For the benefit of my friends, enemies, stalkers, and potential murderers, here's where to find or avoid me in Nocturnal London this week.
Monday – Launch party for Modern Painters magazine, Photographers Gallery.
Tuesday – Daytime – Visiting the Gaston exhibition with my father. Evening – The Dreaded Music Quiz, Boogaloo pub, Highgate. Ms Frost's team, and at her invitation.
Wednesday – The Siren Suite, Atlantic Bar. Kash Point one-off spin-off night with classical music. 8pm to midnight, thankfully.
Thursday – NFT1 – "Teknolust". Camp sci-fi arthouse film, with Tilda Swinton. <a href="http://www.llgff.org.uk/films_details.php?FilmID=188">After party at Kash Point, the listing says</a>. Which I would go to anyway.
Friday – Visiting Ms Denitto and Ms Spivack for the Camden Mews Film Club – "Carry On Screaming".
Saturday – Ms Gonzalez's birthday party in Collier's Wood. This means I have to decline an invite to another birthday party in Finsbury Park (Mr Robin's – invited by Ms Ellen). Ms G booked me first (some weeks ago), and like all sad clowns, I must honour my bookings. There has to be a system. Besides that, I'm fairly certain I've never been to Collier's Wood before. SW19 – the path less travelled. The unkind will doubtless add "With reason."
Sunday – Daytime – Scarlet's Well rehearsal, Stockwell. Followed by my first free evening in 7 days.
The Teknolust film on Thursday night is the only event I have invited myself to, and thus have to pay. I am a great admirer of Ms Swinton and her serenely aloof, endlessly watchable features.
So, very quickly, and not quite knowing how, I find my week mapped out for me. Living on benefits I have to budget my limited finances accordingly. Being unemployed is a full-time job. I'm meant to be staying in more often, working on Fosca songs, Bid's songs, the novel, generally sorting out my clutter (both physical and mental), and chasing up possible means of getting paid for being Dickon Edwards. I will have to start saying "No" more regularly, with the utmost care, so as not to quash the possibility of future invitations. Just not this week, though. This week, I am a shamelessly grateful tart.
Still, a diary mitigates indulgence, and I shall try to write about the events worth reading about.
Here's the first photo of Scarlet's Well, the new live band supergroup incarnation.
<img src="http://www.fosca.com/scarletswell2004.jpg"></img>
Left to right:
– Martin White (<lj user="martylog">) – accordion. Responsible for accordion versions of chart hits at <a href="http://popjustice.com/">popjustice.com</a>
– Alice Healey – vocals. The main SW female singer, who features on all four albums so far.
– Kate Dornan (<lj user="serious_k">) – keyboards, vocals. Also plays in Fosca, Butterfly Stitch, and Madam.
– Bid – vocals, guitar, musical captain. Former frontman of <a href="http://www.bid.clara.net/mset/">The Monochrome Set</a>.
– Jennifer Denitto – drums. Formerly of Linus and Long Good Luck. Currently also in <a href="http://www.picturecenter.co.uk/index2.html">Picture Center</a>.
– D.E. – guitar, vocals. Formerly of Orlando, currently of <a href="http://www.fosca.com/">Fosca</a>.
– Toby Robinson – Bass guitar. Producer of the SW albums, and Krautrock veteran. Worked with Can and Stockhausen.
And here is the new SW press biography, researched and written by myself.
<b>Scarlet's Well – The Yarn</b>
Originally conceived as a studio project in 1998, Scarlet's Well is less a pop band than an exotic secret world, a walled garden whose ivy-covered door implores the curious to try its handle.
From within, three lavishly-packaged albums have emerged, released on the <a href="http://www.siesta.es/">Siesta label</a>: "Strange Letters" (1999), "The Isle Of The Blue Flowers" (2000), and "Alice In The Underworld" (2002). Word-of-mouth recommendations have abounded, and Drowned In Sound.com declared "Isle…" as a <a href="http://www.drownedinsound.com/articles/1539.html">bona fide Classic Album</a>.
2004, however, sees the first tentative raising of the Scarlet's Well profile in The Real World, determined to reveal the band's existence to the thousands who might adore them if they only knew they existed. As well as the release of a fourth album in May, "The Dream Spider Of The Laughing Horse", a live band has been put together and the first Scarlet's Well concerts are starting to be booked around the world. Finally, the secret is out.
On paper, they're the musical incarnation of Bid, the handsome, enigmatic, quietly legendary London singer-songwriter, accomplished fop-pop pioneer and former front man of cult New Wave dandies The Monochrome Set.
"I didn't really intend Scarlet's Well to be a band. I wanted this to be an Atmosphere, created by any method available, and I thought that I would have greater freedom by using a variety of different singers, musicians and writers."
