capturing birds

Here's the inimitable Tom Waits on writing songs -

'You have to have kind of an innocent bravery trying to get started looking for songs … Sometimes you scratch and scratch and you can’t find any seeds and a moment later there isn’t enough pots & pans to catch it in. The beauty of that is that it could be a very ordinary thing that you get an idea from. Something falls, a pigeon flies in, or you hear a siren' (280-1).

'Every song needs to be anatomically correct: You need weather, you need the name of the town, something to eat – every song needs certain ingredients to be balanced (303). … I go looking in other people’s songs for their towns … I don’t know, everybody has things that they gravitate towards. Some people put toy cars or clouds or cat crap. Everybody puts something different, and it’s entirely up to you what belongs and what doesn’t. They’re interesting little vessels of emotional information, and you carry them in your pocket like a bagel ...' (365)

'Children make up the best songs anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one … Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers …. Some songs don’t want to be recorded. You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll scare them off more. Other songs come easy, like digging potatoes out of the ground. Others are sticky and weird, like gum found under an old table. Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful to cut up as bait, and use ‘em to catch other songs … The best songs of all are those that enter you like dreams taken through a straw. At such moments, all you can be is grateful' (346-7).

'Recording for me is like photographing ghosts ...' (317).


Extracts from interviews with Tom Waits in Mac Montandon (ed.), Innocent When You Dream: Tom Waits – The Collected Interviews, London: Orion Books, 2006. Tom Waits photo by Anton Corbijn

good luck everybody

‘We've come a long way to be here and what's more we've come a long way to be here together’ (Lone Twin, On Everest).

As Gregg Whelan points out in one of the interviews in this book, the phrase ‘Good luck everybody’ has often been spoken at the beginning of Lone Twin performances, framing the event ‘in a way that suggests that even in reading a text there’s something at stake that has to do with well-being’.

On one level it contains a serious proposition - this shared encounter might just help a little, it suggests - and at the same time of course it is also a joke: a semi-formal civic pleasantry marking the beginning of a collective ‘adventure’, a small playful wish that all of those present and implicated will have the wherewithal to make it through ‘safely’ to its ending.

This phrase, co-opted as part of the title of this book, encapsulates in miniature certain characteristics at the heart of Lone Twin’s work. As an utterance it references other social situations that are a bit like their brand of performance – gigs, sport, stand-up, public speeches or presentations, long excursions, and so on. In these social events, journeys and rituals, something is to be worked through and transformed, for they are undertakings in which effort will need to be expended in order to attain a position in which something has shifted; and the possibility of failure is always there like a shadow.

The phrase also suggests that art making is always, and before all else, a social practice, made in the company of others; and that language is a core component of the give-and-take of social relationality, its dynamic play. These words invite imaginative complicity and a willingness to be implicated, to go for the ride.

Finally, and paradoxically, this phrase embeds humour within the tissue of something being fully committed to and invested in collectively, a humour that exposes and undoes something of the absurdity of received versions of ‘heroism’. For, like the performers, we are invited to be participants in a task that is both meaningful and insubstantial, gravitied and at the same time as light and throwaway as a gag or a game. (How many football coaches have uttered this phrase as their players jog out on to the pitch to engage in something that’s both utterly ‘serious’ and ridiculous?).

True seriousness admits and is contoured by laughter, lightness and folly; whereas earnestness is monotonal and monolithic, and gravity invariably wins. For all that’s at stake, for all of the real effort required and expended, perhaps there is liberation in conceiving of such work with both an immersive, blooded belief and the pleasure of a letting-go-lightly that is in the most affirmative and radical sense ‘child-like’.

As Tom Waits once said in an interview about song writing, ‘Children make up the best songs anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one …’

Reflecting on the devising process for Lone Twin Theatre’s Alice Bell in 2006, David Williams suggests that, within Whelan and Winters’ approach: ‘“naivety” and the “amateur” are qualities to be worked and affirmed and celebrated, and it’s often uncomfortable in terms of my own received ideas. It’s like hanging out with two disarmingly smart kids whose perceptions unsettle and surprise, and invite me into elsewhere and otherwise’.

This book, co-edited by two academics with an ongoing engagement in Lone Twin’s work, one of them as a long-term collaborator, is the first major publication to reflect upon Lone Twin’s protean body of work, and detail the development of its core concerns, processes and forms; its intellectual, aesthetic and social contexts; its continuities and evolutions; its perceptions, humour and paradoxes.

Furthermore this book is another kind of collaborative and collective ‘adventure’ in which you, the readers, will determine what’s at stake in its matter for you - what matters - and what’s disposable, the stuff of paper planes. At its outset, and as a way of marking the transition to the core materials it contains, we would like to take this opportunity to wish you a safe and pleasurable passage through its pages.

Good luck everybody…

____________________

Extract from the introduction by David Williams & Carl Lavery to a new book, Good Luck Everybody: Lone Twin - Journeys, Performances, Conversations, Aberystwyth: PR Books, 2011. Designed by Kevin Mount. 364 pp. ISBN: 978-1-906499-02-0

Introduction © David Williams & Carl Lavery / PR Books 2011

Book launched in May 2011 at the Anatomy Theatre, King's College, University of London

Contributors include: Emma Brodzinski, John Hall, Daniel Ladnar, Barry Laing, Carl Lavery, Larry Lynch, Esther Pilkington, Rebecca Shatwell, Nina Tecklenburg, Patrick Primavesi, Alan Read, Gregg Whelan, David Williams, Gary Winters

** For further details, and to buy the book via the CPR's online bookshop, see here