If you aren't familiar with the Langley Schools Music Project, check it out here.
(From Careless Talks Costs Lives #11)
The Langley Schools Music Project
Innocence And Despair (Bar None US import)
Music should be primal.
Doesn’t have to be, sometimes is better if isn’t, but if we’re talking something as fundamental as rock’n’roll – and I believe we are talking something as fundamental as rock’n’roll here in Careless Talk Costs Lives – then it helps. You don’t need to be naïve to be primal, but it’s bloody hard without. The music I love is unadorned by knowing production (production that seeks to enhance listening pleasure is fine: production that is merely aimed at smoothing away all the corners). Except when it isn’t. Hell, there ain’t anything wrong with ABBA or Motown: or Godspeed You Black Emperor, or The Roots.
Still. The music I usually love the most is that which, either intentionally or instinctively, recaptures the spontaneity of youth: the tunnel vision, that clarity, the self-absorption. Jonathan Richman, The Shaggs, Melody Dog, Ramones, James Brown, Brian Wilson, Jad Fair, The Dirtbombs... Writing about music, it sometimes feels that when I use the description child-like it feels like an insult. It isn’t. It’s high praise. Solo, children’s voices can near break your heart. When those voices are multiplied a hundred fold, the thrill and trauma of being alive comes rushing through – take, for example, those voices chanting on Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall”, cynical and uncaring. They sound all the more chilling because of the juxtaposition of perceived innocence with adult values. It’s almost pornographic.
Innocence And Despair, a collection of 70s and 60s pop covers, sung with verve and instinctual fire is (my) Greatest Album Ever Made. Period. There are so many moments when you are left gasping for joy or sorrow, the voices rising and falling behind the incredible, minimal orchestrated instrumentation: too many moments to list. To pick one moment of magic over another is too much. “God Only Knows” where the children destroy any chance I have of listening to The Beach Boys again; the raucous, undemanding exhilaration on the cover of the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night”, that girl singing all timid and lost on “The Long And Winding Road”... (and doesn’t McCartney sound like a hack, wouldn’t any adult sound like a hack, next to that)... the mesmerising reading of “Space Oddity” where the music is stripped so far back, all you are faced with is beauty. This is beauty in the raw, almost as pure as the human frame can allow.
Of course this resonates on every level with me. When I first heard Daniel Johnston, I started laughing because I couldn’t believe anyone could be so pathetic. The first time I heard this, I was thrown by the production and the purity, voices ringing untrue in my jaded ears. It took another listen: halfway through, “Saturday Night”, before I understood. This is an ultimate expression of the music I love.
It’s so blindingly obvious how you can create such wonderment. Why doesn’t it happen everywhere? Maybe it does happen everywhere. Maybe it does.
Find a nascent music teacher genius, one who empathises with the children in his care, allow him and them free rein to express their wonderment at life through the medium music, and record the result. The basics are: a 60-voice choir of rural kids; shimmering gamelan chimes and elemental rock trimmings; a two-track tape deck: a western Canada school gym in 1976 and 1977. The results... no, they’re not magical, because that would imply some trickery at work.
Innocence And Despair is spiritual, in the deepest sense of the word.
Everett True
P.S. The excellent illustration that accompanies this entry was originally drawn by Andrew Clare to accompany the above review. It was a favourite, ended up on our wall in Brighton. The album too was centrepiece to a particularly memorably night in Hull on the first night of a Legend! tour.
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