Minimalism
This weekend consisted of a 40th birthday party with a difference: a bunch of us went camping in Epping Forest. It was an intense experience.
You can stop groaning now.
The birthday boy is a mountain bike nut, and the forest is his regular riding ground. It took us about 20min to drive to the campsite, and for the benefit of those who don't know London, I live right slap in the middle of the suburbs. Because it's so close to the city, people tend to think that Epping's a bit fake; a tame forest.
Well, there aren't any bears or wolves or anything. But Epping's as real as it gets. Ancient woodland, a true relic of the Great Forest that covered the country before the Romans came visiting. Oak, beech and chestnut; bracken and fungi; birds and badgers. Yes, there are footpaths and bridleways, and it's managed woodland; but there's no plan, no plantation. Just lots of squirrels and people from Essex. Sorry about that.
The campsite is on the edge of the forest, and we were in a field where campfires are allowed, which led to some interesting evening chats. One of the party, an old friend of the birthday boy, we'll call Chester; a man who knows his outdoors. A twinkly-eyed fortysomething, Chester is the type who's always in a fleece and hiking trousers and looks perfectly at ease with that. He's seen the world, he's worked on farms in South America, and he knows the ins and outs of the public sector in the UK. And he has a bone to pick, it turns out, with Quakers.
'I really admire Quakers; they're dead sound, politically. Done a lot of good,' he said, having arranged the campfire for cooking and turned out a delicious cauldron of basque chicken. 'But I went to a Quaker wedding, and it was dull as fuck. Honestly! They do this extemporising thing, where they don't have any ministers or leaders, and nobody says anything until someone is moved to stand up. And then they just mumble on about something completely unrelated and it just peters out! I don't want to hear some platitude about Jesus, I want to hear about the couple who are getting married! I was gnawing my arms off!'
It got us thinking about minimalism, oddly. How the point of it is that it includes only what's necessary, but what's necessary is done really well. 'I can see the point of minimalism, and purity and all that sort of thing,' Chester said, 'but you have to get the bits that are there right.'
And so often, it isn't. Bad materials, shoddy workmanship, not the faultless craftsmanship that the philosophy demands. It's an excuse to cut corners, not to pare back to the essentials. Minimalist architecture should have a calming gleam. Minimalist literature should weigh the precise impact of every word and piece of punctuation (read Alan Garner's haunting and haunted Strandloper to see it done perfectly). Minimalist religion should go straight to the heart (and according to Chester, it doesn't). Minimalist music should have nothing out of place; every note, every word should contribute to mood and meaning.
And that brings me the Royal Festival Hall (minimalist architecture at its best, incidentally) and - naturally - to Seasick Steve.
Steve Wold doesn't look minimalist. He doesn't wear a plain black or white suit. He doesn't have metal-framed glasses. He's a scruffbag not far off 70, in a pair of jeans, a sleeveless yellow teeshirt whose faded logo once probably advertised a beer, a green baseball cap, blurry greenish tattoos up and down his arms, and a jutting grey beard. He plays sitting down; when he walks, it's with a bowlegged lope, slightly stooped. His guitars, battered and held together with tape and spit, are slung around his neck with string. Most of them have strings missing. One is a bit of two-by-four with a single string and a homemade pickup made from a can of corn.
Is it a pose? Partly. Seasick Steve probably isn't short of cash, these days; even though, in his mellow, hoarse Tennessee croak, he tells us that he still can't believe that people actually turn up to see him play. 'I left home before I was 14,' he tells us, in the middle of Doghouse Blues, reciting his story as he has over and over for the past five years or so. 'And there followed years of bummin' around, sometimes gettin' arrested, sometimes goin' to jail. And I don't have no schoolin', but I could always turn to a guitar, throw a hat on the ground for some spare change. And I'm gettin' that spare change now! Heh, only took 50 years.'
You get the feeling it's real with Seasick Steve. He's not like John Lee Hooker, a man who appreciated fine tailoring and was always immaculate, but would put on overalls and a workshirt to play in the UK because it's what the middle-class blues audience expected. Steve's not been on the road for many years. He's worked with big music names, as a studio engineer and a producer; he lives in Norway with his wife. But at heart, you feel, the romantic old hobo life, which frequently wasn't romantic at all, is still the biggest part of him. You can't imagine him with the beard neatly shaved and a white shirt and trousers. It'd be like Chester out of the fleece.
And then there's the music, and that's minimalism. Not the plinky-plonky minimalism of classicists like Reich and Nyman. Not the keening, pure machine minimalism of Kraftwerk and their descendents. Just a man and a guitar and an equally hairy drummer called Dan, stringing out the twelve-bar riffs, over and over, just like they did at the jukejoints back in the 30s. There's the Smokestack Lightning riff, chiming and chuntering like when Howling Wolf played it. There's a cascade of notes and chords straight out of glamrock; a chugging line from Marc Bolan, a flourish and a stomp from The Sweet. There's a quiet walking blues, sung to a woman from the audience whose boyfriend Steve had met that day in Soho and invited along. 'My name's Steve and I'm a staying man...'
You could probably write a thesis about the blues scale and how it links straight into our emotions. Is it something we've learned from hearing it repeated, over and over again, in different forms, in the music we grew up with? Or is it deeper than that? Does it link with something atavistic, deep in our hindbrain? But whatever it is, it's up there, pared back to perfection; an old man who doesn't seem old, loping and skipping up the aisle with a battered guitar, grinning at the willowy blonde dancing at the back from under the peak of his green baseball cap.