Bid's Scarlet's Well collaborators have included living modern rock star Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand, lately in the charts with "Take Me Out"; and dead Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, constantly in church services with the hymn "In The Bleak Midwinter". All of which is very Scarlet's Well.
"I wanted the feeling of an open-ended musical with a partly ever-changing cast. The identity of the albums had to be strong enough to allow these changes, without them seeming like compilations. I like the variety, and it gives me more leeway as to the subject matter of the lyrics."
And what lyrics. Archaic and arcane, literate and witty, cinematic and surreal tales of doomed pirate crews, ghostly parrots, lusty werewolves lurking in leafy glades, flirty jellyfish, water-shrew shuffles, demons and cobbled streets. Lead vocals are approached like roles in a story, with Bid's voice taking turns with a diverse cast of girlish young ladies, mostly recruited from local school musicals. The archetype of the petticoated girl wandering matter-of-fact among the fantastical and mysterious sets Scarlet's Well in the cultural company of Lewis Carroll, E Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett, "Picnic At Hanging Rock", and more recently, Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials".
The music, meanwhile, is a gorgeous, intoxicating form of defiantly non-rocking, timeless and folkish fop-pop. Stunning, ornately-crafted melodies arranged for accordions, mandolins, brushed drums, summer guitars, smoky pianos, banjos, fiddles, ukuleles, and bouzoukis, most of which are played on the records by Bid himself.
"I pick up whatever instrument is lying about in the studio and attempt to play it. I used a bouzouki because Toby Robinson (the studio owner and co-producer) had just come back from a trip to Greece and had been hood-winked by a canny shepherd."
Attempts to pigeon-hole Scarlet's Well musically are ultimately frustrated, though the desperate might invoke comparisons with upstarts like The Divine Comedy (fop-pop crooning), Tindersticks (exotic, atmospheric arrangements) and The Magnetic Fields (eccentric, but accessible songwriting, a multitude of styles and genres). Other names that spring to mind are The Tiger Lillies (the band from the stage show "Shockheaded Peter"), Kurt Weill, Kate Bush, Tom Waits covered by girls and girlish men, as well as Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and Into The Woods (non-ironic, Gothic fantasy songs laced with metaphor, wordplay, symbolism, soul, and love).
<b>A BRIEF HISTORY OF BID AND THE MONOCHROME SET</b>
Descended from a long line of Indian kings ("It's still, technically, an offence for the British Queen to step on my shadow."), Bid began his musical career while a teenager in giddy Punk Rock London. He played in The B-Sides before they became Adam and The Ants, and then founded The Monochrome Set in 1978 with early Ants refugees Lester Square and Andy Warren. Their first singles appeared on the original Rough Trade label.
Influential, articulate and unique, The Monochrome Set delighted cultish hearts and critics alike. Their admirers include Morrissey, who used to write fan letters to Bid in his pre-Smiths days, and who once remarked "How can anyone go through life without the dear, cuddly Monochrome Set?"
Andy Warhol's Interview magazine described them in 1982 as "…possessed of a very bright wacky eclecticism… they have a very charming way of fusing seemingly incompatible styles of music that makes their songs fresh, instantly familiar and pleasantly alien…psychedelic mannerisms with California Byzantine pastiche….the dilemmas of aristocratic genetics…an ominous minstrel air….. Martinis refracting Mount Everest…"
After 20 years, 9 studio albums, 6 compilations, 2 live albums, one stab at the UK pop charts with the 1985 single "Jacob's Ladder", one reformation, a number one single in Bolivia ("Eine Symphonie Des Grauens"), and a bout of genuine success in Japan, Bid finally felt The Monochrome Set had run its course and looked elsewhere for a suitable context for his estimable talents.
By way of a prologue to Scarlet's Well, he worked as a producer for many Monochrome Set-admiring groups, including the Would-Be-Goods and The Karelia, the underrated former band of Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand). Crucially, he also produced the 1996 acclaimed compilation "Songs For The Jet Set", celebrated by NME as "escapist pop music of the highest calibre; a tapestry of delights…8/10", and by Melody Maker as an album of "poise, balance, charm – with oodles of class added."
Escapism was the key. Whereas The Monochrome Set were always restricted to reflecting and inhabiting The Real World, whether it cared or not, Bid now realized he could instead let The Real World come to him. His creative imagination was utterly unleashed, unbound, and unfettered for the first time in his life. Scarlet's Well was born.
The Scarlet's Well songs are so classic-sounding, so infectious, and so unlike everything else around the musical firmament right now, that they could well appeal to small children and old ladies alike. The group remains defiantly anti-fashion and anti-rock. Pro-vocabulary, pro-creativity, pro-wit, pro-beauty. A band led by one of the greatest British singer-songwriters in the English language alive, at the peak of his creative powers.
