OK. I’m not a fool. It would of course be unforgiveable of me to let it pass that Scotland’s national football team have qualified for the World Cup by defeating Denmark after a glorious piece of footballing brinksmanship, the like of which only they can deliver. But the fact that this happens on the same night that local elections are taking place across Denmark does complicate matters somewhat. And yes, this is especially the case when the people of Copenhagen end up getting a new mayor, a woman called Sisse Marie Welling who seems refreshingly like someone who would call themself a socialist without obfuscation, and whose position reflects the priorities of a coalition of two main parties in the city council, the British equivalent of whom would be, I suppose, the Socialist Workers Party/Greens and Your Party. And also when, after over 100 years of the mayor always being a Social Democrat, this change has possibly happened because the Social Democrats have become weird lately, banging on about immigration, pointing the finger at ‘lefties’ and being, I suppose, a bit ‘righty’, presumably because they think that’ll make the people like them. And when it’s therefore a bit of a big deal that they’ve been rejected, and it makes me a bit proud of the city of which I’m a citizen, whose voters weren’t having this nonsense and did something about it. Like I say, it’s complicated. But not unfathomably so.
It’s That Simple
My attitude to football culture has always been relatively, some may say depressingly, simple. I’m basically only on board when we’re talking international tournaments. That’s to say for me, club football holds little interest. As Danes like to say, ‘It says me nothing’. For a game of football to light my candle, if I’m being honest, I need the guilty pleasure of national chauvinism, with all its ugliness and tribalism, to kick in. The simple joy of watching people hoof a ball around isn’t enough. There I said it. Of course when your chauvinism hangs on a sense of national pride in Scotland, or for that matter Denmark, one has the crucial advantage of supporting an underdog, thereby sidestepping the accusations of gloating, imperialism or swivel-eyed racism which would be levelled at you if you were, say, English. We do all know however that there is a specific, undefinably unlovely quality to English football-based nationalism that’s somehow different from most other kinds. It just is. There’s also no doubt that nothing riles Scottish people more than the snootiness of English football commentators towards Scottish teams and players, and their assumption that the entire non-English sector of the British nation is always staunchly behind Engerland and their fans every time they play. We sometimes are, though we may not admit it, but you shouldn’t just reckon with it. It’s the reason we like to beat the English and want anyone to win apart from them; it’s not because of the English people themselves, it’s because of sports commentators. Seriously, it’s that simple. Ask anyone. It’s also connected to the reason why Scots and Danish fans seem to get on OK any time I’ve experienced their presence together in Copenhagen. We both know another underdog when we see one. And importantly, we don’t mind ripping the piss out of ourselves and each other. I saw that a group of Danish fans hired a bright red bus full of hot dogs and drove it over to Glasgow for the game yesterday, and were seen doling out these Danish pølser to organisations who then distributed them to homeless Glaswegians. What was especially poignant about this gesture was that, while carrying out this generous act, the Danish fans took the trouble to dress up in both predictably silly viking helmets and also absurd, bright-red kilts, as though keeping all the bases of piss-taking covered. Nothing brings people together more than a shared sense of looking like a fool
Godfrey
In other news, I visited the music venue Vega on Monday, to see, and very much hear, the remarkable old New York no-wave band Swans. For the uninitiated, according to Wikipedia they’re ‘an American experimental rock band formed in 1981’ one of the trademarks of whose early period was ‘….playing at painfully loud volumes during concerts, sometimes leading to police stopping shows..’ , a description which sounds so wilfully transgressive as to be almost comical, and yet somehow serves to trivialise the very real power they exhibit as a live ensemble. They’re kind of old, a mismatched posse of seven variously be-stetsonned, balding, hirsute, skinny, wizened, chubby men (and one young-ish woman) seeming to display, like Snow White’s analogous seven companions, the entire range of human curmudgeonliness and affability. To paraphrase the words of Malcolm Tucker they look like the waiting room of a prostate clinic. But over the two and a half hours or so that they play, they still draw you inexorably into their long, droney anthemic pieces, big scary, swaying chunks of awfully loud sound that engulf you and have you feeling like you’ve being immersed in one of Goya’s black paintings. They’re absolutely not ‘metal’ in any sense though, black- death- or otherwise, genres I’ve always found difficult to take seriously. No, they’re quite genuinely dark, like what Mogwai would be like if their sense of Celtic upliftingness had been replaced by American Gothic. One of the commentators on the video clip I’ve linked to writes, rather puzzlingly, ‘I almost turned into a wildebeest listening to this’. As I’ve written before, I wear hearing aids, and so this visit raised an interesting conflict of issues about how to be able, on the one hand, to hear what people were saying in the bar before and after the gig, whilst also being able to protect my ears from Swans’ onslaught at the concert while they actually played. Essentially, my problem was that you can’t wear both hearing aids and earplugs at the same time. I therefore opted to sacrifice the hearing aids, which meant that as soon as I had to talk to more than one person at a time in the bar before the gig, I became Godfrey out of Dad’s Army, mishearing, not hearing at all, smiling and nodding, apparently knowingly, but actually in profound incomprehension. During the actual gig, in moments of devilment, I took to indulging in a kind of perverse aural edging, whereby I would sometimes tease myself by pulling my earplugs out a millimetre or two, for short periods, just a little bit, to get a glimpse of the power of the music without coming to permanent harm. When I did so, I would think to myself ‘ mmm…actually…I think I can handle this’. And then at some point, their singer, Michael Gira, would do the weird, wailing thing he does in almost all their numbers at the start of each line, a kind of guttural ‘Uuuuuuurrrrrhhhh!!!!….’ that sounds like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu calling you in for your tea. At these moments I consoled myself with the vague hope that police might still at some point actually stop the show like in the old days. But it was fun and you should try it sometime.
