Active Fire
In April, the poet Rishi Dastidar and I started exploring an album we both love deeply: The Boo Radleys' Giant Steps. This post captures our exhange - a collaboration in epistolary form - in full.
April 19, 2024
Dear James,
Everything starts with a heartbeat. Let’s press on ours, so it flutters into life.
A moment, unrolling on the infernal timeline the other night, after you’d told me: I want to write about this, I have to write about this.
Quote post with the covers of your four favourite albums on Creation Records. And someone said, I paraphrase slightly, 'I only heard Giant Steps for the first time today'.
Which blew my mind, even though it shouldn’t have.
Because: how? How did you manage to dodge having your life changed? How did you avoid having your head and heart cracked open?
I am assuming this person is roughly the same age as us. I mean, he looks it from the few pixels in his avatar, but how can you really tell?
My point: as much as we are reflecting, I think we might have to be advocates for this record too.
Unless it turns out we are the only two middle-aged nostalgic wallflowers who give a fuck.
Yours,
Rishi
April 22, 2024
Dear Rishi,
Some exposition, then. What is this record and why care? Why now?
Many questions, but they share an answer - one rooted in the album’s internal contradictions: hope and regret, ambition and self-doubt, belonging and escape. Giant Steps is a limbo record.
And not only lyrically; the record felt out-of-time the moment it was out. Too easy to go missing in that Creation Twilight Zone - August 1993, two years late for the label’s Cambrian Explosion, still a full year until Definitely Maybe - with the group themselves in transition too, ugly duckling their music somewhere new, their moves hard to pin down. All of which might explain your pixel peer’s blind spot.
Indie’s trajectory in the early 90s, let’s remember, from shoegaze to zeitgeist, was wild, and fast, and while the Boo Radleys felt the Gs as fully as anyone - from the noise and shimmer of So For The Morning To Sing to the breakfast-show clarion of Wake Up Boo! in under three years - they were too unconventional to really stand for that shift in the minds of anyone beyond a devout NME readership. Giant Steps sees them moving along that continuum, a rebirth in slo-mo (not for nothing was Lazarus their ‘comeback’ single), but not yet all-guns-blazing. They are still hunkered down and haunted. They are uncertain. They are becoming. Giant Steps is a group in chrysalis mode.
I felt like that, too, then. That Autumn was my last at school. A certain kind of freedom was tantalisingly close but still abstract, visible on the other side of lots of hard work, anxiety, and luck. I remember a sense of that freedom also arriving now and again in letters from my girlfriend, already away at university. Giant Steps is to me the sound of open days and revision evenings, of dreams just out of reach, of navigating a course through a world that has you in its grasp and wishing it were the other way around.
I wonder if this is why, Rishi, when your missive arrived on the Spring blue calm of a Friday afternoon, the prospect of a weekend signifying a respite from responsibilities, I tried to listen to Giant Steps, and failed. It didn’t fit that moment. (That August release date btw - more out-of-time-ness; it’s such a winter record.) It had made far more sense just a week before, the day I listened - twice - on the train to and from London, and hatched the idea of this collaboration. What does it mean that Giant Steps makes most sense from the depths of the working week, I wonder? In transit (I Hang Suspended, indeed), in the cold, in need of comfort, a pressure valve to pull on? Perhaps it re-connects me to who I was then. Perhaps I’m still him.
How about you, Rishi? Where do we find you? How and when and why did Giant Steps crack you open?
Yours,
James
April 28, 2024
Dear James,
Big questions James, and possibly too big for me to contemplate right now, as I type this at my desk, looking out at a window where it is raining. Again. Like it has been forever this spring. I was told there was some sun once, one weekend.
I am dodging, in part because truthfully: I always struggle to pin down a moment when a record entered my life, and became a part of it. The most concrete example I have is My Bloody Valentine’s ‘only shallow’, which is another anecdote for another day. How do you pin down, not a memory as such, but something memory adjacent? The soundtrack to something that is almost a memory? The feeling of a memory? I feel like I am trying to grab a fistful of cloud, and stuff it into a kilner jar.
