One of my pals called David (I know so many Davids I am losing count: it’s like almost every other bloke I know is called David) just sent me a copy of a biog of The Fiery Furnaces which I’m pasting in here. I think originally it came off Wikipedia but it’s not there any more, but by all accounts it seems to have been written by the band so probably they won’t mind it being here and read. Dave and I saw The Furnaces a couple or three years back at The Rescue Rooms in Nottingham and had a short chat with Eleanor after the gig…. Not that I can remember much about it; it had been a bad couple of days ….
You can listen to a track ("Two Fat Feet") off The Fiery Furnace’s first record, "Gallowsbird’s Bark", here: [Listen]
Anyways, here’s the biog, which I think is kind of funny:
Eleanor was constantly ridiculed in the crudest and least interesting manner by her brother Matthew. He, for his part, had to suffer such things as her coming in the room and various other affronts: for instance, talking, or watching the TV show she wanted or putting on a
record she might like to hear.
So Eleanor had to hide her likes and dislikes until he left. It was a beautiful day. She stood at a second-floor window, watching as Dad drove Matt off, and roughly, excitedly, triumphantly put "Houses of The Holy" into the CD player, turning up the volume on what used to be her brother's stereo.
Matthew had only liked The Who. He had Who records and videotapes, and as a youth, down in the basement, he tried to make Who noises. But he failed miserably and, with black jealousy, guarded the scene of his humiliation and insufficiency, that basement, where he kept the tape recorder. In fact, Eleanor was hit over the head, stabbed in the knee and smashed on the foot for coming down in the basement. But that didn't make his songs any better.
Years later, when Matthew - his pride gone, his spirit, such as it was, crushed - encouraged Eleanor to come down in the basement to make their first Fiery Furnaces music together. Maybe he should have hit and stabbed and smashed her. But he just swore. Things had changed.
Her older brother went to Germany at 17 and managed to learn not a word of German or even have a good time - apparently pining for mommy and daddy, and doggy, and the comforts of home, which he was incapable of enjoying in the first place. After failing repeatedly at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he cleverly stayed in that fascinating metropolis until he was 26. He then moved back in with his mother, sealing his fate and cementing his status as parasite and waster of indulgence and advantage. Looking for further opportunities to squander goodwill and embarrass himself, he later imposed upon a high school friend to help him move to New York (because his sister made it clear he couldn't stay with her). He was, you see, the proud author of such works as Spider Spite, Toad King Land and Banobazus Persian Prince. But certainly those things are terrible and only give evidence of no-talent and periods of excess sponging. No one doing a good job and paying the rent could ever have time for something as stupid and illiterate as Toad King Land. By the way, he has musical ability only as compared to his sister. His only achievement, in fact, is a series of short videos, made with a student he worked with in Urbana, Illinois. But Matthew never bothered to do the narration he promised to the student's mother. And the poor student is now dead.
God rest his soul.
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This all reminded me of a great biog of a band I like a lot, ……And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. This was also autobiography. It’s a few years old now but it’s still lurking on the web and, I think, holds up as a good example of the genre. Here it is:
Kevin Allen, Neil Busch, Conrad Keely and Jason Reece grew up in the small Christian community of Planoe, Texas (not to be confused with Plano, the suburb of Dallas) - a place more known for cattle ranches and it's single corner grocer than for it's music.
The four boys grew up in close proximity; Conrad, Neil and Jason attended the same Sunday school at the Planoe Anabaptist Ministry (Kevin's parents were Presbyterian). The four shared an interest in the sciences and literature, but also shared a love of singing. In Junior High they joined the church choir where they competed internationally in vocal ensemble competitions (Planoe Methodist Choir won the National Boys Choir Award in 1983).
During college the four lost touch briefly, then reunited in Austin, Texas, where Neil was attending UT. There they rekindled their old love of singing, and performed for a while as a four piece vocal ensemble for church revivals.
During a recording session for the Austin All-Male Ensemble they were introduced to Mike McCarthy, who would later wean them into recording artists. For the present, McCarthy infused the four with his interest in audio recording, fascinating them with the idea that the technology for sound recording predated the steam engine, and had actually existed for several thousand years.
It was also during this time that the four took an interest in the budding field of Maya, a field that was progressing with leaps and bounds at the University of Texas. Another research project they had started in high school and continued through college had also become an obsession - thinking along the precepts of Greil Marcus, Guy Debord, and Anton Levay, they had begun to search for a unifying link which would tie patterns in popular and ancient cultures with a singular repeating theme. In other words, to anthropology what the Theory of Grand Unification would be to physics.
Studies in both fields lead them to the "...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead", a glyph discovered to be present in distantly related ancient cultures that was currently being investigated at the Mayan department at UT.
Meanwhile McCarthy, who had become a constant presence in their lives, had coaxed the four into a studio at the Hamstien offices in the Austin Hill Country which he was using as a laboratory for his own experiments in sound manipulation, continuing the unfinished investigations into the field started by the likes of Wilhelm Reich, Michael Oldfield, and even the unpublished speculations of Thomas Edison.
Originally planning to record the group performing two versions of the popular hymns "Lord of All Hopefulness" and "Bell of Creation," they decided instead to put their recent hypothesis into practice. The four's explorations into music anthropology had lead them to experiment with idioms in rock music and it's commonalties with primitive folk music, especially that originating in Papua New Guinea, Hindu Kush, and Polynesia. Converting the tonal and rhythmic variants of the hymn "Lord of All Hopefulness" along a random logarithmic arc, they made the first recording of the “...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead” experiment - "Richter Scale Madness."
Over the past several years the four boys, under the name "...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead" have toured continuously throughout the US and Europe, also finding time to record three albums. Their first, comparably rawer eponymous LP (Trance Records) saw the four expanding upon the conversion of ecclesiastic hymnal into secular rock disaster theory.
Their second foray into sound manipulations, "Madonna" (Merge Records) dealt heavily with the themes of iconoclastic worship, the creation and subsequent defamation of popular idols in the post-industrial age, and the premature development of cynicism among modern children due to the pressures of our hastening information age.
...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead is currently continuing its research into it's theory of Anthropological Unification, which they intend to publish in full in the near future.
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This all makes a lot more sense if you listen to their music, a sample of which ("A Perfect Teenhood") you can listen to here: [Listen] I am always whistling this one as I stroll to work, or around the supermarket looking for the drain cleaning fluid.
I think autobiography is great. It’s where truth sometime is and sometimes isn’t.
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