Pah!!…Pah!!…Pah!!
My attitude to loudness, and loud noise has itself always been a source of some amusement in our family. I suffer from what can only be described as an exaggerated fear of sudden loud bangs, such as firework explosions, cannon fire, gun-shots, car-doors slamming and people hitting snare drums. All of these can cause me to recoil physically and yell out loud as though feigning Tourettes. When I played in bands, my aversion to snare drums used to be so all-encompassing that I had to hurriedly leave sound checks in a mild panic as soon as the drummer started the familiar, thunderously upsetting Pah!!!…Pah!!…Pah!!!…Pah!! of a snare check. I’ve tried to analyse this and can’t quite figure it out. Is it the shock of any unexpected, sudden sound? Well, yes, but once, as an experiment, I stood in a little room on my own and tried repeatedly beating a snare drum hard with a drumstick myself to see what happened. Each time I hit it, I jumped in shock, even though logically I knew what was about to happen. I could literally make myself recoil in shock every time as though someone else was doing it. Incidentally, loud, low-frequency ‘thuds’, or indeed constant loud sounds, like for example heavy traffic or music by the terrifying Japanese artist Merzbow, don’t seem to have the same effect; it’s sharp snaps and shots that are the trigger. There’s also something about the circumstances under which the noise occurs. For example I have always had a major problem with loud music being played in seated venues in which you can’t choose how far away you are from the source of the sound, for example the loudspeaker stack in a rock music venue or theatre. Likewise, if I attend a theatre production which has a pre-warning about loud bangs, gun shots or explosions of any kind, it will drive me to an anticipatory, fluttery frenzy of fingers-shooting-up-to-ears every few minutes of the show, terrified of when it might happen. There’s also what I might term ‘empathic fear’ in which I become concerned, almost to the point of panic, about other people, specifically old people, being subjected to loud noise or music. I remember as a kid feeling irrationally concerned and somehow sad at the thought of my poor parents – who would only have been in their forties and fifties throughout my childhood – having to be around loud music. As a 65-year old, this is a weird, primal feeling, the source of which I feel a good therapist could get to after a week of tearful regression and viewings of 1960’s public information films from the archives. I still experience something related to this feeling any time I find myself in the presence of a genre of music, let’s say big-band jazz, which you wouldn’t expect to be defined by its loudness in the way something like Swans is, but is anyway somehow louder than it should be. It’s somehow seems ‘not right’ in a disturbing, even dangerous way. I remember sitting in the front row of a big-band concert for kids and pensioners at Christmas time, a bit to close to the brass, and feeling more disturbed to the core of my being than I have ever been at any supposedly scary, experimental noise gig. The thing is, as you might guess from what I wrote before, I love loud immersive music that I have actually chosen to hear, although single snare shots, with not much going on around them can still bring on the old panic. And don’t get me started on fucking fireworks…
A Kind of Cadeau
It was also rather heartwarming to observe the demographic who attends something like Swans – everything from seventeen-year-old misfits who probably feel that no one in their school really understands them to a good portion of old fucks like myself and also a smattering of silver-haired ladies whose eye make-up, or perhaps just their general deportment, shows that they maintain a little discreet veneer of gothiness, a kind of cadeau to their memories of youthful outsiderness. For the truth is that this kind of music – whatever that is– is no longer exclusively the prerogative of the young or indeed old people. So-called ‘popular music’, and all of its offshoots, has been around so long now that some of the people who play it are able pull a trail of followers - older and more recent– behind them in their wake like a comet. At the same time, pretty much all of existing recorded music has become essentially available to everyone, a situation which encourages young people to dip into the cornucopia of goodies without bothering too much about when they were created. And so my eighteen year old daughter’s playlist can feature Danish rappers, Billie Eilish, Nick Drake, Randy Newman and Blossom Dearie without any of those seeming especially more‘niche’ than anything else. I recently met a young friend of my daughter’s, about seventeen, who is planning to see Kraftwerk for the first time, without knowing any of their songs or indeed much about their music at all. He’ll doubtless be there, standing beside slightly tearful old crusties in their seventies and wondering what they’re getting so het up about. I can’t help feeling that this scenario is now the new norm at such events in a way that it surely was not for my generation. Good thing, surely?