Martin Creed and his Band

Martin Creed recently commented that not working with sound and music as part of his artistic practice, "would be like I'm ignoring half of life." As anyone familiar with his art will know, Creed has spent the past 30 odd years methodically and impishly exploring every detail of human existence: from Blu Tack to puking – from the flicker of an electric light to the gait of an Irish wolfhound. The fact that these visual, physical and exceedingly tactile things comprise so much of his work, and yet he considers them only half the world, goes something toward proving that Creed is as much a musician as he is anything else and that this album (his second proper) is as far from being a side project as you can get.

It kicks your preconceived ideas of the artist out of kilter too. Most likely, his 2001 Turner Prize winning 'Work 227' (The Lights Going On And Off) will remain the thing for which he's best known (those shuddering filaments somehow epitomising the perceived lunacy of contemporary art); but while it accurately captured his enduring sense of humour, it has caused him to be wrongly pegged as an exponent of minimalism. Creed is anything but. He is a motely paint daubing, neon monolith building, giant turd shitting, orchestra commanding maximalist. Recorded in London, Chicago and the Czech Republic Mind Trap transmits simple emotions on rousing scales. Rather than the chugging riffs & repetitious texts that he's previously produced, Mind Trap brims over with actual songs - melodies and sequences that flutter outside the lines; not loose scribbled accidents but joyful, emotive bursts.

Take 'New Shutters' for example, a gentle romanza in ¾ in which Creed berates a window (in Italian) for blocking the view to his lover; or 'Kid Yourself' which teases with stark, unaccompanied repetition of the song title, before a house-y stab of female backing vocals chucks you one way and then a rhythmic bass line the other. You could legitimately dance to 'You Return' and 'Pass Them On' draws a direct felt-pen line between Creed and Ivor Cutler, whose influence (incidental or not) bleeds through in absurdities, expletives and the genuine tenderness of his delivery.

The second half of the record gives way to three extended orchestral pieces. Creed has dabbled in classical composition before, but instead of toying with the nature of the material – likening a scale in G to a pile of Elastoplast or bricks – he has pulled off something deft and dramatic. On paper, their Cage-ian playfulness might be more evident, but in practice those schemas quietly recede in favour of an uncluttered and gently grandiose classical music that's genuinely impressive.
It'd be inaccurate to say that Creed had let go of systems and sequences entirely - his lyrics are cyclical and simple – but it's formulaic in the best way, like three chord punk – a communal uproar, gleeful and energising in repetition, rather than seeming predictable or stuck. Mind Trap is a triumph of feelings over ideas, of making sounds bigger and more mobile than the spaces (or heads) that contain them. - The Quietus

INTERVIEW
Martin Creed
The Turner Prize winning contemporary artist Martin Creed asks: ‘What’s the Point of It?’
Against the Barbican’s grim, concrete backdrop, Martin Creed’s strolling arrival in a colourful candy stripe ensemble, topped off with a straw hat perched on top of his unkempt curls, is an agreeably bright one. Relaxed and affable, he carries the thoughtful air of a man happy with his place in life and a drooping moustache that regularly fails to contain a genuine, beaming smile.

A long-time musician but more famed for his literal, chronological contributions to the contemporary art scene, the former Turner Prize winner inspires an honesty and humour into his work that permeates his personality. An artist that doesn’t consider himself one, his ‘Work No 227, The Lights Going On and Off’ was exactly that: an empty room in which lights switched on and off.

This direct approach helped set the direct, literal tone for his first full-length LP, ‘Love to You’ – an eighteen-track, scattergun collection of thoughts driven by repetition, blazed through at a Tourette’s speed of short barbs and blasts of stubborn trains of thought and sound. Emboldened by a tug of war between love and hate, the album’s spirited snapshots offer an ad hoc glimpse into Martin’s musical, and visual, take on the world.

“I feel like you can’t separate what you see from what you hear. It’s a total blur and I wouldn’t distinguish between them,” he explains. “When it comes back to me living in my little world in my own head, it’s the same effect. I’m just trying to live my life in the world I find myself in and I think I’ve got to work on noises as well as what I see.
“I’ve tried to use words a bit in my visual work with neon signs and stuff but I think one of the reasons I try to do the music is because I want to work on words and then combine it with the music and that weirdness of the melody that you can’t understand. Maybe music is more life-like because it has these elements…like a painting is a fixed thing and a song is something you can repeat, and live, it’s something you can grasp. It feels like if you have to look at something, there’s a power thing – you have to be there to look at it but you can listen to music while you’re living your life.”

