MARTHA WAINWRIGHT: I Wish I Were

This thing, the grain of the voice, that Barthes kept talking about; quite often it matters more than the song that's being sung, that is if the listener is inclined to maintain the illusion of lack of distance between singer and song for long enough; that is, if there is any illusion about it. No one doubts that the Ian Curtis of "Twenty Four Hours" was singing about himself, nor the Kurt Cobain of "No Apologies." But hedge against those certainties Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" or, as though I needed to emphasise it further, Randy Newman's "Short People," which are clearly character studies. Then consider the huge grey area in the middle where Liz Frazer or Beth Gibbons may or may not be concealing truths about themselves, may or may not be narrators at one remove.

So you see the difficulties I have in talking about Martha Wainwright, a woman who by all accounts is happily married (married, moreover, to Brad Alberta, the musical director and principal producer of her new album, which to add to snaky ladders is entitled I know you're married but I've got feelings too) yet who spends these 49 quietly exhausting minutes torn, almost unutterably torn, between husband and non-husband, between future love and lost love, between herself and the River Niger. Or a guy named George who thinks Beefheart is above the common man. It's not easy, and I think that intentionally so.

The cover, controversial to canting purists, is still vaguely ambiguous; an inverted monochrome Martha sprawled all over her sofa, a strange smile of half-closed eyes but no other obvious evidence of recent self-pleasure. On the reverse, a golden Martha as caught in the half-light by Sam Taylor Wood, on the left of the picture, gazing apprehensively towards the mirror beside a shrunken disco ball. The record is a journey through an intermittently troubled river, during which various passengers - a Pete Townshend here, a Donald Fagen there - hop on and off as unobtrusively as possible, for the show is hers. Rufus confines himself to one cameo (harmony on the aforementioned "George Song") while Kate and Anna are best and most startlingly heard on a straight rendition of "See Emily Play," Martha tucking Syd's nursery rhyme back into its original cot but is the childhood-as-key thing really that obvious?

What is unavoidably obvious is that these thirteen performances are vitally carried by Martha and what she does with her voice more than what she writes with her hands; the slowly stunning (like a sixteen-ton safe hitting one's head at a speed of 2 rpm) "In The Middle Of The Night" with its death-spelling long black limousine outside, the way Martha's tongue tries manually to invert the line "As you walk to the top of the hill" so that he tumbles down in time to meet the steady breakout of Africa/Brass horns acting as delayed reaction police sirens; the curving malunion of "Bleeding All Over You" where her gutturals make "daughter" indistinguishable from "cow shit"; the terrifying non-hysteria of "You Cheated Me."

In many places married isn't too far away from Third; the flotation Sherman tank of "Tower Song" seems as unanchored as anything Gibbons utters (sex as 9/11 metaphor/substitute), the Lydon cackle of "I'm on the back end of you" (which she makes into one gargling gargoyle of a syllable) in "Hearts Club Band." In "River Niger" her labial vowels ("Take, take my hand, and push") and the candid caress of Cameron Greider's nylon acoustic eventually merge with an Eno night. The serenely shattering "Jimi" (half dusk prayer, half arsequake eruption) finds her racking her soul for her dad, herself as her dad, "this dead woman in my lane," "this man in my house," slamming her head against different doors all labelled The Past in different hues of perditious pastel.

But come together it must - and her "See Emily Play" (did she get sung to sleep by it in her childhood?) is the necessary glue to stop it and her from tumbling apart - and "I Wish I Was" accomplishes the fitting fusion. Out for the count ("I can hardly move/And I sure can't groove") she slowly wills herself back to facing life and love, not necessarily in that order - the long, verge-of-silent sustains on "afraid" and "say" and "see" in consecutive verses indicate a slow refuelling at an emotional pit stop, each slightly more audible than its predecessor. "Do I know what anything means?" she snaps at one point (to herself, but maybe also to those of us foolish enough to try to interpret her snaps directly). She rifles through talk shows ("not music"), PBS and BBC, doesn't want to meet the press, but the pain will not be subdued, indeed is exacerbated by her hammering self-guilt, and so she has no choice but to escape through the lips of that final, almost triumphant "real" in the line "Is the only thing that is real (viz. "the hunger that I feel")."

