Where there is Sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do.
– Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897)
Life writes lousy plots. At the peak of his career, and with four of his plays simultaneously running in London, Oscar Wilde suddenly found himself ridiculed in chains and prison clothes, guarded on the platform of the Clapham Station, receiving people’s contempt and spitting. He was to be taken to Reading Gaol for a two-year imprisonment for the outrage of being passionately fond of another man. “Suffering is one very long movement. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return,” he wrote in De Profundis, the long letter he penned in his confinement to this lord “Bosie”. The youngster gave the letter – which had taken Wilde three months to write – a look, then threw it into the river Marne, unread. (This magnificent text was saved by chance by a friend of Wilde’s who had it copied.) “All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death,” Wilde wrote. He died as a broken man in L’Hotel’s room 16, at 13 Rue des Beaux Arts in Paris, which at the time was an unbelievably miserable establishment called Hotel d’Alsace.
Mr Wright writes amazing songs. I have always loved his music. And I am proud of the fact that Mr Wright was the first person that I ever interviewed in London, almost 20 years ago. It is like life resides in a fissure between heaven and earth in his songs. Where disbelief would be all too easy, Mr Wright goes to great lengths to remain brisk and courageous, to impose some sort of kind and serious order with a refined sensibility, always in opposition to the dark forces that want to render our lives futile. The songs are sometimes like haunted houses, thronged with vehement lines and innuendos and that particular honest voice of his that almost seems effaced by a private darkness. But this is a suffering however that makes such perfect sense as it points towards an urge for something so much better in this life. Mr Wright’s music is a shrine to love and beauty.
The early 1930s film Million Dollar Legs, starring WC Fields, also comes with its own fantasy microcosm – Klopstockia – something which made Man Ray declare it a surrealistic masterpiece, and The New York Times wrote that it “deals with high and cosmological matters which are devoted to man’s eternal helplessness”. That’s very Mr Wright indeed. Fields was moreover a god-given juggler. Mr Wright delivers his words in the same way: with brevity, great timing and this speciality virtue of his, which is to situate strong emotions in a somewhat detached fashion. He claims that he cannot sing, but make no doubt about that.
We debated back then whether his music is particularly British or not, and of course it is. But it does have that sort of electric ambivalence which (the Scot) Bill Drummond summed up in two breaths in his book 45: “We only needed to go into the toy shop, the treasure trove of desires: everything we wanted, from Corgi cars to Airfix models, from Hornby trains to Raleigh bikes, would have somewhere on them ‘Made in England’ … The very word England has somehow come, subconsciously or not, to symbolise everything from the playground bully to the overbearing wife, from the lack of career opportunities to the oppressive political and religious power.” It is The Village Green Preservation Society, and it is Tony Hancock when he’s gleefully throwing away his Britishness in the Channel upon leaving for Paris in The Rebel.
Mr Wright has a new album out today, The Diary of a Fool, released by Series Two Records, a small-scale label in Columbus, Nebraska. So to celebrate this event Just another colette blog had a chat with him.
How come you chose that title, The Diary of a Fool?
The title reflects the absurdity of sending out beautiful things into a world that is insensitive to them and how out of step I felt with everything around me.
I think that all your records are like glimpsing into your “diary”, but that this album is more open than the others, lighter if you may?
It is not as intense as some of the other records and I tried to stand a little further away from it. I had not planned to make a record, but whilst helping out in the studio I was given time so it evolved not out of necessity but circumstance. I like the records to be different and this one felt lighter and almost more “pop”.
Please tell me a little about your love for cinema, French films and jazz – things that are always prevalent in your work.
Cinema has become more important to me than music. This wasn’t always the case, but there is so much more sustenance and truth in a film by Buñuel or Fassbinder than any new music I have heard in ages. I get ideas from films, not for lyrics but for sounds and moods. The best jazz is more abstract, it swings, is more human and fallible. It never sounds the same when you hear it and it doesn’t sound old.
Why did you choose to do a duet with Bid [of The Monochrome Set], before you have always worked with female voices?
One of the things that made Bid stand out was being a ballad singer in a pop band and I felt his voice would be well suited to a slower-tempo song.
And the “Sky” song is the first that you have done that has the air of some other band, Tindersticks. How did you decide which instruments to use? This album has cembalo and trombone for instance and is a bit “swingy” at times.
I never base arrangements on other bands, in fact it is often completely haphazard or organic the way things grow. On this album people who were around the studio often got asked to play along with one or two songs just to see what would work. It was looser than other records as I usually have instruments in mind for certain songs. Actually the Diary has a lot of guitars on it.
Why did you write “Civilization”?
This is about the M25, the motorway that circles London and goes nowhere. I feel it’s an important moment in our civilization and I wanted to bear witness to it.
Do you think that your music would still be this beautiful and important if you were really happy?
I don’t think so, but I find it hard to imagine being happy or satisfied for a long period of time.
What good, would you say, comes from this situation of being an “outsider”, someone who is looking for love (and beauty and some reason, et cetera), but cannot find much of it?
You would hope everyone is looking for love and beauty, but experience tells us otherwise. If you can recognise beauty then you will always have something to cling to.
You must also listen to Metropolitan and his masterpiece The Fancy Man, to name but two of Mr Wright’s albums.
