Pay no more than 10p/99p: Eyeless In Gaza

'Listen to the voice of Buddha' - Human League, Being Boiled

A bit like how it's often quite difficult to decide, at any one time, what music to listen to (the paradox of listening), I think it's pretty much the same with reading. Which book should I plough through next? A novel I originally read 30 years ago? A secondhand book I just bought rather haphazardly last week? One of the dozens of unread books on (or by) musicians I've unwisely purchased in the past few years that are now clogging up my shelves? God knows. One approach, superficially enough, is to read a book simply because its title has certain irresistible associations. Hence, last week, my reading Aldous Huxley's Eyeless In Gaza (1936). 

Three-and-six then, 10p now: Huxley's Penguin classic

Yeah man, it's a great book with a great title. As the Penguin blurb mentions, the title is from Milton's Samson Agonistes and not er, the semi-obscure post-punk band from Nuneaton. Shame. No, Huxley, writing the book in the 1930s and himself deceased in 1963, almost certainly wouldn't have heard much of the output of a band who started doing their off-kilter bedroom pop stuff in 1980. A band who self-released their first EP, set up a run of cassette releases for local bands and for their own solo releases (post-punk DIY in action), and then did several albums on Cherry Red Records. I imagine like quite a few people, I first came across Eyeless In Gaza via the 1982 Pillows & Prayers compilation (pay no more than 99p, you miserable cheapskates), and their excellent No Noise track. For years ever after, No Noise has - in a low-key sort of way - haunted my musical dreams. The warbly oddball voice of Martyn Bates, the lovely whimsical sound of the synth, the (Marine Girls-like?) chiming acoustic guitar and the chop-chop of the woodblock thing: yeah, it's somehow the sound of post-punk possibility. Luxuriant, understated, tinged with strangeness and baroque beauty. As I've been bashing out this humble post I've been listening to Eyeless In Gaza's Photographs As Memories and Caught In Flux/The Eyes Of Beautiful Losers. Both albums are pretty good, but somehow not quite as good* as the standout track No Noise - true, I probably need to give it time; I've shamefully only just decided to track down more Eyeless In Gaza music a mere 44 years after Pillows & Prayers. In Huxley's book, Anthony Beavis, a moral and physical coward who betrays his best friend (who promptly kills himself) and becomes an aimless middle-aged cynic until he meets a doctor who teaches Beavis to treat other people with a Buddhism-derived sense of non-egoistical compassion, chronology is radically chopped up and we're left to piece things together only gradually. This is also true of appreciating music. It's nearly half a century since I first heard Eyeless In Gaza and only now am I starting to appreciate them. Pathetic, and here I am, a fellow Nuneaton-er. Eyeless In Gaza's first five albums were produced by the mighty John Rivers (Felt, Swell Maps, the Specials' Ghost Town, The Jazz Butcher, the Pastels etc), so it's not as if the clues weren't already there, all hiding in plain sight. Better late than never, I guess. At the very end of Huxley's excellent book, the older and considerably wiser Beavis is about to go out to Battersea to give a speech at a pacifist rally despite having received an anonymous letter warning that he'll be attacked if he goes ahead with his "dirty pacifist speech". Beavis screws up his courage and decides not to worry about the threat. These are the book's final words: "Dispassionately, and with a serene lucidity, he thought of what was in store for him. Whatever it might be, he knew now that all would be well." Rather nice. I'm going to borrow this thinking and apply it to any lingering worries I may have about music I "should" have listened to years ago or stuff that's going on right now that I somehow haven't properly checked out. After all, there's always time for an Anthony Beavis-like conversion.   

*PS: on second thoughts, the controlled chaos of John Of Patmos and the mournful beauty of Knives Replace Air - from Photographs As Memories - are both extremely good.