Turner Prize winner Martin Creed – new album

Martin Creed

Wakefield-born and Glasgow-raised, Creed is known as the self-effacing, playfully provocative artist and 2001 Turner Prize-Winner (for the infamous Work no. 227: the lights going on and off). His pre-eminence in contemporary British art was confirmed by the Hayward Gallery’s expansive 2014 Creed retrospective/takeover show, What’s The Point Of It? But that’s only part of the man’s protean CV. Indeed, he has maintained a complementary commitment to composing, songwriting and performing since the early ’90s, fronting bands of his own devising, releasing an impressive catalogue of singles, EPs and albums and consistently garnering plaudits from gnarled music critics and stellar musicians alike (members of Franz Ferdinand most vocally).

Creed’s visual art has often embraced sonic elements, such as the 1998 installation Work No. 189: thirty-nine metronomes beating time, one at every speed and 2009’s Work No. 1020 — a ballet, no less. Music, he believes, is a medium that offers something that art alone does not. As a glance at the biographies of John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Pete Townshend, Brian Eno, David Byrne et al will confirm, groundbreaking pop musicians have for decades cut their creative teeth in the world of visual art. “I got into the music because the visual work wasn’t enough… you hear things as well as see them… I like that you can make music in your head and carry it around with you. You’re freer. You’re not tied down by the burden of physical objects.”

Martin Creed’s performing and recording career began several years before his art-star status arrived. He wrote the material, sang and played guitar in the band Owada, who released their album, Nothing, on composer David Cunningham’s Piano label in 1997. Its twenty-three brief, dada-minimalist songs setting the urgent, focused tone of Creed’s music. Sporadic, limited edition Martin Creed releases, often at least tangentially tied to art shows, would appear over the next decade until, in 2011, he started a label, Telephone Records, releasing a brace of singles, before, in May 2012, Moshi Moshi stepped in for the splenetic art-punk double-A-side ‘Fuck Off’ and ‘Die’, and, soon afterwards, an album, Love To You, produced by Creed, David Cunningham and The Nice Nice Boys (aka Andrew Knowles of Johnny Marr & The Healers and Nick McCarthy of Franz Ferdinand). Telephone was re-engaged in January 2014 to release Creed’s Mind Trap, an album of songs and three instrumental works for orchestra.

Creed’s new long player, Thoughts Lined Up, was recorded to 1-inch tape in a small studio in Brixton in one week just before Christmas 2015, and mixed with sonic impresario Liam Watson, in glorious mono, on the ex-Abbey Road EMI desk at Hackney’s legendary, analogue-only Toe Rag Studios.

“I didn’t want to overblow the songs or try to big them up,” Creed explains. It’s an album whose 24 succinct tracks marry some established Martin Creed tropes (spiky, garage-punk guitars, classical percussionist Serge Vuille’s by turns primitive and polyrhythmic drums, beguilingly nursery rhyme-like vocal melodies, lyrics as playful, haiku-like linguistic games, or repeated axiomatic, existential statements…) to a less familiar, far daintier sonic palette. Imagine Billy Connolly, Ian Dury, Mark E. Smith and Daniel Johnston writing songs that are then played by The Mekons, Willie Nelson and Virginia Astley’s Ravishing Beauties, together, and you’re at least in the vague vicinity of Thoughts Lined Up’s very particular ballpark.

“It’s called Thoughts Lined Up because that is literally what it is, just all these bits – these thoughts – put in a row one after the other, trying not to worry about what they add up to. Most of it started as audio notes recorded on the Tube or in the street – just little everyday mantras that you say to yourself as you go along; things that come up in your head, and that help keep you going, or that sometimes you want to go away…”

It’s this kind of unconventional spirit and friendly, mischievous iconoclasm that mark out much of Creed’s work. On Thoughts Lined Up, such concerns arrive borne along on the kind of earworm melodies that bore away long after the record has been put away. This makes for work that is as accessible as it is challenging – further testament to an ingenious individual for whom art, of whatever stripe, is a vehicle for the unswerving evocation of what it is to be alive. Indeed, if, as Walter Pater’s infamous epithet has it, “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music”, then Martin Creed might just be its living, breathing, freely thinking embodiment.

Artist’s website: http://www.martincreed.com/

Furthermore, the Artsy Martin Creed page provides visitors with Creed’s bio, over 50 of his works, exclusive articles, and up-to-date Creed exhibition listings.

‘Understanding’ – official video:

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