It’s a statement that rings resoundingly true of his work. An active musician for a number of years, ‘Love To You’ marks a period in Martin’s life that he felt compelled to share. A combination of little thoughts, dogged mantras and personal experience, it’s an album that treads a caustic path between two extreme emotions and one where repetition provides both structure and the scathing spirit.

“A lot of the songs are written over a long period of time,” he explains. “I work quite slowly so if something keeps coming back to you, it must mean something. If something can bear repetition, it must have something in it. ‘What’s the Point of It?’ started like that. It was something in my head and I wanted to say it,” he laughs.

“I often say things to myself when I’m walking along,” he continues, “my lyrics, other people’s lyrics, it’s why I love words, you can carry them with you, but if it’s a melody, you can’t carry all the instrumentation. With words, you can have them; they’re yours, like if you learn a poem. A lot of the words in the album are like that, just words that kept coming back to me.

“I’m not consciously trying to make it like that but most of the repetition is there because anything else is just pissing around. It would be talking around the subject and bullshit or being dishonest to just not say that. For a song like ‘Words’, that could only be the only word in that song and if I added more words into that, it’d spoil it,” he laughs.

The album is also a milestone that denotes a struggle to write, refine and curate a collection of tracks to satisfy both a personal and literal release.

“I find it really difficult to let go,” admits Martin. “Finishing this album has driven me crazy because some of these songs have been unhealthy, like children kept in a basement for too long, and bringing them outside, they’re quite fucked up children. It’s been really traumatic dragging out the shit in my life but I’m quite familiar with that in a way with the work that I do as well. Things get stuck in your private life and it’s tough bringing it into the public.”

Determined to get the songs out, but also keen to allow them to evolve where necessary, settling on a process of working presented a test of both patience and resolve, for Martin. With an analytical approach to making music, he says that finding the balance between capturing feelings but avoiding the clichés proved to be an exercise of distrust. “A lot of the songs on the album are written on paper and I try and work out the song then work out how to play it,” he explains. “Whereas if I strum away, I’ll do stuff that sounds nice and I like that sort of music, but then I’m kind of at the mercy of my own good taste and I hate that. I find working on songs, if I try and write on the instrument by strumming guitar, end up with clichés and something that sounds easy.
“I go do things then come back to them, especially playing things live and changing them a bit after that. Doing it in the real world, instead of your own bedroom, seems like the real place to try things out because that’s when you know whether you’re deluded or not,” he laughs. “Being able to have distance from it as well, especially as I’m singing most of the songs, it’s really easy to get hung up on it. When you’re on stage, you care about how you look and it gets narcissistic; ‘Am I in tune? Can I sing?’.

“It’s like when you’re drawing, I can remember in school trying to draw a hand and you’re like, ‘I can’t draw a hand, am I a shit artist?’. I think you can get really hung up on the craft if you’re doing it yourself. That’s a weird thing that I feel has got to be overcome a bit, to try to not care about your own shortcomings.”

At various points, our conversation veers between both Martin’s art and music, and the fine divide between the two forms. An artist that sees no distinction between visual art and music, and employs and enjoys the literal to elicit basic emotions and reactions, it makes perfect sense that his music would be as playful and tongue-in-cheek as his visual works. And while there’s a constant, underlying sense of indecision to both – from the personal turmoil of deciding which notes or paint brushes to use – there’s also a fierce reaction to kick against control, constraint, exclusion and battling the “am I supposed to get this?” outsider perception of contemporary art.
“I’d hate that. I hate that idea,” he exclaims. “I think if specialised knowledge is needed for something then I think it’s not good enough. That’s what I think about my work – if someone feels like they have to know something about it, something specialised, other than just being a human being, I think I need to work harder. I would be happy if my work gives someone some fun, or they like the tune or the words or it gets under their skin. A big reaction is exciting. Hating something is exciting and feelings are the most important things in the world, through just being mysterious things that rule our lives.”

