There’s a school of thought that ‘good music’ is not only timeless, but should represent something completely independent of the artist; that there should be a clear dividing line between songwriter and song, artist and art, producer and product. That it’s okay to like The Smiths despite Morrissey allegedly being a racist (c*nt), because the songs are great. It didn’t matter whether S Club 7 were created in a test tube because 'Reach' is, quite simply, perfect pop. Wagner and anti-Semitism? Have you heard 'Flight of The Valkyries'? Jacko, kids and ‘duck butter’?     

 

It supports the justification of music-as-solely-entertainment; Motown, Kylie and Jason, S Club 7 (this is like some kind of Freudian obsession). It also justifies our inability to pin down our own tastes, because – and stick with me on this one – since the great shadow of post-modernity engulfed us, not to mention the off-shoots (post-post-modernity? Post-post-post-modernity…? Fuck. Off.), we don’t really know what we like. Or more to the point what we should like. When we hear a song for the first time, before we can judge it we’re inundated with a deluge of factors to consider:      

 

“Is it cheesy? Or ironic and self-reflexive? Knowing? Too knowing? Naïve? Ironic again? Pure? Contrived? Cheesy-but-self-aware-enough-to-acknowledge-it-and-somehow-that-makes-it-okay? An homage? A pastiche? A rip-off? Fresh-sounding? Breaking new ground? Over indulgent? Which radio station was this played on? Can I check Drowned in Sound (R.I.P.) and get back to you?”     

 

That’s because applying post-modernist principles to music criticism is like dripping water on a mogwai - questions fire out in all directions, scattering doubts and uncertainty everywhere. Trying to resolve these is like feeding them after midnight.      

 

The human brain is the most powerful technological tool in the known universe. Yet ask someone why they like a song it’s best that they give you a simple answer. Because if they don’t and you probe a little further, more questions keep flooding in while answers become more complicated. The principles by which we judge music reveal themselves to be a huge heap of tangled contradictions. Push a little further still and you’ll pierce the façade, breaking through to the Truth that they simply don’t know. At this point those under scrutiny will collapse in a crumpled heap, hugging their knees, shaking and sobbing “I don’t know, okay?! I just… I just don’t… know. God! Why did you have to do this to me?! WHY?!!”. If this is the case it’s best to back off – you’ve said enough.     

 

So most people these days tend to go for the somewhat aloof ‘I just do, okay?’ line from the outset - even if we don’t ‘just do’. It’s more convenient. Furthermore, in the current climate (post-post-modernity?!), it lends us the opportunity to congratulate ourselves on our smug open-mindedness. ‘Look at us – we’re so inclusive, democratic and enlightened; so conveniently non-committal. None of us love anything (we’d have to have a justifiable rationale) but we appreciate the merits of everything’. It’s an inverse snobbery that allows us to feel superior to music snobs – or at least those pricks who used to use the term ‘Real Music™’ in an argument (rendered ineffectual by the fact that they were usually referring to Coldplay or Starsailor or some other such wet guff), and to be honest, they’re pretty easy targets.     

 

Ian Brown – sorry: ‘Shockwaves NME Godlike Genius’ Ian Brown (*pfft*) – unintentionally epitomised this when he said “it’s not where you’ve been it’s where you are” or words to that effect; in doing so insinuating that The Moment supersedes The Context. It’s a nice thought. 

 

But I for one don’t buy it.  

 

Maybe it’s because I like stories, or maybe it’s because I’m a romantic (more Havant and Waterlooville than Sleepless in Seattle). Or maybe it has something more to do with Meaning.    

 

You see, if you divorce the moment from its context, the art from the artist, you’re not really left with anything of any real significance. The whole Dylan/Judas/“Play-it-fucking-loud” thing becomes nothing more than an unpopular man with a Jew-fro, standing on a stage, whining. Strange Fruit is just a series of words and chords. Spike Island, Knebworth, Glastonbury are just geographical locations. It’s The Context that lends The Moment its magnitude; its near-mythical status. It gives it Meaning and makes a Moment an Event.      

 

With that in mind we can start to evaluate tonight’s event. Because with Daniel Johnston, the artist and the art are inseparable – both in the way we receive it and the way it was conceived. To try to view one without the other is to miss the point completely. That’s not to say that it’s an entirely healthy symbiosis; as anyone who has seen the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston can attest.

 

For those who aren’t familiar with him, the tale of Daniel Johnston the musician is one of the most hilarious, heartbreaking and strangest stories you’ll ever hear.   He grew up in West Virginia as the oddball youngest child in a strict-religious family. During his adolescence he spent his days and nights at the piano in his parents’ basement; feverishly writing and playing his Beatles-inspired compositions, recording them on a crappy tape player and handing the results to whoever would take them.     

 

Despite having almost no singing talent and fairly rudimentary musicianship, the boy could pen a melody and had manic energy and a knack for pop lyricism that tied in perfectly with his wide-eyed persona. What’s more, his total inability to conform to any notion of professionalism or pretension meant that although scrappy and at times painfully raw (both sonically and emotionally), these early cassettes have an air of intimacy and a vitality virtually unmatched in popular music. Think Lennon and McCartney not being able to sing or play guitar, recording on a kids’ tape player… but they’ve written the Beatles’ back catalogue.     

 

 However, Daniel didn’t just record songs on these early albums; he recorded his whole life. From diary entries to the sound of his lifetime muse - Laurie – saying “I love you”; to goofy comedy skits and his mum screaming fire and brimstone verse at him – it’s all there, captured and woven into and around his songs; at times funny, others heart-rendering, sometimes God-awful, often both hopeful and despairing. Sometimes it’s all of these at once. But it’s never dull and – crucially – it’s always him and it’s always human.     

