Longform: Kevin Coyne and Dagmar Krause — Babble (1979)
Or: It's not new music, but it's still a Friday review
“‘Babble’ is essentially a love story. The lovers are shown struggling to communicate — succeeding then failing. The lovers are lost …. does it really matter? It’s the late sixties.” -Babble show program, March 1979
No romantic relationship can survive without effective communication. Being open with one's partner, making an effort to put difficult feelings into words, and listening respectfully and without bias—ignore these principles, and any connection between lovers is destined to fall apart. However, in some cases, instead of shattering, the link between two hearts can actually begin to rot, eventually festering into a more perverted and doomed love. What then? The lovers drag each other further and further down, isolated in their own private Idaho, no longer able to see themselves as a part of society.
What's scary here is not that this happens to some people, but that it could happen to anybody. We love to think of love as a pure force for nothing but life and good, but it never manifests like that in the real world. On the path from heart to heart, this love passes through two human souls, full of both the lightest and darkest feelings. Sometimes, it absorbs the light and reflects the dark. Sometimes, it's the other way around. Both are forms of love, but only one is seen as such. What of this other love, then? How do we make sense of it? To ignore it would mean allowing it to sit unchecked, inflicting pain on generation after generation of lonely lovers.
These sorts of questions were on Kevin Coyne's mind in 1977 as he was writing Babble, a song cycle meant for the stage. By that point, Coyne had already been writing, performing, and recording music for quite some time. After graduating from the Derby School of Art in 1965, Coyne decided not to follow his somewhat newfound passion for the Blues and instead worked as a therapist and drug counselor for 3 or so years. While this did delay his entry into the music scene for a bit, it was an extremely important period in his artistic development. Instead of jumping straight into a life of creation and struggling with the self and art, Coyne stayed in the real world, the world of imperfect and damaged people. These positions, along with his brief stint as a bus driver, gave Coyne a greater love for the people around him who were just trying to get by despite the roadblocks, self-imposed or otherwise. Regardless of how erratic or eccentric his music may sound, one can always feel a compassion for the quotidian in the subjects he chose to sing about. Coyne made his musical debut around 1969 as a member of the band Siren, a blues rock outfit who released their only two albums on John Peel's Dandelion record label. In 1971, the band broke up, and Coyne released a solo album on Dandelion, Case History, which was noticed by Virgin Records, who promptly signed him (he was the second artist they signed; Mike Oldfield was the first) and would release his next 10 LPs.
He spent the next seven years writing scores of songs and releasing five albums. His debut, 1972's Marjory Razor Blade, was a set of unconventional and abrasive folk-blues songs anchored by his distinctive nasal bray and lyrics, which always had a sort of demented twist. At a time when music was becoming more melodic and escapist-friendly, Coyne raved and screamed without a care for mass appeal. None of his releases were ever commercial successes, though he did earn recognition among critics and other musicians for his one-of-a-kind style (Johnny Rotten, only months after the Sex Pistols split up, played "Eastbourne Ladies" on Capitol Radio as a part of a selection of his favorite music). Not content to just write songs and albums, Coyne collaborated with playwright Snoo Wilson on the production of England, England, a musical about the English gangster Kray Twins. The show received middling reviews, but it was clear to all that Coyne was less interested in the actual story of the Kray twins and more interested in the psychodrama of their condition and how it reflected or was influenced by British society, particularly how this interaction in general could produce crime and nationalism.
So it makes sense that his second attempt at a stage show, Babble, would take as its inspiration the sensationalized Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who killed multiple children in Britain from 1963 to 1965. We won't go into detail here, as we're more interested in the music, but it's safe to say that the murders and the resulting trial had a large and long lasting effect on Britain, Coyne included (fun fact: The Smiths' song "Suffer Little Children" is also based on the Moors Murders, with Morrissey even invoking the names of 3 of the 5 victims). The wider culture was fixated on Hindley, whom they labeled "the most evil woman in Britain" for carrying out the gruesome acts under Brady's influence, but Coyne was caught on the relationship between Brady and Hindley itself, the sort of psychotic commitment that was necessary for something like child murder. Were they an exceptional case, or could this happen to anyone? Is it an example of total unification or complete separation? It always came back to communication—making oneself known to another, and babbling—communication without any intelligibility.
