TATE MODERN
This is the twelfth in a series of original music tracks written about artworks at Tate Modern.
Tate invited New Young Pony Club to walk around the gallery and find a work of art that would inspire them to write a track.
In the end, it was Martin Creed's Work No. 232: the whole world + the work = the whole world that grabbed their attention. They said ‘we chose this bold and direct piece because we feel those qualities reflect our sound.’ This is the result.
You can listen to it in the gallery now or here online soon.
Tahita Bulmer and Andy Spence are explaining their band, New Young Pony Club.
Tahita: The thing with us is, we’re not 15-year-old
boys singing in a garage with leather jackets and a manifesto.
Andy: We do have a manifesto.
Tahita: But it’s a lot less bombastic… It’s
a subtle manifesto.
Andy: What Ty is trying to say is that most bands…
Tahita: No, what I am saying…
Andy: Well, this is the obviously the other thing with us:
antagonistic affection…
Saddle up! A classic Morrissey/Marr axis lies at the warm, beating heart of NYPC – production guru Andy playing Mr Music to frontwoman/ singer Tahita’s all-mouth-and-trousers. It’s a singular chemistry that’s marked NYPC as one of 2007’s most talked-about, must-hear, must-see bands.
They have already achieved plenty. Based on the not unreasonable belief that music should offer more than sullen boys wearing trilby hats, NYPC singles “Ice Cream” and “The Bomb” have already proved irresistible. Simultaneously targeting heads, hearts and feet, these were glorious tunes that left the safe harbour of easy categorisation for the clear blue seas of ‘anything goes’. “Indie” or “dance”, perhaps – but only in the same way that you might say that about Talking Heads, Blondie or ESG. Anyway, they easily made good on Tahita and Andy’s hopes: to put the fun back, and get people dancing.
Tahita: “We wanted to get everyone dancing. Just joining in. Not being po-faced. Yeah, alright, you may be the A&R guy from the biggest bloody major label – but do you actually have to stand there and look like a twat? No, you don’t. You could be enjoying yourself. This is not a dress rehearsal. This is life. Do you want to think of yourself on your deathbed standing at an amazing gig drinking a pint and trying to look cool?”
Now NYPC have done more than perhaps would be reasonably expected of a great singles band: they’ve made a great album. In fact, with their unconventional backgrounds – Andy a graduate of UOL: The University Of Life, with his peace-activist, CND-mad mum and Tahita raised in transit somewhere between Egypt, a Greek motorway and New York City (“I survived! And didn’t become a brat. Or a teenage mother”) – you might say Fantastic Playroom is the album they’ve been destined to make all their lives. “To do anything,” Andy reasons, “You’ve got to do it your own way.”
Andy: We met along the way, though different bands. Neither
of us were really excited by them...
Tahita: We were really mingingly unhappy! I was in a band
where I was being made to stand on stage and sing like Sarah Cracknell. I
wanted to do an Iggy Pop thing. I always have.
Andy: That’s how we bonded. We could sniff a new direction.
A British equivalent to what James Murphy, The Rapture and
others were doing in New York.
They put out “Ice Cream” in early 2005. 500 copies. The response was insane. A “headfuck”. Instantly playlisted on XFM and eventually spangling its ankles onto MTV2 in The States – no mean feat for a channel that has all but given up on music – via a transatlantic telly ad for computer processors, no less. They signed to like-minded label Modular, sometime home to The Avalanches, Cut Copy and Wolfmother. They found fans in David Bowie (Favourite line: “Let your girlfriend do what your boyfriend can’t”, from “Get Lucky”), Lily Allen and Daniel Radcliffe. Tahita lit up NME’s “Cool List”. Then they wheeled out the big guns, muscling up their live show with Sarah Jones (drums), Igor Volk (bass) and Lou Hayter (keyboards), making the NYPC on-stage experience a complimentary, but very different, one to NYPC on-record.
Tahita: We always imagined it being a live band, rather than Andy standing there going ‘Hi, I’m Dave Stewart. And this is my good friend Annie Lennox.”
As anyone who caught them on the NME Rave Tour earlier this year alongside Klaxons and CSS, or gigging their way from Europe to Australia and back, will tell: they’re a riot. See them this summer – they’re “doing” the festivals.
But first: Fantastic Playroom. Really, it’s everything you hope every album is going to be. Packed with tunes, yes – but literate, funny, sad, just-weird-enough, crazy, sexy and cool to boot. (Sometimes, dance-based music forgets it’s allowed to be all these things.) From an undeniable “Get Lucky”/”Hiding On The Staircase”/“Ice Cream”/“The Bomb” opening salvo to the potential-future-NYPC-direction and quite Grace Jones-y “FAN” via the overtly pop “Grey”, it gets everything right. Most of all, it’s really good fun. Those bungled, off-time handclaps and back-of-class giggles? Left in during recording, because… well, they sum up Fantastic Playroom’s spirit as much as anything else. Oh, and the lyrics are great.
Tahita: The lyrics are provocative. Whether sexually provocative
or intellectually provocative. Who says you can’t have songs that have
a cultural resonance, that have a sing-a-long chorus, that make you go away
and think, make you want to fall in love with somebody or dance? And why shouldn’t
that exist in the same moment?
Andy: I was listening to the lyrics to ‘The Get Go’ and
thinking: ‘What’s that about?’
Tahita: You know what it’s about!
Andy: Everytime I ask you, you kind of avoid the subject. ‘Cos
I don’t think you know…
Tahita: Of course I know!
And they’re off!
Creed’s titles always begin with an number for the artwork, although about half the numbers between 1 and 232 have been missed out. After the ‘Work No.’ there is always a description of the piece written in lowercase. Work No. 232 presents his indecision as two options are bound into an equation that can never be solved. Although the piece has been interpreted by critics both as a positive statement of the inclusiveness of art, and a negative statement of art’s irrelevance, it is neither. It can never express an opinion because it is a tautology – a statement that is irrefutable because its internal logic covers all possible conclusions. While none of the conclusions can be false, none can be true. The meaning of the work is caught in a loop which feeds back into itself and continually frustrates all attempts to give it a fixed meaning. Originally, the sculpture was placed above the main entrance of Tate Britain, highlighting the ambivalent position of art within society.
You can view this work in the Tate Collection.
Martin Creed was born in 1968 in Wakefield, England. From the age of three he lived in Glasgow, Scotland. Between 1986 and 1990 he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. After art school he lived and worked in London until 2001, when he moved to Alicudi, Italy. In 2001 he was the winner of the Turner Prize.
He currently lives and works in London and Alicudi.
You can read more about Martin Creed in the Tate Collection.
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