Acoustic archaeology
Category: Music

Tidying up my desk today I came across a news item I'd forgotten, about a research project directed by Professor De Mattia at the Conservatory of Music in Salerno. They claim to have reconstructed the exact sound of the epigonian, an wooden harp from ancient Greece, by using a computer modelling process. You can hear examples online – www....com/58fn2c - and what is immediately apparent, to me at least, is that they sound synthetic and completely modern. I felt much the same earlier this year, hearing Toshi Ichiyanagi's reconstructions of ancient Japanese instruments, all of which sounded like something you'd buy from a supplier of new instruments for schools. 'For the first time we can hear the musical sounds of the past,' de Mattia has been quoted as saying, which is the usual bait throw out by these research projects. What you actually hear is a very approximate form of listening.

Currently reading : The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely By Anthony Vidler

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Tess and the humming stones
Category: Writing and Poetry

The BBC TV adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles looked attractive but wrecked the ending. On television, Tess and Angel Clare wander into Stonehenge in broad daylight, Tess drapes herself tragically on one of the stones, then the police arrive. In the book, they stumble into the stone circle at night, unaware of what they have found but overwhelmed by its sudden massive presence within the landscape:
'"It hums," said she. "Hearken!"
'He listened. The wind playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp . . .
'"A very Temple of the Winds,' he said."'
Sound is important in Thomas Hardy's novels because critical moments of narrative often turn upon what is left unsaid: the repressions, evasions and missed opportunities for openness that so often prove excruciating to a modern reader. What should be spoken is left silent, cannot be voiced, or by accident, is overlooked. Misunderstandings that follow always blossom into grim tragedies. At the climax of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess and Angel emerge out of darkness into the humming drone of Stonehenge. They stay and listen 'to the wind among the pillars', like two pagans momentarily isolated from the strictures of the world, then light dawns and society returns. The romantic idea of Stonehenge as a 'heathen temple', and the uncanny natural wildness of the sounds produced by aeolian harps combine to haunting effect, an echo of Coleridge's poem of 1795, The Aeolian Harp, in which he described the sound of the harp as 'a soft floating witchery of sound/as twilight Elfins make . . .' These were still powerful ideas in the late 19th century. To ignore them not only misses the drama of the scene, but loses the contrast between this eerie sounding and the disastrous silences of the past.

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the divide
Category: Music

I don't mean to give the impression that this occasional blog is succumbing to morbidity or nostalgia, but the obituaries of significant figures are coming thick and fast. On Tuesday it was Bo Diddley, yesterday it was Hammond organist Jimmy McGriff, who died on May 24th at the age of 72. I'd been thinking about McGriff recently, having bought a copy of Lisa Tucker's book, Hornsey 1968: the art school revolution. This was a hot item in our local book shop, which is a two minute walk away from the Hornsey main college building where the sit-in of 1968 took place (and which is, coincidentally or not, just being demolished). I was slightly embarrassed to buy it, having seen other men of my age pay for copies and rush outside to see if they could spot their younger selves in the meagre selection of photographs.

Regrettably, it's a dull read: less than 100 pages of main text and 100 pages of glossary, notes and index. Writing with chilly academic distance and grinding devotion to the minutiae of bureaucratic process, Tickner seems to feel there's no need to document much of what actually happened during the sit-in. Worst, she restricts her focus to a few "stars" in either camp. I'd just turned 19 when the sit-in started and got involved. I gave up what I was supposed to be doing in my foundation year at the Tottenham annex and started attending meetings, seminars and all-night film shows, tried to organise a concert, and got involved in some of the practical stuff like buying food for the kitchens. The impact on me was enormous. It influenced my decision to give up art school to become a musician, and gave me a grounding in collective action and self-organisation for later ventures like Musics magazine and the London Musicians Collective. I'm sure the same impact must have been felt by many others, but you don't hear about them in Tickner's book.

But the reason Jimmy McGriff came to mind was because I remembered an occasion during the sit-in when I got the chance to do some Djing. I was listening to soul and R&B, as I had throughout my teenage years and still do, though conscious that the "cool" people had switched their allegiance to white, so-called progressive music. One of the records I played was Jimmy McGriff's "All About My Girl" and that was the track that pushed somebody to complain and tell me that this music was old-fashioned. I suppose I felt angry and just a bit humiliated, so it's an experience that has never gone away. The racial divide in music seems to be getting wider; whatever small attempts I've made to consider music from an equal starting point – black, white, folk, classical, whatever – seem to have made little impression. I don't feel humiliated any more but it still makes me angry.

