Then there are those like The Pastels themselves – led by Stephen McRobbie, a man so uncomfortable-looking on stage he gives the impression that even speaking a few mumbled words causes him pain – who, while superficially of the shambling indie clan, seem in fact to use their music as a method of transcending their own discomfort with existence, and thereby creating moments of fragile but very real beauty.
It's this urge to "go beyond" in their music that has set The Pastels – in various configurations, with Stephen as the one constant – apart from so many of their contemporaries, and kept them functioning for some 27 years now. It has also forged strong and lasting links with other musicians not just in their hometown of Glasgow, where Stephen is a shareholder in the Monorail record shop and venue and runs the Geographic label, but across the world and especially in Japan. Tokyo psychedelic duo Saya and Ueno, aka Tenniscoats, have been long-time Pastels fans and set the wheels in motion for the collaboration which led to the Two Sunsets album and now this tour.
Onstage, the combined Pastels-Tenniscoats, numbering seven members in total, had the dress and demeanour of primary school teachers on long-term sick leave and all appeared to approach their instruments with some trepidation. Never mind Oriental inscrutability – the entire septet were completely stony-faced as they set about the business of delicately picking out the notes of their their first song. Beginning with drones of flute, sustained guitar and Saya's melodica and gradually beginning to build a song structure, the musicians moved as if in loosened gravity or underwater, or perhaps as if scared that too sudden a movement could break the quivering framework they were creating. The atmosphere, and the twang of slightly detuned guitars, approached the musical atmosphere often called “Lynchian”, but there was none of the sinister elements that David Lynch is associated with – just a gentle, crepuscular strangeness.
This tentative approach continued throughout the set – simple, even naïve, melodies winding around one another to create something altogether more complex and evocative. The songs on which Saya sang (mainly in Japanese with a few heavily-accented English lines) saw a particularly fascinating alchemy, as her plaintive voice occasionally merged with similarly clean flute or guitar tones to play tricks on the ear as to where given notes were coming from. And as things went on, this interlocking of elements began to create something resembling a groove: although the band on stage were unfunky to the bone – the very opposite of down and dirty – they genuinely seemed to transcend their “indieness” to create something with its own natural, even momentarily elegant, sense of movement.
Spots where just Tenniscoats played, and a finale where all on stage built up a standard indie groove into a whirl of abstracted guitar noise, suggested much wilder and weirder possibilities – but had the musicians wigged out more often the experience of the delicateness they were capable of could well have been overwhelmed. And natural discomfort did return – the moments of transcendence were always ephemeral, and comparing the set to the even lighter touch of Pastels-Tenniscoats on CD, even with a hushed and respectful audience of indie cultists and even in the genteel victorian surrounds of Bush Hall, one couldn't help feeling that perhaps that live audience were intruding on the creative process on occasion. But overall the show was a beautiful display of escapism as a positive thing – musical communication as an escape to something that, however briefly it might hang in the air, can transform otherwise awkward people into light, graceful beings.
Two Sunsets is released this week on Geographic/Domino.