The chorus also steadily gets stronger: "I wish I were a singer, a dancer/A dancing for your love" but it's now too strong, Garth Hudson's law marshal piano declaiming its judicial hammer behind her, before finally she relents, and yields, goes past words in a crochet of an intercourse with Chaim Tannenbaum's mandolin; larynx and strings tickling each other like loose pillows in an overstocked bed shop, reacting, caressing, snugly settling, and both have the grain of those feelings too.

THE SHORTWAVE SET: Harmonia

"Them there days, those temporary days, they're over boys, move on."

The easiest thing would be to say that the second Shortwave Set album was one of the great 1968 albums - the beginnings of burnout just after the initial burst - but the record, whose eleven songs are linked in an ever-strengthening 39-minute chain, warns against unthought-through nostalgia, from its title (Replica Sun Machine) downwards, or sideways; the above observation is taken from a song entitled "Now 'Till 1969." There is also a song called "Yesterdays To Come" down whose steely corridors (additional spiking courtesy of Van Dyke Parks' characteristically challenging string chart, shuddering with warnings not to proceed backwards) the group sing of "all our tomorrows" merging into "a fine lament" for a past which is ungraspable, if not unlearnable.

This is not to say that Replica Sun Machine doesn't contain hope within its reluctantly dark cloisters, but the Shortwave Set's euphoria is always guarded, and usually with good reason; the slow warnings of benign Armageddon in "Replica," behind whose cobwebbed floorboards emerge the patiently vast temple of Parks' strings, as though glimpsing but a solitary brick of St Paul's from underneath the cistern; the trembling body swerves of Those Lying In Power described in "House Of Lies." The unresolving "Sun Machine" ends up saying goodbye even to the replica, welcoming a "poor imitation," eyes shielded from the unspeakable horror of the next dawn.

Though still made on a comparatively low budget, this is nonetheless, and perversely, the Shortwave Set's big budget album; the SE8 junk shop findings replaced by the calm anti-authority of Dangermouse in the producer's booth, Parks and John Cale dropping by to dabble subtle dashes of magic into the group's broth (for instance, the return of the "Sunday Morning"/"Northern Sky" celeste in "Glitches N' Bugs") though Cale largely confines himself to "atmospherics," mainly the abstract drifts of links between the songs; both Parks and Cale's contributions come to full fruition as they take over "I Know" for the elegantly distorting long fadeout.

I'm not sure, however, that expert gloss is a long-term substitute for happy accidents - the beauty of The Debt Collection lay in its seemingly "unproduced" approach, that they were making it up as they travelled along and stumbled across unforeseen Cortesian revelations, that Millican and Nesbitt and Humperdinck and MFP Hawaiian ukuleles and Tomita could be deployed to help produce a new awe. This is a potential trap in which the Shortwave Set need to be careful not to make themselves too comfortable.

Nonetheless, when the songs are so strong - as they certainly are here, by and large - when Ulrika's voice comes through so forcefully, yet non-imposingly, on the 1980 Clash-with-Ellen-Foley diatribe that is "No Social," its strength is still natural. The key songs, though, are the first and the last; forget that "Harmonia" is the name of an obscure Krautrock group and listen to what they're trying to convey in its ruinous majesty - a guide to a better life, while the next nine songs describe what happens if we hesitate to take the right path, cling to an entirely unhelpful yesterday; the "maybe next time" and "maybe sometime" warnings which "Harmonia" conveys in its milky breast - on your own, in a dream that seemed about you, then you called my name, told me how to find you, and it is THEN that you have to embark on that path towards the future; it must be THIS time...and you grasp the nettle and find it is a feather. Then, at the other end of whatever blast has occurred, "The Downer Song," the patient campfire/after the fire singalong ("there's something wrong, there's something wrong") as a "Genetic Engineering" voice (but now female) repeats "Love one another...love one another...love one another...NOW" throughout. That's "now" as in "not yesterday" and a hundred thousand reasons why it - and we - matter.

SCOOTER: The Question Is What Is The Question?

So is the wind finally changing back? Out of the long dark tunnel of Third and into the longer, deceptively brighter promenade of Jumping All Over The World? The commercial triumph of both would suggest a New Pop fightback, and not before time either - the eleventh hour victory of Scooter over the new plank of stern wood masquerading as a Madonna album is a significant event, slow week or not, particularly since it represents a gigantic 99 cone of a fuck you salute to the venerated music press, the slightly less venerated blogosphere, the deadly static mainstream radio of this nation - no one bothered to bother with them, suffocating in "proper" "new" "music," so they sneaked up and walked away with the prize.

