The rumour that the Commodore 64-music scene I dead is rather exaggerated. You just have to know where to look. Super PLAY took a flight to Manchester to look for life signs. And met a few living legends while doing so.
Manchester’s old ghosts have never settled down. You look out over the town and see the whole central skyline is thorny of construction scaffolds and cranses, “crane cityâ€Â, as its called. Yuppie-lofts and latte-places are packed up next to decomposing brick facades.
But at the same time as the city core is constantly expanding, like scabs over the wartimes soot blackened buildings, there’s something resisting to let go. Because just like Manchester is the countries strongest northern soul-string holds, a music religion which revolves around stamp-collecting mentality and clinging on to the far side of the 70’s, it’s no coincident that Chris Abbot’s fourth Back In Time-show arrangement is taking place here. Like Mike Middles wrote in the opening for the guide book Morrissey’s Manchester: “the magic of the old ghosts is there, if you just know where to lookâ€Â. That’s why I’m here. Back in Time.
About Back in Time:
Album series of C64-remies, a trilogy, that then evolved into live-events and now culminates in a DVD-release.
- The success of the CD sales is because we’ve used songs that people have an emotional attachment to, says Chris Abbott, the man behind the whole Back in Time-concept. It’s hard to sell a product people don’t already know.
Near Curry Mile, the kilometre long stretch with 50 or so Indian restaurants, lies the slightly worn down suburb Failsworth and The Avenue arena. I’m taking a taxi there and there’s a football derby tonight, Manchester United vs Manchester City; outside every pub we pass young men are crowding up with crude cut hair and sneakers so blinding white they can only just have come out of a Stan Smith-box.
- Take a cab home tonight as well, the chauffeur warns me. This is no nice place at night.
The Avenue is an insignificant arena, a cross between a pub and recreation centre, with acoustic plates in the roof and worn carpets on the floor. Bar mirrors. A 55-year-old waitress, peroxide blonde plume hair and sunglasses. About a hundred people is already in the room.
About the audience:
Above 30, shirts, badly fitted jeans, glazed in the face from all the beer-chips-white-bread-with-mayonnaise. Which is exactly what this is about.
That’s why Rob Hubbard is an Englishman, Ben Daglish, Fred Gray, Martin Galway. The dream away from a water damaged council flat. Game music is not scrap culture, it’s far too British to sink to that level. It can be self-ironic, sure, but that’s just another reason why it never could be an American invention.
Inside the concert hall Stuck in D’80s – “SID’80s†– is rehearsing tonight’s set-list. Their thing is to pick classic C64 songs – Way of the Exploding Fist, Paperboy, Rasputin – and create a full blown band sound with six, seven instruments. Unlike the SID-chip, which only could master three different sound types.
- Every SID-chip was unique, no two chips had the same sounds, says Kenneth who airs radio with C64 music and mixes. That’s why it’s interesting when bands deliver version of SID-music: everyone has their own vision of what it should sound like. I once played the same song four times in a row without anyone noticing it was the same song at first – they were all so different.
As a paradox it’s the SIDs initial limitations that drove its users to push the boundaries – creativity takes over when technology reaches its limits. With living instruments one can’t just transfer game music to a bigger format, it also becomes more organic and a whole other way.
- The music is not so much a genre as a library, says Chris Abbot. My remix albums go over several genres and shows the value in the original melodies.
That’s what I’m thinking when I hear SID’80s: percussion, violin, flute, bass, acoustic guitar and keyboard; creating a jazz-like jam on stage.
About Ben Daglish:
Chip-music legend, The Last Ninja, fronts the band and looks like a sprawling scarecrow, long hair and beard, wiry, triangular version of Charles Manson. He sitting there, puffing rolled cigarette after rolled cigarette, with his flute resting like a shotgun over his lap.
When will you start making music for games again?
- Well, the reason I left the business was because it turned into a business. It’s not about the music anymore, it’s just money. So now I’m making music. And no money, haha!
Do you play in any other bands than just SID’80s?
- Yes, my main priority is the folk-rock band Loscoe State Opera. Celtic rock, like Levellers and Pogues, you know. We’ve released three albums so far.
What up next for SID’80s?
- We’ll play a gig in Copenhagen in November, but more than that I don’t know. We don’t rehears that often as we’re a band with three nationalities. Today everyone are here, so we’ll play the songs we know.
More about the audience:
Friends of Chris Abbott, record buyers, scene people, themselves remixers. Most of the visitors are probably all the above. Almost every person who sees that I have a notebook comes over to promote their own mixtape or site. It’s a bit overwhelming after a while.
- I have started to emulate Pro Tools on my Mac, says a guy with an untamed moustache. As soon as I’ve learned all the functions I’ll become big, real big. Boom, then you’ll never see me again!
At the same time it’s nice that there’s still such burning enthusiasm in this moneyless scene. A scene that has to shout in a megaphone about its existence in a time when everyone is talking about the next generation and HDTV.
It’s a family reunion, a political universe, a hundred-headed, beer-fuelled forge of ideas that echoes the discussions from the Commodore Remix-forum of the genres lifeline.