It’s one of the few occasions in the interview that Martin borders on the stern and solemn, and is clearly a source of immense pride and driving motivation to ensure that all of his work is open to any level of knowledge or interpretation. But that’s not the only thing that’s put him on edge, recently.

“I was really nervous this week with the official release date,” he tells me. “I don’t know what to expect and I hope people will like it and I hope that I’ll like it as well. I’m always anxious when I do things that I’ve got to live with for the rest of my life. There’s a source of anxiety with everything I put out, but I think it’s been especially true of this album, with these songs, because it’s been so difficult to finish.

“I was trying not to read any reviews but then someone said have you seen this review, and it was your review, and I read that and crumbled and read all of them. There’s been some nice reviews.”

For a man who’s spent most of life putting his thoughts, feelings and ideas on public display, it’s endearing to know that even now there’s a healthy, human trepidation of wearing your heart on your sleeve, in any form. And armed with eighteen energised snapshots of what’s proved to be a difficult musical journey, Martin Creed is ensuring that while there’s likely to be no let-up of such struggle with his second album, it won’t be anything other than an open invitation to feel. After all, if you try to deconstruct your feelings too much, what’s the point of it?

“There’s other songs from the past that never went further but there’s actually nearly an album now. I’ve just been recording the next album and there are quite a lot of songs, but like I said, it’s unhealthy and I need to try and release this stuff and let go of it. I’ve been doing it over the years through gigs and little releases but I just wanted to put the mixed up stuff on this album.

“I wouldn’t call it therapeutic; to me it would be more a comfort thing, like strumming those nice chords on a guitar. That’s safe and comfortable but I think when work’s good it’s exciting and like hurting yourself. So you can feel something.” - Loud and Quiet

Better known as the artist-provocateur responsible for winning the 2001 Turner Prize for lights going on and off in an empty room, Martin Creed's musical forays are much beloved of the Cribs and Franz Ferdinand, and you can hear why. The Glaswegian employs similar frenetic, jagged guitars, although the way his ramshackle pop teeters on the edge of chaos is more reminiscent of the very early Mekons. Creed's songwriting avoids conventional structures but emerges with quirky tunes, over which he ponders life's daily grind with titles such as What's The Point of It? and Die. The title track is beautifully wistful, and I Can't Move finds him layering vowels, like a painting done with sound. Such minor gems alternate with more provocative short statements. The deliberately irritating Fuck Off is like being harangued by a drunk, and will surely be responsible for one or two scratched heads and grumblings of "Is this art?" - The Guardian

Sat 23rd April – Rock For Nepal II 2016 – The Windmill Brixton, London
Sun 26th June – Avalon Cafe Stage – Glastonbury Festival
Weds 13th July – The Moth Club, London

Wakefield-born and Glasgow-raised, Creed is known as the self-effacing, playfully provocative artist and 2001 Turner Prize-Winner (for the infamous Work no. 227: the lights going on and off). His pre-eminence in contemporary British art was confirmed by the Hayward Gallery’s expansive 2014 Creed retrospective/takeover show, What’s the point of it? But that’s only part of the man’s protean CV. Indeed, he has maintained a complementary commitment to composing, songwriting and performing since the early ’90s, fronting bands of his own devising, releasing an impressive catalogue of singles, EPs and albums and consistently garnering plaudits from gnarled music critics and stellar musicians alike (members of Franz Ferdinand most vocally).
Creed’s visual art has often embraced sonic elements, such as the 1998 installation Work No. 189: thirty-nine metronomes beating time, one at every speed and 2009’s Work No. 1020 — a ballet, no less. Music, he believes, is a medium that offers something that art alone does not. As a glance at the biographies of John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Pete Townshend, Brian Eno, David Byrne et al will confirm, groundbreaking pop musicians have for decades cut their creative teeth in the world of visual art. “I got into the music because the visual work wasn’t enough… you hear things as well as see them… I like that you can make music in your head and carry it around with you. You’re freer. You’re not tied down by the burden of physical objects.”