Nobody saw it coming, not even the array of popists currently busy watering themselves over the flaccid MoR mock pop of Alphabeat. This is because "experts" who "matter" don't hang around HMV of a Saturday mid-afternoon, watching the copies of Jumping All Over The World complete with bonus free 20 Greatest Hits CD jumping off the shelves. Isn't that an idea waiting to be expanded - why, if Athlete, say, want to flog a few more copies of their next stillborn and polite hiccup of a record they could do worse by including a bonus free CD of, say, Trout Mask Replica or Songs For Swinging Lovers. That would help get the buyers back into the shops - except, of course, as I said, they are in the shops, filling them all up, but just not buying what the Guardian or Popjustice would like them to buy, the latest pitch from their pals in *blank for legal reasons* or *ditto* PR.

And it's high time that we started demolishing these rancid stables of canon again. When I started out on the Portishead thing a fortnight plus ago I decried the failure of nearly all contemporary music and music writing to reflect the horrific grief I and many others felt as Tory Britain slowly and smugly reasserted itself. But this was also a kick reaction against the lack of actual pop in contemporary pop - the Brit School scrubs, the Dermot O'Leary rep reliables, the "polite" way forward; all ashamed of being pop, all not wanting to live next door to other races unless they're 30 or 40 years older. Even the declining Xenomania one-act empire (let's not bring the shameful Gabriela Climi into any discussions on "pop") has stuffed its gob with so much meaning-free subtext that it's beginning to turn purple and choke.

There's hardly any urge to party again, and a lot of the time that's what pop needs; not a semi-sit down lecture on what such and such a record could be, but putting out banger after banger and THEN theorising about it, if you've got your breath back. So Scooter - who, let us remember, proudly proclaimed on 1996's "Back In The UK" that "we started in 1994" - are exactly the refreshing hosed bath of sherbert that pop needs, and the fact that they're all more or less the same age as me should make the kids improperly ashamed.

More importantly, they can party and deliver subtle stand-up lectures at the same time. I don't know any other act who bases EVERY one of their tunes on the precepts laid down in the KLF manual but Scooter are one - on the greatest hits CD alone, witness and wonder at the "It's Grim Up North" quotes and the "Join the JAMMs!" exhortations rumbling through the brilliant "Apache Hits Rock Bottom!" (the KLF do over the Shadows), not to mention "The Logical Song" passim and everything else I mentioned the last time I wrote about them. On the new album proper they restrict their direct KLF references to the MC5 intro (uncensored) which heralds the amazing "Jump That Rock" in which huge chunks of Status Quo's "Whatever You Want" are redeployed to cheerfully violent means, including the entire, rubato guitar-only introduction (after which HP Baxxter takes a huge, satisfied breath as though just having demolished another pint of strawberry cider) before the riff is mechanised and gradually speeded up to become stock car crash custard pie 20000000 bpm mentasm! The Quo invent Atari Teenage Riot!

And if another lamentable fact of modern musical media life is that bands cannot stage custard pie fights on TV, like Wizzard used to do on TOTP, and anyway the health and safety Colins wouldn't let them get away with that these days, then be aware that the new Scooter album is the profoundest of custard pies aimed at the bullseye of tepid, timid pseudo-pop in 2008. Half the tracks follow exactly the same formula as they have nearly always observed, i.e. unlikely old hit sung with the voice sped up to 96 rpm then being subsumed by hysterical techno crashes and Baxxter's sublime/subliminal vocal non-sequiturs; witness the parable about the three men in a boat with four cigarettes but no matches relayed in the track which is reasonably entitled "And No Matches" over some crummy old resuscitated Eurohit ditty which sounds like Gunter Grass live at Cream.

"Enola Gay" is a hardcore version of "Enola Gay" which I'm sure OMD will relish; "Neverending Story" is THAT "Neverending Story" and the deceptive gift of Scooter's version is demonstrating just how lovely Moroder's meandering but logical melody line is without the distracting voice and mullet of Limahl. "Cambodia" is a surprisingly solemn recasting of the old Kim Wilde electro-weepie.

