2013-05-24T06:02:29-04:00 Simon Johns http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=simon-johns Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Simon Johns Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3042339 2013-04-09T19:00:00-04:00 2013-04-09T17:17:14-04:00

Simon Johns http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johns/ My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky in 2010 and The Seer in 2012 and, this year, a world tour that is bringing them wider audiences and greater critical acclaim than ever before.

"The longer you hang around and the longer you manage not to die, the more likely you are to be noticed", Gira said in an interview ahead of a show this week in Istanbul, one of the far-flung destinations where the band is playing.

The young Turks at the sold-out show applauded politely as the group of musicians, very much their seniors, ambled onstage at the Istanbul Culture and Art Foundation's smart new venue. What awaited the crowd was something not best described as heavy: a performance that started with an enchanting drone and gradually built into a tremulous, raucous wail.

Swans established the stylistic groundwork for a generation of heavy rockers and art bands in the decades that followed, including Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Tool. Early records were almost unbearably dense. Later output lost the tinnitus-inducing volume but maintained the menace.

In Istanbul, the stage was densely packed with tall stacks of amplifiers and speakers, as well as a drum kit, pedal steel player and percussionist with two gongs (and by the end of the show, no shirt).

The songs relied on ecstatic repetition but were still disparate, at moments sounding like the motorik blues of early Hawkwind or a Parliament-style bass groove. There were jazzy shuffles and hints of Morricone, all overlaid with Gira's mantras on personal failure and expressions of obsessive love.

All the while, the performance edged towards grander and grander crescendos. After a little more than an hour, they reached the upper limit of volume and intensity and stopped. The band was exhausted. Gira said, "Thank you", and waved to the crowd. And then they started again and went on for another intense hour.

"The goal for us is to be inside the sound just as much as the audience", Gira said. "The music is playing itself or playing us. We're not really playing it".

The Swans set is almost fully comprised of brand-new, unrecorded material. (They plan to put out the songs a year from now, funding the new record with the release of a limited-edition live album on Gira's own Young Gods record label). "I'm more interested in things that you have to struggle to make, because it's about making it happen with your blood and with your body, as well as with your intellect and your soul", Gira said.

The band thrives on discomfort. To get the blood pumping, Gira has been known to have the venue shut off its air conditioning, mostly to save his voice from blasts of cold air. The side effect, he said, is a breakdown of the divide between performer and audience so that they can more closely share the same physiological experience. It's not without its risks: Gira has almost fainted onstage.

The 59-year-old singer has had trouble supporting himself at times in his career. Even at the height of Swans' popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, money from record sales was often not enough to live on. The Young Gods label and other groups Angels of Light and Skin, with Swans member Jarboe, were also labours of love.

Gira came to Istanbul last year to play a solo show. Previously, he passed through Europe's largest city in the late 1960s as a long-haired 15-year-old runaway. He ate at the famous Pudding Shop featured in Oliver Stone's film Midnight Express, in which the protagonist ended up in a Turkish prison for drug smuggling. Gira met a similar fate, but in Israel, where he spent time in the clink for possessing hashish.

After a brief stint at art school back in the US, Gira formed Swans in New York in 1982. He was joined on the band's first album Filth by guitarist Norman Westburg, who is part of the new incarnation. They now are joined on stage by former Swans member Christoph Hahn on pedal steel, Thor Harris of Shearwater on percussion, Chris Pravdica on bass and Phil Puleo of Cop Shoot Cop.

Gira said the decision to reform the band was one of the best he has ever made. This time, the media and the music world are listening more closely. While the new interest is appreciated, Gira said it's not essential. "I'm not impressed by the attention. In the very recent past, I was worried about how I was going to feed my children. It's just good to be able to keep working", he said.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2756892 2013-02-25T19:00:00-05:00 2013-04-27T05:12:01-04:00

Simon Johns http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johns/ Kevin Ayers died last week at the unripe old age of 68. He was in my favourite band, Soft Machine. Ayers brought a graunchy bass-playing style and a mellifluous baritone voice to counter drummer Robert Wyatt's skittish rhythms and athletic tenor and Mike Ratledge's howling organ. Ayers also recorded a large body of solo work, including 17 albums, which featured many of the finest musicians of his age - some of whom are also recently dead.

