Tomorrow’s music today. This Issue: Spoon
Austin, Texas soul-rocking indie lads Spoon have had a snowballing success in their home country over the space of four albums. Frontman and songwriter Britt Daniel talks us through the rise of Spoon.
lnere are two d:fterent kinds of bands ones that come out with a bang and do some great stuff and then fade away. and some that ease into being very good, I'm glad were one of those latter bands. It wasn't until our third album that we really got into our st":de.
Your music seems like straightforward rock ‘n‘ roll, but there are all sorts of weird arrangements and structures going on underneath. How come?
I guess it's just my approach. I never think we should take an ‘oddball approach'. I just very desperately try to make each song work. Somehow we've got to make this who of clay ElliC something good.
Your albums all have real coherence to them, and they’re all pretty short. Why is that?
| always thought just because you can make records longer now that we've got (IDs. doesn't mean that you s/iou/d. My favourite records are all mostly around 3:") minutes long.
Spoon come with a formidable live reputation. Is that something you work on?
Not at all. I love playing live everyone in the band does. lo me it's the most immediately fun part of being in a band. so we just try to have a good time. 'lounng is the most fun thing I ever do. so we basically just try to have a party every night.
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ALTERNATIVE FOLK KING CREOSOTE AND
THE EARLIES moo Mono, Glasgow, Mon 5 Sep
It feels like King Creosote is on the verge of something huge just now, and the buzz of expectation at this show is positively palpable. Using Mancunian psych-folksters the Earlies as a backing band is a stroke of genius. and with the inclusion of fellow Fencer the Pictish Trail there are nine musicians on stage creating a sumptuous and beefy orchestral folk sound that has to be experienced to be believed. Tuba. cello, organ, sax, accordion and the kitchen sink are all thrown in with gleeful abandon, and on the likes of slow-burning anthem 'Not One Bit Ashamed' or the achingly touching 'So Forlorn' it all makes a magical. awesome kind of sense. It's time for King Creosote to assume the throne. (Doug Johnstone)
ART SLEAZE
BUMRAPE
The Subway, Edinburgh, Fri 9 Sep 0...
On stage. a man in a dirty mac. skimpy but sturdy pants and a horne- rnade gimp mask is declaiming over a sleazy synth-core beat about his lonely onanist existence. Behind him, his partner in crime. a man so parka'd up he looks like South Park's Kenny reborn as a rent boy, undertakes some vintage knob—twiddling. The noise that spurts out over the next hour is a non- stop erotic cabaret which, with tongue lodged firmly in gob when other orifices are left wanting, wilfully exploits the grubby hinterland that lies between the seaside-postcard take on
entertainment vaudeville.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the Bumrape experience. a double act soundalike Soft Cell by way of Vic 'n' Bob and Little Britain, who, for the last year, have been plying their trade to give solace to mummy's boy crybabies everywhere. It's a gloriously flamboyant affair, and when the towel that is the prop for the show's grand- finale punchline gets stuck in the extractor fan, it's too perfect.
Soon to decamp to the fleshpots of Berlin, where more of their ilk reside, be sure to give Bumrape a hug soon. Just not too hard — you never know what might pop up. (Neil Cooper)
lNDlE
STARS
King Tut’s, Glasgow, Fri 9 Sep mo
Although singer Torquil Campbell would have had us believe his father being expatriated from Mount Florida lay at the root of the Canadian septet's wide-eyed jubilation at playing Glasgow, there's much more that's conspicuously 'Wegian about Stars than one man's genes. Lyrics of the likes of ‘listening to the sound of the Chemikal Underground reveal something of the truth, if not as starkly as does their unmistakany carbon reproduction of the Delgados' rich, ornate style of songcraft.
And why not? If the now defunct said four piece aren't going to utilise it anymore. then someone else damn well should. Especially when it's put to as brilliant effect as in 'Ageless Beauty' or ‘Y0ur Ex-lover is Dead'. material Stars will no doubt continue to try and blithely pass off as being little more than 'emo shit'. But we'll quietly know better. Which is one
Doug Johnstonei
I King Tut's. Glasgow. Wed28 Sep.
60 THE LIST 2):) Sep t) ()(.I mus
naughtiness. the ugliness of lonely, betwixed confrontation and top light
JAZZ. ALL RISE Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, Wed 5 Oct
Wynton Marsalis has performed in Scotland in a variety of capacities, including quintet. sextet. and with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, but All Rise will dwarf the scale of even tne great LCJO. It stands alongside the earlier and equally epic Pulitzer Prize—winning Blood on the Fields as the trumpeter's most ambitious foray into large-scale composition.
The piece was originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1999, and premiered in December that year with the combined forces of the NYPO. the LCJO and a choir and vocal soloists. It represented a huge investment of creative energy by its composer and all those involved. as he recalled.
'I devoted every single day of 1999 to working on the composition. It required a notebook full of structural details and written thematic relationships. and the copyists were exhausted
reason why more than just the band walked off with a grin. (Malcolm Jack)
writing out the parts. After the premiere it took me six months to recover. The last thing I wanted to hear about was this piece.‘
Subsequent performances did follow, however. including a recording in 2001 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for his previous label, Columbia. The Glasgow performance of the 12-part composition will feature the London Philharmonic Orchestra. conducted by Kurt Masur, the man on the podium at the New York premiere, and the LCJO.
The Glasgow visit comes in the wake of the devastation of Marsalis' home town of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina (the LCJO quickly organised a fund-raising concert in New York in mid- September). It is not the first time that a performance of the piece has coincided with a disaster — the recording in Los Angeles in 2001 was almost scuppered by the attack of September 1 t, and the subsequent shutdown of the American air transport network. Then, as now, though, Marsalis and his musicians decided the only valid option was to keep on swinging. (Kenny Mathieson)