But even the best of parties must hold a conscience, and that comes with the increasingly uncompromising run of tracks towards the album's end; a reading of the Sisters of Mercy Goth chestnut "Marian" is performed straight, and partly in German, with Baxxter adding a layer of vulnerability to the trademark Eldritch baritone, and reminds us of the incredible debt all of this music owes to the equally unheralded Front 242s and Front Line Assemblies and Young Gods of a generation past. As for "Lighten Up The Sky" and "The Hardcore Massive" we could almost BE listening to Thrill Kill Kult or even Laibach; great bronze arcs of atonal rays of rhythm, nudging ever more certainly towards omnisonic disturbance.

Then it's back to the beginning, with a nod to the word-perfect dictionary definitions which open and close the record (to the accompaniment of the same classical sample used on Funky Monkey's "Peaceman"!), and maybe the record's two greatest achievements, the title track which introduces the concept of Bounce Techno (as in Space Hopper, or as in Human Resource's "Dominator" slowed down to manageable speed) and heavily quotes Sailor's "Glass Of Champagne" to the accompaniment of football crowds and Baxxter's frenzied "Jungle jumpers under orders!," and then the dazzling "The Question..." which uses an ancient Mouth and MacNeal sub-Eurovision jingle of a song, puts it at maximal speed and then demolishes it, with the improbable aid of that crusty old Lyn Collins/JB "yeah...whoo!" sample which I haven't heard since they'd been reduced to the Andrew Lloyd Webber novelty hit level in the early nineties. HP is in demon form here - his "no diggity diggity HP" insertions confirming a TOTAL understanding of what makes pop - with references to his prick being longer than Rick's, wonderful Mars, fixing a candle with a spanner, "Pi nami nama" (followed of course by "like a hammer"), and the usage of timeworn samples is beyond inspired (the "LOUDER!" that comes between "the question is" and "what is the question?"). Towards the end he issues a special announcement to the audience: "Please refrain from NOT smoking!" and finishes, exhausted, by asking "Can I have a light, please?" answered by a Rasta "yeah, mon!"

This music isn't going to soundtrack any dinner parties - at least, not those worth going to - and if you're not already 75% out the door and bounding, beaming, down the road to your nearest record emporium to pick up a copy of this phenomenal New Pop Party record COMPLETE with bonus Greatest Hits (20 of them! Count 'em! A day per track with 34 tracks? Do you think I'm that mad? And don't answer!) then you deserve all the Sandi Thom yeah-but hit on head with Salvation Army newspaper BE RESPONSIBLE tickings off you deserve. Really, it's the best revenge, and after eleven days of Portishead I think even writers have earned the right to shiny yellow catharsis and yes, I of all people am fully aware that you can't have one without the other but look! The sun's out! All due respect to MC Sauce!!

PORTISHEAD: Threads

"...You're a writer...You push people around on a nice clean white page. Do this, do that, you say. Speak. Be quiet. Cry."

"And when I look up from the page?"

"You see real people."

"Real...people."

(From the 1976 television play Double Dare, written by Dennis Potter)

Of course I have no factual basis on which I can prove that Portishead are saying what I believe they are saying on Third. I can draw a fairly well defined musical line between, say, Third and the Soft Machine's 1970 album Third ("The Moon In June"; Wyatt cheerfully spouting semi-gibberish to ward off the apocalypse) but lyrically I have to fall back on the optic(al illusion?) of the same event being described from eleven different perspectives, or eleven different versions of the same song. Or one 49-minute-long song split into eleven reasonably tidy fragments. Just as, for instance, The Prisoner now more than ever seems to me like seventeen different ways of telling the same story.

There is no great catharsis at the end of "Threads," merely the memory of the eighties television drama of that name which dealt with nuclear holocaust in Sheffield. She has reached the light at the end of the tunnel and it is not the sunshine nor is it an approaching train; it is a queerer light, a greenness she has never quite seen before, and it is slowly terrifying.

And I think of "Orang," the opening track of Herd Of Instinct, a 1994 album released by 'O'Rang, a duo comprising Lee Harris and Paul Webb, late of Talk Talk and impatient with Mark Hollis' work rate, whose music implied a booting viscerality which represented an opposing vision of release to Hollis' calm, refracted prayers; the CD booklet is full of violent, vivid images of cleansing by fire, of suppressed desecration of idols, of escape and ultimate release by means of ritual surrender. "Orang" the song is some ten minutes in duration, moving very steadily from troubled calm to etiolated eruptions; the voices aren't quite clear enough to discern what they are singing but they are clearly striving to get out of this burning place. Placid piano procedurals give way, via the crucial guitar of Bark Psychosis' Graham Sutton, to semi-improvised riots and then back to an even more disturbed peace.

