Imagine that you've just been the odd man out in a conceptually brilliant but consciously isolated, deliberately timewarped record label, recording multi-layered, hidden, biblically-rooted satire on the Thatcher era and utterly unsentimental new translations of Jacques Brel, while those around you simply want to create a kind of fantasy pop, a living museum piece in complete defiance of the 80s, utilising an outmoded idea of "exoticism" dating back to the 1930s. It must have felt like Alexander Mackendrick attempting to present a dark, even misanthropic, view of the British people amid the sentimentality of Ealing comedy (the most literary and least cosy example of which, Kind Hearts and Coronets, was however part of the el Records blueprint). That was Nick Currie in late 1986, and it's not a position I'd wish on anyone.
Many have said that he fitted more into the el aesthetic than he did into Creation, for whom Murderers was his first release. But Alan McGee's operation was far removed at this stage from its later fundamentalism and devotion to the Rock of the Proletariat, in fact it was closer to the sheer eclecticism of Mike Alway's early ventures before he risked everything on el. Of course McGee's devotion to rock's idea of the Romantic hero on high, never to be questioned, was imposed upon Momus (who says that Creation saw him as their Nick Drake, and were rather disappointed that he didn't commit suicide to complete the analogy), and of course the European cabaret stylings of these songs is a long way from virtually anything else ever released on Creation, coming much closer to the el sound (but without any of its dated idea of "sophistication". But what stands out about these songs is their sheer nastiness, contempt for one's follow man, a world where there is truly no such thing as society. Listen to Murderers, The Hope of Women itself, and cherish the conniving, driven, determined tone in Nick's voice as he outlines his plans for his woman, the knowing contempt when he sings "This is where your misery starts, this is where your mystery stops", the sheer lack of sensitivity or love in his voice throughout, but without any sign of the sneer of punk.
These are Thatcherite values, of course, and you wonder how much is real misanthropy and how much is a sardonic attempt to outdo the mainstream of the time. But details like that don't matter. What matters is that Eleven Executioners sounds like all the fairground rides of your life recurring before a group of men in cloaks carrying swords turn up on the waltzer, and that What Will Death Be Like? sounds like all your cold, icy nights wondering what will happen at the end of it all, every one of your premonitions and fears described, before the vicious silence of an atheist reality reminds you of the truth.
The vision had been set out. Nick Currie was to prove more than the late 80s could take, at least in Britain, and the 90s were still less sympathetic. But in the era of High Thatcherism, Momus was looking at London with a scintillating combination of fascination, dissection and disgust. In retrospect, it seems slightly more than London in late 1986 deserved.
Robin Carmody, 16th August 2000
Exclusive!
Nick Currie explains the genesis of "Murderers, The Hope of
Women":
Nick posted to alt.fan.momus after I promoted this piece, and I now reproduce his comments with his permission:
"There seems to be a confusion here between the song's narrator and 'Nick'. What unfolds in the song is not a real relationship, but a caricature of marriage as a very slow knife crime set in the world of petit bourgeois suburban values (bungalows, muslin drapes, pipes and slippers).
In retrospect I'd say the genesis of Murderers, The Hope of Women went like this. On arriving in London in the mid-80s, and influenced by my friend Babis who was writing a PhD there, I started attending lectures at the London School of Economics. You can just slip in at the back, no-one cares. The lectures I found most interesting were by a psychoanalyst called David Badcock. The course was called 'Psychoanalysis of Society'.
Now normally psychiatry isolates a deviant individual and brands him problematic, then attempts to re-adapt him to the norm. (That's what we might call reactionary psychiatry.) But Badcock was putting society itself on the couch, and saying that whole cultures may be seen as sick or deviant, or at the very least a bit cranky. In Thatcher's Britain (a society run by late-anal methodist grocers) that made a lot of sense.
Attacking society with the tools of pyschoanalysis is very different from accepting Thatcher's view that society doesn't exist. If you think of society as a series of contracts, the marriage vow is a pretty central one, and conservatives always stress 'family values'. My song was intended to do for the marriage vow what my earlier Circus Maximus had done for the Bible and the classical world: to show that these classic texts which underpin western civilisation are often sick and neurotic, even ridiculous. They preserve their power by going, mostly, unread and unexamined.
The title comes from Oskar Kokoshka's expressionist drama, 'Murderer, Hope of Women'. And there's probably some Andrea Dworkin in there too. Dworkin stressed in her book 'Intercourse' that sexual intercourse was always a territorial invasion, and, while men and women remain unequal, essentially a rape. She would probably agree that marriage is a form of slow motion murder, if not of a person, at least of her potentialities. The song doesn't exempt women of responsibility, though: they after all collude, selecting men for their talent as potential assassins. We are all hormonally programmed, puppets on strings of oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone. The song presents marriage as turn of the century dramatists like Wedekind or Strindberg might have: as a kind of grotesque cabaret sideshow.
It's not a pretty picture, it may well be misanthropic, but I don't accept that it's Thatcherite, except insofar as any piece of satire has to sum up some of the values it seeks to undermine."
3rd September 2000
http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/80s.htm