Asking the Bisonics what their musical influences are is like trying to coax quicksilver into a mason jar on the first crack. So intrigued by the disc “seconds” that I had to, dared venture to ask. Its the kind of music that when we are all good and really dead, someone will discover hailing it as a gem, a lost cultural artifact, its neglect symbolic of the overall evil and malignancy of the culture that gave us Justin Beiber and Leonard Cohen as part of a bi-polar social neuroses that can somehow be pinned on Canada justifying an invasion in 2050 claiming they have stolen all the world’s water. Refreshing when the standard canons of conservative ideology are trotted out like show dogs in Madison Square Garden: the Beatles pure bred, U2 clerical bow and be received, and the Stones paleolithic canine resurrection.
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(Paul:) Oooh, er, The Coasters, Lionel Bart, Anthony Newley, The Missa Luba, George Formby – you know, all the modern rug-cutting stuff. What else? Godley & Creme, er, comedy film music (‘Two Way Stretch’, ‘St Trinians’, ‘Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines’). …I like music to be onomateopaeic – Carl Stalling, effects-laden stuff like the tunes to ‘The Hair Bear Bunch’, ‘Catweazle’ and ‘Hong Kong Phooey’ – so ‘earnest’ music, like folk or C&W, or shouting men generally moaning, bores me rigid. There are exceptions, of course, and I love the caustic wit of folk sage Jake Thackray. Who?…
…I am the “silent” Bisonic, so called because I like the silence between music. I hate music of all kinds, especially ours. The next album will be completely silent and has a working title of “Extreme Noize Terror”…Also, it may be worth considering that Harold Pinter is actually using his death to test how long one of his legendary pauses can last….
Everybody’s laughing
Crimson sky
Set the sails our hearts are open
Don’t cry
I believe release is in your smile
The tide shall turn to shelter us from storm
The seas of charity shall overflow
And bathe us all
Walk on by
Make believe our exile’s chosen
Untied
I can see our freedom’s in your mind
The tide shall turn to shelter us from storm
The seas of charity shall overflow
And bathe us all
COMMENTS
Good of you to venture into the rarefied world of picking through musicians’ brains to find the starting point. Usually it’s a fruitless task – as they are either too stupid to know where the impetus stems from, or so clever they want to cover their tracks. On the strength of your previous post I caught some Bisonics films on YouTube. Quintessentially English with that mindset that lets an empire slip through their hands just so they can tell jokes and write sad songs about it, their industriousness fueled by indolence. The mention of ‘Two Way Stretch’ could be a subtle clue: a Peter Sellers film and, like Sellers, Bisonics songs are dressed in various disguises, adopt alien attitudes, cloak themselves in irony and humor. It’s a form of guarded exposure. They reveal themselves, and some ugly truths (the heartlessness and egoism of ‘Karaoke Version Of Myself’, the despairing desperate desire of ‘Reunion’) but always at a remove, so they can jump back and say, ‘No, that’s not us; it’s only a game’. A song like ‘Old Hat’ is a case in point; it seems like a facile mockery of outdated manners but it’s really about obsolescence and encroaching irrelevance. I apologize for such a long response but the song ‘What Happened’ (love that absence – deliberate? – of a question-mark) deeply moved me. It was a rare moment in music where both sides are as innocent and guilty as the other, and they are left at the end, staring at each other, wondering what happens next, no easy resolution, no answer, no conciliatory gestures.
thanks for taking the time to write. I think they take responsibility and are willing to face the music. Its painful, but are engaged with that. I would suggest the guardedness takes the form of certain eccentricities; retreating to the parochial and being a bit ambiguous with the semantics which can serve both to liberate and enslave. The other remark, is that the subject material can so raw that some irony and the comic serves as recourse at times to a palliative.
Dave