A sad week in which we lost two titans of the alternative music universe.
First, Mimi Parker of Low. Stevie Chick has written very movingly here:
“For Parker, music had been “kind of a dream, but not something I’d ever thought I’d do”. She had other passions anyway: sports, and riding snowmobiles across Minnesota’s wintery landscapes. But then Sparhawk suggested he and Parker form a band, giving her a snare drum and cymbal he’d found in the basement of the arena where he worked (Parker had played drums in her junior high concert band, years earlier). “She was a little reluctant,” Sparhawk remembered. “She’s really not terribly interested in being in front of people.”
That minimal drum set helped shape Low’s early, spare sound, but Parker’s voice – along with her songwriting – would prove her most crucial contribution to the group: a hushed, strong voice, holy yet human. “I vividly remember writing Words, off our first album, in our old apartment,” Sparhawk told me. “And then Mimi came in with the harmony, and it was like putting the spirit into a body, like taking something two-dimensional and making it three-dimensional.” The intimacy of their harmonies almost felt like we listeners were eavesdropping.
The ability to make music, to release their universally acclaimed Hey What in the midst of this turmoil (her cancer diagnosis) had, she said, “been a respite and a source of comfort … I’m thankful for the experiences I’ve had, the opportunities to make beautiful music, to collaborate with Alan, to understand his chaos and his tendencies to mesh them with my calmness and my search for harmony and beautiful things.”
Then two days later, Keith Levene passed also, the legendary link between the Pistols and the Clash who helped, along with John McKay of the Banshees, create the metal-shard guitar template in the early days of post-punk. Here’s Alexis Petridis:
“The sound Levene achieved on Public Image itself was just the first sign of his dogged commitment to ‘make the guitar do cool things, use it in different ways’. PiL’s debut album First Issue was filled with examples of Levene’s hugely inventive and original approach to the instrument. On Religion and Annalisa, he plays vaguely punk-y riffs that seem to exist in a state of constant motion, never going where you think they’re heading to. The woozy chords that open Theme are one of the few precursors for the hugely influential sound minted by My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields a decade later: over the course of the song’s nine minutes, the sheer array of noises Levene wrings from his guitar is astonishing, particularly given that the whole thing was played live in the studio, without overdubs.
Things got even further out on 1979’s peerless Metal Box, an album that also demonstrated how much PiL had learned from reggae about using the studio mixing desk as another instrument: listen to the frankly astonishing moment midway through Memories when the entire texture of the song suddenly changes, becoming punchier, harder and more intense, as if someone’s whipped a blanket off the speakers. Levene’s playing sprawled extravagantly across Swan Lake and Chant, as if he was treating the whole song as one long solo, utterly devoid of any standard guitar cliches. The studio version of Careering is largely synthesiser based – perhaps its atonal hums and screams were what Levene had in mind when he tried to get Rhodes to buy a Polymoog for the nascent Clash – but during PiL’s incredible live performance of the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test, Levene alternates between synthesiser and guitar, using the latter as if it’s a purely percussive instrument.
Keith Levene’s guitar … spoke a vibrant language that he’d more or less invented himself – all because he’d discarded the memo about what you were and weren’t supposed to do.”
I’ve smashed their tributes together into one episode which can be quite disconcerting at times. But, in their own immensely different ways, Levene and Parker embodied a fearless spirit, an unwillingness to be restricted by expectations and a sheer joy in sonic exploration.
Tracklist:
Public image, PIL
In metal, Low
No birds, PIL
Just make it stop, Low
Swan Lake, PIL
I remember, Low
Careering, PIL
Congregation, Low
Memories, PIL
Point of disgust, Low
Chant, PIL
Just like Christmas, Low