Real and Imaginary

Listening to Mouth Music by Mouth Music

You will never hear anything quite like this album – forget Afro-Celt Sound system and every other techno/trad cross-over – this is as original as original gets. There is nothing that sounds forced in this matching of Scottish Gaelic, African beats and technologically based instrumentation. You will want to sit amongst the islanders and join in with this, marvelling at the deftness of their craft and their stoicism in the face of everything from the clearances, through the excise men of the time of Polly to the seeming loss of the traditional links to the country. And to include a song that was played at JFK’s funeral seems like bravado on such a thing but it is right in the extreme.

I think Gaelic is the most beautiful language, the strange combinations and mixtures of letters seem just perfect even without knowing their meanings and when mixed with music they become something almost excessively spiritual, something that does not seem to match with the normal everyday things which the language itself must have been used to describe. Mix this with pipes or fiddles and you have the sound of ecstasy born of hardship, nourished by clean winds and fixed in memory forever.

Well it rained some more. The garden is flooded and half of Liverpool lost power when a sub-station exploded. Not sure if that was to do with the rain but it did seem a bit like a larger disaster than it actually was because of the dark skies and squally wind. In the back of a Black raincoat jungle we are – slowing to nothing in our appreciation of the rightness of this music and bowing to the superior knowledge of the blues fans who dye their hair green and are so superior in almost everything. Sing and sing ‘til the ground vibrates and the long-sleeping faeries come back to brush the ears of the torpid king and court that hide in the hill awaiting disaster and nothing less to bring them back to our aid. And grammar is nothing heard today, lost in this music like meaning and thought, squashed out of us until we can think no more. Alice will save us – save us from the rain and tears that may be hers anyway. She will make us race and make us safe. Victoria falls to Earth unreasoned, shadowing me from all those years back and laughing at my poetry that took all my courage to hand over in those concrete corridors of light that made adolescence flee in all the hardship of just surviving on your own wits. I wonder where all those blues records have gone – whether she still plays them, reverently lifting them from their sleeves and placing them on some dust-free player in a clean room somewhere. They were her father’s records and I am not sure whether she stole them or inherited them for she was a mystery, not revealing anything other than her green hair and inscrutable face to us. Maybe she has a shop now, left her art degree and started a laid-back retail empire where she keeps everything for herself, all the rare marks lifted from the incoming boxes to the lined walls of some cheap flat somewhere. And the funeral march in blues for dead presidents had defined her life. Great rats, rats in the skies, flying like bombers to take us all away from here, a strange life of unreason in the absurd and drafty alley-ways of a northern city, faded with the clean-up, into the backdrop of the green, northern fields that takes us from industrial hell to bucolic heaven in just a few miles. We are in full control and yet the revolution does not interest us any more. Kings and Queens for ever we are – dead to the real world but still watching for any kink and crack that might take us back through all those extra dimensions, into the breeze and rain that tells us how life should be.