Hugh Hopper, Ayers' bandmate in the seminal group The Wilde Flowers, his successor in Soft Machine and a collaborator on Ayers' first solo outing, died in 2009 at the age of 64. Leading British saxophonist Lol Coxhill, who played on two of Ayers' solo albums, died last year aged 74. And Ayers' collaborators Elton Dean and David Bedford died in 2006 and 2011, respectively.

Ayers played with Soft Machine, jazz-rock pioneers who helped craft the Canterbury sound, on their first U.S. tour supporting The Jimi Hendrix Experience - the original members of which are now all deceased. The last to go were bassist Noel Redding (died 2003) and drummer Mitch Mitchell (died 2008).

The point isn't that Ayers was some kind of albatross, but rather that he was a central, if unassuming, figure in a epoch-defining scene whose cast members are singing their last chorus.

Musicians who made it through the 1960s are now dying in their 60s. Within the next 20 years, the generation that sang My Generation will be gone. (John Entwhistle died in 2002 aged 57.) These players belong to my parents' generation, and this is what makes their passing so bitter: You know Mum and Dad are next.

Every week, I present a programme on Istanbul's community radio station, Acik Radyo, and like to use the slot to commemorate musicians who've gone on to play The Great Gig in the Sky (written by Pink Floyd's Rick Wright, who died in 2008 at 60). Since the start of this decade, I've noticed a big uptick in these memorials.

Soon, Ayers' entire generation will be gone. They are starting to pay the price that Sandy Denny (died 1978), Gram Parsons (died 1973) and another Ayers' collaborator, Nico (1988) paid up front and in full. The only exception is likely to be the Rolling Stones, who seem to plan to perform forever, embalmed as they are.

The next wave of musicians a mere decade away from drawing a pension, believe it or not, is the punks, whose ranks are already half-depleted. Since their salad days were not exactly spent eating salad, I fear longevity may not be in their stars either.

We've all heard the hyperbolic mourning for the San Francisco Summer of Love (not least in San Francisco by one-hit wonder Scott McKenzie, who died in 2012 aged 73) and in Mojo's endless eulogising of the Beatles (George Harrison, died 2001, aged 58). But there was a quieter group of influential players that included Ayers, who wrote some of the most riveting yet unpopular pop music of the past century, and they are vanishing fast.

Ayers occupied a place in music history that is as essential, though less revered, than his friend in Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett (died 2006, aged 60). Ayers' music was warmer than Barrett's: just as whimsical, but less tinged with madness. While Barrett was trembling in a cupboard on LSD, Ayers invited you to share a bottle of red wine in the back of a van on the way to a gig.

We may never again see this degree of creativity or personality, not least because the industry can't or won't support musicians financially any more. And that's our fault: We want our music fast and free.

While the digital age has killed the pirate radio star, the Internet is a vast visual archive of concert footage, interviews and appearances on obscure European TV programmes. It's the one saving grace. The work of Ayers and his peers live on in vivid detail even if they don't.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2268033 2012-12-10T19:00:00-05:00 2013-02-09T05:12:01-05:00

Simon Johns http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johns/ Bill Drummond, would be answered in a small artist's studio in Istanbul on a recent rainy Saturday afternoon.

Those few of us assembled were listening to what sounded very much like new-age chanting, without rhythm or melody. Five choirs, some just single voices, representing five different faiths in Istanbul were recorded singing the musical note C by Mark Love, an Istanbul-based collaborator of Drummond's. Love captured the sounds of a Sunni Muslim, a Jew, a couple of Roman Catholics, Sufis and Protestants, all amateur singers, in different locations around this city of mostly 13 million Muslims. On this day, the recordings were played back simultaneously to the participants, including my lapsed Catholic wife.

The performance was part of a project called The17, a global collective choir that is performing a long list of scores devised mainly by Drummond, one half of late-80s dance-music duo The KLF. It was one of 40 performances orchestrated by Drummond before his 60th birthday in April when his self-imposed end of the choirs begins.

Like many of his generation, Drummond grew up listening to records and watching live music. By the early 2000s, he became both excited and perturbed by changes in the music industry that would eventually result in what we have today: MP3 files, peer-to-peer music sharing and YouTube, where every song ever recorded is immediately available and free.

