Never judge a record by its cover. But it can happen that a cover is so fascinating that it hits you before you’ve even heard a note. And if that cover is remembered, by pure chance, from a book you are reading, then that record cannot be ignored.
That’s what happened to me this week while reading, by pure chance, An object of beautya book that the American comedian Steve Martin wrote in 2010. In 2012 it was also released in Italian with the title Beauty objects (Isbn editions). The story’s ambitious protagonist, Lacey Yeager, has a grandmother who as a young man was a model for an American painter and illustrator named Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966). In her story Lacey shows the narrator a print showing a classic colonnade opening onto a fabulous landscape with a lying, smiling nymph who is awakened by a naked companion bending over her. “She’s ninety-two,” she says Lacey, “she still has that skin, but her red hair is gone.” The painting is entitled Daybreakwas painted in 1922 and is what today we would call a “fantasy” scene, a compromise between the academic painting of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the imagery of Lord of the Rings.
The description of the painting corresponds exactly to the album cover of a new wave group that I haven’t heard for decades. A quick Google spin confirms it: Lacey’s grandmother ended up on the cover of Dalis Car’s debut album, a parallel project by Peter Murphy of Bauhaus and Mick Karn of Japan. I also discover that the same painting, heavily solarized, had been chosen for the cover of The presentof the Moody Blues. In short Daybreak, a late academic and mildly erotic painting from the 1920s, enjoys an unexpected pop fortune among famous comic novels and record covers. And nobody gets it out of my head who the Michael Jackson video for You are not alonein which he and his then wife Lisa Marie Presley play half naked in a neon Arcadia, is inspired by our own Maxfield Parrish.
The Dalis Car album, released in 1984, is titled The waking hour (Waking up time) and the fabulous sunrise painted by Maxfield Parrish is the best visual introduction to music that still sounds original and timeless today. The miracle of this almost forgotten album is in the aesthetic coherence and rigor that were lacking in far more famous and brilliant groups who were looking for their way out of post-punk in the mid-eighties. I Cure of The top and the Banshees Hyena, in 1984, they had screwed into a slightly baroque psychedelic exoticism which, even in its best moments, revealed an excess of experimentalism. Peter Murphy on vocals, Mick Karn on bass and Paul Lawford on percussion create a granite sound and aesthetic. Listening again The waking hour in headphones today we are struck by how the liquid and protean bass of Karn is in continuous dialogue with the variegated and unpredictable percussive carpet spread by Lawford. The exotic and orientalist element is also here but it is not a false application or a purely decorative fact: it is a way of arranging and playing. The tabla they open Create and melt they are not an oriental habit: they are the basis of a dissonant and extremely interesting arrangement. The whole album is constantly looking for a balance between drone music and pop song and it is precisely this precariousness that makes listening to The waking hour an experience so different from listening, albeit exciting, to the Cure and Siouxsie records from that period.
Dali’s car, the song that gives the band its name and opens the album, starts with a bass that twists in the air virtuously and a synth arpeggio that looks like a flute. The title comes from the name of an instrumental piece by Trout mask replica, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s hermetic 1969 masterpiece. It is almost a declaration of intent: the Dalis Car want to reconnect with the hallucinated and dissonant tradition of the most decadent psychedelia of the late sixties, but to do so they follow an exotic and mysterious thread that leads them towards the east. A thread that is perhaps linked to the Greek-Cypriot origins of Karn whose real name is Andonis Michaelides.
The judgement is the mirror it was the only single from the album and is the closest thing to a Japan song that you can hear here. The text also tries to describe the rhythm of this strange dance music: “The first step is the worst, the dance is new, the momentum is strong, like waves swelling all around”. And the sound is hypnotic, circular and repetitive.
It is surprising to find that such a cohesive and original sound was born with very little physical contact between the musicians. At a time when email and fast file transfer were still the dream of the distant future, Murphy and Karn swapped tapes and worked in solitude. Perhaps this very distance gives a The waking hour this aura of solemn exceptionality. This record is truly a unicorn: to this day it remains the only Dalis Car album that, perhaps driven by the revival of post-punk and Karn’s disease diagnosed with cancer, found themselves in 2010 to record an ep with unreleased material. Mick Karn died in London in January 2011.
Part Car
The waking hour
Paradox/Beggars Banquet, 1984