Friday 18th March 2011
OLD MONEY: THE VERLAINES – “ANGELA” (1982)
I cannot keep up with the past, let alone the future. From now on, every Friday I intend to provide evidence of this ever-growing lack.
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At the age of perhaps ten or eleven, a friend and I sneaked into my parents’ garage with a box of Ship Household matches, a plastic bin and some duplicate Panini stickers. Hidden in the back behind the partly assembled M.G. my dad had never got around to fully restoring, we began setting fire to the footballers’ heads and watched their faces distort into nothingness. We first placed them in the bin, but when that started to melt, we burned them between our fingers, dropping them to the floor only when they became too hot to hold. We did this secretly and for no reason other than to explore the limits of what we already knew. I can’t help but think of Flying Nun in the same way.
I don’t know if the internet makes the world smaller or bigger, or both, but secrets don’t last long anymore. Secrets almost don’t exist. In the 80s, things were different. In Matthew Bannister’s book about indiepop music, he speaks of his experiences fronting Flying Nun band Sneaky Feelings, noting the wait involved in getting hold of new music not from New Zealand. Copies of the NME took months to reach Auckland; Joy Division and Stooges albums took longer. The consequence is that music could exist in isolation and independent of whatever else was going on in the world. More excitingly still, these remote scenes also belied a common psychic network that transcended borders. How did people miles apart and with no knowledge of the other come up with the same idea simultaneously? There was something in the cosmic ether.
Based in Dunedin and a central component of Flying Nun, The Verlaines channelled the same wound-up tight power pop The Feelies were forging about the same time in New Jersey. Did they even know about each other? Maybe. Maybe not. Whereas the latter were seemingly gripped by the same Cold War concerns as fellow countrymen Devo and Talking head, The Verlaines looked inside. Hyper-literate, they name checked Edvard Munch paintings, Rimbaud and, of course, the fin de siècle poet from whom they took their name. There are perhaps more well known songs in The Verlaines modest canon, not least “Death and The Maiden”, recently covered by antipodean fetishist, Steve Malkmus. “Angela” though, taken from the watershed Dunedin Double EP, is an idea ossifying, something on its way to becoming something else. They hadn’t quite found their feet with “Angela”, but those tentative first steps left big imprints.
While Flying Nun has received more recognition in recent years, it’s still likely the case that more people claim to like The Chills, The Clean and The Bats than actually listen to them. The Verlaines perhaps fair even worse. As such, “Angela” still sounds like lighting matches in a garage.
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The Verlaines – “Angela”
(Photo: Christine Karlsson)