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Bo Diddley is (or was) a gunslinger
Category: Music

Bo Diddley was never paid royalties for his compositions, so he had to carry on touring at the age of 79. That was what killed him – a stroke on tour in 2007, followed by heart failure yesterday. His importance to me was immense. In 1964, at the age of 15 I played guitar in my first band. We played cover versions of R&B songs like Bo Diddley's "Roadrunner". That descending plectrum scrape down the low E string on the Chess original was what started me thinking about the strange sounds that might be possible from an electric guitar. When I heard his instrumental tracks, particularly "Bo's Guitar", I began to really experiment. Somebody who heard the band said they thought I was killing my guitar. Actually it was killing me. I'd made it in woodwork classes at school, basing the design on the futuristic shape of the guitar played by Bo on the back cover of his Go Bo Diddley album. It was out of tune, the action was too high, the fretboard was uneven and the pick-ups were cheap, but it made me realise that making instruments was an interesting possibility. After that I moved very quickly into listening to and playing a much wider range of music, including free jazz, and then applying what I'd learned from Bo Diddley. There's an unissued recording of a BBC radio broadcast by John Stevens from 1972. I'm playing electric guitar (through a Rush Pep Box) as part of the workshop group and I can hear that my playing was still heavily influenced by "Bo's Guitar". As for the instrument building, my first solo record was New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments, released by Brian Eno on his Obscure label in 1975. It was the bizarre and exotic guitar shapes invented by Bo Diddley that set me off in that direction. I owe him a lot.

Currently watching : Lust, Caution (Widescreen, NC-17- Rated Edition) Release date: 2008-02-19

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shame, asparagus, empty museums
Category: Art and Photography

This is a delayed thought, and further prevarication. I was told about somebody who watched Matt Wolf's film about Arthur Russell, Wild Combination (in which I was interviewed), and then spotted me at the Whitney Biennale. I feel ashamed to have been seen at such a dismal, wretched event. For the record, my favourite exhibitions this year have been the Cranach at the Royal Academy in London, Juan Munoz at Tate Modern, and in particular the still lives of Adriaen Coorte at the Mauritshuis in the Hague. The latter is breathtaking. His 17th century miniatures of asparagus, walnuts, gooseberries and peaches, only rarely invaded by the living presence of a butterfly, are a kind of silent music. I also enjoyed Paul Schutze's Twilight Science at Alan Cristea, Cork Street, particularly the still, silent museum interiors. Incidentally, there was a queue to get into the Whitney, but no queue for any of the others. In fact, the Adriaen Coorte was almost empty, on a Saturday afternoon, when the rest of the museum was rammed with visitors.

I've been listening today to Mompou's Charmes, recommended to me through this blog by Rob Ellis. I like what pianist Stephen Hough writes in the sleevenotes: "Whilst it would be impossible to claim that Mompou was one of the 'great' composers, it is equally impossible to classify him as second-rate." The same could be said, it seems to me, about Coorte.

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nocturne
Category: Music

Finally, after six months of prevarication, I started writing my new book: Ways of Hearing. Maybe the apocalyptic weather on Monday drove me to it. The worst part of writing a book is the beginning, followed by the middle, then the end, the edits, publication, reviews, starting the next one, etc. etc. So I was struggling to find a direction yesterday and took a break in the evening, during which I watched Mizoguchi's Uwasa No Onna, one of the recent DVD releases by Eureka Masters of Cinema. It's an unusual film for Mizoguchi – more relaxed, modern and humorous than usual – but the music is particularly striking. There are stage performances of noh and kyogen, street musicians, and an overheard fragment of Debussy's Arabesque 1, but the main composer is Toshiro Mayazumi, who uses exotic but spare combinations of Hawaiian slide guitar, vibraphone and an electronic instrument that sounds like an ondes Martinot. The film was released in 1954, the same year that Mayazumi was creating remarkable minimalist electronic pieces like Music for modulated wave by proportion of prime number at NHK. I also like Mayazumi's score for Mikio Naruse's When A Woman Ascends the Stairs, particularly the melancholy vibraphone theme that kicks in when Hideko Takamine actually does ascend the stairs, undecided whether to re-enter the smoky nocturnal world of deceiving men, financial insecurity and a lonely future. Like many such scores, it's almost certainly influenced by the Modern Jazz Quartet, which makes me wonder why the MJQ continue to be excluded from the reduced view of jazz that now prevails. None of this has anything to do with my book, by the way, so I'm still prevaricating.