"Our relationship with music was changing fast. Now that we could have all the music we ever wanted with us all of the time and we didn't have to pay for it, it no longer meant the same thing to us," the musician-cum-artist told Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung in a rare interview. (Drummond declined to speak with me after his decision earlier this year to only give 25 interviews between now and age 72, the age at which his maternal grandfather died.)

Infinitely available, free music also spells the end of most musicians earning a living modest enough to dedicate themselves to music making full-time. No more money to burn. It meant the band I played in for a decade, Stereolab, bowed out nearly four years ago, mainly out of exhaustion from a grinding tour schedule necessitated to drive ever-declining record sales.

Drummond, who used to manage The Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen, tried to imagine a time before recorded sound (about 1857), when most people's experience of music was at home or in church, learning and playing songs as part of a community. He began looking for a musical year zero that would de-commodify recorded sound.

Recording technology gave rise to pop music, but it also "seduced all forms of music before it," Drummond said. The result, he believes, was that music had lost its power.

And so The17 was born. Named after the original performance in Leicester in 2005 featuring a choir of 17 men including Drummond, it has led to a series of performances using sets of written instructions, which he calls scores. The idea was to reattach the audience with the activity of making music, in whatever form that took - usually lacking most of the elements that constitute good music.

The17 now has more than 5,600 members. Among the hundreds of scores are choirs of different age groups singing on five floors of the same building; homeless men given cans of lager, then asked to sing; and a ring of people around part of a city shouting "oi" in a Cockney version of Chinese whispers.

The score in which my wife participated, No. 11 "Combine," had unexpected emotional power. Those in attendance were moved, if not by the music itself then by the fact that the recording was about to be deleted forever. All that effort would evaporate. It was our detachment from music as a product that was so difficult to give up. We tried in vain to capture the moment by photographing Love as he hit the delete button.

Like the million pounds Drummond infamously destroyed on a Scottish island in 1994, the one-off performance of "Combine" was lost, never to be heard again and only to exist in the performers' memories.

As Drummond put it: "Even the most potent of art forms have numbered days."]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1476619 2012-05-04T07:58:08-04:00 2012-07-04T05:12:04-04:00

Simon Johns http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johns/
Hayward chose to talk about the disaster, the worst offshore spill in U.S. history in which 11 men died, at a marine-protection conference in Istanbul.

He warned that Istanbul, a UNESCO World Heritage site with a population of some 15 million people, could see a similar disaster unless it stems the flow of oil tankers through its Bosporus Strait. Some 150 million tonnes of crude and petroleum products transit the narrow, winding waterway each year.

Nearly 5 million barrels of crude spewed into the Gulf of Mexico between April and September 2010 after BP's Macondo well blew out, causing explosions on board the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which was licensed to BP by Transocean.

The oil super-major launched a $15 billion emergency response, the biggest ever in corporate history, Hayward said. It hired nearly 50,000 people and deployed 10,000 vessels, "more than took part in the Normandy landing," he said, likening it to the sacrifice made by more than 200,000 allied soldiers in World War Two.

In another clumsy water reference, Hayward described the disaster as a "black swan": a low-probability high-impact risk that could have been avoided if all systems had been working and monitored properly.

"What happened that day was a tragic and avoidable industrial accident," he admitted but added: "If the blowout preventer had not failed, the events of April 2010 would have remained a personal tragedy and an industrial accident, but would not have caused an environmental and social disaster."

Blaming the rig's blowout preventer -- a valve used to seal and control oil wells -- would appear to pass some of the buck. London-based BP sued Cameron International Corp, which made the blowout preventer, in April 2011 for negligence. BP and its partners Transocean and Halliburton, the oilfield services contractor, have quarreled in public and in the courtroom over who was responsible for the spill. Halliburton is suing BP, claiming it withheld vital information about subsurface conditions.

A White House commission in January 2011 said BP, Transocean and Halliburton made a series of cost-cutting decisions that ultimately contributed to the blaze and oil spill. On Tuesday, the same U.S. administration granted BP permission to construct three rigs in the Gulf of Mexico at a projected cost of £2.5 billion.

"Unfortunately human behaviour works like this ... you learn from your mistakes," Hayward said. "We were wrong but our complacency was not unique. The industry had lulled itself into a false sense of security, thanks to 20 years of drilling in deep water without a serious accident."

These were Hayward's first public comments about the spill since leaving BP in October 2010, his publicist said. By the time he left BP, Hayward had already handed over day-to-day management of the crisis amid criticism for his handling of the crisis, including a comment that he would like his life back.

