AEM037 Andy J Gallagher

 I always get a bit con­cerned when an artist claims, like Andy J Gal­lagher does, to pos­sess a “long­ing, homage, respect, and love for the glory days” of some­thing, espe­cially punk rock. Not only does nos­tal­gia make peo­ple sound old, but the very idea of the “glory days” of any­thing as amor­phous and fickle as punk is ludi­crous: less a genre than an ide­ol­ogy, punk has always been more about break­ing things and cre­at­ing mon­sters out of the detri­tus than a par­tic­u­lar sound or style. “Fuck his­tory,” some col­lec­tive mega-ghost of Joe Strum­mer, the MC5 , Iggy Pop and Penny Rim­baud might say, “Gimme dan­ger instead.” 

On the other hand, despite the fact that every­thing can become punk—a ren­di­tion of Handel’s Mes­siah sung into a beer can, for example—not every­thing that says it’s punk actu­ally is. It’s one of those know-it-when-you-hear-it kind of things: Afrika Bam­baataa, Bob Dylan, Minor Threat, Slayer…all totally punk. And Andy J Gal­lagher, backwards-looking or not, cer­tainly sounds punk. It’s abstract. But is it enough?

Here’s the gist: Gal­lagher, who looks like an actor play­ing Lou Reed in a hypo­thet­i­cal Berlin: The Movie and is not, I believe, related to either of the Oasis bros, gigged around Lon­don for a few years with the bril­liantly titled band The Shop­keeper Appeared, show­ing up on the BBC and play­ing sup­port slots for Radio­head before ditch­ing the fame-and-fortune route to con­duct exten­sive research on inter­na­tional musi­cal cul­ture with some bud­dies. Eth­no­mu­si­co­log­i­cal foray in the bag, the intre­pid Brit returned home to dig deeper into his nation’s own ver­sion of Con­golese war drum­ming: two-minute gui­tar rock songs. When Roman Jugg, a back-in-the-day key­boardist for the Damned (def­i­nitely punk) heard the tapes, he decided to man the decks for Gallagher’s per­plex­ingly dubbed full-length Heli­copter Dol­phin Sub­ma­rine. The songs here are taken from that record.

It’s the arche­typal rock n’ roll nar­ra­tive, almost too much so to war­rant cred­i­bil­ity: man starts weirdly-named band, achieves minor fame, goes off the rails, goes to Africa and Mex­ico or some­thing, uncov­ers a hith­erto hid­den part of his soul in the eyes of a lit­tle boy bang­ing out clave on a dusty bucket, and returns home tri­umphant and ready to start another band, albeit this time with weird album names instead. If Levi-Strauss hadn’t just died, he could have trans­lated this guy’s pro­fes­sional life into a work of struc­tural­ist anthro­pol­ogy called The Raw and the Half-Baked.

But Ampeater is, to quote the “about us” in the upper right hand cor­ner, all about the music. Of course noth­ing really is all about any­thing. Still, if we stick to that opti­mistic assump­tion, Andy J Gal­lagher begins to look a lot bet­ter; great even. So OK, fuck his­tory, let’s get down to the tracks.

It was hard to pick two tracks for this 7-inch, not only because they’re all mas­sively catchy, per­fectly struc­tured pop-punk tunes, but also because they’re all try­ing to do some­thing dif­fer­ent, ref­er­enc­ing dif­fer­ent pieces of the genre’s canon, con­dens­ing whole decades worth of mate­r­ial into sin­gu­lar songs with pro­fi­ciency and verve. I guess that’s a plug for the album. It is, for a per­son who always thought the Clash were bet­ter song­writ­ers than the Bea­t­les, and the Buz­zcocks catch­ier than the Kinks, a heart­warm­ing and self-affirming expe­ri­ence. If this is what homages sound like, I don’t think the glory days ever really ended.

So, for the dig­i­tal 7-inch, I think it’s best to show this guy’s range. A-side “Faster and Faster,” takes a step back­wards on the time­line, latch­ing onto the death-and-sex sen­si­bil­i­ties that fueled proto-punk’s nihilis­tic self-presentation and com­ing up with some­thing that could be a cover of an entire ide­ol­ogy. Gal­lagher makes no bones about the meta­physics of the sonic setup, say­ing it’s, “a song of 3 des­per­a­does — a pole dancer, a con and a junkie — who’s lives are drift­ing away faster and faster. But, like in the movies, they all live hap­pily ever after!” That two-note intro: Jesus Christ, it’s hor­ri­fy­ing, lurch­ing like an ema­ci­ated gutter-kid wan­der­ing out of an alley­way cov­ered in excre­ment and track marks or some mas­sive British sealiner about to sink with thou­sands of peo­ple on board. This is music, I think, for the end of time, which, I sup­pose, the Thatcher years prob­a­bly came alarm­ingly close to becom­ing. While Cold War dread has dis­si­pated in the past twenty years, the res­o­nances of this kind of aural cyn­i­cism still send shiv­ers down my spine, not from excite­ment but from the lin­ger­ing sus­pi­cion that radi­a­tion poi­son­ing from bil­lions of buried war­heads crept into my fetal blood­stream way back in the begin­ning. Gal­lagher knows we’re still liv­ing out a Rea­gan­ite night­mare, infected by weapons and exper­i­ments and mis­takes from the past, slowly grow­ing up into Fukuyama’s his­to­ry­less zom­bies, look­ing for antiques to buy online and devour qui­etly in our bed­rooms. Man, those weren’t the glory days, but the End of Days. Hap­pily ever after indeed.

B-side “Rope Swings Eter­nal” is more a his­tor­i­cal com­men­tary than a chilled-out diver­sion, embody­ing that late-70s sense that aggres­sive, sneer­ing rock could main­tain its abu­sive streak even while dressed up in crunchier clothes. The track sounds like a decade’s worth of styl­is­tic tran­si­tion, punk grow­ing out of dive bars and base­ments to make music videos and expand­ing the tex­tural palette of three chords played really fast into three chords played less fast and on an acoustic gui­tar. “There were a spate of angst rid­den teenage sui­cides in the UK and this is a fic­tional take on that,” says Gal­lagher, “The song started with the title, a play on hope springs eter­nal, and was play­ing this Hawaiin sound­ing thing slid­ing up to the 12th fret and muck­ing around with the A shape, trans­posed it down to G and there’s your verse.” But it’s the more metaphor­i­cal kind of styl­is­tic shape-shifting Gal­lagher cap­tures here that’s impor­tant. “Rope Swings Eter­nal” could essen­tially be thought of as a blown-up pho­to­graph of the punk genre’s virus extend­ing its epi­demi­ol­ogy towards every­thing from folk to new wave to pop crossover, all the things that the scene, orig­i­nally, never wanted to be. Spaced out, bliss­ful, it’s a killer track that’s time­less in the sense that it could only be made in semi-nostalgic ret­ro­spect. His­to­ri­ans say it’s hard to write about con­tem­po­rary events and fig­ures with a crit­i­cal eye. Gal­lagher, com­pos­ing some­thing like the Recorded His­tory of Alter­na­tive Rock, seems to agree.

Ben Las­man

Side A — Faster and Faster Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Rope Swings Eternal Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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