It was acceptable in the 80s
Six degrees of Marc Almond? More like one or two.
What connects Coil, Matt Johnson and Nick Cave?
Actually quit a lot, much to the surprise of my younger self, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been so shocked.
In a 2017 conversation with Mark Lanegan, interviewer Marc Maron comments on Lanegan having worked with members of both Guns n Roses and Dinosaur Jr. “They seem to be in different orbits”, reflects Maron.
From a child, listening to 80s Electro-Pop, like Erasure and Soft Cell, to a 16 year old obsessing over the Gothic songwriting of Nick Cave, I thought what a total disconnect. Going on to discover the Hard Rock of Rollins Band, I looked back and thought, well my tastes must have gone through some drastic, disconnected leaps.
There is of course nothing so special about having eclectic tastes. The internet is full of “ooh look at how crazy my music tastes are, I listen to Mozart, 2Pac and Meshuggah” memes. My discovery was actually the opposite: some of my preferences are more closely connected than I once thought.
It’s partly just a perception shift. As Maron and Lanegan discuss, it might seem as though bands operate like gangs, where the Folk crew don’t interact with Hard Rockers, who never cross borders with Dance acts, but that’s not the reality.
Equally, there are degrees between working relationships and friendships. Connecting musicians by a chain of who worked with who can be a fun game (a musical version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon), but it doesn’t have to mean some great affinity. The fact that Dave Navarro played on one Michael Jackson song wouldn’t be much cause for a fan of both Jane’s Addiction and The Jackson Five to exclaim “wow I didn’t realise there was such a great kinship between my heroes”.
Nevertheless, it’s still been a source of surprise and satisfaction when I’ve come across previously unknown connections between my musical loves. So early Adam & The Ants were an influence on Killing Joke, according to singer Jaz Coleman. I’d wondered about that. Connected. Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli, of The Afghan Whigs, turned out to be good friends and went on to be frequent collaborators. Two of my (I’d thought) unconnected musical heroes. Connected.
Discovering, when I was a huge fan of the band, that Henry Rollins wrote the liner notes of a Jane’s Addiction album, , made me want to investigate Rollins. When I later read Rollins describe how great meeting Ice-T had been, I went back to Ice-T with renewed interest.
But the biggest surprise goes back to Marc Almond, the Kevin Bacon of this story. Kevin Bacon is renowned for having been in so many Hollywood movies that you can link almost any actor to him in only a few steps. Marc Almond doesn’t have some huge CV of musical collaborations, though he does have a few, but it’s the who’s, rather than the how many’s that took me by surprise.
Marc Almond the mainstream pop star, I’d thought. In reality the mainstream success was probably more a fluke of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” cover being such a hit. Almond was a frequent collaborator with experimental electro-industrialists Coil (who would go on to make their own iconic version of “Tainted Love”, with Almond in the video). Matt Johnson, who made a name for himself as The The, was part of Marc’s post-Soft Cell group Marc & The Mambas. Funny, I’d once thought, that both Nick Cave and Marc Almond would choose to cover Gene Pitney’s “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart”. I would never have suspected that Almond and Cave had briefly collaborated in a few live shows together under the name Immaculate Consumptive.
At this point too many connections start branching out, linking more and more of my most beloved music makers. The other two members of Immaculate Consumptive were Lydia Lunch (who would work with Sonic Youth, Swans and Oxbow) and J.G. Thirlwell, who’d go on to collaborate with Coil and Swans. Michael Gira of Swans and Henry Rollins both collaborated with Lydia Lunch at one time or another.
Ultimately, life is full of connections we don’t necessarily expect. These days the Spotify algorithm will helpfully steer you towards something you may like based on what you’ve just been listening to. Sometimes though, isn’t it more fun to take a long way round to find out that where you’ve ended up was right next to where you started out all along?