The “Coach Taylor” Record

My background was very unbookish, and there was absolutely no expectation from my family of my ever reading very much or even writing anything. Then I was taught English by Peter Way (Mr Way to me), and it was as though he walked into my head and turned all the lights on.

-Andrew Motion, poet

In high school, I had one of those teachers who seemed to walk into class straight out of a movie. Mr. Meacock. A cantankerous brit who taught English with the authoritative glare of a 5-star general, yet who harbored a hidden tenderness that led him to covertly mentor some of the school’s most troubled students. Despite teaching literally sophomoric students with a name that sounds like slang for a penis, he took zero shit and ran his classrooms with unrivaled intensity. Students who had not done the reading sweated out classes in fear that they would be called upon and exposed. “Ill-u-min-nating,” he would drawl sarcastically, using each syllable like a potato peeler to pare the lazy rind of an unprepared pupil’s psyche. Mr. Meacock once told a bullshitting student that they were a “pimple on the face of education,” and the phrase stayed in the school’s vocabulary for years.

My senior year, I took Mr. Meacock’s creative writing class and we clashed constantly. I was a smart ass who was too precious about my “brilliant” highschool words, a fantasy which Mr. Meacock rightfully punctured. “CUT” he would write in abrupt red pen strokes across my latest opus, “I don’t understand what you are trying to say.” I seethed and cursed and, ultimately, edited and re-edited until I whittled an Everest of words down to a concise paragraph. I often hear my classmates complain that their education did not apply to the “real world,” but after a few decades I can’t think of a more powerful lesson that what Mr. Meacock taught. Be prepared to defend your ideas. Learn from feedback. And of course, cut, cut, cut until your opera is pop song that no one can get out of their head.

Mica Levi

Rock is often covered as a product of “youth culture,” but this leaves out an important ingredient. Youths are taught, both intentionally and inadvertently, by adults. Adapting and reacting. When I think of the moments in rock history for which I’d most like to be a fly on the wall, it’s the moments where a young musician learns from a mentor. Young Miles Davis anticipating cool jazz when soloing in Charlie Parker’s band. George Martin teaching John Lennon how to play a tape backwards. Ric Ocasek convincing Rivers Cuomo to change his guitar pickups from the neck to the bridge for a brighter sound. Timberlake watching Timbaland’s studio prep before telling the world to cry him a river.  

My favorite “Coach Taylor” record, one where a weathered wierdo coaxes new heights from prodigies on the edge of breaking through, from the last 10 years is Jewellry by Micachu and the Shapes. On it, fresh out of art school rockers join forces with a grizzled electronic music producer to create some of the most deranged, rabid pop you will ever hear.

The teacher on this album, Herbert, will be familiar to audiophiles with creaky knees for his eclectic takes on house music released under the aliases of Herbert, Doctor Rockit, Radio Boy, Mr. Vertigo, Transformer, and Wishmountain. Part polemicist, part big-band leader, Herbert is known to pull conceptual stunts like “One Pig,” where he recorded moments in the life of an industrially farmed pig--from birth to final consumption at a dinner table--sampled the tapes and made an avant-techno record. He made anti-war ballads in which recordings of marchers at Iraq war protests were twisted into songs that sound remarkably like trumpet heavy pop (see 2006’s Scale.)

Micachu and the Shapes on the other hand were a fledgling art-rock project driven by Mica Levi (stage name Micachu), a composition student of London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. With an alumni list that includes Beatles producer George Martin, the school has been a high-brow hub since the 1880s. But Mica brought an outsider’s sneer to her classical education. “My school was full of snobby kids and I wasn’t one of them,” she said. Mica carved her own path by making electronic music outside her class work. She’d garnered underground buzz with the experimental beats of the Filthy Friends mixtape and recruited two of her “Uni” classmates to flesh out the sound as a full band. 

Some of her demos found their way to Herbert, who heard the potential and asked the band to record their debut with his Accidental record label. The Shapes’ music was constructed from odd building blocks--Mica composed by playing an alternately tuned mini-guitar, which she ran through distortion and hit with sticks to create nether-worldly crunches of sound. Her band, consisting of herself, a computer, a drummer and keyboardist took these fragments and arranged a series of songs that placed pop melodies atop concise chaos.

Matthew Herbert during office hours

Herbert was a natural producer for a group aiming to break artistic borders. He taught the band how to place mics in ways that made familiar instruments sound foreign and brought his years of found-sound manipulation to help the band shape their ideas. I can only dream of a feel-good montage of the precocious band and their art-damaged mentor: slowly they turn the knobs on a keyboard until it sounds like a shark vomiting. Delighted, they break into wild celebration. 

Here’s Mica describing the experience: “[Herbert] took a real producer’s seat. If there was structural things or melodic things then he’d step in. And obviously we’d talk about things before we did them...we messed around a lot to try and give each track its own identity.”

The results are really one of a kind. I’ve never heard a song mesh a can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head melody with apocalypse squalls quite like album highlight “Golden Phone.”  The impossible rhythm section for “Ship” shapes static, thumb pianos and the sound you make while clearing your throat into a bouncy sing along. Songs veer out of control, drooling gibberish across 13 delirious tracks.

The key to the whole album is how Herbert showcases the skewed charisma of Mica’s voice. Her yelps and sighs provide percussion. She screams and stews and screeches and coos. At one point she dangles the off key come-on/ threat “I could eat your heart” like a deranged RnB diva. They say a great teacher helps a student find their voice; well Herbert taught Mica to find that voice and then vivasect it, turning an instrument made from only the human body into an alien orchestra.  

Upon release, the record was divisive. Some loved it’s agit-prop-aggro-pop, while others thought the whole thing a mess. One critic panned the record as an album that “devolves into a tuneless, nearly unlistenable mire of avant-noise fragments." Uh, yeah, thats why its good.

After this record, Micachu and the Shapes would continue to produce albums that challenge the listener like a riot. They recorded Chop and Screwed with the London Sinfonietta, applying the production techniques of Sizzurp-era Huston to the high-falutin-ist orchestra I can name. Next they made a video album, Never, which lampooned the idea of the nuclear family with harsh noise and bright “The Sims” imagery. 

And of course, Mica went on to compose one of the most bone-rattling films scores of the decade for Under the Skin, a sci-fi horror flick where Scarlet Johannsen consumes the lonely.

But Jewellry is the record I keep coming back to. An intergenerational triumph whose pop shines brightest because of the noise-rock landfill from which it emerges. To me it sounds like a great teacher coaxing and a promising student learning new ways to listen. 

Clear eyes, fucked harps, can't lose.

Love,

Anand

Oct 2018