He was also berated in the press after he was photographed yacht racing while the oil still gushed. "South Park" witheringly lampooned him.

Hayward invoked the media scrutiny during his speech. "We had no equipment to contain and stop the oil on the seabed," he said. "No such equipment existed. We found ourselves having to design and build it -- improvising, as it were, on prime-time television."

An avid sailor and diver, Hayward, 55, gave his speech at a conference to discuss ways to protect the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, both ravaged by industrial pollution.

Nearly 150 million tonnes of crude and petroleum products transit through Istanbul's Bosporus Strait each year. The narrow, winding straits invite disaster.

Hayward seems to have bounced back. Late last year, with partners he formed the London-listed Genel Energy after they paid £1.3 billion for Genel Enerji, a Turkish company focused on exploration and production in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq. He is now CEO.

His new colleague -- Genel Energy president Mehmet Sepil - has also courted controversy. Sepil was slapped with the biggest fine ever (£1 million) by the Financial Standards Authority, the British regulator, for insider trading during Genel Enerji's failed merger with Heritage Oil in 2009. The Kurdish Energy Minister Ahsti Hawrami, kingmaker of operators in Kurdistan and a friend of Sepil and Hayward, is also accused by the FSA for insider trading the same company.

Hayward received a bonus pay out from Genel Energy of £11 on the second anniversary of the disaster. And greater riches could be on the horizon as Genel considers offshore exploration in the eastern Mediterranean. Will Hayward bring lessons learned from the Gulf of Mexico with him?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1306777 2012-02-28T19:00:00-05:00 2012-04-29T05:12:01-04:00

Simon Johns http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johns/ Baklahorani helps keep their spirit alive.

Two parades, led by troupes of costumed revelers banging drums and blaring clarinets, wound through the streets of Istanbul on Sunday and Monday to celebrate Carnival before seven weeks of abstinence and reflection for the Orthodox faithful. Hundreds of Turks, Greeks and tourists donned masques and wigs to join the street parties.

This year was the biggest celebration yet of Baklahorani, which roughly translates as "eating beans" in reference to the Lenten fast, since its revival in 2010. It was a days-long Istanbul street festival for centuries until 1941, when Greeks, facing pressure from Turkish authorities, abandoned the festival.

"In the 70 years since Baklahorani, demonstrations of faith were done in private. Today it is a matter of pride to celebrate in public," says organiser Haris Rigas, whose family left Istanbul for Greece decades ago. Rigas returned to Turkey five years ago to study political science at Istanbul's Bogazici University.

About 800 people attended the first of the two parades that took place on Sunday and weaved through Istanbul's main high street, Istiklal Caddesi in the district of Beyoglu. The same street witnessed a night of violence that targeted the city's Greeks and other ethnic minorities in September 1955. Hundreds of people were injured, and more than 5,000 businesses were destroyed. That accelerated the decline of the Greek community in Istanbul, once the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Today, fewer than 3,000 Greeks, most of them pensioners, remain in their ancient homeland.

"I am here to celebrate Istanbul Greek culture," said Burcu Karabiyik, 38, a sculptor wearing a red, sequined eye mask. "It's important to stake a claim for Istanbul's traditions and show solidarity when our society is so polarised."

Most of Turkey's Greeks were expelled after World War One in a population exchange that also brought Muslims here from Greece. In later years, tensions over Cyprus, social discrimination and restrictions on property and other rights forced out more than 150,000 others. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property has been appropriated, schools are left without pupils, and priests hold services in empty churches.

Istanbul, Europe's largest city, is home to a mainly Muslim population of 14 million people, yet it retains the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the spiritual centre for the world's 300 million Orthodox. About 60,000 Armenian Christians and 20,000 Jews also live here.

Turkey's centre-right, Islamist-rooted government has made a few steps at improving the plight of Greeks since its election in 2002. They have granted Turkish citizenship to foreign bishops so they can join the Patriarchate's Holy Synod, which runs the Church and provides candidates for future patriarchs. Other gestures have included permission for a Greek Orthodox mass at Sumela Monastery near the Black Sea town of Trabzon for the first time since the 1920s.

