Re: Today's Guardian

[Matthew Semple <matthewsemple@ho...com>]

Hello,
It is available online:
The Blue Aeroplanes, the Bristolian art-rock collective who have 
influenced like-minded bands from REM to Art Brut – and who have a new 
album imminent – have also made something of a speciality out of adapting 
poetry to music. On albums such as Spitting Out Miracles and Swagger, the 
words of WH Auden, Louis MacNeice and Sylvia Plath were spun over a riot 
of tangled folk-rock. Singer Gerard Langley has often pondered which poems 
fit with music and which do not.
"There's something innate in the poem that suggests it will work," he 
says. "I can go through an entire book of poems that I like and only a 
couple will fit. It's the rhythms. The reason that you could do the Beat 
poets with jazz is that they were already incorporating those rhythms into 
the poems. With older stuff it's slightly more difficult, but some of them 
– MacNeice and Yeats – were using rhythms from traditional songs anyway. 
Auden's Miss Gee was written as a cabaret tune." He sighs wistfully. "I 
did always like the sight of a couple of thousand people at the Forum 
moshing to Auden."
Poking fun at poetry slams and "stuff that's too redolent of arts 
centres", Langley is well aware of the stigma attached to the combination 
of music and poetry, a nightmare vision that tends to revolve around 60s 
explorers such as the Fugs earnestly declaiming the words of Matthew 
Arnold over bongos and freeform guitar. You end up either with a 
performance that's indulgent, pretentious and overrespectful, or else 
something à la Bruni that fails to connect with the words. Ideally, says 
Langley, the listener should barely be aware that they're hearing poetry 
at all.
"A lot of poems sung over music don't work because they're too poemy," he 
says. "Rather than words 'on top' of something, I'm trying to make it 
sound like songs. Our version of Sylvia Plath's The Applicant worked very 
well. The poem is structurally quite simple, but it seems more complex 
than it is because I fit the words into different parts of the tune for 
emphasis; then people start hearing it differently. We sent out advance 
copies to journalists and nobody spotted it was by Plath. In fact, I was 
criticised for my 'new man lyricism!'"
Full article here: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/11/poetry-pop-yeats-auden
Thanks Matthew


________________________________
> Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:37:25 +0000
> From: chris.sharp4@vi...net
> To: blueplanes@bl...org
> Subject: [BluePlanes] Today's Guardian
>
> There's an interesting article on centre page of the film & music 
> section in the Guardian today. They mention the "imminent" new album. 
> Maybe they know more than us about the outcome of next week's trip!
>
>
> Is there anyone out there who can scan it and post it up here as I'm 
> traveling and can't get to my gear
>
> Cheers
>
> Chris
                                          
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