mouth music (bit of a cult)

One of those projects where you think "all that technological ingenuity, all that studio expertise - and this is what you came up with?"



Definitely something where the back story / modus of making is more interesting than the front story / actual end product.

Slightly more interesting.



Met Todd R once - in a bar in Oslo with some Norwegians. He's a cult figure there. As he is in many places.

It's odd interacting with a musician who is a legend but towards whose work you don't have a particularly strong feeling.

I mean, A Wizard A True Star is great, amazing, "how did he do that?" etc - but you know what: I never listen to it.

Got it on vinyl for 3.99 at the Virgin Megastore in the Eighties, having gleaned a sense of its reputation from the writings of certain admired critics. Played it just the once, I think.

Later a CD version that belonged to my brother ended up in my possession. That's been played perhaps twice in 10 years. Every time I play it, I do think it's stupendous. But there's nothing that pulls me back to it.

All that Hermit of Mink Hollow, Something / Anything stuff   I had that taped off of someone for years. Remember being mildly beguiled for a while.... but it didn't stick.

"Hello It's Me" seems awfully awfully wet, nowadays.

If I'm honest, the only thing I  ever actively crave hearing is "Open My Eyes".



And now I remember: at the end of this drunken evening (sluiced by a steady flow of astronomically priced - this being Norway - vodka sours),  as we all stood on the snowy pavement outside before dispersing,  I did ask him if he was going to play "Open My Eyes" at his gig the next day.  (We were both "performers" at a music festival). Purely making conversation, since I had no plans to attend the concert and in fact was moving on to another country.  Somewhat tartly he replied that it would be rather hard to do the song live, don't you think, with just one guitar?

No doubt TR finds this early Nazz number somewhat jejeune...  perhaps he finds it annoying when people harp on about the late Sixties and early Seventies stuff, and never mention the Eighties conceptual-technical projects, or the CD-ROMs or whatever....

Zappa-like in many ways: the embrace of the latest cutting-edge technology, but results that are surprisingly old-fashioned and florid.  (Thinking here of my repeated efforts to find anything memorable or mind-blowing in Uncle Meat).



Made with the NewTek Video Toaster, whatever the fuck that was... As if the images could redeem the runny stuff trickling sickly into your ear holes!



The only other thing I remember TR saying during that Oslo night was a bitter bout of complaining about Andy Partridge and the whole sour saga of his production of XTC's Skylarking.

Final thought: "Bang on the Drum All Day" is one of the most heinous things ever committed in the name of rock. Is he essaying a Trinidadian accent there in the chorus?