So: as far as I can begin to reconstruct things: it probably would have been a Saturday morning, and stumbling across ‘Lazarus’ on The Chart Show on ITV at some point in 1992. Remember that? A cut-price MTV for those of us who didn’t know what cable was or how to get it. And so, another televisual music fix to get us through the rest of the week before Top Of The Pops rolled around again.
Sidebar: it’s hard to get this across to people now, but growing up this music – no, any music – did not envelop us quite in the way it does today. Now it is an atmosphere [and dare I say it, as inert as one too? We are going to have to guard against a lazy nostalgia as we go through this record] whereas then, it wasn’t quite. We had to seek a bit, search a bit; and so anything that was more accessible was seized upon, in my case at least.
And so when on one of those sources, you came across something you liked, you really liked, it was like a world opening up. No, that is imprecise. It was like your brain opening up, possibly even your soul, depending on how overwrought you might have been feeling at the time. I have just realised of course that what I am talking about is ‘the encounter’, and it still feels oookie to me to try and claim it for pop music instead of higher cultures.
But that is what it is. When you see yourself in something else. When you are presented with a version of yourself that you didn’t know was there. Couldn’t have imagined was there. An expansion of the possible. An expansion of you.
Did I see and hear all of that in the video and the song? At this distance, who can tell right? In writing this, I am very deliberately not going to YouTube and firing it up, and so I am trying to drag up the most detailed image that my memory has and it is a still of Sice sitting behind the desk in the mini cab dispatchers’ office; maybe he is singing into the CB mic, a metaphor for that distancing that his vocal takes on. And I think that I can see Martin in a stairwell, looking up. But I feel I definitely am making that up.
From a distance of 31 years I think – no, I know – that what I was grabbing on to in the song even then was: it will be bleak and sad, periodically; but you can and will get up again. I couldn’t have articulated as concisely then. But it was there. And I don’t think it’s been a feeling I’ve ever let go of since, however much life has tried to convince me otherwise.
I don’t think I’ve ever said this before but: Lazarus as a hero? Maybe we should teach that myth a little more.
Yours,
Rishi
May 7, 2024
Dear Rishi,
I’m with you, Rishi - I doubt I’d have understood my inchoate feelings about the music I adopted back then, let alone articulated them so concisely. Too much in flux at 17 for that. Adolescence is a mess of infatuation and instinct - more run at than think.
Any thinking that went on was probably done for me, by the music press - at least at first. Music, as you point out, was not everywhere. If your appetites weren’t sated by the Radio 1 playlist, you had to go looking. For the pretentious wannabe sophisticate - the kind Jonathan Raban might have been describing when he called himself “a prisoner of my insecure good taste” - the inky dose of snobbery and evangelism I could score every Wednesday in my smalltown newsagent was a dependency. It was certainly formative. Much of the first contact I had with the music that opened up my brain and soul came via words. Ideas, framings, narrative. Something to grab on to.
There was plenty for someone like me in 1993, the year of Suede’s first album, and Tindersticks’, and Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish. No shortage of skinny, thoughtful young men I could admire for their romanticism, for their outsiderdom, for their clothes. Their dress sense made me look again at my local charity shops, instantly reinvented as Mr Benn-style portals. Who could I be now?
Against this, Giant Steps was different. Lessons in poetry and pose I found elsewhere; it was Martin’s painterly way with sound I fell for. There may have been crisis in the lyrics, but sonically the record is all intention, a shoegaze supernova - multi-coloured joy. The music press narrative was that Giant Steps was a swing for greatness. That was me primed. I heard the ambition encoded in its many textures, all layered on like colour on canvas.
Some shades were already familiar from my two-year obsession with Screamadelica, of course: blaring horns, Jah Wobble bass lines, Beach Boys harmonies. There was still feedback, only now it billowed and breathed and writhed itself around columns of cellos and flutes. There were bouncy, thrashy thrills here too if you wanted. But it felt bigger than all that. Martin, as the sole writer, was part Pete Townshend - steering a band into its second act - and part aspiring stowaway on that ship that bears music’s great starsailors. Like those complicated men - Johns Martyn and Coltrane, Brian Wilson and Kevin Shields - Martin charted a course by his own (new) coordinates: in this case, dub, jazz, psychedelic pop.