‘Thoughts Lined Up’ track listing:

1. I’m Going To Do Something Soon
2. Princess Taxi Girl
3. Understanding
4. If It’s Not One Thing It’s The Other
5. Everybody Needs Someone To Hate
6. (You Put Your) Hand In My Hand
7. Difficult Thoughts
8. Where Are You Gonna Be?
9. Prisoner Of Rhythm
10. What Is It?
11. Do You Know What I Mean?
12. Let’s Come To An Arrangement
13. Can’t Say No
14. Border Control
15. Prayer
16. Let Them In
17. I Woke Up
18. It’s You
19. I Found Lost
20. Text Me
21. One, Two, Three
22. Massive Boat
23. Down In The Sky
24. The Direction Of Love
Creed’s performing and recording career began several years before his art-star status arrived. He wrote the material, sang and played guitar in the band Owada, who released their album, Nothing, on composer David Cunningham’s Piano label in 1997. Its 23 brief, dada-minimalist songs setting the urgent, focused tone of Creed’s music. Sporadic, limited edition Martin Creed releases, often at least tangentially tied to art shows, would appear over the next decade until, in 2011, he started a label, Telephone Records, releasing a brace of singles, before, in May 2012, Moshi Moshi stepped in for the splenetic art-punk double-A-side ‘Fuck Off’ and ‘Die’, and, soon afterwards, an album, Love To You, produced by Creed, David Cunningham and The Nice Nice Boys (aka Andrew Knowles of Johnny Marr & The Healers and Nick McCarthy of Franz Ferdinand). Telephone was re-engaged in January 2014 to release Creed’s Mind Trap, an album of songs and three instrumental works for orchestra.

Creed’s new long player, ‘Thoughts Lined Up’, was recorded to 1-inch tape in a small studio in Brixton in one week just before Christmas 2015, and mixed with sonic impresario Liam Watson, in glorious mono, on the ex-Abbey Road EMI desk at Hackney’s legendary, analogue-only ToeRag Studios. “I didn’t want to overblow the songs or try to big them up,” Creed explains. It’s an album whose 24 succinct tracks marry some established Martin Creed tropes (spiky, garage-punk guitars, classical percussionist Serge Vuille’s by turns primitive and polyrhythmic drums, beguilingly nursery rhyme-like vocal melodies, lyrics as playful, haiku-like linguistic games, or repeated axiomatic, existential statements…) to a less familiar, far daintier sonic palette. Imagine Billy Connolly, Ian Dury, Mark E. Smith and Daniel Johnston writing songs that are then played by The Mekons, Willie Nelson and Virginia Astley’s Ravishing Beauties, together, and you’re at least in the vague vicinity of ‘’Thoughts Lined Up’s very particular ballpark.

“It’s called ‘Thoughts Lined Up’ because that is literally what it is, just all these bits – these thoughts – put in a row one after the other, trying not to worry about what they add up to. Most of it started as audio notes recorded on the Tube or in the street – just little everyday mantras that you say to yourself as you go along; things that come up in your head, and that help keep you going, or that sometimes you want to go away…” It’s this kind of unconventional spirit and friendly, mischievous iconoclasm that mark out much of Creed’s work. On ‘Thoughts Lined Up’, such concerns arrive borne along on the kind of earworm melodies that bore away long after the record has been put away. This makes for work that is as accessible as it is challenging – further testament to an ingenious individual for whom art, of whatever stripe, is a vehicle for the unswerving evocation of what it is to be alive. Indeed, if, as Walter Pater’s infamous epithet has it, “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music”, then Martin Creed might just be its living, breathing, freely thinking embodiment. - Circuit Sweet

Turner Prize winner shows that he is as capable in music as he is in art

Martin Creed is generally known as a visual artist/performer. His is most renowned for ‘Work No. 227 Lights Go On and Off’, which won him the Turner Prize in 2001. So, his foray into music is an intriguing move. ‘Thoughts Lined Up’ features 24 tracks made up of similar and seemingly simplistic ingredients- a stripped back punkie tune, a vocal line from Martin, some harmonies, and repetitive lyrics. The result though, is a thought provoking exploration from the very personal to quite political.

The first track, ‘I’m Gonna Do Something Soon’ addresses the age old situation of procrastination. Like much of his artwork, the album concerns everyday thoughts and emotions that might be considered mundane, but are rendered important, universal and meaningful when expressed by Creed.