One of the voices on "Orang" belonged to Beth Gibbons and it is to this sense of ritual that she seems to have been returning throughout Third. The precipitating factor is beyond dreadful if I am reading the spaces between the lines correctly - and the above Rashomon comparison may not be too absurd - but something terrible, even evil, has happened to her (even though she blames herself nearly all the way through the record and indeed at one point on "Threads" exclaims "And I can't find no one to blame") and she is struggling to find a way back to truth first and life second, only to find increasingly concave mirrors, closing in on what is left of her shattered beliefs - "I've travelled so far but somehow feel the same."

There is a fatigue here which goes beyond "Feel Like Goin' Home"-type battered wisdom - the line "I am alive when I sleep" immediately makes me think of Bill Fay's "the only time I'm not tired is when I'm asleep" - and there develops a mantra, over the most delicately brilliant Portishead backing track you have ever heard

(the unutterable sublimity of the spaces between guitar and drums, the abandoned port, the ravaged tower, the greatness that this group and only this group could have produced - and it's no coincidence that this is the album's only track with a full, live band)

but then this other Gorgon, half smeared sax (Will Gregory), half detuned supra-amplified guitar chaos (apparently played by Gibbons herself), keeps coming in with its gnarly cricket bat signals as she, worn out but still advancing, keeps insisting "I'm always so unsure" before reaching the nadir of self-sacrifice:

"STAND, STAND, DAMNED ONE"

"I AM ONE"

"DAMNED"

"ONE"

The ego which has closed this world down slaughters itself - for Third does sound like the last rites before the gnarled cricket match that is human existence grinds itself down and burns itself out forever - and at last Beth bursts out, invoking Janis just as she did at the end of "Sour Times" whenever she sang it live, screaming and growling this "DAMNED" and "ONE" before being buried in the harsh ash of the inescapable siren blast, now growing louder, now persisting, and then ceasing its last post

"Where do I go?"

Even The Drift had that last escape hatch of a whisper ("It's OK") but by the end of Third there seems little beyond this last lighthouse than...well, blankness, a huge blanket of blankness, and I cannot honestly rule out the possibility that this blankness is a mirror and that I have spent a fortnight analysing something which is basically blank. However, I honestly doubt that this is the case - otherwise, why come back after eleven years' absence, why say or proclaim anything? The grain of Beth's voice - which has now sounded nothing but exhausted and drained - suggests the truthful, and it is probably the case that her truth does not and should not concern me, but yet she has elected to communicate it, and this record has ended with no hoped-for reason or comedy fifties torch pastiche but a boom which seems to shatter the globe into even smaller pieces with every recurrence.

But Third has the partially unforeseen side-effect of invigorating me as a listener, of engaging me as an active emotional participant, and thus very cleverly denies its own apocalypse. I will end by quoting at length from a radio monologue I heard in the mid-seventies - it has never been repeated and possibly never even broadcast outside Scotland - entitled The Artist In Search Of A City, where the nominal artist, voiced by John Grieve and in search of Glasgow, visits his former partner in art Donald, a man of assumed genius, now an inpatient at the large psychiatric hospital in Lenzie. Donald has just said something very foolish, and Grieve's artist, loving him though he does, erupts with fury and awaits his reaction:

"He didn't move. Hardly seemed to notice. He just said, quietly, 'There are degrees of madness. Mine is maybe not the worst; it only harms myself (pause). If you'd have been where I'd have been, you'd have seen the Fairy Queen!'

(a childhood chant to which Grieve has previously alluded)

"I crept out - hardly said goodbye (then without a pause). The fresh air hit me like a punch. Forget it. Forget the bloody lot. Get back to life, get back to painting!"

The attendant irony need, as ever, not be underlined. But the message is clear ("Message? MESSAGE?? Do you think I'm a bloody postman?") - sometimes rock bottom can be a disguised trampoline. Bouncing back to ground level, as Bim did and everyone reading this knows Beth will, we carry on. Gambon and Suzman depart the hospital together at the end of The Singing Detective, and McGoohan gets back to his "life" and isn't quite sure whether it's an afterlife. We, bloodied, carry on.