(There was something else here, too, a sense of playful experimentation I knew well from childhood - from the colourful noise (revisited) my Dad had played me, on records made in his youth, by four lads made in his hometown. The ones who shook the world. Who got weirder as they got bigger.)
That sense of freedom - studio as playground - still comes off this record even now. Perhaps it’s easier when your cup of songs runneth over - 17 of them, each adorned with an individual sonic identity, crashing into one another, styles spinning past at a dizzying rate. I’m sure Giant Steps was conceived seriously, but it is executed playfully. Such is the joy in uncovering a new dimension to your creativity.
In this there’s a link with another 1993 record, from another artist finding their voice that year. On Debut, Bjork’s sound also brightened and deepened, and it too charts an internal transformation. But it’s the contrasts between the two that reveal an essential truth of Giant Steps. Bjork’s epiphany is dancefloor-driven; Martin’s comes while nursing a pint in the boozer. She’s floating through the weekend, he’s struggling to make it through another drab weekday. She’s blooming in London; he’s still working up the courage to go.
When you get down to it, on Debut, Bjork is immersed in a scene, channelling the communal, supportive transcendence of the crowd. Martin is still on the edge of things, looking in, not out. To him, a crowd has always been, still is, and probably always will be, a sign of how alone he really is.
Yours,
James
May 12, 2024
Dear James,
So let’s try and pull on some of these strands (forgive me if it is not all of them; the sun is streaming into the room where I am typing this, and my resistance to the siren call of a fino and tonic in the sunshine is weakening rapidly!)
It’s funny, but I don’t think of Giant Steps as an album of good taste. I mean, how can it be? It’s a teenage album, or as you will a quarter-life crisis album; and woah look at this prejudice coming out but – who has good taste that young? Now, I think you can have taste that aligns with cool, or what’s in or what’s modish or what’s hot, or whatever current term you want to use for now at that age. But not good.
In that: it makes me raise an eyebrow. How do you know what good is yet? How have you seen enough to have even remotely adequate baselines to make comparisons that aren’t absurd? And why are you even worrying about this now? Absurd enthusiasms, proclaimed with the energy that is only given to the young should be your concern at this stage of life, not wondering whether, and I think this is the kicker here, other people might approve of it, maybe even welcome you into a gang.
That will come, if you are lucky. The classics are the classics and will always be there. You should not be canon-building at 23. You should be personal history soundtracking. Wonderful if some of those are things that have stood the test of time. But I want there to be also whims, fancies and ephemera that precisely don’t last. Or rather: only last because of what they mean to you.
Gosh, that wasn’t mean to be a rant. But I want to make sure we don’t parcel this album off into a bloodless realm of good taste. It is far more visceral than that. It means much more than that, in its messiness, angularity, obsessive fixations.
There’s another parallel I’m feeling with the Bjork angle: how in ‘There More To Life Than This’ we hear the thud of the toilet doors at the Milk Bar, that sense of suddenly life has entered this process of distilling music into something that can be pinned down like a butterfly, and in this glorious moment she rejects that to remind us: no, this stuff is alive. I feel like the heartbeats at the start of Giant Steps do something similar – not just the literal forewarning of ‘this will get your blood pumping’, but that nod to the big thing: this isn’t just a record; this is life.
Yours,
Rishi
May 24, 2024
Dear Rishi,
So much life.
It’s certainly in the voice. Which is to say: the words. The turn of phrase, the wryness - a Scouse sensibility, perhaps. Perhaps a kind of poetry.
(We should speak, at some point, about what you pointed out that time - about the ventriloquising going on here, the freedom that might come with writing words to be sung by someone else.)
It’s that, beyond the classicism, which keeps Giant Steps from ageing. Or rather, that helps it age well. Age with you.
