VX - Minutes to Go-Go (2024)

I'm only familiar with VX as Peter Hope's pianist - figuratively speaking, the man who tickled the ivories on the excellent Kilo Price for Dead Shapes which you may possibly remember from here. His own, mostly instrumental, material - overlooking the possible absence of sounds deriving from anything much that might count as an instrument - while similarly raw and initially abrasive, is a whole different kettle of fish. It's noise in so much as there's little common ground shared with Herman's Hermits, but while my closest point of reference is probably the work of +DOG+, Minutes to Go-Go feels intensively sculptured, even structured without quite turning into an Art of Noise record. Amongst the electronic crunches, overdriven circuits, gated slabs of feedback and the like, we find remnants of what may once have been vocals, percussion instruments, and other sound sources warped and looped into shapes which seem to emerge and gain greater prominence with each listen, until you no longer notice quite what a racket it is, instead hearing something that might almost be - I don't know - a film soundtrack perhaps. It seems different to the involuntary admiration of fire extinguishers we sometimes experience at the end of an afternoon trudging around some gallery, because I don't think there's such a pronounced random element here. These patterns are surely more than shapes perceived in the ear of the beholder. Listen enough times and you'll find yourself transported to filthy truck stops in cyberspace, the medina in Marrakech, the inside of your own head, and other alien territories. Minutes to Go-Go is one hell of a trip.

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Depeche Mode - Spirits in the Forest (2019)

'If there was a movie about them,' observed my friend Nick, 'they'd be running round the corner to escape the police in Basildon, and then be in a massive stadium with heroin addictions in the next frame.'

Surprisingly, there is a movie about them, and although Nick was off the mark where the plot is concerned, I nevertheless feel his comment expresses some deeper truth fairly well.

I recall Depeche Mode from way back, at least since they first started turning up in the pages of Sounds.

Ollie who worked in Discovery Records in Stratford referred to them as Depeche Toad, which was amusing; and Photographic on the Some Bizarre Album seemed like a fairly decent impersonation of Cabaret Voltaire, albeit without any of the funny noises which made Cabaret Voltaire interesting; and yet somehow there was a pervasive wholesome quality about them, something guileless, something a bit youth club with synths set up on the ping-pong table. This quality, whatever it was, lingered, rendering subsequent transgressions inherently comical, deeds effortfully undertaken as part of a futile effort to shake off the image, like kids with their first ciggies, lighting the wrong end and taking theatrical drags as though cameras might be running; and then there was the time they found those special sex clothes in that box at the back of dad's wardrobe, and then with the tatts and the arm candy...

I'm sure it was all real, but nevertheless, that's how it looked to me, and how it still looks despite everything. Even a few legitimately great songs - Two Minute Warning, Never Let Me Down Again, Enjoy the Silence, and probably a couple of others - can't quite shift the stench of pop, crisps, and jumpers knitted by your nan, which I propose even whilst holding that Dave Gahan is blessed with a genuinely powerful voice. I'm not even sure what it is - the ballsachingly appalling lyrics, Martin Gore's hair - which doubtless ensured that his dinner money never once saw the inside of the school canteen cash register, the plinky-plonky quality of certain songs, or something else, some emergent property resulting from a combination of indelibly wholesome factors.

Still, it was a free ticket for a film showing for one night only, so I wasn't going to say no, despite my reservations. I anticipated a documentary accounting for their transformation from Herman's Hermits into SPK and then ultimately into U2, but thankfully it was better than that. Spirits in the Forest has six Depeche Mode fans from across the globe tell their stories, interspersed with footage of a predictably massive concert in Berlin. It works because the fans, or at least these fans, are more interesting than the band, so they may as well be Lieutenant Pigeon obsessives for all the difference it makes; and I particularly enjoyed the story of DMK, a tribute act featuring a father and his two kids playing Depeche Mode covers on toy instruments. Actually, I think I liked them more than I liked the main feature.

The live footage, which punctuates the progress of our six fans as we follow them to the gig, fails to shed any light on the mystery of Depeche Mode, at least for me. What subtle qualities their less comical songs may have is lost once blasted out on a scale more suited to some Laibach parody, and Martin Gore standing around like a lemon with a guitar fails to make much difference to anything, and then we come to Dave Gahan, now a troubling hybrid of David Niven and John Waters whose face is too big for his head. His arms and legs are similarly too long for his body, which his weird Jagger impersonations only accentuate meaning that he now vaguely resembles one of those things from Ice Age. I don't understand why you would go to see this band, or why you would go to see them in a stadium the size of the Grand Canyon; but then I found it nevertheless watchable with a couple of decent tunes, despite it being Depeche Mode, so if that's your bag, I've no doubt that Spirits in the Forest must seem amazing.

I'm So Hollow - Emotion / Sound / Motion (1981)

Here's one which seems conspicuously under-represented in the field of posthumous rarities boxed sets at two-hundred quid a pop and, if we look closely, not even a measly CD reissue back when even my cat had his first album re-released by some boutique label with bonus tracks. I'm So Hollow, should they require introduction, were one of those Sheffield bands who enjoyed a brief flurry of angular expressionist excitement back in the day, followed by not much else, not even following the release of a full length album on the briefly wonderful Illuminated label.

People always bang on about Manchester as a font of musical genius - even those who aren't actually from the city, despite occasionally pretending otherwise, smiling indulgently and sighing ah Manchester, so much to answer for, because they heard some bigger boys saying it a bit earlier behind the bike sheds and thought it sounded cool; and yet when Manchester is invoked, I personally think of Northside, Herman's fucking Hermits, execrable Beatles tribute acts, that fucking James record they played on the wireless every five bleeding minutes for an entire decade, and Morrissey working hard on his Free Tommy Robinson benefit album; so no offense, but you were probably thinking of fucking Sheffield. I'm sure there must have been a shit band from Sheffield at some point, but I can't name one, and it seems significant that even those we've apparently forgotten were amazing.

Yes. Amazing.

I'm So Hollow - who recorded at Cabaret Voltaire's Western Works, and who had a track from those sessions released on Vice Versa's label - sound to me like a sort of baby Clock DVA, specifically the early Clock DVA, jazz-poppy and yet so angular it's a wonder no-one lost a finger. Jangling, razor guitar is offset with starkly modernist touches, random honking saxophone or a burping synth to create something that's quite emotional, even melodramatic for all the glowering and cheekbones. In fact, if we cast our collective mind back to all those eighties Cabaret refugees busily rebuilding thirties Berlin with just an SH101 and lip gloss, all your Hazel O'Connors and your Mobiles, this is probably what they were trying to do, except it works. It's not that we've been deprived of potentially mainstream artists who manage to sound this weird since the release of Emotion / Sound / Motion, but there aren't many who achieved the balance so well as I'm So Hollow, and they were usually better remembered.