Now, a London-based live Scarlet's Well band has been formed comprising Bid (vocals, guitar), Alice Healey (vocals), Toby Robinson (bass), Dickon Edwards (guitar, vocals), Kate Dornan (keyboards, vocals), Martin White (accordion) and Jennifer Denitto (drums). <b>Their début will be at the Spitz in London on May 26th</b>.
Blood has been dripped upon Bid's media profile grave, and an elegant hand has shot up through the soil…
<b>SCARLET'S WELL – THE STORY</b>
"I envisaged a village somewhere in the South-West of England. I called this little place "Mousseron" (a particular type of French mushroom), and further imagined a nearby magical well, called "Scarlet's Well". About a year after the release of the first album, I heard about a <a href="http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~cornwallpics/bodminwells/pages/Scarletts%20Well%20Sign.htm">real Scarlet's Well</a> near <a href="http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~cornwallpics/bodminwells/pages/Scarletts%20Well%201.htm">Bodmin in Cornwall</a>. I seem to also recall that nearby Boscastle used to house <a href="http://www.museumofwitchcraft.com/">the only witch's museum in the country.</a> I am irritated by the fact that Real Life continually strives to emulate my twisted and bizarre psyche.
"In making these albums, I am walking through a thick fog, lit here and there by fireflies, and have little idea of where I'm going. Storylines develop between songs and albums, and I sometimes make an effort to guide them, but mostly end up following some silly sprite into a puddle.
""Strange Letters" is "set" in the village, with the penultimate song being about a ship sailing out to sea (thereby inadvertently establishing Mousseron as a port).
""Blue Flowers" is partly set somewhere off the coast of South America, with the crew of the ship from the previous album now on the trail of the lost Lord Fishgarlic, a native of Mousseron. Some of the words on that album are spoken by him, some by the girls sailing after his memory, and some have nothing to do with any of it! The penultimate song is the reading of a parchment written by Lord Fishgarlic and found on the floor of a temple by the girls, describing his opening of a secret doorway within and entry to a foul place beneath the earth.
"On "Underworld", Alice and her friends journey back to Mousseron through the Underworld." The Return…" is the ship coming back by itself. "Macaw" is about a ghost on the ship haunting one of the two macaws that sailed- this one flew back, after betraying the others. The other parrot walks back with Alice's (much reduced) party. Most of the other songs are about encounters and dialogues Alice has with the dead and the cursed. "Cerberus" sees Alice cheat the guardian of the Underworld and escape (by putting him to sleep, q.v. Orpheus and the Lyre). "Diary" is Alice's exit from the Underworld into the Mousseron annual steam fair, where she is unnoticed in the mayhem.
"In "The Dream Spider Of The Laughing Horse", a group of people sing songs and tell stories in an inn ("The Laughing Horse") on the outskirts of Mousseron.
"Some may think that this is a little excursion; far from it. I can't see myself doing anything else for the foreseeable future. I can't help it."
http://www.scarletswell.co.uk/
<img align=left src="http://www.bid.clara.net/swell/dr-spid-l.jpg"></img>The new <a href="http://www.scarletswell.co.uk/">Scarlet's Well</a> album is called "The Dream Spider Of The Laughing Horse", and is released this May on <a href="http://www.siesta.es/">Siesta Records</a>.
It's a glittering gem of a record, and features more cinematic fop-pop from legendary songwriter Bid, at turns wry, arcane, evocative and ornate.
Bid describes the album as "A happy pig walking through the forest, looking different through the varied foliage and dappled light."
As no singles are to be released from "Dream Spider…", I thought it would be a nice idea to make some of the songs available in advance, one by one, as mp3s. People can treat them as singles of a sort. Bid has now granted me permission to do this, and each song will be available to download for a limited period.
Needless to add, if you like what you hear, do tell others. And please <b>buy the album</b> when it comes out.
So, here is the first such release <a href="http://www.fosca.com/Scarlets-Well-How-The-Cypress.mp3">(click here for link)</a>.
This is a rather gorgeous slice of androgynous English Psychedelia, called <b>"How The Cypress Made Apollo"</b>. Written by Bid, vocals by Florence and Bid, and, I feel, the most dreamy and sensual song in the Scarlet's Well repertoire.
<i>Green leaf for his tongue
Petal make his lungs
Breathe deep, scents in the air
Live, live, live
Mute swan weave his hair
Starling make it fair
Curls kiss his golden brow
Live, live, live
Through woods far away
Forget-me-knots will play
Leap high, up to the sun
Live, live, live</i>
http://www.scarletswell.co.uk/