Babbling. Words that may have significance but can not be understood. No one wants to hear babble. Babbling can be unintelligible; it can be interminable; it can be idle and disposable; or it can be full of deep, dark secrets. Often, what is babble to one person can be tremendously important to another. Uncaring partners may hear their lover's pleas and complaints as just more babble to endure. But we were born to babble. One must learn to babble before they learn to speak. Though, when one leaves babble behind as they enter the speaking world, does it actually go away? Or is it always waiting on the borders of our thoughts and speech, trying to destroy what we mean before it gets to our intended recipient? Can we become so isolated that everything except our own thoughts is heard as babble? Coyne wrestled with these thoughts as Babble took shape in his mind.
It would be a musical, though it wouldn't really be a play; it would be more of a collection of songs connected by improvised monologues delivered by the two leads. The staging would be simple: a couch, a table with chairs, and a coat rack. It would be lit simply and starkly by stage lights. The lead performers would stand at the front of the stage, always separated from each other by a few yards. Both the man and the woman would be dressed unremarkably: the man in a tweed jacket, the woman in a pink dress. Everything extraneous—time, setting, names, characters outside of the lovers—would be removed. The resulting production would be like a creature put under a magnifying glass: isolated, intensified, and distorted. Coyne needed a partner, though, someone who could play the female lead and accurately convey the demented contradictions inside her mind. He landed on the singer Dagmar Krause, known for her work with the bands Slapp Happy, Henry Cow, and the Art Bears (Note: all of these bands produced amazing music and are highly recommended by MSMR). Coyne must have met her through her then-husband, Bob Ward, who had produced most of Coyne's Virgin Records output. Krause had a voice better suited for opera, yet she chose rock and roll. She was perfect for Babble, as she had restraint, theatricality, and the ability to let loose a chillingly shrill scream whenever necessary.
They started touring the show in 1978 at various rock clubs around Britain. Curious about how this may have looked or sounded? Lucky for you, there is both footage of the show (in Berlin) from 1979 and a bootleg recording of a full performance, done at The Rock Garden (a Covent Gardens venue that is now an Apple store) from 1978. Both of these documents are interesting snapshots of Babble as it was worked out in real time and as it made the transition from live act to concept album. In Babble, the live act, monologues were very important. In earlier stages, like that heard in the bootleg, Coyne was the only one speaking, but as the show developed, both characters started to speak between songs, which can be witnessed in the video. Even when they had a conversation, they always stayed standing apart, separated by the empty air they refused to cross. And whenever the music began, one of them took the spotlight to sing, while the other danced or just idled in the semi-darkness.
The monologues are about watching; thinking; judging; screaming; sleeping; you and me; looking at the outside world as if it were some trick waiting to be played on you; intense self-hatred justified by a lack of love; and desperate longing for the love of a black hole. Because the spoken parts were improvised, they took on the cast of frantic thoughts, things one thinks and then is surprised that they were the kind of person who could think like that, when in fact they were the only person who could think like that. They're just as vague as the songs are in terms of actual events. They seem more to be an exercise in defining the terms of romance and systematically perverting them or removing their charm, leaving the audience with some sort of mangled and distended thing called “love”.
Initial reviews were mostly neutral, but all critics agreed that they didn't quite understand the point of it all. The emotional content of the show was easy enough to discern, but many were left at the end feeling like it didn't add up to anything. The main issue was that Babble was a love story emptied of all its stories. What was left were all the messy feelings, the half-started thoughts, and the movements—the movement of two hearts toward and away from one another, from themselves, and from the world. It wasn't really a show that was meant to be understood on the level of narrative. One is not supposed to wonder what these characters might do as a result of their feelings; rather, the questions are: why did they feel this way, and what was always pushing them further down?
