Godspeed You! Black Emperor 16mm concert projection
It’s unclear at what point in the evening a Godspeed You! Black Emperor gig actually begins. Long before the band is due on stage at London’s Kentish Town Forum, an ominous drone is already drowning out the 99%-male crowd’s chatter, while on vast projection screens erected behind the two drumkits the word “HOPE”, etched as if by a dying hand, flickers and twitches. One by one, the eight band members come to the stage and take up instruments, adding demonic depth and intensity to the drone which becomes, over its half-hour duration, the sort of apocalyptic white noise which begins to conjure colours and patterns – even if you are, as I was, one of the few members of the audience who’d not ingested some hallucinogenic substance for the evening.
The first thing you hear on the record is a stentorian male voice reporting, with no discernible emotion, “The car’s on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel.”
When Godspeed You Black Emperor! first emerged in the late 1990s (the exclamation mark moved in 2002), it felt like the future of music was up for grabs. With the 60s, 70s and 80s nostalgia market thoroughly mined for Britpop and post-Spice pop, we were either going to have the same revivals repeating again, or see something else irrupt into being – something with no immediately obvious “retro” underpinnings. And sure enough here was f# a# ∞ (“F Sharp A Sharp Infinity”), the debut record by a deeply mysterious band with an exclamation mark in their name, and an unnumbered, apparently leaderless complement of players. The first thing you hear on the record is a stentorian male voice reporting, with no discernible emotion, “The car’s on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel.” A generation of students stopped and listened. And then came the music: instrumental, punctuated with field recordings of industrial noise and apocalyptic preaching. Somewhere in the influences you could make out Steve Reich (the recordings of train noise), Ennio Morricone (the languid waltz of the melodies, the galloping rhythms of the percussion, a general sense of desert), Glenn Branca’s electric-guitar symphonies, and the then-nascent “post-rock” movement of instrumental guitar music (in the UK at this time, Mogwai were the best-known practitioners, though that’s relatively speaking). The music exceeded these influences, however: amid the tense skirling strings, the ominous guitar figures, the mazurkas, the thunderous military percussion, there was a yearning to the music, a sense that these Godspeed people were not just chronicling some disaster, but trying to fight through it to something beyond – a crackling, flickering, just-out-of-reach hope, in fact.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor 16mm concert projection
The band released an EP, Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada in 1999, and two further full-length records, in 2000 and 2002, refining and perfecting their method – long tense building intermissions of dread noise which push the listener’s endurance to its limit, before great rushes of strident melody offer a cathartic release. During this time, their popularity and influence spawned any number of not-quite-as-good imitators, as well as bringing the band close to the mainstream (that’s Godspeed’s “East Hastings” playing over the zombie apocalypse in the film 28 Days Later, one of the very few times the band’s let its music be used for soundtracks). After that, they seemed to have called it quits. For a band which tapped into an inarticulable but potent feeling of millenarian angst, the double whammy of the new millennium arriving without any discernible improvement (or downturn) in the lot of the world, followed in 2001 by the terrorist act which transformed the planet, might have been too much. For the next decade fans assumed Godspeed were defunct.
That’s Godspeed’s “East Hastings” playing over the zombie apocalypse in the film 28 Days Later
In Kentish Town, as all eight band-members get stuck in to their instruments, that dread-inducing “Hope Drone” gradually becomes “Mladic”, the colossal twenty-minute opener to 2012’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor comeback, ’Alleluiah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! The band came out of hibernation in 2011, playing their first shows in eight years, but made no suggestion they would record together again – the first most people knew of ’Alleluiah‘s existence was when it was being sold from merchandise stalls at their shows in September 2012. “Mladic” isn’t a new composition – the band played it when I last saw them, in 2002 – but even when it was premiered a decade ago it was distinctly different from the rest of the band’s work. The thunderous Middle Eastern-inflected melody is unlike anything they’d recorded before, while the driving, guitar-led build-up to it is the most intense groove the band has yet developed – something in it recalls Led Zeppelin (this is very much music which will appeal to your inner pretentious teenaged boy).
Godspeed You! Black Emperor 16mm concert projection
Two fifteen-minute pieces – “Moya” and “BBF3” – bookend what turns out to be a new song, “Behemoth” – not two as I’d thought (it is very long: after a titanic start it goes very quiet in the middle before reviving itself; the whole piece clocks in at 45 minutes). The Forum’s sound systems couldn’t quite convey some of the actual tunes here; likewise much of the subtlety of the string part on “Mladic” was swamped (though a propulsive rhythm from the two drummers was more evident than on record) – and it’s worth noting that for all that I’ve talked about walls of sound and thrashing guitars, Godspeed can concoct the most moving melodies, as evidenced here by “Moya”’s glacially beautiful opening section.
The paradox with Godspeed is that although they don’t use lyrics, and the trappings of their work – the album artwork, the song titles, the projections that accompany their live shows – are always open to interpretation, they’re unmistakeably a political band, though without the crassness that implies (nor, to be fair, the unambiguous declarations of actual protest songs). Tonight, the film projections depict large-scale demonstrations, protest signs, mugshots, grainy film from a train journey through a barren landscape, and most affectingly, a handwritten letter in which every word has been censored except for the phrase “I love you”. This is the most succinct expression of the Godspeed ideology: fighting to ensure that tiny scrap of felt emotion survives censorship by a monolithic and uncaring “them”. They’re never hopeless, but they’re realistic about their goals: even the title of their 2000 record Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven hints that protest is likely futile but must still be encouraged. At least, that’s what I’m choosing to read into it.
As the screen goes blood red, though, for the pummelling final movement of “BBF3”, and one by one the players leave the Forum stage, the feedback still roaring from their instruments for minutes yet, I don’t think too much about that. Describing Godspeed this way might make them sound humourless, or pretentious (I love that this is the accusation frequently levelled at a band who go out their way not to speak to journalists – more musicians might do well to follow the example), but the truth is that the noise they make – capable of being precise and moving at the same time as being brutishly, scouringly loud – affects me on such a visceral level that it drives everything else away. You respond to it instinctively, like you do to injustice, like you do to beauty. What better time to catch Godspeed You! Black Emperor in concert than on the eve of the decade’s most significant election?