John K White is, was, and always will be UV Pop. He has collaborators, cohorts and side-persons who dip in and out as required, but essentially, he’s a one-human project. ‘No Songs Tomorrow’ formed his 1982 seven-inch single for Pax Records. Now these are his songs for new tomorrows.
Where some young people save their cash for a Leeds United away-strip, or a new car, John reconfigured his front room into a recording studio. He recalls ‘back in the day you came over to my house to record vocals for our earlier collaborations.’ Yes, and when I recorded there and fluffed a vocal line he simply spun the tape back to the precise error-point and razored out the gaffe so keyhole-surgery precise it was seamless. He’s a perfectionist who once halted a gig in mid-song to retune his guitar in order to correct a minor fault only he could hear. Was it Chuck Berry who said he tuned his guitar only ‘close enough for Rock ‘n’ Roll’? Not for John K White. No way. It’s got to be right. This time – with his Sound Of Silence album, he’s got it right.
‘It’s been such a long time, but in other ways it doesn’t seem so long’ he admits. ‘I’m still doing what I’ve always done, and I’m finally freed of working for a living… I get paid to be a musician these days! We do have challenges here in Germany as we initially came over four years ago – Brexit played a part in the decision too, but we’re getting on with it…’
What about the album? ‘It’s no different in my world to what it was back in the day, still an eclectic mix of whatever comes out of my jumbled-up art-side brain… I’m halfway through a new project for release later this year, but first I wanted to give you an idea of what I’m up to these days.’ Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat?
So, let’s go tripping track-by-track. ‘Unconfidential’ fades in on chant-samples and a slow guitar figure. Confidential was a celeb-scandal print-rag that announced uncensored facts and named names. ‘High School Confidential’ was a 1958 hit single for Jerry Lee Lewis, the man they called ‘The Killer’. Old grudges, old problems. This is neither, this is ‘unconfidential’. Science Facts & Forecasts. With a flick-knife Modus Operandi, progress was a wonderful thing, it was just unevenly distributed. It went from ferrous magnetic audio tape to floppy diskettes. From Novichok to Bloggers and blaggers, liggers and joggers, from Massive Attackers to Shrinkflation and beyond. ‘Floodgate’ breaks the Levee, it’s in love with television and telephones, celebrities, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and it owns fifteen cars. I want to live in this world where floods ripple and surge, inundating this consumerist planet in cleansing tsunami.
‘Sirens’ is treated voice and cascades of guitar, with hair like fingernails. There are Nee-Naws on the street every day. Sounds of the city, so familiar we blank them out and no longer hear them. Stay in silence. Words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm. Around guitar bends that shiver with echoes. Stay inside. Suffer in the silence of domestic violence. ‘You Are The Only One’. Do people still write letters in longhand? Do they fold the sheet of paper and slip it into the envelope? Lick and seal. Affix the stamp picture of the king? Do they, do they? This is a love letter to bind in pink ribbon and keep safe in your most secret drawer. Thursday on his mind. Friday morning seems so far away. Close the door. Turn out the light. Then ‘Mr Parkinson’ opens with high ambient sighs. Heavy power-chords. ‘I don’t want to be frightened.’ Nerve edge, lyric repetition as sonic storms burst and erupt around him. Lost and lonely. Who is Mr Parkinson? Why him? He’s an anonymous every-person. Your fear. My fear. Our fear.
For ‘Black City’, there was an electro-time when the guitar was so passé. Pulsed and sequenced beats were the only immaculate cool. This is the alchymical marriage of the two. A Judge Dredd underpass setting the Mona Lisa Overdrive on fire on ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming. A fairground of carnage with accelerating geometries. You can reduce this track down to a narcotic equation and inject it direct into your frontal lobe. John’s guitar jingle-jangles like digital flickers on the monitor. ‘Someone Like You’ is split-screen surges in dense walls of sculptured sound. With John’s voice in a Doncaster Bowie mode, retuned by life itself. Friends and parties always let you down. Rhythms never do. Programmed drums tick and throb.
‘Open E’ is primal electro-beat, dialled to vibraphone setting. Haunting nags and pulses that dance your neurons dizzy. Lost for words. So it remains wordless. This could be looped into eternity. ‘Made Of Stone’, how does it feel? Try not to laugh. Cars burn below us. Carried on a ghost-storm of ultra-violent volume. The sound of breaking glass. The eye of Medusa that petrifies its victims to statues. ‘New Dimension’ is a mind-spider noodle that tunnels into the brainstem and refuses to quit or let go. It opens psychic portals in perception into a disrupted otherness. Who is your sister? I have no sister! Sometimes a systematic derangement of the senses can offer the only route forward.
‘Black City (reprise)’ is a noir instrumental soundtrack for a movie the studios lost their collective nerve and were too terrified to shoot. All the way is far enough. It might be advisable to download it from an even darker web. Sometimes laptop computers have troubled dreams. ‘The Man Who Haunted Himself’ is the interloper from the pen of D Hardcastle, a title filched from a 1970 psychological movie thriller starring a pre-‘James Bond’ Roger Moore as a man who discovers he has a doppelgänger masquerading as himself, following his clinical brain-death during surgery. The term ‘cult’ is not entirely inappropriate, but re-visioned as a David Cronenberg body-horror. There’s a background swarm, listen how they breathe, as they crawl out in our sleep, when they’re at feast. Insinuating, skin-crawling, tormented by night-fears.
‘Mr Mystery’ connects back to ‘Mr Parkinson’, a cipher where guitars interact and copulate in controlled dynamic tension, layered. Wasn’t ‘when you’re moving right up close to me’ a line from Johnny Kidd & The Pirates? It gets another spin. As for the title track – ‘Sound Of Silence’ is chiming guitars. The sound of nothing. The sound of no-one. Existential angst. Alienation. Isolation. The sound of nowhere. Paul Simon’s lawyers have yet to initiate proceedings.
‘I used to work at Music Ground in Doncaster with Eric Haydock one of the Hollies’ founder members and their original bass player…’ John recalls. ‘He was a proper character, Eric and I once drove to Italy and spent a full week together on work-related business, a trip which was chaotic for a couple of different reasons but lots of fun too….’ As an artist, writer or musician, you don’t necessarily start out with a route map of the future. You just follow your own instinct, but you do that regularly over a period of time, and suddenly you realise that you’ve built up a ‘body of work’ almost without realising it. It creeps up on you unawares, you can’t force it. You can’t fake it. You go with the flow wherever your creativity takes you… it knows things that you’re not aware of. That was the way it must have been for John K White. At a time when Rock ‘n’ Roll is as old as the planet Mars, and just as tired, it needs to mainline on these rejuvenating shots.
‘No Songs Tomorrow’ formed John’s 1982 UV Pop seven-inch single for Pax Records. These are songs for all our new tomorrows.
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON
U.V. POP ‘SOUND OF SILENCE’
(Genetic Music www.geneticmusic.de and www.uvpop.co.uk )
- Unconfidential (2:54)
- Floodgate (5:36)
- Sirens (5:21)
- You Are The Only One (4:41)
- Mr Parkinson (4:25)
- Black City (6:01)
- Someone Like You (4:08)
- Open E (4: 05)
- Made Of Stone (4:03)
- New Dimension (3:17)
- Black City (reprise) (4:40)
- The Man Who Haunted Himself (by D Hardcastle) (5:02)
- Mr Mystery (5:29)
- Sound Of Silence (1:45)
Produced and engineered by John White at UTSM Düsseldorf