Oof. “As the vultures circle, as the bills and demands fill the floor…”. This as the beat shifts and picks up, the energy of the music set against the debilitating inertia of the lyric. I didn’t know what that felt like, then. The flight from responsibility, the prison of anxiety piling up in postmarked paper. I’ve known it since, battle it still. The mournful stretch over the six minutes of that song, Upon 9th And Fairchild, how it howls at times, and pauses to do so, while gamely asserting “this is my life too” over and over - this never stops feeling ominous, alive. Who is he telling? At 17 I probably pictured my parents. He probably meant a girl. Today it feels like the world, its pressures and obligations. Like trying to stay off the floor.
Oof. “When I start to look back, I feel like I've spent my whole life just kicking round and not getting in the way.” The regret, the ennui, the sense of wasted energy. God how I feel that line sometimes, as if life has been lived as one of those copper coin arcade games - draws moving thoughtlessly back and forth like the tide, constantly on the verge of a tipping point that never comes. Inertia creeps. At the height - no, the depths - of lockdown, when I couldn’t write, could barely finish reading a book, Lazarus (re-)appeared. Part rescue, part reminder of what I felt I’d always been, what I couldn’t escape. And so I drafted something. It was for A Longing Look. My co-editor didn’t know where to look, probably: my draft was in verse; I took the shape and cadence of the Lazarus verses and into that poured all the rumination, the self-recrimination and self-doubt, whatever resolve I could muster. How maybe now I would change. An epiphany from within my own chrysalis. It made sense only to me but I needed someone else to read it to realise that, I think. It tore at the chrysalis from the inside. That skyscraping wordless chorus burst in like belief.
Oof. “Now I'm getting older, it's easier to hide, to run away day after day - betray the voice that tells me: leave it all behind me.” The ambivalence of Barney (And me…) - that act-closing soliloquy. Dart-sharp but lost. Sice sings ‘betray’ in one verse and ‘believe’ in another. Now that’s life - the way it can turn on such moments. A fucking coin toss. One word out of place can change its course. At 3.17 the song flips - a flick of a pedal starts the race to the end of side one. And: curtain. Time for a drink. Life isn’t a musical, I know, but the halfway point of Giant Steps suggests it might be easier if we treated it that way. In which case, I’ll keep a Greek chorus with me to harmonise ‘Faye Dunaway’ on demand…
And, finally: oof. “There’s something else I need to find…” I’ve Lost The Reason is Giant Steps in miniature. Contained, but teeming with ideas, bulging at the seams. The sha la la las, the curlicues of guitar, the ‘ok calm’ it brings as the end nears. There are jazz chords and Beach Boy harmonies, crashing drums, a french horn that augurs a string quartet, a flourish on the timpani. It is, all at once, a desperate cry, some journal thoughts, and a rush at the horizon. “I’m only 23”, Sice sings (and Martin writes). An attempt to calm and convince himself, it may be. For anyone twice his age who might also feel they’ve got more to find, it’s both an alarm bell and a comfort blanket.
No life ever stops needing either.
Yours,
James
June 2, 2024
Dear James,
“An alarm bell and a comfort blanket.” You’re right of course. But then that leads us on to the question: why does this album do that, more than most others we know, have heard?
Part of it is lyrical, for sure, as you outline in your last email. And the ventriloquism is important here precisely because of the freedom it gives, to say what you really want to say. Why? Because of the distancing that is possible: when it’s not you, not your voice per se, well you can use gap to perspective, so the insights can be more acute.
It’s also the notion of finding and then being able to deliver truth through characters or personas. Why do we still venerate the novelists and the playwrights so? Precisely because they do this. They put words into other people’s mouths – some living and breathing, some only doing so on the page or the screen – and allow us into the deepest recesses of souls, minds, hearts.
Tell it slant, as Emily Dickinson said. But maybe we forget that we have to be a little bit slant – a little bit slant from ourselves – to really get to the good stuff.
I think you’ve hit on something also when you say how Upon 9th and Fairchild is ominous. Noise. As much as we are being hit in the gut with what is going on lyrically, I don’t think it would – would have – register a quarter as much if it wasn’t for the extraordinary sonic palette that is on display here.
