SWC over at No Badger Required has a long-running series called ‘Near Perfect Albums’. #118 in the series appeared last month, and it looked at Anarachy by Chumbawamba, released in 1994 on One Little Indian Records.
His piece has actually provided me with a few of pieces of inspiration. Yesterday’s monthly mix included Give The Anarchist A Cigarette, the very first track to be found on the album.
He also made reference later in his piece to one of the gentler sounding tracks, on which the lead vocal was taken by the angelic-sounding Lou Watts.
mp3: Chumbawamba – Georgina
I remember on my first listen to the Chumbawamba record being totally enchanted by this one, partly as I picked up the references right away given the entire lyric is based on the story/plot of the 1989 film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
The film is a visual and sonic tour de force thanks to the direction of Peter Greenaway and the score by Michael Nyman.
It is not for the faint of heart, with gore and violence very much to the fore, much of it perpetrated by ‘The Thief’, a man called Albert Spica who was played to perfection by Michael Gambon. There’s also a fair amount of sex and nudity, almost all of involving ‘His Wife’ (Georgina Spica, played by Helen Mirren) and ‘Her Lover’ (Michael, played by Alan Howard). Oh, and ‘The Cook’, (Richard Boarst, played by Richard Bohringer) plays a key role in how the plot develops and unfolds.
It was one of the first films that myself and Rachel went to see together. It wasn’t maybe the wisest of choices given we were in the throes of just embarking on an affair while we were both married to other people, and the film does not have anything like a happy ending for the lovers. But then again, given we are still together 35 years later, you could say we passed some sort of test with flying colours.
Incidentally, me mentioning the lack of happy ending shouldn’t really act as a spoiler alert given that the lyrics to the Chumbawamba song provide a full reveal.
Afterwards, both of us couldn’t stop talking about the score that had accompanied the film. Neither of us would claim to be all that knowledgable about classical music, particularly the work of 20th century composers. Michael Nyman’s name was known to us, mainly from his association with Greenaway, for whom he provided cinematic scores that were lavished with praise in the broadsheet newspapers.
A few days later, I bought a cassette copy of the soundtrack. It would have been difficult to explain to my then wife if I’d taken home a vinyl or a CD copy given that I couldn’t admit to having been at the film, far less why I was suddenly taking a liking to some classical music.
I still have that cassette. There’s just five pieces of music on it, but with a total running time of some 40 minutes. The opening track on side one is the one that stuck mostly with myself and Rachel when talking about it all afterwards. It is more than 12 minutes long.
mp3 : The Michael Nyman Band – Memorial
Nyman had actually written this piece of music some five years prior to the film being made.
It had been written as a much longer piece to commemorate the deaths of the 39 football fans at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, prior to the match between Liverpool and Juventus in the final of the European Cup. The piece in its entirety was performed just once, and what Nyman described as its fifth movement, was used as the centrepiece for the film soundtrack of The Cook etc…
I know this isn’t the normal sort of thing you find at this little corner of t’internet, but I hope you’ll allow me to indulge myself on this occasion.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 