If "Hairstyle of the Devil" had been a hit...

Well, for starters "Stars Forever" probably wouldn't have happened, since if HotD had been a hit the Momster and his label might have been able to afford the legal fees required to stave off the lawsuit that prompted the album.

That's just a guess, mind you.

And Beck would never have had a hit with the obvious knock- off, "Devil's Haircut". ;-)

Funny question. Since his nibs is asleep in Japan, I'd venture that the early '90s would have been very different and just maybe, Creation people would have spent time looking for the next Brel rather than the next Beatles. Which would have spared us Wazzis.

He'd be desperately trying to re-create his one big hit and be very, very bitter.

the charts would never against have been a refection of corporate interests

a refection of corporate interests

Refection = when refectories launch calculated strategies of domination. "We've been refected! Run from the treacle!"

Wazzis? Surely Wazzat. And there's a new album and...

Wot RickyT sed.

"Hairstyle Of The Devil" is still one of my three favourite Momus songs. The other two are synthpoppy ruminations too though not as funny.

I just wonder if Momus sat sulking in the ICA cafe the day White Town hit no.1 with 'Your Woman' ?

clever jokes are always funnier when you misspell every othah word

Strangely enough I was with Jyoti Mishra at the ICA shortly after 'Your Woman' was at number one, and he said to me 'This is your chance, Nick, if I can do it you can...' I wasn't sulking, I was happy for him. But I was pinching salt.

Then I was with him a few months later in a room at the Metropolitan Hotel on Park Lane, and he was playing me his new stuff, the follow-ups that never charted.

EMI dropped him six months after his number one. Now is that a question of 'even a number one hit single can't save you' or 'If it weren't for my hit I would have been perfectly happy'?

Jyoti bought a new house with the money and went back to making ultra-indie stuff.

Baby Bird now writes novels. Adam Ant is mad. Fad Gadget is dead. I sit in Tokyo filling up my sampler with the sounds of 'spooky kabuki', preparing an album called 'The Pirate'. If you don't get typecast by the industry, you get to typecast yourself, which is much more fun.

but in the ultimate faraway end potentially more damaging? => cf mark e. smith, surrounded by yesmen he despises, compare/contrast er neil young, and his (manifestly absurd) battle with geffen for "releasing albums untypical of himself"... smith is a trapped near-alcoholic genius, with absolute control but (i believe) too much well-guarded self- policed control against instrusion which will throw him onto his nerves and back into genuine response invention... neil young by being wayward and bonkers etc etc has carved himself more room for self-astonishing expression

???

(ps i think the risks of failure in re the neil young approach are MUCH MUCH HIGHER, and if someone wants to argue that hey, actually you know NY has failed and is a failure — viz a lame-oid dad-rock standby — then that is not the element in my argt I particularly stand by myself... really what i'm getting at is that to stay indie is to dodge a certain species of risk; to insure against that particular kind of failure is to limit yr potential achievement...) (if bowie eg had stuck to the arts-lab free-festival circuit he would have been of no consequence to anyone today EVEN IF HE HAD MADE THE EXACT SAME RECORDS, not that he would have, since his entire evolution was partly an argument with and among the various factions and generations of his fan massif...)

Strangely enough I was ALSO at the ICA with Jyoti and Nick shortly after Your Woman topped the charts; J knew he was flavour of the month and said to us both that he'd be dropped within six months.

But fame is even more fleeting than that. After the ICA, we all tried to go to the Atlantic for drinks and despite the protestations of someone not yet wearing an eyepatch that we had in our party a genuine number one recording artiste, we got the knockback.

"limit yr potential achievement" = not necessarily at all a bad thing => when you were young and wanted to be a spaceman, a ballet dancer, a clown AND to breed ponies, the fact that you eventually chose spaceman is because you preferred being a GOOD spaceman than being lousy at everything... focus and discipline are consciously selected narrownesses, and nothing wrong with that => but better sometimes to acknowledge that with a gain comes a likely loss also?

"*I* think i am being subtle and dialectical" vs "YOU think i am being a fence-sitting xmas-cracker-motto hippy" FITE!!

only person evah to blag their way into the ATLANTIC = Lord Peter Wimsey?

if bowie eg had stuck to the arts-lab free-festival circuit he would have been of no consequence to anyone today EVEN IF HE HAD MADE THE EXACT SAME RECORDS

For every Bowie there's an artist who only became of consequence to anyone today by giving up their aspirations to chartdom and instead embracing the 'arts lab free festival circuit': Scott Walker, Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart, Holger Hiller. I mean, we don't want everybody to be either popstarz or failed popstarz, do we? What a nightmare world that would be!