PORTISHEAD: Magic Doors

“And yet the tales we tell are not of bodies but of hearts and minds and souls”
(Simon Barnes)

If you happened to be on the outskirts of Wimbledon Village on this grey, drizzly Saturday mid-morning just past, you would have glimpsed a nondescript-looking middle-aged man ambling along the dully wet pavement, slightly hunched up against the weather but otherwise unconcerned. I like these wanders around obscure parts of the city, even though this slightly too clean to be true village doesn’t really feel like London , despite the occasional skyline glimpse through the steeply-angled bushes. The village hall is scrubbed perhaps too perfectly, the good-natured haggling in the ironmonger’s a tad too scripted, and the general premise of remoteness is ruined by the occasional streaking car, but overall it’s not an unpleasant place and a nicer walk than, say, any given stretch of the Harrow Road.

I also like these walks because hardly anyone does west or southwest London psychogeography – all the names which matter are circulating around the dwindling anti-paradise of the East, getting the last blood out of each paving stone before the Olympics come and render it into a new emptiness – and the only leylines I’m really seeking are emotional ones. As with that surprisingly lush, hidden part of Tooting – the golf range which runs round the back of what used to be Springfield Hospital – there is the feeling of deliberate shelter from a markedly less lush world outside. Eventually I arrive at a bus stop, and there’s that increasingly rare of sights, a single-decker non-bendy hopper bus, but its doors are open and the driver is patiently waiting for a passenger to finish smoking. The ladies on the bus – for they are nearly all ladies – are chitchatting as Saturday morning housewives are wont to do.

Then, just before he makes to leave, the driver drawls a sort of uber-Cockney reproach to the smoker; something about his having to leave the doors wide open and stop the bus for the smoke to clear. The smoker duly apologises, but it’s all a bit mechanical, as though they were obliged to act out this routine to pacify the invisible Health and Safety Executive. The bus departs and I alight at the markedly less placid concourse of Wimbledon Station itself, with its tacky Centre Court shopping centre façade. A quick skirt past the standard chain nightmare parade of shops, however, and onto the Broadway where quiet once more reigns; we silent throng of charity shop regulars, searching through the dust to find yet more unexpected miracles, the nearly imperceptible nod to other recognised travellers, the quest to reclaim something, heaven only knows what, non-living, unloved and abandoned, knowing full well that if I go out specifically to look for something I will never find it; jettison ambition, go with the slow flow and find whatever happens to be waiting.

Thankfully, however, I am no longer non-living, unloved or abandoned, and I now visit these places for a different reason. I don’t think I will ever forget the old man I once encountered in a charity shop in Streatham, no more than three or four years ago, pawing through and carefully examining cassettes and regularly bursting into tears; he had just lost his wife, the council were giving him grief about his home (I knew all this because he was conversing with the shop assistant) and he was desperately trying to piece together whatever fragments he could encounter to call his life “life” again. I recognised his quest immediately but was wise enough not to intrude with words of attempted empathy that he would at best have regarded as condescending, and at worst as the most grievous of insults.

No, I don’t want to go back to being that sort of person again. These days, whenever I buy things out of charity shops, it’s for things which are likely to brighten up our own home, mostly music and books, but anything else that may catch my eye and would be likely to catch hers, and I enjoy the experience far more than purchasing the latest off-the-peg produce from immense, impersonal department stores or chains. This is an aesthetic and moral rather than an economic response. I can buy any number of identikit lamps from the local Habitat but only one of the curiously coloured lamps I might view cowering behind some Mills and Boon paperbacks. My stubborn wee Clyde tugboat of resistance has yet to exhaust its supply of puff.

No need to go into intense detail about Saturday’s haul – and note that word “haul”’; there is the same end-of-day warm satisfaction that I’m told the huntin’ shootin’ ‘n’ fishin’ crowd derive from a day’s worth of meaningful activity, though without actually taking any animal’s life in doing so – which encompassed everything from an obscure 2000 Paolo Conte album which I hadn’t heard of before (half the record is sung by others, and the songs he sings are largely in English) via the Residents and Peter and Caspar Brötzmann to a Harry Secombe 2CD best-of (The Gold Collection) which I bought because my wife is keen to hear his version of “This Is My Song,” which came second to Pet Clark’s rendition in the early 1967 charts. And why not? The noble Seagoon deserves to be as much a part of 1967, that most expansive of years, as anyone else. And I said I wasn’t going to go into intense detail. Well, there were many others.

