I Am Not The Beatles

Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…

On the evidence of this truly excellent song, Secession may well be the most cruelly overlooked band here. Essentially a pop song for The Secret Goth Inside Us All, ‘The Magician’ is nothing short of majestic.

Taking ‘I Will Survive’ as its basis and the reflective finale of ‘The French Lieutenants Woman’ as its centrepoint, this song exists in the haze of a post-coital cigarette mere moments after Sisters Of Mercy have given New Order a rather ill-advised right royal seeing to in a crappy B&B in Lyme Regis.

Realising these painful attempts at a relationship to be a mistake they leave New Order dozing lightly and, slipping on their blackest cloaks, they go. They walk out the door and head down to Lyme Bay for a tearful walk along it’s famous cob - looking, as they always do, like the four Meryl Streeps of the apocalypse.

Standing at the Cob’s nether reaches with the empty sky above them and violent sea spraying unforgiving salt onto their mirrored shades, they are now bang slap in the middle of their own middle 8. This is the mystical place where the mysterious magician - Is this a metaphor for the human heart? Is it your next infatuation ? - allows the hurt of lost love and separation to pass and for the individual to move on.

The Magician knows that this hurt will always be replaced with the eternal dull ache of lost opportunity, but also that this is the way it must be. Without this we would never realise - as Charles does at the end of ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ - that ‘life is not merely a symbol, it is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, it is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but it is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city’s iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea’.

Brilliant.

Secession Update

Secession hail from Glasgow in Scotland, and the story that surrounds them is typical of many a local music scene. ie Fledgling bands often nick each other’s members in an attempt to find that hidden magic formula.

Various musicians and vocalists later of Reef, Kula Shaker and Toploader all played together in different permutations of the same band when growing up, for example - and somewhat more illustriously, two members of Secession would very soon go on to be in another Glasgow band cited by Kurt Cobain to be a major influence on his songwriting.

Before the Nirvana part of this story however, let us first note that information concerning Secession is not exactly easy to find. Their unofficial myspace site has only managed to scrape together a pretty lonesome 15 friends :

http://www.myspace.com/secessiongroup

Worse, all the information they give about the band was just copied and pasted from their extremely brief Wikipedia entry. This entry has the definite whiff of an ironic inside job about it, as it includes everybody’s middle initial in a (very successful) attempt to confuse Google - and (at the time of writing, please see the note at the bottom of this article) describes another Secession song called ‘Sneakyville’ rather knowingly as ‘a popular dance hit about the Charles Manson Family murders’ :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_(band)

Now, the above link also claims that Secession’s lovely gruff vocalist - Peter Thomson - sadly died in the late 1990’s.

Interestingly however, a reasonably well known Scottish artist - also called Peter Thomson - graduated from the Glasgow School Of Art one year after Secession were formed, apparently disappeared for the entire length of their existence, then only started doing any actual exhibitions one year after they split up… which is six years after he graduated. This Peter Thomson is alive and painting so, even if it isn’t Peter from Secession, it is still one fuck of a coincidence :

http://www.compassgallery.co.uk/cg-exhibitions-7.htm

Hmmm… anyway, although it will come as no surprise that nobody’s tried to make the above vaguely dodgy link with Secession before, it will probably come as a bit of a surprise that nobody also seems to have noticed the following…

Nirvana Update

The drummer in Secession is a chap called Charlie Kelly and the bassist is called James Seenan.

Charlie’s brother is called Eugene. A friend of Eugene’s called Frances McKee was once in a band, called The Pretty Flowers, with both Sean Dickson soon to be from the Soup Dragons and Norman Blake soon to be from Teenage Fanclub. This band split and eventually Frances started a band with Eugene called The Vaselines.

Eugene then asked his brother Charlie and his friend James - both from Secession - if they wanted to join too, and they said yes :

http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/7085/index.html

The Vaselines went on to be Not Very Famous At All At The Time, but were that previously mentioned major musical influence on Kurt Cobain, and their reputation has only grown. Indeed, according to the biography ‘Heavier Than Heaven’ Kurt even named his daughter after one of The Vaselines : Frances Bean Cobain. To help you realise how long ago all this was, here is a picture of Frances with her mother these days :

http://tinyurl.com/2kkot6

Anyway, as well as recording a few of their songs with Nirvana, Kurt also invited Eugene Kelly onstage at the 1991 Reading Festival for a duet of The Vaseline’s song Molly’s Lips - a moment Kurt would later claim to be one of the greatest moments of his life. There is a more in depth look at this relationship, along with a nice picture of Kurt singing with Eugene, here :

http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/7085/index.html

And Finally…

James went on to record in a few bands like The Painkillers and Suckle with Frances McKee - but has since gone missing.

Charlie went on playing with his brother Eugene in Captain America (later renamed Eugenius) and hasn’t disappeared as such - but with his myspace profile set to ‘Private’ details are certainly sparse :

http://www.myspace.com/charlieboykelly

Which only leaves Carole Branston… so presuming that she didn’t retire to her family’s mansion to count her Branston Pickle millions - Carole, where are you ?

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence

Current Value : 3 pounds and 9 pennies. They’ll never understand the joy this gave me - as the last time anything was worth more than this was six weeks ago, with Boys Wonder

Current profit : 143 pounds and 70 pence. Want a copy of their allegedly superb only album, ‘A Dark Enchantment’? It’ll cost you - usually 80 quid or more - but here, thanks a generous exchange rate, is a cheap one for 50 : http://www.amazon.com/A-Dark-Enchantment/dp/B0009E5YJY EDIT - Friday 23rd November. Well, there was one there. But one of you appears to have bought it.

Supporting Cast Update : Sisters Of Mercy; New Order; Reef; Kula Shaker; Toploader; Kurt Cobain; Nirvana; Eugene Kelly; Frances McKee; The Soup Dragons; Teenage Fanclub

I Am Not The Beatles Update : As you have probably already noticed, a very lovely person called Funk Police appears to have updated the Wikipedia link with more inside information than you can possibly imagine, thus making all my speculation above look really rather silly. It’s about bloody time though isn’t it? All I ever seem to do is moan about Wikipedia, and then never actually do anything about it. Thank you Funk Police… whoever you are. Oh, and thank you also to Margaret - Peter’s widow - for contacting us  and being incredibly lovely. Pop off to the comments to see how it all unfolded.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Nice Record Sleeve, Brilliant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.