The Female Gaze
This was originally an article written for Plan B Magazine - just had a bit of a problem with the word count... so well, even if an edited down version does ever appear on their website, here is the original
It all started with that picture. You know - *that* picture, surreptitiously emailed around the female staff of Plan B like a virus. "I'm not sure if that's disgusting or totally erotic," gapes the normally unflappable Miss AMP. "Either way, I approve." "They're not just naked, they're naked in a *fjord*," enthuses Frances. "They're playing at Sonic Cathedral," I observe. "We're going. Purely out of professional interest, of course."
120 Days aren't just pretty. They're the sort of Scandinavian sex gods that make even married women turn and stare, all six foot tall, with coltish limbs and long blond hair like an orgasmic Herbal Essences advert, elven jaws and cheekbones like dinner plates. They are beautiful. And they're totally naked.
OK, they're clothed at the gig, elegantly wrapped in skin-tight jeans and leather jackets, but the other bands are nervous. Nothing unnerves men like Male beauty. Maybe it's their fear of latent homosexuality, maybe their egos are threatened. Women are used to competing for The Male Gaze; the beauty stakes start in adolescence. But when the Gaze is turned on men, they can't cope - to the point where they'll write endless Guardian columns about how shallow women are for fancying pretty boys! Feathers are ruffled.
I understand how they feel, though. There's a cluster of Japanese hipster girls gathered round the front of the stage. "I can't help it," I confess. "I know it's xenophobic, but I just think they're here to steal our men." "I know," teases Frances. "I feel the same way about American women." And that's the way our pale, pasty native English dronerock boys are eyeing these interloping Sex Vikings.
Local support boys, The Early Years, go on amid a haze of psychedelic feedback, and 120 Days come out to watch. Suddenly we're surrounded by a forest of implausibly good-looking Norwegian manflesh. We make faces at one another and mouth "Phwoar!" behind their backs. But something is going on, onstage, behind all the swirling strobe lights. It's like that scene in every WWII movie, where the plucky Brits band together and through sheer ingenuity and courage, the sprecky boffins, though massively outmanned and outgunned, cobble together a plot from tin foil and sticky tape, and manage to defeat the suspiciously immaculate Nazi hordes.
photos by Bob Stuart
Dronerock - *good* dronerock – is totally sexual. Yeah, I know what Stockhausen and LaMonte Young said about the transcendence of repetition and the disappearance of melody and all that, and yeah, it's great theory, but put Eno's Oblique Strategies away and listen to me. That relentless, four-on-the-floor 'Für Immer' motorik beat? It's Musik für Fucking. Klaus Dinger totally gives me the horn. And all those Machine metaphors? Come on, you don't have to be a Freudian analyst or a feminist theorist to realise that all those Kraftwerk robots and autos and pocket calculators are classic phallic symbols. A 20-minute krautrock epic? When it's right, it is the aural equivalent of being fucked within an inch of your life by a tantric sex robot from planet Dusseldorf.
TEY have got the motorik thing down perfectly, they've got the dirtiest drone going. David Malkinson's got his eyes closed, hair in his face, lips parted - in drug-induced haze or sexual ecstacy - who cares? Stroking his Korg with long, elegant fingers like he'd stroke a lover... we push our way up front, elbowing the Norwegians out of the way. We want more! There's Roger Mackin, skinny arse in tight-buttoned cardigan, lips pursed in concentration. No he can't be – oh yes, he is - dry humping his telecaster against his amp to get a wail of feedback, that jam-jar full of angry wasps guitar tone so beloved of obscure 60s freakbeat bands with names like Electric Treacle Well and the Marmalade Mine.
It's like the sexual satori moment of adolescence. Those local boys from the club, in the maelstrom of music, like the maelstrom of hormones, suddenly They. Are. Sex. I know how it works, the groupie magic. (Some cunt wrote a review of my own band, saying before the show, only two of us appeared remotely fit, but after a good gig, he'd shag all of us – even the mingers. Yeah, cheers.) But great music is magic, and that magic is as powerful as sex.
The frenzied My Bloody Valentine rave-ups, fucking like beasts in the hall because you can't wait to get up the stairs. The achingly pretty, drifting melodies where you just lie together, tracing your lover's nose and ears and hipbones with fingertips and lips, suspended in the perfect moment of those harmonic structures, your bodies fit close together like intertwined Spacemen 3 arpeggios. Those endless motorik spacejams with tangles of wah guitar, you just want to keep coming, again and again, every nerve throbbing like that tremolo.
Oh, god, the Norwegians don't stand a chance. After the aching, open-hearted sincerity of TEY, their beauty just seems like a cheesy chat-up line. Icy Teutonic cool just comes across like arrogance. They play in darkness, their backs turned to the audience, like trying to make love with the lights out. The music is svelte, sinuous, consciously sexy, their Moog drones mixed with a bit of Duran Duran bass, a bit of Eurotrance drumbeat. But after TEY, they just come off like the dronerock McFly. Their moves are too studied, a bit too Richard Ashcroft in the nasal vocals, a bit too much of the Bobby Gillespie School of Rock in the way they throw colt-like shapes with their bony limbs and toss their golden manes. But, like a boy who knows he's fit, somehow it's not sexy, in the way that TEY's slightly gawky charm and studious intensity is totally, undeniably hottttt with a million Ts.
120 Days passed like a dirty holiday fling, but The Early Years are in it for the long run. We came, wanting to fuck 120 Days, but we fell in love with TEY's music, and left, clutching them to our collective bosoms. Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the sine-waves.