Currently reading : Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art By Lewis Hyde

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a roof of screaming
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural

Morning in the woods, a big gang of starlings completely covers a canopy of trees, cackling and squabbling though mostly hidden from sight. Their noise is a roof of screaming under which I feel both captivated and repelled. At midnight, trying to sleep, I am disturbed by a screaming, revving noise nearby, a car seemingly locked in battle with itself. This ends with a loud bang. For the next half hour I am kept awake by helicopter noise, sirens, police cars and a large vehicle trying to negotiate the narrow street adjacent to ours. I have very little idea about what's going on, though I assume somebody tried to steal a car and ended up ramming it into another vehicle. My sleep is restless all night. I am woken by imaginary noises from downstairs, then dream that our house is possessed by demons. The stairs shake. A tiny horse, the size of a large dog, stands in our bedroom. He looks cute but rumbles just like Regan in The Exorcist. Knowing it's malevolent I try to kill it by squashing its neck in some sort of wooden box; then the miniature horse transforms into a cat. This is what wakes me, heart pounding. Perhaps I'm experiencing an overdose of horror: I just read Peter Ackroyd's depressing book on Edgar Allan Poe; currently reading Hoffmann, and recently watched Exorcist III, which is surprisingly good in parts. In particularly, there is one effective and lengthy near-silent scene in which eerie sounds off-screen turn out to be cubes of ice melting in a glass. Sound: you just can't trust it.

Currently listening : Mompou: Música Callada Release date: 1995-06-13

03:11 - 5 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

grisaille / sanjo

One of the highlights of visiting New York recently was seeing Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s tiny painting, The Three Soldiers, which hangs in the Frick Collection.
One soldier is beating a huge bass drum, another plays a transverse flute, the third raises a flag. I was reminded of another of his miniature masterpieces, Christ and the Woman Taken In Adultery from 1565, in the Courtauld Institute, London.

Both are painted in the grisaille style, in monochrome, though The Three Soldiers is closer to sepia; both suggest extraordinary depth, a black void plunging back to infinity, a magnetic nothingness exerting its pull on the complex interweaving of shadowed figures that so dynamically activates the foreground. The grissaile technique gives the impression of life continuing after a great catastrophe, the world coated in a layer of pale ash. At Tate Modern last week, looking at Duchamp’s largely monochrome Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, and his early luminescent, thinly coloured paintings such as Dulcinea (1), or the reproduction of Sonate in The Box in a Valise, I wondered if he had been affected by the unique effects of grisaille (2).

It seems strange to me that this small Pieter Brueghel painting should have been a highlight of my visit. In the past I’d be more likely to talk about performances by musicians - Milford Graves, Grandmaster Flash, Daniel Ponce, Trouble Funk and many others – but scanning the listings for music I found nothing enticing. One of my favourite New York restaurants is HanGawi, which is Korean vegan. The last time I ate there, a few years ago, they played great Korean music which suited the food exactly, but now it’s mostly sickly new age. I wonder if the switch has come about through customer responses to the more astringent textures of kayageum sanjo?

1. Typically self-deprecating, Duchamp described this as wishy-washy.
2. But I’m forgetting Cezanne, and the ’grisaille’ of cubism.

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Ichiyanagi/Robert Johnson/Poussin
Category: Music

Last week I was in New York, invited to speak at a symposium – Ancient Soundscapes: New Echoes - organised by the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies at Columbia University. The subject of the symposium was composer Toshi Ichiyanagi’s project to reconstruct eighth century instruments housed in various states of preservation in the Shosoin museum of Todaiji Temple, Nara, Japan and compose new pieces for these instruments, played by Ensemble Origin (a group that includes the wonderful sho player, Ko Ichikawa).

This theme of reconstructing music histories that are only partially known to us must have been on my mind. Waking up early on my first morning in New York, I could hear sounds from outside, including a constant droning noise that seemed to emanate from ventilation ducts on nearby rooftops. E. is still asleep. Slipping in and out of sleep, I had an extended, very detailed dream.