Because that is what is really painting those base layers that the lyrics are (bad analogy incoming) providing the varnish for. I’m sure I mentioned the woozy amniotic heartbeat shuffle that everything opens with before, but track by track, it’s the sound that’s really doing the work of taking the cut in the skin the lyric has made, and then, well, choose your metaphor: pouring salt in. Or better, going a layer deeper again, to hit the nerves.
Where it really stings. “Hey! What’s that’s noise? Do you remember?” The genius here is that you – and the body – don’t really forget.
Yours,
Rishi
June 19, 2024
Dear Rishi,
That’s what I’m learning, Rishi: that the body doesn’t forget. That the best thing a mind can do is lend a hand now and again.
I’ve been thinking about this since your last email. The reason is the darnedest thing. Do you remember a few weeks and emails back? I described a situation where Giant Steps hadn’t quite worked. A Friday afternoon, work done, sunny. Well. I tried again, same kind of moment. This time it hit. It really did. It all coalesced. That amniotic wooze became a hazy shimmer, the oil paint on that sonic palette glistened in the light. Those textures seemed to animate, separate, let me sink in between them, layer by layer. I was blotting paper, drawing out the latent calm within, the acceptance.
I guess we might paraphrase Anais Nin, then, and say, we don’t hear things as they are, but as we are. What previously felt ominous seemed to manifest resilience. What once drew me inward showed me how much there is of the world. I heard a man promise “with a headful of beer I will try and tell someone tonight” and it sounded less like procrastination and more the summoning of Dutch courage. The words of a man not drowning, but waving.
Because, of course, that’s what Martin has been telling us all along. That’s why this record does what it does and others don’t. And that sunny summer Friday I knew. And it was the wormhole that clinched it.
It’s there, you can hear it, about three and a half minutes into Leaves And Sand: a noise opening at the back of the mix. A texture - perhaps the only one - held over from Everything’s Alright Forever. Hearing it that day, I heard it as the option we often think we want - the return path. A way back to what we know, the comfort of familiarity. It’s an option this band never chose - so much so, I wondered if they put it there purely to show they could ignore it. To represent, in other words, a refusal of the easy path. A commitment to moving forward, not standing still.
I realised then, that underpinning the internal contradictions I talked about before (hope and regret, ambition and self-doubt, belonging and escape) is the fundamental tension with which the record wrestles. Stasis and movement. Martin tells us that he’s stuck and that he can no longer live like this - he is a man literally caught between two minds. Yet the music shows no such indecision. It imaginatively and prolifically shows us the pace at which he’s already moving. Stasis can feel like paralysis, yet in its bones, in the flesh of it, this is a record of resourcefulness and creativity and magic.
Does the mind choose and the body follow? Or do our bodies sometimes tether us to a reality we might otherwise escape? Perhaps it’s not as easy to disentangle as all that. “Release me from the body I’ll go anywhere,” Sice sings in Butterfly McQueen, and I think that day I heard this to mean that though we can all get stuck sometimes, it’s with our minds we free ourselves.
What Giant Steps might be telling us with all this - the internal contradictions, the mind and body working together, and the idea, as you said, Rishi, of Lazarus as hero, the thought too that this is life on record - is perhaps an echo of Marcus Aurelius. The obstacle is the way. When we encounter stasis, that is the trigger for our will and creativity. “The impediment to action advances action.” The movement we need, in other words, is within what has us stuck. Futility holds the promise of belief. We only get to get back up again because we’ve fallen down.
There is always hope - so best lose the fear.
It’s not about deciding whether to look back at who we were, or leap forward into who we might become. We always have a choice. We can do both. We should do both. Remember the way your heart beat then. Remember how it beats now.
Yours,
James
My huge thanks to Rishi for taking part in this collaboration. His poetry has been published by the Financial Times and BBC amongst many others. He is a fellow of The Complete Works, and a consulting editor at The Rialto magazine. He is editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century and his latest collection is Neptune’s Projects (both Nine Arches Press).