Veteran Poppy's Day

I guarantee you there are no Pulp-based errors in this piece, you knowitall fuckers.

ANDREW POPPY’S SUSTAINING ENSEMBLE, OCM, Northwall, 3/12/09


We first came across Andrew Poppy in the mid-80s, playing a cheeky breed of pop-minimalism, injecting a little classical rigour into the ZTT roster, whilst puncturing the solemn salon atmosphere of British composition with situationist jokes and artrock packaging. We lost track of Poppy some time ago, but aside from growing a cascade of beautiful bone-white locks, like some posterboy for new Timotei Goth, it would appear that little has changed. His music is still indebted to the giants of minimalism, and still features absurd texts intoned over slowly shifting sonic weavings.

The set, a selection of quartet arrangements of pieces from his last album, …And The Shuffle Of Things, is a definite success. In some ways Poppy has honed his strengths over the years. Firstly, he has embraced the development of electronics in the past quarter century, and the prerecorded parts of the performance are intricate without being needlessly flashy, often adding a disquieting Lynchian buzz to the pieces. Secondly, Poppy’s vocals have matured noticeably: where his delivery was a tad smug and portentous in the 80s, it has mellowed into a stately, melancholically comic recitation. At times he sounds like a cross between Laurie Anderson and John Hegley, and “My Father’s Submarines” or “The Head Of Orpheus Football” are truly hypnotic, at once hilarious and mystifying.

Sadly, some of the experience simply feels second hand. The stage is an array of pitched percussion, and everyone knows that massed marimbas are the new music equivalent of Marshall stacks, and the ensemble play behind moody projections on gauze, the arthouse version of dry ice. Also, “Periscope” is just those same old Glass Reich melodic cells jumbled together on two keyboards, and seems to last most of the week (an effect not helped by the hackneyed projections of clocks running backwards – cheers for that). Frankly, the world has changed, and what sounded pretty radical in 1986, now sounds like the soundtrack to a Barclays ad. Whilst the show is wonderful, we’re concerned that Poppy is creating a heritage industry for a contemporary classical movement in which he never felt comfortable to begin with. We love him, but we hope he takes more inspiration from the restless individuality of his ex-teacher John Cage, and less from the reductive autophagy of his ex-colleague Genesis P-Orridge. Stop shuffling, try a new deck.