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Auden, Berlin, Music, Carthasis and Therapy.... · Sep 29, 12:33 PM

On the bus, on the island, with a biography of WH Auden that was given to me back in 1996. Auden, like many others of both his (Isherwood) and later (Bowie) generations of effete Englishmen spent a year in Berlin, embroiled in some sort of process of self-liberation. Following Bowie, Berlin became a mecca for English musicians decamping for new directions, (Depeche Mode, David Sylvian). I arrived around the same period as this latter group, in the early eighties, drawn by the mystique of the Wall, Bowie, the Weimar years, and indeed, Auden, Isherwood, et al, coupled with a desire to finally see the city described so vividly by the American author “Cornelius Ryan’ in ‘The Last Battle’.

“A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them…,” That’s an axiom of Freud’s that (we are told) Auden subscribed to. I’d come to something similar myself, that I needed to make friends with the darker impulses of my being, give them room to play too, re-assure them that if they came into line with my needs and the drives I overtly privileged that they wouldn’t be de-foliated or dehydrated, that those (more subsumed) parts would live, in fact thrive too. Otherwise, I was going to get screwed by my own inner demons. The move to Berlin, in search of artistic development was therefore so much more an instinctive move to personal development, achieved in part by becoming an active observer/participant in the myriad possibilities of that city, especially during the night hours.

So forward some twenty years, and I am in NYC. Not a very original journey to have made, in that the London to Berlin to New York axis has been trodden enough to be almost cliche. However, I’m here, I’m cutting “Red,” and finding that there’s a theraputic element…. for a couple of years now I’ve played with having a kind of ambivalent ‘you’ pronoun in the lyrics. Who or what am I addressing: God, my lover, myself, my friend, or all at once? It’s an idea nicked from Rumi, or at least my way of reading Rumi, where he refracts the Beloved through the earthly prism of his (beloved) friend.

Earlier this year, in England I talked with relatives and friends who are either therapists, or in therapy, and it was proposed to me that sometimes, the act of creating is serious work on the self, in that same sense. A notion I’ve always skirted suspiciously, not wishing to dump my crap on you, as I haven’t enjoyed being dumped on by some ‘artists’. Yet here I am, feeling catharsis and change through my act of creation.

So, as I’ve sung these tunes, well, I’ve realised that you’ve been there with me, you’ve emerged from all sorts of corners where I hadn’t suspected you’d lurk. And this music resonates a little more deeply, with a little more width than before because of your presence. Some of these newer recordings are really imbued with you.

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