly about the sound of things in the abstract (Mr Keen and Lee Scratch Perry -I wonder how they’d get on?) It’s great when you get a Mr Keen, I always think, and heartening that almost everyone seems to have one.
But I digress -when I was eleven grandad died of a heart attack and left me the old W.H.Barnes Mean Machine. Ma and Pa had it schlepped down to Swindon and it became my Place to Go (as well as a place to hide Special Things where my Mum’s unilateral cleaning program could not legitimately disturb them). When I’d had a bad time at school; when I wanted to make up stories in my head and drift off with them; when I wanted to score my Meisterworks for unlimited orchestral forces or the humbler school orchestra there I would be bashing away, self-taught, unbridled Piano-Boy free at last.
But then came ROCK and it just wasn’t loud enough (Dave Marx and his Gibson saw to that). I yearned for an instrument that would compete in the Rock Arena and eventually I got my first electric organ -the Crumar Group 49 -and new realms opened to me- the world of the shrieking sustained note and the bowel-affecting drone were now accessible.
crumar group 49 off the peg:
and after recontextualisation:
Where this all led of course is tangential to the present story, suffice to say that the piano -when I wasn’t kicking it, breaking its’ keys, pushing it brutally around the stage and spray-painting it with vile slogans -was, in my recorded work, relegated to the role of self-parodic bit-player: little tasteful sprangs, fragments of highly stylised adornment and solos in heavy inverted commas were it’s contribution in the studio. It was like being ashamed of this remnant of childhood (of myself) in front of cool, new, multi-timbral friends. Organs and eventually poly-synths were about drugs, sex and rockist weirdness: awash with exotic possibilities; free of associations; up for anything. The piano was the past, my unexceptional roots: one boring sound that everybody knows and which is lumbered with the embarassing emotions that have no place in a gifted, over-stimulated young maniac on his way to Unprecedented Things.
the piano is saying 'forbidden or compulsory’ -of course it is -other such gnomic, piano-defacing statements included 'all human life is here’ and 'dogs breath’. What?
The songs on Haunted Box.. are in 4 categories: Old Ones -if only to see what’s left when you take all that production away; New ones, because they’re my favourites at the moment; Ones with No Other Homes To Go To -some of which I have never played to anyone before- and Made-Up-On-The-Spot-Ones. The improvs are the sort of thing I do for myself usually, and particularly in those I found myself drifting back to that space of 38 years ago: using the piano as trance-machine, atmosphere producer, therapy. I include them as little sketches of moments -records of what my brain and hands did right then and there.
Which is I guess what all of these tunes are -holiday snapshots left on the dunes till winter..
It was a good holiday actually. I’m smiling in this one…
to the memory of John (Jack) Langan
June 18th 1888-November 22nd 1966
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