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Noch - Francesco Tenaglia

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26 pages

English

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"Momus. A Walking Interview" is a long conversation between the Italian critic Francesco Tenaglia and Scottish born artist Nicholas Currie aka Momus that took place during a day-long stroll in various areas of the city of Milan with an always-on microphone. The different neighborhoods elicited different topics including musicals, Chinatowns, enterism, Italy, Sehnsucht, David Bowie, word processors, death, classic rock, politics, isolation, future, and much more.Momus started his career in music making during the '80s first with the band The Happy Family then as a solo artist for Creation Records and Cherry Red Records. He has written for various publications such as Wired, Vice, Index Magazine, 032c, and Mousse. He has also been active in performance art and as an author: he wrote "The Book of Jokes"; "The Book of Scotlands", and "The Book of Japans" for Sternberg Press; "Herr F", and "Popppappp" for Fiktion.Foreword by the journalist and dj Fabio De Luca.More info: www.nochpublishing.com

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Sociologie, société et politique

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Publié par	Noch
Date de parution	21 septembre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783018086
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Momus A Walking Interview
Francesco Tenaglia
Momus. A Walking Interview Francesco Tenaglia Published by Noch © Noch Text © the author Published in September 2015
ISBN 978-1-78301-808-6
All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Design and code: Paolo Inverni Editing (interview by Francesco Tenaglia with Momus), translation (foreword by Fabio De Luca): Paul Beauchamp
Noch is a publishing unit focused on other points of view Noch commissions, edits and publishes ebooks Directors and Editors: Paolo Inverni, Francesco Tenaglia
www.nochpublishing.com
Contents
Cover
Titlepage
Colophon
Introduction
Foreword by Fabio De Luca
Momus. A Walking Interview
About the author
Introduction
Momus. A Walking Interview is a long conversation between the Italian critic Francesco Tenaglia and Scottish born artist Nicholas Currie aka Momus that took place during a day-long stroll in various areas of the city of Milan with an always-on microphone. The different neighborhoods elicited different topics including musicals, Chinatowns, enterism, Italy, Sehnsucht, David Bowie, word processors, death, classic rock, politics, isolation, future, and much more.
Momus started his career in music making during the '80s first with the band The Happy Family then as a solo artist for Creation Records and Cherry Red Records. He has written for various publications such as Wired , Vice , Index Magazine , 032c , and Mousse . He has also been active in performance art and as an author: he wrote The Book of Jokes ; The Book of Scotlands , and The Book of Japans for Sternberg Press; Herr F , and Popppappp for Fiktion.
My Pervert Doppelganger (Confessions of a Fan)
Fabio De Luca
Right before closing down Firefox in order to write this preface, a piece of news popped up in my feed reader about a Canadian indie singer-songwriter who, during a concert in Williamsburg, between one song and another did what the reporter called "the human water fountain". Basically, he took a sip from a bottle of water and then began spewing it out of his mouth on the people in the front row of the audience. The reporter observed that the fans were trying their best to catch the spewed water in their mouths, "like hungry baby birds in a nest". Uhm. [insert here cunning albeit painful comparisons to Johnny Rotten spitting in 1977] [actually no, don't]
At a certain point in the long conversation you're about to read, Nicholas Currie says he was "on the side of the people who booed Dylan at Newport". Because, he argues, what moved Dylan was not the desire to experiment or push the limits, but pure and simple ambition. I'm not sure I completely agree, but we can talk about it. [insert here a quote from "Ambition" by Vic Godard & Subway Sect] [incidentally, my favorite Momus quote – Facebook status at least once a year – is that passage from "Nicky" which goes: "...between Vic and Jean-Luc Godard"]