(The camping trip, by the way, has ended up with us buying a new tent that we can stand up in. And a barbeque.)
You can stop groaning now.
The birthday boy is a mountain bike nut, and the forest is his regular riding ground. It took us about 20min to drive to the campsite, and for the benefit of those who don't know London, I live right slap in the middle of the suburbs. Because it's so close to the city, people tend to think that Epping's a bit fake; a tame forest.
Well, there aren't any bears or wolves or anything. But Epping's as real as it gets. Ancient woodland, a true relic of the Great Forest that covered the country before the Romans came visiting. Oak, beech and chestnut; bracken and fungi; birds and badgers. Yes, there are footpaths and bridleways, and it's managed woodland; but there's no plan, no plantation. Just lots of squirrels and people from Essex. Sorry about that.
The campsite is on the edge of the forest, and we were in a field where campfires are allowed, which led to some interesting evening chats. One of the party, an old friend of the birthday boy, we'll call Chester; a man who knows his outdoors. A twinkly-eyed fortysomething, Chester is the type who's always in a fleece and hiking trousers and looks perfectly at ease with that. He's seen the world, he's worked on farms in South America, and he knows the ins and outs of the public sector in the UK. And he has a bone to pick, it turns out, with Quakers.
'I really admire Quakers; they're dead sound, politically. Done a lot of good,' he said, having arranged the campfire for cooking and turned out a delicious cauldron of basque chicken. 'But I went to a Quaker wedding, and it was dull as fuck. Honestly! They do this extemporising thing, where they don't have any ministers or leaders, and nobody says anything until someone is moved to stand up. And then they just mumble on about something completely unrelated and it just peters out! I don't want to hear some platitude about Jesus, I want to hear about the couple who are getting married! I was gnawing my arms off!'
It got us thinking about minimalism, oddly. How the point of it is that it includes only what's necessary, but what's necessary is done really well. 'I can see the point of minimalism, and purity and all that sort of thing,' Chester said, 'but you have to get the bits that are there right.'
And so often, it isn't. Bad materials, shoddy workmanship, not the faultless craftsmanship that the philosophy demands. It's an excuse to cut corners, not to pare back to the essentials. Minimalist architecture should have a calming gleam. Minimalist literature should weigh the precise impact of every word and piece of punctuation (read Alan Garner's haunting and haunted Strandloper to see it done perfectly). Minimalist religion should go straight to the heart (and according to Chester, it doesn't). Minimalist music should have nothing out of place; every note, every word should contribute to mood and meaning.
And that brings me the Royal Festival Hall (minimalist architecture at its best, incidentally) and - naturally - to Seasick Steve.
Steve Wold doesn't look minimalist. He doesn't wear a plain black or white suit. He doesn't have metal-framed glasses. He's a scruffbag not far off 70, in a pair of jeans, a sleeveless yellow teeshirt whose faded logo once probably advertised a beer, a green baseball cap, blurry greenish tattoos up and down his arms, and a jutting grey beard. He plays sitting down; when he walks, it's with a bowlegged lope, slightly stooped. His guitars, battered and held together with tape and spit, are slung around his neck with string. Most of them have strings missing. One is a bit of two-by-four with a single string and a homemade pickup made from a can of corn.
Is it a pose? Partly. Seasick Steve probably isn't short of cash, these days; even though, in his mellow, hoarse Tennessee croak, he tells us that he still can't believe that people actually turn up to see him play. 'I left home before I was 14,' he tells us, in the middle of Doghouse Blues, reciting his story as he has over and over for the past five years or so. 'And there followed years of bummin' around, sometimes gettin' arrested, sometimes goin' to jail. And I don't have no schoolin', but I could always turn to a guitar, throw a hat on the ground for some spare change. And I'm gettin' that spare change now! Heh, only took 50 years.'
You get the feeling it's real with Seasick Steve. He's not like John Lee Hooker, a man who appreciated fine tailoring and was always immaculate, but would put on overalls and a workshirt to play in the UK because it's what the middle-class blues audience expected. Steve's not been on the road for many years. He's worked with big music names, as a studio engineer and a producer; he lives in Norway with his wife. But at heart, you feel, the romantic old hobo life, which frequently wasn't romantic at all, is still the biggest part of him. You can't imagine him with the beard neatly shaved and a white shirt and trousers. It'd be like Chester out of the fleece.
And then there's the music, and that's minimalism. Not the plinky-plonky minimalism of classicists like Reich and Nyman. Not the keening, pure machine minimalism of Kraftwerk and their descendents. Just a man and a guitar and an equally hairy drummer called Dan, stringing out the twelve-bar riffs, over and over, just like they did at the jukejoints back in the 30s. There's the Smokestack Lightning riff, chiming and chuntering like when Howling Wolf played it. There's a cascade of notes and chords straight out of glamrock; a chugging line from Marc Bolan, a flourish and a stomp from The Sweet. There's a quiet walking blues, sung to a woman from the audience whose boyfriend Steve had met that day in Soho and invited along. 'My name's Steve and I'm a staying man...'
You could probably write a thesis about the blues scale and how it links straight into our emotions. Is it something we've learned from hearing it repeated, over and over again, in different forms, in the music we grew up with? Or is it deeper than that? Does it link with something atavistic, deep in our hindbrain? But whatever it is, it's up there, pared back to perfection; an old man who doesn't seem old, loping and skipping up the aisle with a battered guitar, grinning at the willowy blonde dancing at the back from under the peak of his green baseball cap.
(The camping trip, by the way, has ended up with us buying a new tent that we can stand up in. And a barbeque.)