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individuals are so good we’re supposed to listen to them all the time and pay money to hear them do it, care about every little thing they put out. People are passive in this process because they like music rather than love it and take it for granted. That’s what makes the distribution and the concentration of power in the music business so dangerous. We become imprisoned, rather than liberated by it.”
In this, recorded music plays its part as it fosters the idea that
there’s one ideal performance of one song, an idea that Brennan finds “troubling”. The danger, he says, is that the recording becomes a template and it’s false. It plays into the unhealthy idea that there’s a ‘best’ in any kind of music. “I see it all the time. It’s quite tragic when an individual wants to be a performer and they have a self-image, a delusion about themselves and the minute that they finally experi- ence a real performance it’s crushing. I’m sure some people want to kill themselves or certainly go home and die an emotional death, but a necessary one for a lot of them too. They could have a beautiful life playing music, but they want to be the best and there is no best. That’s what’s so sick about this system. It’s such a gross system.”
It’s a system “where even the great artists, the few that exist probably are better than most people, but they peak out and then they become performers, entertainers, and great ones. I completely understand why someone might want to spend whatever money they can to get good seats to see Bob Dylan or Neil Young or Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen. I totally get that, particularly with Springsteen when he goes out and does the whole River album, but he should have stopped making records in 1982 with Nebraska.”
He says “That’s what’s so beautiful about Peter Gabriel, he’s a new model of what somebody could or should do now that we have the technology of the internet to makework available in a more fan- based way and then get the hell out of the way!” Gabriel clearly does more than get out of the way and Brennan is hugely glad of WOMAD. It’s provided a platform to wider audiences for many of the artists he’s recorded.
I
asked about the impact of travel on people who have never previously held a passport. He believes that overall it’s a pos- itive experience and artists are able to return home with “modest sums” that might be the equivalent to two years wages. It stimulates local interest in the music and there’s an expectation that they’ll help others. He says they try to manage expectations, pointing out that opportunities for earning in this way are limited. But there are jealousies and disbelief in some com- munities: he says that the Mouse Boys chose not to tell anyone where they were going, partly because they didn’t want to fail and people refused to believe them when they returned.
I make the feeble joke – that his having worked with the psychi- atrically unstable must have proved useful in his work with musicians? Brennan smiles politely (he is actually a brilliant interviewee, unfail- ingly charming, self-deprecating, open and patient, giving due consid- eration to even the most inane line of questioning). “I hope that for all of us, whatever we do helps us. We have a lot of experiences we don’t want to have in life, but ultimately they act as raw material that we can metabolise and develop (creatively) with. That’s the ideal any- way. It’s a cliché that musicians are crazy. Music is healing and helps the processing of emotion. Often they’re quite stable, they’re not repressed because they deal in their emotions all the time.”
Everyone can be creative, he says. But it’s not so easy to access that creativity and capture each unique voice. “There’s so much affectation as people are influenced by recorded media. In South Korea girls can sing spot-on like Adele. It’s not the healthiest expres- sion of someone’s existence.” The voices he listens for are those where he hears “the connection between the speaking voice and the singing voice. Then I know there’s sincerity going on.”
He’s found that some of the most powerful performances he’s ever recorded are from people who claim they’re not musicians and cannot sing or write songs, but who have – with encouragement – come up to the microphone to improvise on the spot or who’ve come back in a day or so having thought about it. “I believe that some of the best songs are those written and sung with that level of freedom (as if) the performer thinks they are not being heard, so people feel they’re eavesdropping. It’s almost voyeuristic.” It’s this emotional immediacy that Brennan captures in his recordings.
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