We Are Proud Of Our Choices

October 2007. Tracey Thorn is in my studio to demo some new songs. “What are we doing then exactly?” I ask. “I think I want to make my miserable middle-aged record” she replies. Today that record, ‘Love and Its Opposite’, is released and I am reading the thoughts of a blogger who thinks we did our job a little too well. “These songs are simply no fun” he writes. “Tracey, well, I guess she’s going through a lot. No doubt her pain is genuine… I just don’t want to hear about it.”

My first reaction is to chuckle, remembering all the laughs we had in the studio. But of course the listener isn’t privy to the jolliness behind the scenes and the record certainly is darker and starker than he might have expected. It is a common enough mistake – what literary critics call the biographical fallacy – to imagine a work can be mapped directly onto the experiences or the emotional state of the author. A few weeks after recording a song called ‘Oh, The Divorces!’ Tracey got married. Infer the life of the artist at your peril.

What is actually happening here is reportage, acute observation the likes of which you usually only get in fiction. And very good examples of it can be hard to take without a hankie close-by. A few days ago my girlfriend, reading Lorrie Moore’s brilliant short story collection ‘Birds of America’, complained that she could only read one at a time as “they’re just too sad”. Being able genuinely to upset is a sign of great writing as far as I’m concerned. The best stuff always draws a little blood. But though the likes of Thorn and Moore make us stare hard at disappointment and difficulty, they’re wise and laugh-out-loud funny as often as they’re heartbreaking.

The simple fact is that life is full of sadness. Sometimes art serves as a welcome distraction from that, but it’s duty-bound to bring us back around before long. There is a place for disco escapism – and maybe Tracey’s next record will return there – but sad songs and stories perform a vital service. The pang of recognition is one of compassion. We are reminded that other people have been and are there too; that, in the face of the dark, we’re not alone.

I just watched Gaga and Beyoncé’s new video for “Telephone” and I feel dirty. Not because of its sub-Tarantino exploitation movie imagery. Rather, it’s the shameless intrusion of the mobile-phone, soft-drink and camera paying for the good Lady’s 10-minute flights of promotional fancy that leaves a bad taste. It feels cheap, whilst funding something that’s obviously very expensive.

I’m from the last of those few generations lucky to have enjoyed advert-free state broadcasting and whose early messings-about with music or paint were facilitated by social-security money or university grants. Post-punk, we were the privileged inheritors of an Enlightenment notion that art should be autonomous and independent. The recent return with a vengeance of product-placement – the noughties felt like the fifties – reminds us that it has rarely been so.

Once high-art existed to sing the praises of Kings or God. In the 20th century popular art was co-opted to do so for soap-powder or motor-cars. And when you fund something with sponsorship or advertising then the people paying tend to want a say in what that something is, often with awful results. Movies lumbered with clumsy product-placement. Reality shows chosen over TV drama. In 2001 Fay Weldon wrote a novel called The Bulgari Connection. She took £18,000 from the jeweler and was required to mention it twelve times through the course of the book. Such crassness breaks down the fourth wall in the most insulting way possible.

Unlike the novel, despite the computer, much popular art remains expensive and can’t be made independently of patronage. As a consumer I don’t want to choose only from folk or indie – sometimes I want Up!, Mad Men or ZTT. And if I want to be Trevor Horn I need a major label or an established artist to work with. It’s amazing what one can do with a laptop today but I’ve been spoiled by vintage microphones and trained engineers, by the magic of full orchestral string and brass sections. Falling budgets mean I may not get these resources in future. Any soft-drinks or phone companies out there with a soft-spot for orchestral disco? Call me, there’s a record I want to make.

[Note: this was written in -16 celsius Berlin after some 10 weeks of below-freezing conditions. Feels a bit churlish to post it now, when i'm in Sydney in the sunshine with nothing whatsoever to moan about, but forgive me as we cast our minds back...]

In 2005, in my home town of Birmingham, the Springhill Institute started an art project where members of the public were invited to sing their moans about the things that currently annoying them loudly and in key. The idea has been taken up and similar projects are running in Finland, Hungary, Japan and Australia. I now present the Prenzlauerberg Complaints Choir in concert.

(In C. Con fuoco ma non troppo)

“Why do (almost always male) journalists in particular insist on making exhaustive lists at the end of any given time period / year / decade etc.?

Come to think of it, why do people insist on referring to to the year 2010 as the start of a new decade when it shouldn’t really start until 2011 – there wasn’t a year zero was there?

Why is my mail inbox stuffed with links to hundreds of bland anonymous post-minimal deep-house promos that sound like they were made on a laptop in twenty minutes?

Why can only half the people sending me these promos spell my name correctly? (“Hello Erwan Peason you are being sent this promo because you are a valued member of our music scene.”)

Why do the Pirate Bay refer to Big Content but never Little Content and why do more people not see them for the parasitical freeloading ratbags that they are?

Why is my metabolism so slow that I store fat like an arctic squirrel with a thyroid disorder?

Why do the worst natural disasters happen to the poorest countries with the most vulnerable people?

Why are my townsfolk incapable of clearing snow or gritting the pavement until the path to my studio has become a sheet of treacherous black ice?

Why when my hausmeister decides to clear our ice, does he insist on doing it at seven in the morning, right outside my window?

Why didn’t I buy that Korg PS3200 when I had the chance?

Why isn’t Berlin by the seaside?

Why is so much of my income tax spent on executing morally bankrupt foreign wars, nuclear defence and generally clearing up the greedy messes of late capitalism?

Why am I still incapable of growing a beard? I’m 37 years old, for goodness sake.

Pat Robertson. Jeremy Clarkson. Dick Cheney. Silvio Berlusconi. Nick Griffin. Fox News. Simon Cowell. Just why?