In 2015, at the Barbican Gallery in London, J Spaceman, John Coxon,
and friends performed a live soundtrack to the photographer William
Eggleston’s film “Stranded in Canton”.
They’d been invited to put the soundtrack/happening together by the
artist Doug Aitken as part of his Station To Station festival. He saw
the parallels in Spaceman and Eggleston’s work; highs and lows;
darkness and light; sin and sorrow. The simple details of life
elevated into powerful reflections on the wildness of existence where
the mundane becomes sublime.
The movie was made in 1974 and shows Eggleston’s friends carousing,
playing music and firing pistols into the night sky. It is raw,
greasy, Quaalude-y and hot. Memphis in the 70s seems like a lot of fun
if you had the stomach and access to bail money.
Shot on the first commercially available video camera, the Sony
Portapak, Eggleston put a 16mm Leica lens on the front and an infrared
picture tube on the back of it to allow him to shoot in low lighting.
The chaotic, wobbly filming style expertly framed by a master.
“Hogarth on Beale Street” as writer Richard Williams describes it on
the album’s liner notes.
"With Memphis, I grew up with and I fell in love with that whole part
of the world and the music that came from there,” explains Spaceman.
“Memphis is infused with this magic, then this dreadful poverty as
well. There’s a strangeness to it. It’s a place where I never felt
comfortable.
"When I was making Ladies and Gentlemen, I went out and did some work
with Jim Dickinson because, much as I wanted to have him help me with
my record, I just wanted to go and meet the man. He was always a bit
like Dr. John, a walking encyclopedia with knowledge of all the music
of that area, all the blues musicians, and all the stuff that doesn't
get written about.
"So, the Eggleston film is a spying hole into that world. Jim
Dickinson even plays in the movie, Furry Lewis plays in the movie too,
but there’s also an unhinged craziness. It feels dangerous.”
Spaceman wrote the music with his friend John Coxon, who has worked on
every Spiritualized record since the mid ‘90s. Guitarist Tony Doggen
Foster, also of Spiritualized, and percussionist Rupert Clervaux
helped out too.
Coxon says: “It was quite a difficult thing to do because it’s an
American film. Obviously, we're fascinated with American music, but
you don't want sort of cod Americana from England, but I think we got
the balance right.
“We came up with themes for different parts of the film, based around
basic sort of rock and roll riffs. And we expanded them by maybe
adding a little soft counter melody to it.
“We didn’t want to just do a freeform thing. Jason always wants the
best of all worlds, so you want the best of all the energy of
improvising things and then the beauty of great compositions. You want
everything. It was just a question of getting the balance right.”
Spaceman continues: “There was a fashion at the time where people were
putting on gigs with movies without the sound, for bands to jam over
and I hate the idea of jamming. We wanted to do something that was
more structured, songs that sat alongside the film but loose enough to
allow for improvisation. It kind of worked straight away. And the
spoken word parts of the film almost became like vocals to the music.”
The tone they came up with mirrors the ragged nature of the film
perfectly. Riffs written under flickering light bulbs, hypnotic
tremolo, boozy romances, some bar room boogie, the blues, and hoping
the bottle won’t let you down tonight.
The characters of “Stranded in Canton” dance around the music, living
their best Memphis lives by any means necessary.
"With the film, and the culture of music and art of Memphis, there’s a
sense of escape and release,” says Coxon. “There's a history of
interesting things coming out of places which are kind of apparently
cultural deserts because there’s a human instinct to make something
cultural to stick people together. It's very strong, isn't it? And I
think the less there is, the more you must make your own. I think
that's why punk came out of the kind of suburban London in the ‘70s.
Because there was f*** all.
“Eggleston came from a wealthy background, but he was also escaping
the pre-ordained destiny of his life and then you have people escaping
the segregation that was there and all coming together. You feel it in
this film.”
After sitting on the shelf for almost 10 years, Fat Possum will
release the recordings of the Barbican show on October 18. There will
also be shows in the UK and the US. Eggleston’s son Winston personally
invited them to come play it in Memphis.
“I suggested releasing this back when we did the show,” says Spaceman,
“but it just didn’t bite. I hadn't thought about the recordings for
years but, quite by accident, I heard one of the tracks again and
thought that people should hear it. This time around people seem to
catch it and go, ‘Yeah this is really something else’.”
ANDY CAPPER JUNE 2024