I discovered Momus almost immediately, in 1987, on an Él record label compilation which included his song – a sort of "Nick Drake with a better friendship with auto-eroticism" – entitled "Paper Wraps Rock". His own Dylan-in-Newport moment came possibly with the sudden mid-'80s Hi-NRG switch of Don't Stop the Night : but instead of having me boo him, I was an enthusiastic supporter. In my eyes, "Nick Drake and Neil Tennant to a piano house beat" was even better than "Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat" (cf.: Pet Shop Boys' "Left to My Own Devices"). And, oh, ambition is curiously present here as well, yes. The linear ambition and cocaine addiction of the late '80s, of London riding between Thatcher the Witch and Tony Blair, embodied by a long line of antagonists and rivals to Momus' beautiful and self-saboteur narrating self (see "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous", "A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy Parts 17-24", and "The Hairstyle of the Devil", for example).
Momus' 1992 album, Voyager , is simply one of my all-time favorite records. It's very strange, when you are no longer a teenager and you find someone – an artist which is also your contemporary – who describes an emotional world which is exactly yours. Wow. Back then, references to "The Man Who Fell to Earth" were totally lost to me (forgive me, mr. Roeg), while I was more than amazed that there was someone able to place into the same frame William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" and Banana Yoshimoto, Juan Atkins when he says "I'm probably more interested in Ford's robots than in Berry Gordy's music", Deee-Lite and the post-human humanism of the first issues of Wired magazine (which us kids avidly read without understanding a single word). Oh boy. That impatience for a future of collective isolationism that was on the verge of beginning, that sense of anticipation (pure adolescence) and ending ("If love ... has left the arena"), the continuum of sadness of a verse like "We dance to dead men – Marley, Marvin, Otis and many others", which closed any possible conversation on retromania twenty years before it even began.
(Confession/1: I got Voyager 's cover reference to David Bowie's Low only in the summer of 2012. Yes, don't ask).
(Confession/2: in the summer of 1996, I spent some time in Paris with a friend who was showing a photographic project at Ircam. The evening that I arrived, I ripped a page out from a telephone book in the lobby of a building in the Marais – a page that contained the number for one Nicholas Currie . I don't know if it was him or not, I just read somewhere that he was living in Paris at the time. Obviously, I never called. I still have that page folded inside my worn out copy of Douglas Coupland's Mircoserfs .
In the spring of 2013, it must have been the end of April, I visited the extraordinary David Bowie Is exhibition at the V&A in London. When I got to the third room – the biggest and most confused one, the room which had Ziggy Stardust's outfits and the video for "Under Pressure", the room you access right after seeing the photos of David Robert Jones losing a talent show, and the covers of William Burroughs's books – I suddenly thought how it would have been amazing to do something similar on Momus. Smaller, obviously, but with the same intention of mapping the sources: an homage to the neural pathways and to the narcissism of a genius. From that moment on, and for the rest of the visit, the David Bowie Is and Momus Is exhibitions perfectly overlapped in my mind. It was a lot of fun.
(Confession/3: they overlapped, except for the very moment when I found myself in front of the Moog that Brian Eno played on "Heroes". There, I could only think about Bowie. "Damn Franz Kafka, damn the Thin White Duke...").
You should never become friends with rock stars, someone once said. One Sunday afternoon in the late winter of 2014, the author of the conversation you are about to read called me to ask if I wanted to join him for a coffee with Nicholas Currie. Uh oh. Should I? It's strange indeed, making small talk with someone whose albums you know by heart. It is also strange because – I thought as was walking towards piazza Moscova in Milan, where we were supposed to meet – Momus is a super-intelligent person, and I was sure that he would have been disappointed, if not disgusted, should he have found out that one of his so-called fans was also a fan of Franz Ferdinand, James Murphy and Haircut 100 (I know, I know: I'm crazy). So, I pretended not to be. Not to be his fan, I mean. "There's always that Judas moment", that moment when you betray something.
In the end, it was an afternoon in which reality and fiction remained politely separate, each in its place. I gazed at Momus gazing at Giacomo Balla's Due palme alla luce (Two Palm Trees in Light) at the Cantiere del '900 Gallery in Piazza della Scala, and it seemed one of those strange coupling moments in the course of events in which you are certain to be living a scene from some previous night's dream (except it's never like that: it's usually an "echo" effect of what you're living in real time). I gazed at him, silently whistling a song whose lyrics went: "The theatre and its double, the world". And anyway, Momus Is would be a great idea, believe me.
Momus. A Walking Interview