Thousands of years ago, in or about 1977, I remember reading the intemperate jazzer Benny Green writing about Genesis, whose years of commercial success were just beginning. Green was not impressed. ‘It’s all very loud bits and very quiet bits,’ he said, or words to that effect. You can just imagine his customary wasp-chewing grimace of lofty contempt. But then everyone over a certain age hated pop music in those days, and senior jazzers were often wheeled out to express the silent majority’s view.
Green’s comment hit home with me partly because, at the time, I adored Genesis, and partly because he was right. It was all very loud bits and very quiet bits. That was the fun of it. Lovers of rock music don’t necessarily seek any great subtlety in their dynamics, but they do love a bit of drama. Is not ‘Song 2’ by Blur simply a very, very quiet bit followed by a very, very loud bit? And it is uncompromisingly thrilling, sending a shiver up the spine and straight out through the top of the head to this day.
As it happens, I am now the same age as Green was when he said those words, and I have to admit that, as I get older, my interest in loudness for the sake of loudness begins to wane. I know I am not alone in this. At least two old friends of mine have recently emerged from what may be the last remaining cultural closet and admitted that they have started listening to country music. (One, a soul girl of long standing, can’t quite believe it herself.) We are drawn not to the sentiment, particularly, but to the simplicity of the music, its almost comforting straightforwardness. And while I still love music that combines quietness and loudness in entertaining ways, I would say that quietness usually now has the edge.
When Johnny Cash did his mesmerising version of Nick Cave’s ‘The Mercy Seat’ on one of his last albums, I sought out the original, which I didn’t remember at all. Cash’s recording is dignified, passionate and above all quiet. Cave’s (with his first group, The Birthday Party) is loud, thrashy and monochrome. For Cash and his producer Rick Rubin to have heard this deeply boring original and transformed it into something of such substance seems miraculous to me. But then I have not the smallest vestige of musical creativity and they have (or had) loads. My only role in the process is a purely passive one. Hand over the cash, marvel and enjoy.
The process can go the other way. One of my favourite quiet musicians is Sam Beam, a heavily bearded American former lecturer who trades under the name Iron and Wine. Early albums could hardly have been simpler or more hushed. His 2002 version of a Postal Service song, ‘Such Great Heights’, would be on my longlist for Desert Island Discs: it is simple, beautiful and formally perfect. Recent albums, though, have been denser and more elaborate, and the new one, Kiss Each Other Clean (4AD), is like slashing your way through a shrubbery. There’s guitar sludge, distorted saxophone, clangs and squeaks from keyboards, layers upon layers of vocals…and you can admire it, enjoy it even, but after a couple of months I am steadfastly failing to love it.
It’s his career, I suppose, and his ‘artistic journey’, but I preferred him when he was on the byroads, rather than now, when he seems to be on the motorway, trying to overtake pantechnicons. Fans of quiet believe that loudness sells — it certainly sounds better on the radio — but fans of loud become equally incensed when their favourite acts turn down the volume and ‘bland out’, as people used to say in the 1970s. I begin to wonder whether any musician can live up to the expectations set by their most dedicated followers. No wonder they keep us at arm’s length. Usually it’s not even their arm.
The thing is, as a rock star you can never get it right. Genesis became one of the biggest bands of the 1980s, and lost me and many others who had loved them in the 1970s. Beam hasn’t lost me yet, but I am wavering. He has five kids to feed: these are hard times. But in one respect at least they are far better than the 1970s, in that the Benny Greens of this world, people who loathed you for who you were and what you were doing, have gone. They are dead and we are not. A small victory, maybe, but not a trivial one.
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