Where's Dickon Edwards when we need him? I want to hear about the other side of the coin: what it was like to be in a boyband (Orlando) that played arts labs? Or what about Fischerspooner, are they really going to cross over from their arts lab world (in New York they have no label, just an art gallery) to Top of the Pops (in London they have Ministry of Sound and a 2 million pound recording contract)?

For you, this sort of 'neither fish nor flesh' band may be interesting. But for them, the artists, it's often a sort of compromise, or a sort of schizophrenia, or just circumstantial. Yes, you take a certain kind of risk playing those games, the 'double or bust' risk. But you take more artistic risks with the Mark E. Smith strategy of control and calculated marginality. (Though even he had his foundation and shoulder pads phase, heh heh heh...)

For every Bowie there's an artist who only became of consequence to anyone today by giving up their aspirations to chartdom and instead embracing the 'arts lab free festival circuit': yes i agree (that was what my second post said, sort of)

Yes, you take a certain kind of risk playing those games, the 'double or bust' risk. But you take more artistic risks with the Mark E. Smith strategy of control and calculated marginality. Because I agree with the first claim, obviously I have to disagree with this. Calculated marginality is (sometimes, for some artists) a kind of deep artistic cowardice (and actually Smith is someone I put in this second category). (Because I suppose I consider him to be the single most important figure in UK semi-popular music since late 60s... )

I think the pursuit of indie — I mean as a distribution strategy, rather than a sound style — was a compromise that (post)punk made, actually against its own deepest ideology, which simultaneously ensured its long-term survival AND the survival of the musicworld and industry it made claim to overthrow. I think the compromise was tactically unimpeachable: lots and lots and lots of things emerged from it that I love. But I also think there was/is a cost to this compromise: which is why I distrust its presentation as a self-evident virtue. You have resigned yourself to the belief that what you do will never persuade the majority of listeners, Momus, and that this proves that what you are doing is good. I think that is a self-defeating definition of "quality", the idea that the interchange with a carefully selected audience is NECESSARILY a greater thing. It isn't, necessarily. Sometimes it is, sometimes it ain't: for every Beefheart there's a Marsalis, if you like. A second-rater policing his listeners to ensure that NO SURPRISES EVER ENTER HIS WORLD, that his constituency will never present with him demands that force him to raise his game. I mean, it's ponies for courses, also obviously. A good spaceman is a bad ballet dancer, and vice versa.

"deep artistic cowardice": erm "deep" here means "subterranean" rather than "very", and even then it's obv a bit of a wanky thing to say => and also there are of course plenty of foax for whom the cowardice was going for the easy fame rather than the difficult whatevah

oh, and just in case it came across the wrong way, a "second-rater" refers to marsalis, not momus - this is a crit of the tenor of a line of aesthetic justification, NOT (in any way) of the work momus has actually done or the directions he's chosen... (in fact in some ways it's more about me casting doubt on my OWN choices, and what constitutes an easier route and an easier life for ME)

I certainly don't believe that my inevitable failure to persuade 'the majority of listeners' PROVES that what I do is good. That would be absurd. No recording artist in the history of the world has, to my knowledge, had 'the majority of listeners' on his or her side. Even selling 30 million albums, in a world of five billion people, makes you pretty marginal.

It seems to me we're talking about 'an internal locus of evaluation' versus 'the expectations of the audience', and which of those pressures creates better work.

The phrase 'an internal locus of evaluation' is one you come across in the psychology literature about creativity. It's apparently one of the things that distinguish the highly creative from the competent. They judge their output by whether it comes up to their own standards, not those of their neighbours, their time, their publisher, their client, their teacher, the textbooks, the music industry, fans, whatever. (The portrait of an MES-style stubborn curmudgeon emerges, perhaps. But it could also be Rem Koolhaas. Or Issey Miyake.)

List of the top three expectations I hear from my audience:

1. Momus, stop trying to run away from your troubadour talents by hiding in arty conceptual masks. Back to the bedsit with the acoustic guitar, please!

2. Momus, when are you going to write that one great song, the hit, the standard, that puts you on the map? (One of my first song publishers wrote to me just last week asking this. He also expressed pleased surprise that I'd lasted so long, but failed to make the connection with the fact that I haven't ever been cranked up and typecast by 'the one great song'.) (Number 2 is also what Jyoti Mishra of White Town was asking at the ICA in 1997, but would probably not ask now.)