In the dream I was sitting in an audience, perhaps at a familiar college, though I recognised none of the features of the room. Blues singer Robert Johnson was playing a solo concert. At times, this felt like an intimate concert in a lecture theatre; at other points it seemed as if I was seeing recovered footage from an early television show. Then I heard his guitar playing in detail – one lengthy passage was almost like free improvisation and I could sense the change, the charge of intensity, the focussing of listening in the audience, as he concentrated on certain phrases, breaking the music down. His virtuosity is obvious but he has no problem with notes sounded imperfectly, blunted or clipped. At the end of the first set I see an opera administrator of my acquaintance, who is involved in the organisation of this event. I try to tell him how historically important the concert is but feel emotionally overwhelmed by what I’ve just heard and have to walk away.

For the second set, Johnson is sitting in the audience and I am sitting next to him. He wants to involve the audience in call and response, wants them to shout "yes sir" in the pauses of his song. "Do you say that here?" he asks me. It’s as if he is struggling to reach across time, distance and cultural difference, the way somebody would if they had been time transported. I tell him that "yes sir" might be said in shops where staff are still trained in such polite forms of address, then I explain to the audience what he wants.

There is a break in proceedings; everybody is waiting. The setting has changed into a dramatic Arcadian hilltop landscape, like an 18th century painting of a scene from Greek mythology, somewhat like Poussin. Johnson comes out again, but this time with no guitar. The atmosphere has changed also, now more like a Baptist religious meeting. A circle of people surround him and he is banging a tambourine, holding it flat like a frame drum, shamanic now. Then the dream ends.

One aspect of the dream that was so striking was the fact that despite my work in music and sound, I have only remembered a few dreams in which I actually hear any kind of sound. Later that morning, E. and I visit the Metropolitan Museum, where I want to pursue some research. We go straight up to the second floor and the first thing we see is a special exhibition devoted to the work of Poussin. I won’t say that the scene I saw was in the exhibition, but a number of paintings came close. I feel slightly spooked by this, pull out my notebook where I have written out the dream in all its detail, point to the name Poussin. The coincidence left me with a strange sense of disquiet which lingered all day.

Currently reading : Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia By Jennifer Mundy Release date: 01 March, 2008

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Orientalism
Category: Music

A few weeks back I was passing one of the local charity shops and did a cartoon double-take on seeing their window display. Sitting there waiting for me to walk by with money in my pocket was a Decca 7-inch 45rpm disc of Albert Ketelbey's "In a Chinese Temple Garden", b/w "The Sanctuary of the Heart". Released in 1961, it's a fine example of exotic light music from the 1920s – inauthentic and in many ways indefensible, yet from this point in time, strangely appealing in its political naivety. The record cost me £1, which is about as good as a bargain gets.

I assumed we had moved on since 1924, which was when Ketelbey composed "In a Chinese Temple Garden", but then watched the BBC2 TV series, Around the World in 80 Gardens, and realised that isn't necessarily the case. The subject this week was the influence of Zen on gardening in China and Japan, and since the approach of other programmes has been generally serious and research-based, you would think they could locate some geographically appropriate music. These documentaries fronted by arm-waving, gushing presenters (not so amusingly satirised on That Mitchell and Webb look recently) have a formula for Asia: a somewhat unconvincing hushed reverence for Japanese Zen weirdness, undercut by music which may be Japanese, but is more likely to be Chinese or a horrible hybrid of the two. Around the World In 80 Gardens slid back and forth between all three, which was disorientating and insulting.

A photographer friend of mine once showed me a CD-ROM of images and music he'd prepared to publicise his work. When it came to the section of photos from Japan, I told him he'd used Chinese music by mistake. "It doesn't matter, does it?" he asked. "Nobody will notice." Apparently not.

Currently reading : Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (1890) By Vernon Lee Release date: 11 April, 2006

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long drawn (out) grooves
Category: Music

There's a very nice story by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian today about Mingering Mike, the soul superstar who existed only in his own imagination. A resident of Washington DC, he created his own albums by drawing the artwork but filling the covers with cardboard discs. The grooves on the records were also handpainted onto the card, yet despite the private nature of the enterprise, some of the albums were shrinkwrapped and priced. As Mingering Mike's website will tell you, between 1968 and 1977 he produced over 50 albums, managed 35 of his own labels, and produced, directed and starred in nine of his own motion pictures. Personally, I'd like to hear Mike's "High In the Sky", clearly a response to Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On", and his scores for fictional kung fu films also sound enticing. Those of who have expended great efforts and expense in the past on releasing records to a non-existent audience may wish we had thought of this approach.