- I always thought that C64 music had a limited lifetime, says Chris Abbott. But now I’ve been doing this since 1997 and my shop has got more than ever to do. Would people dump their music taste when they’re 40? I don’t think so.
I ask Andreas Wallström, drummer and co-founder of SID’80s, if there’s anything in the music for people who’re not in it for the nostalgia.
- You should ask my wife. She doesn’t like chip-music, and thinks it’s mostly blip-blop, but she thinks our gigs are fantastic. And basically it’s all the same melody structure.
Rob Hubbard has switched off. He’s lying across three chairs, his cap pulled down over his eyes. Sometimes he gets up and walks over to the stage to correct some errors.
About Rob Hubbard:
The golden cow of chip-music, Monty on the Run, International Karate, very reserved, quiet, lets the sentences go out half way to nowhere.
The last thing I heard was that you were some kind of middle management boss over at EA.
- I’ve not been there since 2001. I didn’t like how they were treating people, so I chose not to stay.
So what do you do?
- I’m working on a game, which I’m not allowed to reveal the name of. Also I’m working on a project to conduct a live orchestra to re-arrange some of my old song. But I can’t tell you which yet.
How secretive!
- Naaah, we’ve just not decided exactly on which tunes it’ll be yet.
Do you still get a lot of fan-mail?
- Not since I moved to a secret address and got an unlisted phone number…
MJ Hibbett has actually nothing more in common with the C64-worshipers than his glasses and that he wrote Hey Hey 16K, an anthem to the childhood of the home computer, with a lot of name dropping of programming commands and loading messages in the lyrics. Part from that he composes pretty witty power-pop with his band The Validators. And even though the PA-system seem to be quipped with revolving doors, it’s an excellent warm-up act. When Hey Hey 16K, in a shameless public pleasing manner, is played the second time around a third of the audience gotten down on their knees by the stage to sing along. A guy dances unsteadily, a combination of euphoria and cheap lager.
MJ Hibbett sings in the song The Lesson of The Smiths: “Don’t wait for years for a retrospective / get into it nowâ€Â, and that’s the key phrase of Back in Time: those who’re here has been in it from the beginning.
And now?
- Look around you, says Mark, who’s 31 years old and working for IBM. I know at least nine, ten guys in here who’ve worked as programmers. Now they’ve gotten kicked out because their jobs were outsource to Taiwan or whatever.
Then it dawns on me. This isn’t as much about the worshipping of old gods as a political statement. A drunken and near sighted awakening meet-up.
- You thought you were going to a write about a retro thing, didn’t you, Mark says and it’s not a question.
Both Ben Daglish and Rob Hubbard says that they left the business because of how it treats people. The star gazed worshiping of them this evening is just as much about worshipping an image of them as guerrilla artists. Old ghosts who refuse to settle down.
The next concert set feels a bit lame after this awakening. It’s three guys from Press Play on Tape, who I know has a brilliant Krafwerk cover of Das Model (Das Gamer). But part from an acoustic version of Ghosts ‘n Goblions, which is rather fonky, they feel more like a scaled down pause act.
Better proof of “Less is more†than Rob Hubbard’s fine tuned new age-vision, which with violin and keyboard lead my thoughts to Mike Oldfield or the musical equivalent of the “ice berg effectâ€Â: it’s what fills the silence between the notes that builds the emotion. A few metres from me a woman is sobbing. On the table there are three rolled up Kleenex.
Hubbard’s legacy to the game music world, what made him a prophet, is that he was a musician who brought his knowledge to game creation rather than the other way around. That’s why it’s peculiar how his living music is beautiful, but not nearly as hypnotically captivating as the work his prodigies copied and pasted and tweaked a thousand times.
Though it’s pretty hard to motivate that in a crowd of two hundred people, listening with religious devotion and wide open mouths and a woman choking her tears in a tissue. The only thing puncturing the silence the waitress’s stiletto heels behind the bar.
A few issues ago I wrote about how the boundary between artist, event arrangers and audience in the Swedish chip-music scene is as good as wiped out. At The Avenue I get proof that this is a universal phenomenon.
- Here’s a tune that, oddly enough, no one has remix yet, says Ben Daglish.
- But I’ve already done that, shouts Chris Abbott from the crowd.
- Oh, right, Daglish corrects himself. You’ve already done that.
SID’80s set is the culmination of the evening, pub rock, live oriented, euphoric. Old Amiga-icon Mark Knight, Alfred Chicken, Wing Commander, plays the violin as if every heartbeat would be the last. Someone tells me he used to play with Massive Attack. When he’s running around in the room, lies down on the floor, out to the urinals, his elbows are pumping non-stop, spastically. It’s the same energy as in young garage bands and – dare I say it? – Stone Ponty, early 70’s.
In the corner of my eye I see Rob Hubbard standing on a chair, clapping his hands to a rising Cossack-beat. A mysterious feeling when I leave the arena and walk into the night, haunted by the mist and steam from inside the hall. Just old ghosts. Nothing to care about.
Or?
Caption: So much to say, so little space.
