Jandek In London
I first encountered Jandek back in the mid-90s at one of Kieron's musical evenings. I remember him removing this huge stack of LPs from his shelves and saying "take a look at these & tell me what you think." Well...hmmm..these are interesting looking records...great titles...."Six And Six"..."Telegraph Melts".."Ready For The House"...wow...he's kinda scary looking though. Who is this guy? Can we hear some of this? "Oh, you wouldn't want to listen to any of it" he replied, but filled me in on Jandek's schtick (check the link). It didn't really sound like my kind of thing, so I quietly forgot about him. Until a few years later when I played a session for WFMU in NJ, and found myself flicking through their house magazine which included a feature on our hero, penned by Irwin Chusid. It included one of my favourite musical descriptions of anyone ever:

"Did someone say 'rock and roll'? Jandek's neither 'rock' nor 'roll'.
He's not even 'and'."

My interest was piqued again. Irwin's feature was later republished in his Outsider Music tome "Songs In the Key Of Z", which accompanied a CD containing...gasp..at last, an opportunity to hear some Jandek.
It was pretty much as I expected: depths-of-hopelessness sub-blues; tuneless, formless, meandering, barely-there...a repellent dirge. As Irwin implies, his music honestly can't be compared to any other, but if pressed I'd say Palace Brothers extrapolated to the nth degree. Well, I guess I was warned. And yet...there was still something strangely attractive about it. Just the idea of one guy hiding at home in this darkened room, churning out these unlistenable LPs two, three times a year and sending them out into the void to be heard by...basically no-one. C'mon, who wouldn't be intrigued?

Then a year or so back Jandek On Corwood appeared, a film which attempted to tell his story. Given that no-one really knows who he is or why he does what he does, it was a remarkably compelling film, even though it basically consisted of a bunch of record collectors theorising about a load of really bad music (yes, very cinematic). The most surprising aspect of the film was that some of Jandek's music was actually astonishingly good. "Nancy Sings", for example, is easily the equal of any UK "acid folk" (pih!), and there are some other remarkable atmospheric pieces in there. Time to dig a little deeper, I think...

Then over the weekend, news of a live apperance in London seeped out. The story of Jandek's odd relationship with the live arena can be found in the link above; one unannounced show in glasgow in 2004, followed by a couple more earlier this year. Suffice to say it's unique. I'm still not sure about this, but I couldn't resist buying a ticket.

C'mon, it can't be any worse than the TVPs...