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Crossfade Reviewed: Freddie Joins The Dots
Crossfade is The Big Chill's first venture into book publishing. Published to coincide with the festival's 10th birthday it offers ten essays written on different music genres or eras by handpicked Big Chiller contributors, each from an enthusiasts' perspective. Aimed at anyone interested in music - whether a novice or a music expert - we thought why not get two very different people, with different perspectives on The Big Chill, to record their responses to the book. Here are the resultsTo read Freddie's review, drawn from a Big Chill stalwart's standpoint, read on. To read Nettie's review, drawn from a newcomer's perspective, click through.
Has there ever been an age with such a limited historical perspective as ours? Never mind the Second World War, with all our constant revivals, reissues and rediscoveries we can hardly see beyond our own lifetimes. No more Beatles, Elvis or Rolling Stones? How wrong The Clash were.
No doubt it's because everything moves so fast these days. Pre-1977, life as a young person in Britain could be an unspeakably drab affair, stuck out in the suburbs with sod all to get excited about (apart from the exploits of Tucker in 'Grange Hill', perhaps). A communique from the front lines - such as '1977' - was a much-needed sign that things were changing, fast and furiously.
And now we're stuck with change, and are surfeiting on it. Our 24/7 consumer hypermarket is so driven by novelty that no sooner have we been introduced to something new than another immediately slides into view, clamouring for attention. At the risk of sounding like a Grumpy Old Man - not such a bad thing, in my book - I can remember when a couple of new albums and the discovery of a great book would keep me and my close pals sustained for weeks into months of listening, reading and talking. It doesn't happen so often these days; there's such a tidal wave of product that intensely focused absorption and cultural synchronicity are impossibly hard to achieve. Surfing, and grazing upon endless little cultural light-bites, have become the norm.
So it really shouldn't come as any surprise to find that 'Crossfade' is absolutely steeped in nostalgia. Pete Lawrence, Alan James, Mixmaster Morris, Guy Morley, Stuart Borthwick, Hillegonda Rietveld, Tony Marcus, DJ Derek - they're all music lovers of a certain age; they cannot but look back. And what do they see? Days when our musical culture was incredibly creative (post-punk), utopian (house), socially revolutionary (jazz), hilariously adventurous (80s pop) or fresh and authentic (folk). They don't necessarily say it - apart from Borthwick in his wonderfully trenchant defence of 80s pop - but the implication is clear: music might have fought its way out of pubs and seedy clubs into the money and the limelight, but it sure as hell has lost a lot of soul on the way.
As Tony Marcus points out in his chapter on the mythology of aciiid, however, musical culture cannot but be nostalgic. No sooner has the next big thing become big, then talk of 'back in the day' begins, and what was once spontaneous, derivative and cobbled-together becomes hymned as authenticity incarnate. And because you have such a shallow base of personal history on which to draw when you're young, last month's all-nighter or last year's festival can easily take on the aura of paradise lost. It's just the way it goes. Fashions fade, relationships change, loyalties shift. Nothing really progresses or resolves itself... and so nostalgia becomes inevitable, not least because the records remain to remind us that the peak experiences they inspired were fleeting, hallucinatory and utterly unrepeatable.
In this respect, 'Crossfade' feels like a somewhat limited book given its provenance from within The Big Chill. Ally Fogg defends chill-out - on the basis of four classic albums - and Susanna Glaser rhapsodises about bleep, but no-one really attempts to capture or define what is worth focussing upon in today's music scene. The title gestures towards one possible route, but the book is divided into ten discrete chapters and doesn't pursue it.
That's not to say that there isn't food for thought here - quite the opposite, in fact. The chapters by AJ, Mixmaster Morris and Tony Marcus, in particular, read like tantalising out-takes from longer works that might actually go some way towards mapping our prodigiously inventive music scene onto the social and cultural histories that it's irrevocably bound up in. That book remains to be written. In the meantime, it's over to you, reader, to take the fascinating raw material presented here and start joining up the dots.
Freddie B.
Nettie's review
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Written: 22nd Sep, 04
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