There are many excellent tracks here, but a couple of highlights include ‘Understanding’, a song about arguing and the trials of truly comprehending and listening to one another. Starting with a discordant minor key harmony stating “We’re bitten down, we’re clamped on, we won’t let go, we’re joined like dogs”, in Creed’s Glaswegian drawl, this is undercut by a jaunty guitar line and hand claps, “I’m understanding, I’m understanding, I’m understanding, I’m understanding, I’m listening, I’m listening, I’m listening, I’m listening.” The tune is thickened with percussion- the situation grows with the argument- “I’m a victim, no I’m a victim, no I’m a victim…”. The vocal lines start to undercut each other, both still similar, but made complex in the arrangement. The song grows until both parties are almost shouting “I’m listening…”

This is a punchy album that is almost like poetry on the page. The use of repetition builds and is almost writ large in the sky to imply a kind of live happening of the situation it describes. The middle part of the record concerns these difficult but typical thoughts. There is an undercurrent of philosophy- The Other for instance, is covered in ‘If it’s not one thing, it’s the other.’ In a way, these songs are a great primer for interpreting these themes in an everyday kind of way.

This personal examination of irrational, but inevitable thoughts and feelings paves the way for the more political tunes towards the end. The idea that we all feel hate as in ‘Everyone Needs Someone to Hate’, comes back when migration and borders are discussed in the lilting, almost Beatles-esque ‘Let Them In’; “Let them people in. Give them a hug, let them stand on our silly bit of land”. The jaunty ‘Border Control’ focuses on these ideas too, “It’s border control, it’s a border, it’s a bore.” Perhaps the message from Creed is that we all have these impulses, but we don’t have to act upon them. We have love too.

The music itself is fun, simple intertwining tunes and melodies are replete with saxophone, flute, tambourine, drums and droney synth. The feel is punk, lo-fi, with its Glaswegian roots plain to see, stemming from Belle and Sebastian, perhaps. Each song is definitely under four minutes with many barely scraping one and a half.

The result is a composition that plays with palindrome and pattern. Fun and pain are here in equal parts. On one hand, the whole album is a bit much to listen to in a single sitting; on the other it does the work a disservice to disrupt this tapestry of interwoven messages and rhythm. It is replete with humour and humanity.

Finally, the sleeve art deserves a mention, featuring a dishevelled Creed in slacks, tank top, jelly shoes and socks, it is a riot of cut-and-paste colour; the live performance should be equally entertaining.

This Martin Creed article was written by Fraisia Dunn, a GIGsoup contributor. - GIGsoup

A kind of extended happening, or maybe a series of short ones, has gently taken over the Park Avenue Armory, one of the architectural gems of New York. Numerous moving parts, animate and inanimate, are involved, and they are all the doing of the British maverick Martin Creed, the first artist to be given the run of the armory’s entire first floor, where he created an exhibition titled “The Back Door.”

In the past, artists have mostly been limited, if that’s the word, to the armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. There, with greatly varying degrees of success, they have tended to orchestrate elaborately kitted-out spectacles, heavy with noise, lights or high-tech wizardry.

Mr. Creed has done something quite different. A jack of all mediums, including music, he is part court jester, part circus master, part philosopher and also something of a Luddite. At 47, he has spent the past two decades setting off subversive vibrations along the fine lines between art and life, art and silliness, and art and provocation, melding Conceptual Art smarts and Minimalist literal-mindedness. Simplicity, modesty and obviousness appear to be his bywords, all the better to disturb the assumptions of preciousness, skill and aloofness basic to art.

His preferred compositional modes are making stacks or rows of everyday objects, and unnerving repetition, as with “Work No. 160: The lights going on and off.” This piece, a variation on the empty-gallery-as-art tradition, became the target of public derision and some thrown eggs when it earned the artist the Tate’s Turner Prize in 2001. It consists of a light mechanized to turn on and off incessantly; in effect a Duchampian ready-made, but a performing one, doing exactly what it was designed to do, but excessively. (Mr. Creed’s fixation on how things work extends to the human body, as exemplified here by short videos of people vomiting and of people defecating on expanses of white seamless paper.)

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At the armory, Mr. Creed has, as usual, trodden lightly. His most aggressive act has been to cover the upper walls of the armory’s grand corridor with wide black diagonal stripes. (This part of the historic interior does not have landmark status.) These break cleverly for the many officers’ portraits and add a startling roadblock effect.