I don’t know how much charity shop browsing Portishead have collectively done over the years but I imagine there’s been a lot of it (at the time of Dummy, for instance, Johnnie Ray’s “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” had not been commercially available for some years and was the kind of record you could only really hope to find as a battered old Oxfam seven-inch); a lot of meticulous, agonised piecing together of elements with the purpose of telling a tale (or telling tales, for those who think Portishead are somehow having us on). As with the Shortwave Set, though, they’ve moved on from simply sampling their bargain findings and now furnish soundscapes which are entirely their own, albeit still clearly influenced by whatever they’ve been listening to that week, or month, or year (because it has been eleven years, near enough). But always to tell a tale, or in the case of Third, to spend the record’s 49 or so minutes spinning out a single tale, or the tale of a single soul.

Note how the music on Third has gradually solidified over the course of its journey, that things initially vague and indistinct are now being pulled into sharp focus. It’s the same tale she’s been telling all along – “I can’t deny what I’ve become/I’m just emotionally undone/…I can’t be someone else” – but the music is now visceral, a pummelling, distended 1987 Def Jam beat full of discordant, stumbling cowbells over which electric piano, hurdy gurdy and her Leslie cabinet voice combine for a raga of rage, a melody line which sounds eerily familiar (“The Sun Always Shines On TV” perhaps?) but twisted and kicked back into a bloody 1968 and regularly punctuated by stentorian, nation-sized deep piano plangencies (“I’ve been losing myself/My desire I can’t have/No reason am I for”).

Eventually all is brought to a head by an epileptic, echoplexed, overblowing baritone sax which is a clear homage to 1970-period John Surman but is actually being blown by Will Gregory (who was working on and off with Portishead before Goldfrapp, the duo, came into existence). Yet she continues to struggle her way towards the way out; the song begins with a dead test card monotone TV closedown whine and ends with the same note droned far more softly on a string synthesiser, a bridge towards the place where all of this is leading us, out towards whatever life remains – although when we reach there we should cast an eye back towards another, now nearly forgotten record which actually helped invent all of this, with the active participation of at least one of these souls now under such acrid self-scrutiny.

PORTISHEAD: Small

It only took one Alexis Korner to open the box, this coruscating panoply of hitherto suppressed moods, byways, stratagems and jokes which came out of wanting to try to be rhythm and blues, and then it flowed out of the clubs, some of it straight into rock, other of it towards impure R&B, which in turn took in ska and nascent funk, and then yet more of it into jazz, this extraordinary round robin of musicians, loping from group to collective and back again, always imbueing this week's destination with the newest thing they'd learned from Prince Buster or Joe Zawinul or Archie Shepp, and they circled into wider and wider circumferences of plan and happenstance, into psychedelia and free improvisation and confrontational street theatrics, and some if they weren't careful/too careerist invented hard rock.

And the voices, too, not quite unlearning the torch, the voices of the women, where best to place their emotional suitcases in a terminal stretching from Bessie Smith to Mary Weiss, from Vera Lynn to Dusty? Those suburban voices who imbibed whatever plankton of grit might have been blown over the Atlantic, to refine or coarsen it, to enlarge or microshrink it, thus tremulous Faithfull to righteously howling Driscoll and then Miles, via Hendrix, got a toehold on this ever increasing circle and then so did Carla Bley and suddenly the loop was feeding back across to America and now everything was interactively possible...

So a blankly melancholic 3/4 one note guitar line over which she breathes memories of "Tennesse Waltz," the lamp flickering ever less frequently; inhaled closets of unforgettable wines, the feeling alive, "the wisdom that took me away from the bed," bouquets of glory and scents of forgiveness, the "she" who speaks of freedom ("'the way in' she said")...

The chimera collapses and we are in Henry Cow's 1973 with a piercingly calm, processed one note 'cello sample (Georgie Born trapped in a jam jar) and she lights up the mirror to mutual disgust: "Small, tasteless and flawed," and then, more with pity than contempt, "hoping to see, blinded like me - you tried to understand, but you're just a man, hoping to score - just like me." The veil of a Julie Covington awaits on the other side of the tanned door.