 

Emerging from the basement the next 10-15 years were fairly tumultuous to say the least. I’ve rambled a lot as it is and no one has the time to cover it all, so to cut a long story short: college drop-out; bi-polar and schizophrenic; Laurie marries an undertaker; ran away with the circus; MTV; McDonalds; bad acid trip; fixated with the Devil; mental hospital; Kurt Cobain wearing Daniel’s ‘Hi, How Are You?’ T-shirt; Mountain Dew obsession; Casper the Friendly Ghost; crashed a plane; mental hospital; pushed an old lady out of a window; mental hospital again; now fat, middle-aged and reasonably stable…  (aaaaand exhale) – All the time capturing and recording this in his songs.    

 

Since the mid-nineties, although amassing a cult following, it’s all been a bit quiet on the DJ front. The brilliant ‘Devil and Daniel Johnston’ documentary was released in 2006 to rave reviews, kick-starting a new appreciation for the troubled ‘star’. That documentary along with magazine pictures and You Tube clips reveal that the skinny kid is now a fat middle-aged man. Due to the effects of his medication he has greyed prematurely while several of his teeth have fallen out (perhaps casualties of his Mountain Dew obsession), exacerbating his lissthp. Meanwhile, due to his mental deterioration he now needs to read the lyrics of his songs from a sheet, despite having must’ve sung them hundreds of times. He still can’t sing. Viewing the You Tube clips in some horror, you struggle to reconcile the myth with the reality. The effect is something akin to watching someone’s fat crazy uncle do bad Daniel Johnston karaoke.     

 

So it’s with some concern and low expectations that I arrive at the IndigO2 tonight. I look around at all the kids in ‘Hi, How Are You?’ T-shirts; feeling superior in my standoffishness. I look at them the same way I look at people who still turn up to Babyshambles gigs and applaud wildly as Doherty flounces across the stage, drawling his way through some unwitting parody of a half-baked Libertines song, in the vain hope that he might stumble across his muse again – or at least make enough from the tickets to injects his bell end full of ‘squidgy black’. The venue is pretty nasty too: all neon lights and bar staff who are louder than the (exceptional) support. It all reeks of the worst kind of cash-in; a huge corporate tent with a merchandise stall making money off of the back of a fella with a lifetime of mental illness. It’s not looking great.    

 

Then with Jad Fair’s introduction - “I’ve known a lot of talented people in my life but I’ve only met one genius” – out comes the man himself, clutching a guitar. After two numbers unaccompanied it’s fair to say that after some 25 years of trying he still can’t play guitar. He disappears backstage before quickly re-appearing with the rest of the band (including Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse), before launching into his set proper. After a slow start I find myself involuntarily bopping along to the deceptive groove of ‘Speeding Motorcycle’. The playful tone of ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’ hides a deeper message about the human condition (“He was smiling through his own personal Hell/Threw his last dime in a wishing well/He was hoping too close and then he fell/Now he’s Casper The Friendly Ghost”), while the understated melancholy of ‘Walking the Cow’ touches upon the onset of his mental breakdown. Both are early highlights.     

 

Every now and again though he tests your patience with one of his cod-rock numbers; a more recent consequence of the effect his medication has on his creativity, perhaps? You tend to find yourself indulging him but I don’t know whether anyone really enjoys them and, despite his best intentions, his cover of The Beatles’ Rain does little to convince you otherwise.    

 

These are minor complaints though, for as the set passed I found my initial concerns were, for the most part, dispelled. I realised that the shoddy delivery and the self-indulgence interspersed with moments of almost transcendent beauty were completely in keeping with what I’d loved about the man in the first place. It had clicked. He hadn’t changed all that much at all. It’s precisely these flaws that made him so honest, so appealing to begin with. All of a sudden I could reconcile the man standing, shaking nervously in front of me with the myth of Daniel Johnston; with the kid playing piano in the basement.    

 

 The rest of the set took on a whole new meaning. The refrain at the end of ‘Hey Joe’ killed me: “there’s a Heaven and there’s a star for you” - sung as if to himself over and over, with exponential gravitas; that of a lifetime of inner torment. In ‘Go’ he states that “to understand and to be understood is to be free” – in doing so he sums up the whole raison d’etre of his output for the past two decades - before conjuring up echoes of Laurie leaving him to marry an undertaker as he implores someone to “Go on ahead/Take her in your arms/And be wed… if you think you’ve caught onto something/Don’t let it go”. While an encore of the oft-covered ‘True Love Will Find You in The End’ sums up a lifetime of unfaltering faith in the face of ever decreasing odds. There’s even time for a sing-a-long a cappella rendition of Devil Town before it’s over.

 

    

On our way out my friend and me each picks up a ‘Hi, How Are You?’ T-shirt from the merchandise stall.

    

I suppose we like the music certain bands or musicians make fairly arbitrarily – it’s usually the way they put one chord in front of another and throw a few lyrics in there – but we love the music our favourite artists make because of who they are: their personality, history, the context in which the songs were written - even the context in which we relate to the songs: where we were when we’ve heard them, who with etc. That’s what stops you from just downloading anything and putting it on shuffle. So I suppose, returning to (Shockwaves/NME Godlike Genius) Ian Brown’s quote: for me, it’s not about where you are - it’s about how you got there. 

 

 

Otherwise I just paid £20 to watch a tone-deaf mental fat guy wail and shake on stage for an hour.

 

     

Posted In Features, Jun 03 2009. Words - Steve