It all started with that picture. You know - *that* picture, surreptitiously emailed around the female staff of Plan B like a virus. "I'm not sure if that's disgusting or totally erotic," gapes the normally unflappable Miss AMP. "Either way, I approve." "They're not just naked, they're naked in a *fjord*," enthuses Frances. "They're playing at Sonic Cathedral," I observe. "We're going. Purely out of professional interest, of course."
120 Days aren't just pretty. They're the sort of Scandinavian sex gods that make even married women turn and stare, all six foot tall, with coltish limbs and long blond hair like an orgasmic Herbal Essences advert, elven jaws and cheekbones like dinner plates. They are beautiful. And they're totally naked.
OK, they're clothed at the gig, elegantly wrapped in skin-tight jeans and leather jackets, but the other bands are nervous. Nothing unnerves men like Male beauty. Maybe it's their fear of latent homosexuality, maybe their egos are threatened. Women are used to competing for The Male Gaze; the beauty stakes start in adolescence. But when the Gaze is turned on men, they can't cope - to the point where they'll write endless Guardian columns about how shallow women are for fancying pretty boys! Feathers are ruffled.
I understand how they feel, though. There's a cluster of Japanese hipster girls gathered round the front of the stage. "I can't help it," I confess. "I know it's xenophobic, but I just think they're here to steal our men." "I know," teases Frances. "I feel the same way about American women." And that's the way our pale, pasty native English dronerock boys are eyeing these interloping Sex Vikings.
Local support boys, The Early Years, go on amid a haze of psychedelic feedback, and 120 Days come out to watch. Suddenly we're surrounded by a forest of implausibly good-looking Norwegian manflesh. We make faces at one another and mouth "Phwoar!" behind their backs. But something is going on, onstage, behind all the swirling strobe lights. It's like that scene in every WWII movie, where the plucky Brits band together and through sheer ingenuity and courage, the sprecky boffins, though massively outmanned and outgunned, cobble together a plot from tin foil and sticky tape, and manage to defeat the suspiciously immaculate Nazi hordes.
photos by Bob Stuart
Dronerock - *good* dronerock – is totally sexual. Yeah, I know what Stockhausen and LaMonte Young said about the transcendence of repetition and the disappearance of melody and all that, and yeah, it's great theory, but put Eno's Oblique Strategies away and listen to me. That relentless, four-on-the-floor 'Für Immer' motorik beat? It's Musik für Fucking. Klaus Dinger totally gives me the horn. And all those Machine metaphors? Come on, you don't have to be a Freudian analyst or a feminist theorist to realise that all those Kraftwerk robots and autos and pocket calculators are classic phallic symbols. A 20-minute krautrock epic? When it's right, it is the aural equivalent of being fucked within an inch of your life by a tantric sex robot from planet Dusseldorf.
TEY have got the motorik thing down perfectly, they've got the dirtiest drone going. David Malkinson's got his eyes closed, hair in his face, lips parted - in drug-induced haze or sexual ecstacy - who cares? Stroking his Korg with long, elegant fingers like he'd stroke a lover... we push our way up front, elbowing the Norwegians out of the way. We want more! There's Roger Mackin, skinny arse in tight-buttoned cardigan, lips pursed in concentration. No he can't be – oh yes, he is - dry humping his telecaster against his amp to get a wail of feedback, that jam-jar full of angry wasps guitar tone so beloved of obscure 60s freakbeat bands with names like Electric Treacle Well and the Marmalade Mine.
It's like the sexual satori moment of adolescence. Those local boys from the club, in the maelstrom of music, like the maelstrom of hormones, suddenly They. Are. Sex. I know how it works, the groupie magic. (Some cunt wrote a review of my own band, saying before the show, only two of us appeared remotely fit, but after a good gig, he'd shag all of us – even the mingers. Yeah, cheers.) But great music is magic, and that magic is as powerful as sex.
The frenzied My Bloody Valentine rave-ups, fucking like beasts in the hall because you can't wait to get up the stairs. The achingly pretty, drifting melodies where you just lie together, tracing your lover's nose and ears and hipbones with fingertips and lips, suspended in the perfect moment of those harmonic structures, your bodies fit close together like intertwined Spacemen 3 arpeggios. Those endless motorik spacejams with tangles of wah guitar, you just want to keep coming, again and again, every nerve throbbing like that tremolo.
Oh, god, the Norwegians don't stand a chance. After the aching, open-hearted sincerity of TEY, their beauty just seems like a cheesy chat-up line. Icy Teutonic cool just comes across like arrogance. They play in darkness, their backs turned to the audience, like trying to make love with the lights out. The music is svelte, sinuous, consciously sexy, their Moog drones mixed with a bit of Duran Duran bass, a bit of Eurotrance drumbeat. But after TEY, they just come off like the dronerock McFly. Their moves are too studied, a bit too Richard Ashcroft in the nasal vocals, a bit too much of the Bobby Gillespie School of Rock in the way they throw colt-like shapes with their bony limbs and toss their golden manes. But, like a boy who knows he's fit, somehow it's not sexy, in the way that TEY's slightly gawky charm and studious intensity is totally, undeniably hottttt with a million Ts.
120 Days passed like a dirty holiday fling, but The Early Years are in it for the long run. We came, wanting to fuck 120 Days, but we fell in love with TEY's music, and left, clutching them to our collective bosoms. Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the sine-waves.
Labels: 120days, shoegazing, sonic cathedral, the early years
posted by Masonic Boom | 3:39 pm
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