The Breakdown
Should Bob Dylan have got the Nobel Prize for Literature? Of course not, he wasn’t a poet; as he famously said, he saw himself more as a song and dance man. And did Wordsworth, senses working overtime after a surfeit of daffodils, ever just scrawl awopbopaloobopalopbamboom across the page before hitting the laudanum? Of course not, he wasn’t a rock’n’roller; had his ghost ever gone a-haunting New Orleans in the 1950s, it would simply have snorted that Little Richard’s attempts to find a rhyme for awopbopaloobopalopbamboom had clearly been tutti fruitless and then tried to high-five a plainly terrified Gene Vincent.
So are poetry and pop music just different beasts which, if foolishly encouraged to mate, can only ever produce some sterile, mule-like, lumpen thing? Because, as Mott the Hoople almost said, it’s a mighty long way to rock’n’roll, down a dusty trail littered with the mortifying efforts of poets who thought they could cut it as pop stars, and pop stars who thought their words worth turning into a slim volume. Well, maybe. Or maybe what a poet needs isn’t a guitar, but someone else with a guitar to come along and say: “I think you might have accidentally half-written some fantastic pop songs – do you mind if we finish them off?”
Which I think is essentially what Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey of the Catenary Wires – and also of Swansea Sound, and before that of Tender Trap, Marine Research, Heavenly and Talulah Gosh – said to former Bard of Twitter turned IRL meat poet Brian Bilston. And, thankfully, he said yes, if only to stop them listing any other bands they’d been in. It probably helped that he was a big Heavenly fan; indeed, it was when Rob and Amelia heard that he’d given a reading while wearing a Heavenly T-shirt that balls got rolling.
It could easily have been a short-lived collaboration. John Cooper Clarke never really liked the LPs he did with Martin Hannett’s Invisible Girls, as he thought the music distracted from the words. And forcing a poem, which has its own internal music, to sing another person’s tune could just mean cacophony. Or worse. When I was young and living in Bristol, I spent many nights being unsure what I thought of the Blue Aeroplanes, that city’s premier “poetry beat group”, before realising they were the apotheosis of pretension and antithesis of pop; which is odd, because Showing Off To Impress The Girls, a seven-inch single by their earlier incarnation the Art Objects, is actually a tiny shimmering pop gem. But maybe the words “seven” and “inch” are significant. Because a seven-inch single is, in a nutshell, an exercise in concision and precision and putting things in nutshells; to cram an entire emotional experience into a groove that’s rapidly spiralling towards a tiny black hole requires each word and chord to be chosen very carefully, you can’t just waffle about; and distilling a thing’s essence into something giddily heady, pithy and pure before binning the unneeded sludge is, at the end of the day, what a poem does.
That single is also one I can hear echoes of in many of the tracks on Sounds Made By Humans. From the last-orders singalong sway of Every Song On The Radio Reminds Me Of You to the propulsive surfy twang of Out Of The Rain is, for instance, a run of five fantastic pop songs – great tunes, great lyrics, proper choruses, the whole caboodle – about which no one need mumble the word “poem”. And, as with all the songs here, you’d never guess the words had been conceived in isolation (they’re taken from poems across several of Brian’s collections), so well does the music – written by Rob and performed by him, Amelia and Catenary Wires drummer Ian Button along with Fay Hallam on keyboard – fold itself around them, bespoke arrangements blending Rob’s and Amelia’s sung vocals with Brian’s spoken words. Where necessary, the music even comes to the fore; it is, most definitely, not simply a politely respectful ambient bed of noodles, suitable for all poetic occasions.
I’ve not really said much about the words, when the one redeeming feature of poets is that they’re good with words. Brian is particularly good with words that make you crack-up, make you well-up, make you incandescent and make sense at first listen, which is handy for a pop song. There’s wit both dry and giggly (Every song on the radio reminds me of you … That time you missed my birthday because you were sat in a tin can high above the world), politics both world-weighted weary and age-not-withered angry (And when I die / I will be the scattered ashes / that attach themselves to the lashes / and blind the eyes / of racists and fascists) and floor-dissolving moments of poignancy that make you catch your breath: the elderly widow who’d dance like no one was watching (although she liked to think he was) remembering the Locarno and the Ritz in a time before the shadow the doctor spotted on his lungs…
Is that sort of stuff the stuff of pop songs? Well, plainly it is, because these are definitely pop songs. Pop songs for people who love poetry
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