Currently reading : A Voice and Nothing More (Short Circuits) By Mladen Dolar Release date: 17 February, 2006

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slippages/fractures/displacement

The other night I watched The Lady From Shanghai on TCM. Setting aside Orson Welles's risible Irish accent, the film is overwhelmingly strange and almost unbearably powerful. One account describes it as alienating for the viewer: a mystifying plot that wallows in amorality and infidelity, and the looming intensity of wide-angle close-ups, each of these filling the screen with characters so unpleasant that you almost smell their sweat and bad breath. A peculiarly voyeuristic sensation of repulsion mixed with compulsion seeps into the pores, rather than the eyes and ears. Even fish and sharks swimming in the background of Welles's rendezvouz with Rita Hayworth in an aquarium are nightmarish, gigantic, absurd.

I wish I'd taken more notice when I was writing Exotica, as Heinz Roemheld's score is wonderfully exotic, a clear precursor of Les Baxter's quasi-classical touristica. At times its sensuality is as gloriously inappropriate as Hikaru Hayashi's lush exotic score for Kaneto Shindo's The Naked Island.

As with Touch Of Evil, released ten years later, Welles delights in sonic slippages, those moments when sound and music jump genre or place, an emotional glitch. Dialogue, like those sickening close-ups, is spoken (so heard) as if in a bad dream, recorded too close for comfort. Like other 'flawed' films, the madness spouting through narrative fractures and incoherence is more revealing of the times than better ordered 'masterpieces' of cinema.

The following morning I was in the garden and from somewhere nearby heard bagpipe music, a Scottish bagpipe playing "Marie's Wedding". Later we went out for a walk. At the end of our street, what sounded like Bulgarian folk music was heard coming from the gardens to our left, then bouncing off houses to our right. Ten minutes later, after hearing the same tune move from one geographical source to another, cut up and shifted around by a fickle wind, we found its mysterious origin in the grounds of one of the cricket clubs in our area.

People, quite a large gathering of them, were dancing hand-in-hand in a wide circle to this music, played on clarinet and other acoustic instruments over a disco four-on-the-floor. The music could have been Greek but an announcement made over a megaphone was definitely not. My initial guess seemed right: Bulgaria. Throughout the day, a sense of displacement lingered, though its effect was far more gentle than the madness erupting from The Lady From Shanghai.

Currently reading : Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770 By Emily Cockayne Release date: 28 May, 2007

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writhing sigla/Bechet/ornithology

In Queen's Wood this morning, tiny caterpillars hang suspended from the trees, each dangling from a single thread at about the height of a human being.
Green, brown, grey, or mixed white and black, they writhe or bide still in the air, small and mysterious calligraphic sigla that invite the passing walker into a fruitless decipherment of an impossible text. Drops of rain are falling, so infrequent that they can't be felt; they whisper their existence as sound, a faint crackling within the dead-leaf forest floor.

As I leave the woods I realise I am covered with caterpillars, their deception complete, since I am now the carrier (one crawls onto my ear as I write this) rather than the observer. Earlier I read an amusing story in the Evan Parker interview in this month's Wire magazine. Walking home I replay it in my mind. According to Evan, Numar Lubin, who ran Nimbus Records, lived in the same apartment block as Sydney Bechet in Paris in the 1930s. He could hear Bechet practicing scales and arpeggios, then finishing each session with strange animal noises. One day Lubin asked Bechet, why the strange sounds? Bechet replied: "You know, I sometimes wonder if what they call music is the real music."

Thinking about that as I walked, and comparing the intuitions of a remarkable musician (peering into an unknown to read impossible texts) with the current death rattling of the classical music establishment - insufferable snobs like Martin Kettle in The Guardian and Norman Lebrecht with his book on the supposed death of classical music - I spot what might be a tree creeper or maybe a wren fly in front of me. My inability to identify birds with any confidence troubles me more than these defenders of civilisation.

Currently reading : Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy By Barbara Ehrenreich Release date: 09 January, 2007

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the art of self-inflicted punishment
Category: Music

In response to prehab's question, yes, I did like Ong Bak, but I also enjoyed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I've heard wuxia pian fans being very dismissive of this film, but a bit of plot development and characterisation contrasts well with certain of the films that clearly inspired it, such as King Hu's Raining In the Mountains, which looks terrific but mostly involves a lot of running about. Having said that, I wish it were possible to obtain a good sharp print on DVD of Hu's A Touch Of Zen. I first saw this classic when it showed in the BFI London Film festival in the mid-1970s and all subsequent TV screenings and DVD issues have looked murky and very diminished by comparison.

