We were there to see faux-Mississippi delta via Yorkshire blues men Gomez, but this spectacle was the warm-up act. The squawk faded into a mess of battered instruments and a final flourished kick of the microphone and stand, the tipping up of the drum kit and seeming ambivalent stalk off the stage. This was music as gestures, as statement of intent. Hell, it might even mean something.
‘That was amazing,’ my Kiwi friend gushed. ‘Who were they again?’
‘No idea,’ I replied somewhat staggered. All around us the same questions were being asked: Who? Where? What?
Later, with the aid of the internet I learned that they were from Los Angeles, they were called Funeral Party and nine months later the dice have thrown up their debut album, The Golden Age of Knowhere.
Ten years or so, an aspiring visual artist said to me something about needing to be successful now. Right this minute. The implication being that artists who didn’t make it young were never going to make it; only with youth would you have something new to say. With age you become more accepting of the establishment. Life, in the end, wears you down.
In this instance, they were explicitly referring to visual artists, but I think it’s something that could, maybe, be applied to all art forms. Certainly music, with the possible exceptions of jazz, classical and opera, would seem to suggest so.
Perhaps it’s just because so-called youngsters buy more music and are inclined to buy something made by people their own age. Were we more interested in elevating our peers to positions of grandeur because then it felt more feasible that we could do it too? David Baddiel thinks that there no more heroes to be found in the arts. He argues that an excessively large critique market means that the equivalent of Ezra Pound pointing out James Joyce was a genius will never happen again. There are too many people with access to an audience (ahem) who’ll poo-poo any such proclamation. But the young don’t really know this. They haven’t been saddled with too much expectation being dashed too often.
Perhaps youth also brings with it a bravery to be different, to be innovative, to throw fucking rule book out the window and play what you need to hear or say or make rather than just what needs to sell to cover your mortgage repayments and keep you stocked up with nice wine.
There’s a notion in music writing of the difficult second album syndrome. The idea that the incendiary debut is almost impossible to follow up because there are now fans with expectations to meet without just repeating the trick, there is a profile to adhere to. Oh, and because under pressure from those same fans and the traditional money end of the business the record needs to be written, recorded, produced and released in a year whilst still promoting the debut, and so the band don’t have the luxury of time that helped the first’s gestation. They don’t have the freedom to hone the new songs by performing them live and to write and rewrite. They just have to do it.
This lack of fear to make the shapes and sounds that rest in your head, I guess, was what my artist friend meant. Age brings caution.
Common consensus seems to suggest that writers are different. As a general rule, writers are expected to be older. They are supposed to use the benefit and experiences of the life they have lived to write new ones for everyone else. Maybe it is all a matter of perspective. Maybe the concept of youth just depends on which direction you’re looking in.
It’s an optimistic thought and feasible in that no-one ever talks about writers under twenty, do they? Granta’s best young British/American/Spanish writers’ issues are always popular and young always means those under forty. In the classic 1983 list all bar http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/19/fiction.kazuoishiguroand Adam Mars-Jones were older than I am now. A similar list in the New Yorker last year threw up only one. The Telegraph, copying the Americans blatantly, came up with their own list and only had Evie Wyld younger, although Ross Raisin was born the same year (Goldsmiths alumni both, by the way).
This is all reassuring. Sort of. As another rejection letter lands on the door mat, I can tell myself that there is still time to get it right. But sometimes it still feels like there’s so much stuff my head, so many scraps of notes and plot outlines and fragments of dialogue that I am simply running out of time to find people to read them.
Because writers are young too. For every David Abbott only coming to pick up a pen once life is mostly through there is someone like the hugely talented Amy Sackville who was just twenty-eight when the Stillpoint was published last year. Or Joshua Ferris who was thirty-three when Then We Came To The End persuaded me there was little point trying to write the perfect office experience novel because he’d just done it. He was the same age as when Ali Smith when Free Love and Other Stories came out. Ernest Hemingway was just twenty-seven when The Sun Also Rises was published and F. Scott Fitzgerald was just twenty-four when he held his first edition of This Side of Paradise. Neither of them had quite as much time as they may have expected. That’s the problem with life. You never quite know how long it’ll be.
Compared to the Arctic Monkeys being seventeen with a number one album they all seem positively ancient. Maybe it’s all about how old you feel.
You know what, I have no idea how old Funeral Party are. They might be in their late twenties or early thirties. They might not. It doesn’t really matter. In the end, it’s about the sound. My Kiwi friend and I went to see them again, making an active decision to check them out this time when they played Cargo in Shoreditch recently. Perhaps, forewarned they simply weren’t as surprising, but it didn’t feel quite the same.
As the crowd bounced and punched the claustrophobic air in the catacombs of the railway arches and the singer stared at his disjointed hand clutched the remains of the tambourine and said ‘I think I broke my thumb’, I glanced around and felt by far the oldest person there. Not because I wasn’t enjoying myself. I was. Not because I didn’t get airborne with the same enthusiasm as everyone else. I did. But because when they sang about revolution and changing of the world for the better through hedonism and ideals I couldn’t help but be objectively distant. They weren’t singing to me. They were singing to youth, to belief.
So, are Funeral Party going to be the next big thing? Are they heralding in a new era of music? Don’t be silly. Of course they’re not. They’re just a band. A good one, sure, but just a band. They do make a glorious racket, though.
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