The lost thrill, the ceaseless attempts to pretend, the calamitous gulf between the him of then and whatever he is now, all crawling down to a blunted cigarette incapable of eating any moon; and so, into a mechanical 1969 R&B rapidly blasted apart by her Berberian antitonal choirs - the dissonances encapsulating her inability to land - and there is an Auger organ and a grumbling guitar; the organ doesn't solo as such but merely proceeds into intently intense discordant clusters, the machine winding down to explode.

Back, briefly, to a pastoral Twiggy 1976 of yieldless yearning - if only that 'cello would (be) pipe(d) down - before the ravaging combo thrust hurls itself back into the damaging picture; the guitar becoming increasingly a groaning, locked joint of malaligned ligaments mutually and frantically grinding each other down into abhorrent dust and after six and a half minutes the operator has no option save to turn off the switch. The hidden history of a noticeably green rock - algae, or did we let it grow into plutonium?

PORTISHEAD: Machine Gun

"Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls."
(SP, from "Crossing The Water," composed 4 April 1962)

...blind, blind, blind, blind, blind...

There have been other machine guns. But the Brotzmann one wasn't just about May '68 and turning the gaff over to the beach; its original sleevenotes refer explicitly to the '68 Germany of unresolved, craterised bombsites, of concentration camp museums, of a consequent generation saddled to the point of spinal collapse with guilt. The pressing siren of need to create something new out of the elements of destruction.

The Hendrix one, a year later, not just about 'Nam, but looking askance and aghast at what might happen to those of his boys who survive and what kind of society they'll be coming back to and isn't this the preparatory ruination which will haunt that generation of unearned consequence?

Narrowing down, down, ever down into the era of Me (not my Me, you understand) when all the beacons have had their blaze extinguished or compromised - and is there any useful difference in the end? - to an age where one is forced to look through oneself rather than look after others because others will always betray you at either end...

...but also back to a ghost older than her great grandmother...

"I saw a saviour

a saviour come my way

I thought I'd see it

at the cold light of day

but now I realise that I’m

Only for me"

...a working woman's Bristol Channel blues...

...and yet also as young as any daughter would be...

Consider the video to Britney Spears' 2004 number one single "Everytime," also the last formal track on its parent album In The Zone (zone nature unspecified), wherein her prayer is contorted into the smallest and reddest possible corner - the bathtub, the blood - but still suggests escape; a child, angel as child, ANGEL OF ASHES...

(always coming back to HIM, too...)

...which on the album sounds the least reversible ending since Closer but she doesn't quite die even as her radar detaches itself from her bodily grief and rises to meet the absolute.

Is her grief, therefore, necessarily any the lesser in validity than those of others?

And can she still see the ANSWER?

"If only I could see

You turn myself to me

and recognise the poison in my heart

There is no other place

No one else I face

The remedy, it will agree with how I feel"

"Here in my reflecting...

What more can I say?"

She knows the answer is in front of her but cannot quite grasp it and thus these tortuously huge barriers of defence; a guillotined "Blue Monday," humid hammers of call and response between two drum patterns which might once have been people - the buried voice which emerges when drum pattern 1 (hammer on snare anvil) doubles up in strength halfway through (GET ME OUT OF HERE!) though the scan of titular drum pattern 2 remains unrelenting...

A confessional tango, a ballad which Veloso or Gilberto could have written before life and loss did things to it (thus marvel all the more at the former's retained composure as all else falls down around them).

Confessional -

"For I am guilty for the voice that I obey

Too scared to sacrifice a choice

Chosen for me."

THERE ARE FIVE STAGES OF LOSS, IT SAYS SO IN THE MANUAL, FOLLOW THEM AND YOU WILL BE FREE OR YOUR MONEY BACK

ESCALATED HILLS of trombones as sirens, basses shifting out of synch and tone, bombarding cascades of miniscule hailstones bouncing off or maybe radiating through the inadequate hood of cover DO YOU REALLY WANT TO STAY HERE

THIS IS YOUR WORLD!
I AM YOUR WORLD!

"And I could say nothing because I was as guilty as they were."

(Mingus, after Pastor Niemoller)

STOP

Scratches of misrecorded memory

And then RESTART

But your wings have been SAVED

A warm synthesiser enters - the tone of the melody remains relatively harsh in its metallic melancholy, but it is doing its ardent best to clear the smoke from the victim's eyes to look, to see

RAT-AT-AT-AT TAT-AT-AT-AT!!!

The smoke clears.

The choice is mine.

Out of the elements of destruction, salvation.

End of world deferred until further notice.