Otherwise, Mr. Creed has created a kind of anti-spectacle, a strange, discombobulated whole greater than the sum of its parts, in which the building is a co-star. He is displaying painting and sculpture to be sure, but he has also insinuated several of his performing ready-mades into the building, and they have never looked better.

In the big corridor, a set of massive curtains, usually decorously tied back, instead hang loose, and they open and close endlessly. This is Mr. Creed’s “Work No. 990,” and in this instance it takes on some of the grandeur of “Valley Curtain,” Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1974 land-art piece.

In the Veterans Room, the best-known of the period rooms once used for receptions, stands a grand piano — it is stark white and couldn’t be more different from the extravagant interior, which is mostly the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated Artists. Several times each hour, the piano’s lid and keyboard cover rise and then fall with resounding bangs, as if slammed down by a pianist throwing a tantrum.

As for the on-off light piece, it may never have such heft as here: It is being enacted in the relatively small Parlor by two rows of ceiling lights whose close placement is regimental.

Mr. Creed’s passion for music is apparent in small troupes — four instrumentalists, one singer with megaphone — that rove through the show at all times. The musicians perform songs from his next album, “Thoughts Lined Up,” coming in July. The tunes are catchy, punk-folk-minimalist amalgams that parody pop music by increasing the simplicity and repetitiveness of much of it, and use and abuse language brilliantly. The titles of most songs — say, “I’m Going to Do Something Soon” — also constitute nearly all the lyrics. (The songs’ true weirdness emerges when Mr. Creed and his own band perform them as they will do on Friday night at 10 and Saturday at 6.)

Follow one of the show’s ragtag troupes, and you may end up at the opposite end of the corridor, at the Colonel’s Reception Room and a 2015 iteration of a Creed classic: “Work No. 2497: half the air in a given space.” Large white balloons half-fill the room, an inexpensive, nearly labor-free act of installation-art largess. You can dive in and experience the disorienting orbs of light and the gentle rattling sound they make, not to mention the new-balloon smell. Finding the exit may prove challenging.

Mr. Creed’s sculptures are concentrated in the armory’s Library and its Field and Staff Room. They include ziggurats made of stacks of cardboard boxes and three recent pieces using secondhand furniture. The simple precision of the placement of boxes — of which there are nine reaching 8½ feet high — give it a surprising modicum of dignity. The furniture stacks culminate in a child’s chair or table, and evoke the farm animals in Aesop’s Fables. Also here is a stack of half-inch-thick sheets of plywood as high as the sheets are long (eight feet), as well as a one-inch cube of masking tape, made by layering together one-inch pieces, sticky side down.

Mr. Creed’s subversiveness gains a sharper political edge in the Library, where he has placed numerous small objects among the dense displays of mostly silver trophies, including two raised fists, one in bronze and the other in gilded bronze. (This edge also comes out in videos like “Let Them In” and “Border Control,” which, like the songs Mr. Creed has written for them, allude to the world’s refugee crisis.)

The ziggurat motif carries over into some of Mr. Creed’s paintings, in sort-of abstract images that are stacks of three or four horizontal brush strokes, each increasingly shorter and narrower; they resemble rudimentary Philip Guston paintings. These are found among two large clusters of small canvases in the recently refurbished Board of Officers Room, a Herter Brothers design from the late 19th century. The canvases hang on chains to clear the heavy wood paneling or protect the wallpaper. Also here are portraits painted from life, sometimes with the canvas mostly covered.

The vulnerabilities and tensions of human connection are a constant theme in Mr. Creed’s songs and many of his videos. They figure prominently in the work he has created for the Drill Hall, which may never have been used with such restraint. He has left this giant space completely empty and dark except for a large hanging video screen. On it play six videos of women, seen in short, slow-motion close-ups. Each woman opens her mouth, which has food in it, closes it and seems to swallow. Here the human body is again demonstrating something it was designed to do, but as an isolated gesture, without the usual repetition. It is an intimate, vulnerable act, a display of trust in the artist that extends to us. Especially touching is how natural and relaxed the women’s faces look.

At the end of each video, the armory’s big back door, the garage kind, rolls up. Light spreads into the space but barely penetrates its vastness. We see a bright rectangle of people and traffic on Lexington Avenue, which resembles another video. Then the garage door rolls back down, darkness falls, and the next video appears. - The New York Times