3. Momus, I loved (x) or (y) album, why don't you do another one like that?

Actually, to be honest I have been influenced by audience expectations -- incarnating the foppish, vicious Briton to please a small coterie audience New York's Fez Club. But they were the expectations of an audience I knew was mine for the right reasons. I created that (extremely small) audience, you might say, to give me license to be the things I was going to be anyway!

I remember when 'Hairstyle of the Devil' was getting played on daytime Radio 1. I was in Ipswich. I didn't listen to the Steve Wright show to hear my record get its daily play because daytime Radio 1 gave me this vague feeling of the worthlessness of all creative effort. It wasn't about music, or imagination, at all. It was 'whistle while you work', it was 'you've gotta laugh, haven't you, or else you cry', it was repetition and habit and formula. Mediocrity of the soul, even!!!! Everybody was listening, but nobody was listening. (And nobody listening, as it turned out, was buying 'Hairstyle of the Devil'.)

Anyway, I was in Ipswich, in a studio, recording what we thought might be a follow- up single, 'Lord of the Dance'. The engineer's wife looked in on her way back from school with the kids. She said 'I don't really like your music, but I hear it's doing very well at the moment and I respect success. So good luck to you!'

Whenever I hear people telling me to think about widening my appeal by various strategies, I just think of that honest woman. I think of trying to win over people who are basically indifferent to what I define as music, imagination, art.

McGee once said of Oasis fans 'They're the kind of people who only buy four albums a year'. That's not the kind of people he was dealing with when he started Creation, and it's what made him dissolve what Creation became (Creation-Sony LRD) and start Poptones. Life is too short to change what we do for the sake of that majority of people out there who will never care about art / music / the imagination as much as we do.

Yes, the indifferent masses can make you rich, they can make you a 'celebrity' (and in fact they prefer dreams of celebrity to the dreams you put into your work, or prefer them to be one and the same dream, all dovetailed). But what's the point in being a sort of musical Donald Trump when you wake up in your gold rococo bedroom one morning to find that the muse no longer visits, you have no agenda, no purpose, you've forgotten why you were smitten with this activity in the first place, and your 'locus of evaluation' is in your manager's daily phonecall? Time for more coke. Another celebrity tragedy in the making. The engineer's wife will lap it up.

McGee once said of Oasis fans 'They're the kind of people who only buy four albums a year'.

Once again he hits and misses at the same time, McGee does.

yes i think aiming for all five billion might lead to an element of disappointment...

Come now, folks like Christ and Bill Gates aimed for just that level.

But I think you also just pretty much ceded my point: you're kind of not interested in the response of someone whose aesthetic credentials you feel can't be up to snuff. Which is maybe 99.9% of the time a perfectly justified lack of interest. Why distract yourself?

But the neither-flesh-nor-foul things I do think a lot about in this specific context — the pistols, say, or the stones c.65-69 — were making something out of a wide-open and widening feedback loop, in which maximised "appeal" (seems sort of the opposite of the correct word) and complex manipulative contrariness of content were DIRECTLY related. People liked them because they were horrible, to put it crudely: and the uglier and more forceful they became, the better they were "liked". I accept that this, as a full-on project, hardly ever happens and is hard to pull off (Oasis never came close), and — possibly most serious of all — seems generally to have horrible psychic side-effects (ie band members ended up dead). I don't think musicians have a duty to try for this: in away, I think it's counter to what most musicians take themselves to be doing. But creating a NEW mass audience - as oppose to merely plugging in to the lowest-common-denominator description of an extant one (ahem: Oasis again?) — is an experiment with open possibility which I think your Codex of Artistic Verities looks to rule out. Trapped and lost in among the ever-indifferent — way out there — there are many many many lights waiting to be flicked on: yearning for a contact whose shape and meaning they have not yet begun to imagine. I think the Great Indie Compromise chooses to pretend that a. those lights are a lost cause, and b. that this of no great consequence.

OK it is three o'clock in the morning.

I know what you mean by the 'many lights waiting to be flicked on'. Last time I seriously felt this was in a taxi in New York in 1998. I was reading a Raygun special issue about Japanese pop, and I seriously thought: 'This slumbering nation is sick of Hootie and the Blowfish, there are millions of young Americans who are now ready to turn on to the sounds of Cornelius and Shibuya-kei. And I will be totally central in the New Awakening!' I had a sense of being pinned back in my seat by the aniticipated G force. Of course, no such thing happened. They moved on to Limp Bizkit and the Dave Matthews Band.

So nu-metal is YOUR fault!!