This raises another subject: the music in martial arts films. King Hu used a very interesting soundtrack composer – Wu Dajiang - and sound design for A Touch of Zen; a lot of the films that showed outside Hong Kong in the early 1970s had fantastic, if crude, soundtracks, often stitching together samples and pastiches from other films and merging Ennio Morricone's post-Cageian approach with elements from Chinese opera and Isaac Hayes. Eighties synthesisers offered an equally cheap, though safer and more professional alternative, with horrible consequences that continue to resonate today (otherwise ingenious films like The Eye, by the Pang Brothers, are difficult to watch because of the relentless synth soundtrack – maybe they should watch something by the Quay Brothers and learn how to make story, image and sound more integrated). King Hu worked a bit on The Swordsman with Tsui Hark, before walking away from the project. Both of them spoke just before the screening of this film at the London Film Festival. Asked what he thought of the final picture, Hu diplomatically and tellingly described it as "a little bit flashy for my taste". Again, the music is brash and irritating.

There's a long line of development here which leads to the decadent style of Zhang Yimou's Hero and House of Flying Daggers. People seem to love these epics for their extravagant, self-conscious beauty, but for me they are trapped in their own regard - static, symmetrical and empty. Even worse, I think Albert Speer might have liked them, which is strange considering Zhang Yimou's personal history and previous films. A lot of martial arts films were built on notions of subversion – often isolated men or women fighting against corruption, racism, territorial expansion or invasion, abuses of power and exploitation - accentuated by rough edges, discontinuities and all the other implausible or supernatural elements that stretched the framework of rationalist narrative filmmaking. As in music, the articulation of the body passes through and beyond the constraints of written text.

08:16 - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Deaf and Mute Heroine
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

When a very close friend dies, there's a tendency for memories to emerge at random, events or incidents that may not have seemed important at the time but somehow gain significance for being a mark of shared experience. Last week I went to see Wu Ma's 1971 film, The Deaf and Mute Heroine, in the National Film Theatre's Heroic Grace season of Hong Kong martial arts (wu xia pian) movies.

I'm hoping my mind's not playing tricks on me, but I recall seeing The Deaf and Mute Heroine with Paul Burwell at some point in the early 1970s, at a time when so-called Kung Fu films were shown in double bills with blaxploitation classics like Superfly and Foxy Brown. The title was so evocative and mysterious, particularly since Hong Kong films like Golden Swallow and Touch of Zen often featured female fighters who were tougher than the men, many of whom seemed entrapped, rather comically, in a repressed home-erotic bubble of narcissism and masochism. The tough guys pounding their fists into hot iron filings couldn't figure out that they really wanted to be gay, so the women kicked their asses. In a period when feminism was still being rejected as an aberration by the majority of the population, this was inspirational stuff. I didn't remember much about The Deaf and Mute Heroine, except for a scene involving straw hats and dyed cloth, and a fight on a beach (not so unusual, since films such as Kung Fu The Head Crusher depended on great fight scenes in spectacular locations, rather than any of the familiarly tedious cinematic virtues like script, acting and story). As it turned out, the print shown at the NFT was a strange, washed-out violet colour, the sound was muted and faint, and the subtitles were so far off-screen that they had to be typed in as the film was running. So much for the opening of the Shaw Brothers vaults after all these years.

Some of the film was great and some of it was risible, and there were moments of ennui when my mind drifted to other films that Paul and I watched together: Kwaidan at the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road, and Babycart To Hell at the Scala. This type of cinema-going has all but disappeared, of course. All of these so-called midnight movies have become institutionalised into a marginalised category of behaviour, a genre, with the truly extraordinary ones like Kwaidan getting separated from the rest. Paul and I once decided to study kung fu together (yes, I know what you're thinking), took one look at the motley characters gathered in a Soho dojo, and changed our minds. But the connection for us, between the soundworld to which we aspired and this magical world of training, precision and intricately choreographed violence, was very serious. My favourite book on the subject remains A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film, produced for the 4th Hong Kong International Film festival in 1980. The influence of French theorists such as Lacan, so central to arts criticism in the 1970s, was still in evidence at the turn of the decade, to the extent that an image from King Hu's The Valiant Ones could be captioned thus: "the woman (Xu Feng) as 'originator', not object, of the 'Look'." Nostalgic, moi? Surely not.

Currently listening : There's a Riot Goin' On By Sly & the Family Stone Release date: 24 April, 2007

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