The Raincoats vs Phil Collins

The following entry was drafted on the 380 on the way to Kelvin Grove this morning...



Listen to the drums. 'Odyshape'. They're febrile, smart, stuttering, a living beast, not there to fill the silence or the spaces for breathing, but alert and fluent to the music and story unfolding around them. A tumble on the floor toms. A hissing fit on the cymbals. A race around the snare.

How different, how oppositional to the dull thud thud thud of their competent male peers. Most drumming, you can predict it from beginning to end. Not on 'Odyshape', and rarely anywhere within the initial brace of Raincoats albums. No one will ever be able to convince me that Phil Collins is a good drummer, the way he sucks the life out of the instruments around him with his barrage of fills and cross-handed technique.

Bad drumming is the reason I'm unable to listen to most rock bands, more so then even the singing. I say 'bad', but clearly that's a core subjective judgment. Yet who is anyone to tell me to think different? Listen to the drums on 'Odyshape' and tell me I'm wrong to feel this way...

And then listen to the downright wrong bass runs on 'The Body' (from 1983's The Kitchen Tapes) and tell me that I was wrong to hate this band - for the way they betrayed me, the way they betrayed their own music - before they first split up, round about 1984. What's this cod-funk got to do with intimacy? They knew it themselves, too.  Take a listen to 'Don't Be Mean', that incredible damaged-spiteful song of Gina's released in 1996, a delayed reaction to a certain acquaintance's interest in their music. It could be from a missing period between the first and second albums, such is the paranoia in the voice and violin.

Whatever. There's often a reason bands split in the first place, y'know. What is far rarer is that they reform, and are still as vital. The Raincoats briefly proved to be the exception. (Um, except that I saw them at the Concorde in Brighton in 1996 and they were horrible. I walked out. I can't deny, however, that I might have been suffering from very mixed emotions that may well have prejudiced me that evening, for a variety of reasons.)