Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Feelgood Hit of the Summer


First published on Opera, Thur 27th May, 2004.

This might be the last entry I make in this blog for some time. There are various reasons for this. Firstly, the archives at Opera do not appear to be working, and the enquiry I sent to Opera about this some weeks ago has not been answered, so I am in the process of re-constructing this blog elsewhere. Opera only displays twenty entries on a screen at one time, after that they are archived, which, owing to some fault or other, means they are effectively lost. This is the twentieth entry in my blog. So until I have caught up on my new, re-constructed blog, this, as I say, may be the last entry. If you have followed me thus far, please do not abandon me now!!!!!


Another reason is, I had an interview today and I seem to have got the job, much to my shock and amazement. So, that cuts down my time considerably. The treadmill beckons upon which we all must tread, and which leads eventually over the cliff called ‘Death’. I did try to become a freelance writer, and perhaps I shall rally again after this retreat, but, well, it’s not easy. There is no beaten path for the writer. And there’s precious little respect. Imagine the scene, someone goes into a baker:


Customer: I’ll have one of your buns, please.


Baker: Certainly, that’ll be ninety pence.


Customer: Are you joking? Don’t be so tight-fisted? That’s so mercenary! Come on, you can give me a bun, can’t you?


Baker: Well, I’m afraid I have to charge you, or I won’t be able to buy and eat buns myself.


Customer: I can’t believe that a creative person like a baker can have such a materialistic attitude. I try to do you a favour by eating one of your buns, and what happens? Look, if you let me have the bun, and I like it, I might tell other people to come here for their buns, and some of them might even pay you, if they’re rich or something.


And so on.


It sounds ridiculous, but this is the attitude that people seem to take towards writers. And I’m utterly sick of it.




Anyway, I am really writing this entry in order to review an album. That album is Summerisle. It is the latest release from Momus, and it came out last month. I interviewed Momus prior to its release, and now, having listened to the album a few times, I finally come to write the review as I have long intended. Here goes:


Summerisle is a collaboration between Momus and Anne Laplantine that Momus tells us is based conceptually upon the film The Wickerman. Hearing this, we may imagine that the album is either horrific or cinematic or both. In fact, it is neither. To me, it hardly sounds like ‘an album’ at all. I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense, although it was a little unexpected. Albums, I think, like stories, tend to have a feeling, however tenuous, of beginning, middle and end. Summerisle does not have such a feeling. It is far less dramatically conceived, in fact, than most of Momus’ work, in which a sense of theatre and narrative is often quite prominent.


No, what this album conveys is not drama or narrative so much as daydream. What it has taken from The Wickerman is not horror, but idyll. Perhaps, for me at least, the key to the album is in the word ‘isle’. This music, in the nicest possible way, is not going anywhere. It is happy to enjoy the summer quietly on the little island it has created. Time seems to have stopped on this island. In fact, some of Anne Laplantine’s ambient instrumental doodlings sound to me somehow like a clock might sound trying to tick and to chime in a world without time where its hands, like the needle of a compass in a world with no poles, swing about lost and lazy.




Listening to this music I feel the way I did as a child, listening to some grown-up idly making music in the same room as me while I watched sunlight creep across bare floor-boards. And when I suddenly shiver for no reason, I wonder why it is that that world seems to have disappeared – the world where there was more sense of community and less sense of time, where it was not unusual for someone to sit stroking someone’s hair, saying nothing, for an hour or so.


Momus’ lyrics are usually the kind that you might want to sit down and read for their own sake. On Summerisle his approach is quite different. The opening track has a vocal that seems to consist of chanted made-up words, somewhere between a recital of Japanese Noh drama and someone mumbling to themselves in a dream. Even when the lyrics are at their most coherent and linear, as with a little tale of a tailor who follows a shape-changing hare to a coven of hares, I have the feeling that they are not so much trying to tell a story or make a point, as to conjure up a world in which people had the time to sit around telling such stories to each other.




This is not a dramatic or spectacular album, but if you feel like just lying down and having someone stroke your hair, musically, for half an hour or so, well, Summerisle is the place for you. I don't know about you, but I could certainly do with some time, or no-time, there this summer.