Progress on returning seized properties has been slow. Greeks, along with Israelis, are reportedly barred from buying homes in Beyoglu, which was populated by ethnic minorities during the Ottoman era. The Patriarchate's seminary has been closed since 1971, making it impossible for the Church to train its clergy.

Despite the constraints they face, Baklahorani demonstrates that, at least on the street level, Greeks are more comfortable about expressing their identity. A second, smaller parade was held on Clean Monday in Kurtulus, the former Greek neighbourhood known as Tatavla that has traditionally been home to Baklahorani.

Istanbulites have in recent years begun celebrating the city's native culture. The Sabanci Museum held a major exhibit last year featuring 5,000-year-old artefacts from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the first collaboration between Turkish and Greek museums. Nostalgia for Istanbul's recent, cosmopolitan past has seen publication of cookbooks with Istanbul Greek recipes, rembetiko bands performing weekly in Beyoglu bars and Greek-style tavernas serving meze to boisterous crowds.

"By no means does Baklahorani represent a true revival of Greek community or culture," Rigas says. "But it is still an expression of optimism for the Greek Orthodox of Turkey."]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1077943 2011-11-06T18:00:00-05:00 2012-01-06T05:12:01-05:00

Simon Johns http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johns/
The 7.2-magnitude quake in Van province on 23 Oct killed about 600 people and injured thousands more. It hit during a period of renewed violence between the Turkish army and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an outlawed guerrilla group that has waged an armed campaign for Kurdish autonomy since 1984. Just four days before the quake, the PKK killed 24 soldiers in an ambush in neighbouring Hakkari province, sparking convulsions of national grief.

With feelings still raw after the attack, some public figures expressed outright racist sentiment towards victims of the earthquake in the hours after it rocked Van. Breakfast show host Muge Anli spat on national television: "When we feel like it, we throw stones at police and kill soldiers as if we were bird hunting in the mountains. Then, when something happens, we say, 'Police, soldiers, come.' We need a balance...People need to know their place." And Duygu Canbas, a news anchor, departed from the teleprompter to express racist-tinged sympathy over the tragedy. "Even if it is in Van, all of Turkey is sad about this news," she said during a live broadcast.

Anli and Canbas were speaking for those Turks who equate Kurds with the PKK. For these people, Kurds had it coming to them. Though both women were widely criticised and soon offered apologies, the comments are still a crack in the veneer of national unity, the mandate of successive governments since the birth of modern Turkey. Last Saturday marked the 88th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic. Official celebrations were cancelled out of respect for the loss of life in the earthquake, causing outrage on social networking sites. Not everyone obliged with the show of respect: About 1,000 motorcyclists held an impromptu ceremonial ride-out in central Istanbul, their bikes festooned with Turkish flags. (In this topsy-turvy country, even bikers are fervent nationalists, while elsewhere they are outlaws, at least on the weekends.)

Turks' inability to distinguish between Kurds - who make up some 20% of the population - and the PKK mirrors the trouble Americans have distinguishing Muslims from terrorists, the British had when separating Catholics from the IRA and the Spanish in seeing ETA everywhere there are Basques. It is a mistake the Turks have made before when ridding themselves of established ethnic populations before and after 1923. Even today many still refuse to accept that there is an independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq, even though it is codified in the Iraqi constitution. For decades, Kurds were not even recognised as a distinct ethnic group and were instead referred to as 'Mountain Turks'. The Kurdish language was banned outright until 1991.

Nationalist dogma papers over many cracks, including the institutional corruption that leads to almost no prosecution for the criminal disregard of construction standards that leads to avoidable deaths in a country crisscrossed by fault lines. The sending of tax money specifically set aside for earthquake-proofing is spent on other government projects. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan calls on families to have three children in a country with one of the youngest populations in Europe and highest rates of childhood poverty to stave off a pension crisis that will inevitably arise.

In Turkey, nationalism lets political parties of all stripes hide behind personalities instead of policies and obedience to a national cause rather than public-service-led government. It stifles debate, scuppers reconciliation with the past and engenders cultural homogeneity. It can, quite literally, bring down the walls on an otherwise great nation.

Out of tragedy, community is often born. Turkey realised that in 1999 when successive earthquakes here and in Greece prompted mutual outpourings of aid and led to reconciliation between the arch enemies. The earthquake in Van offers Turkey another chance at such "earthquake diplomacy," this time inviting it to make peace with its own citizens. ]]>