If one thinks about the former question too seriously, they begin to think about the original inspiration of all of this: the Moors Murders. And that is exactly what the reporters at The Sun did when they caught wind that Babble was to be performed at the Theater Royal Stratford East. The performance, which was approved by a local government council, was slated to go on as planned until the Sun published an "exposé" about the fact that the program for the show explicitly said that Moors Murderers had been part of the inspiration. The Sun immediately interpreted this as Babble endorsing the murders and so published an article titled "MOORS MURDER SHOW STORM," which caused that same local council, who had approved the show before, fully aware of the program and what it said, to cancel the performance entirely. Coyne and Krause were briefly thrown into the media circus spotlight, where they repeatedly denied that their show was a glorification of Hindley and Brady. Speaking to a reporter, Coyne said, "Brady and Hindley seem to be gruesome examples of how far loneliness can make you resentful, but it's not just a story about them; it's about the dilemma of communicating and trusting people." This was not enough to change the public's perception, however, so Coyne was forced to take his show to Europe, where the show was more positively received, despite the language barrier. Audience members told Krause and Coyne that the feeling was palpable from their performance alone.
While they may not sound as distant from their roles as actors usually are, Krause and Coyne were definitely not the people they were singing as. Like Randy Newman, Coyne hoped his embodiment of these disturbed characters in the form of songs and lyrics would humanize rather than further demonize them. And maybe this is what the folks in Britain were afraid of—that "the most evil woman" in their country's modern history was, at the end of the day, just another person. The show was an acknowledgement that love by necessity has a reverse side that is always a part of it, something that people were still unwilling to admit in 1979, 10 years after "peace and love" fell through. The seductive format of a pop song combined with this kind of two-sided love can only result in ambiguity, but it is an ambiguity that we must confront rather than claiming that it doesn't exist or isn't worth talking about.
And it must be noted that the text of the work never makes explicit reference to the real-life inspirations. Instead, there are just a few details here and there (glorifying Hitler, drinking wine by the moors, killing a cat as a child) that merely give the protagonists a resemblance to, not a claim to the identity of, Hindley and Brady. Like Coyne said, the story was not just about them. They were important as a foundation for the characters's backgrounds and motivations, but beyond that, they didn't have much relevance at all. This could be why, when the song cycle was eventually recorded as an LP, the monologues, as well as any sort of background information, were left off. Without them, the songs become eerier from a complete lack of context or plot, and as a result, the album as a whole sits in an even foggier realm of interpretation.
Oh yeah, that's why we're here: to discuss the Babble LP from 1979! It took a second to get here, but we think it was quite important to go over the history of the work before delving into the recording proper, as it wasn't as simple of a process as writing, performing, then recording. Instead, the Babble that eventually made it to wax was shaped by controversy and continual rebirth through re-performance. Maybe it's because of all this that Babble sounds so sure of itself. Songs play one after another like a traditional pop album, but something constantly feels off, like our expectations are being played with. It makes no sense to go over this track-by-track; that's what listening to the album is for. Instead, we'd like to take a more abstract approach and compose a sort of emotional word painting for each of the record's two sides.
SIDE A: DESPERATION
They've become other people—monster people. Can't get out of bed, stumbling through life, hopelessly attached to themselves. The drunk is spiteful and mournful, brilliant and foolish, magnetic and repulsive all at once. I'm always untrusting unless it's from my mind. It's always his pushing and her pulling, just come down here, come down, a verse, a line, anything, I really love you, it's just hard to love you, I should leave you, I should keep my mind, I'll always have my mind, but she keeps on wanting, she'll believe the moon is made of cheese if he tells her its true, she wants her mind to be his and for his mind to be hers, for their mind to be theirs, if she can get him to her she may be able to pick him up, or maybe he can just drag her down, because without each other there is nothing, there is a black world full of monster people, but wait, let's just go dancing, let's get out of here and be alone together, it's just us in the disco. A rebirth? or a false restart? Eerie, disturbing, sad, but just come down here, you want to live, right? Live with me? No, I'm dead already, dying, sleeping, waking, sleepwalking. I just want my revenge, alone, alone, alone, but maybe we can join forces...
SIDE B: ACCEPTANCE?
What's the use of turning back? We made our choices, and now we know who we are. I knew you were a black hole, I knew I would be sucked inside, I knew that you would take me in and make me part of you, but why did you never try to be a part of me? I pleaded and pleaded and pleaded until my voice gave out, let's mean it this time, let's just try, we're happy, we're happy because we say we're happy, look at me, I love you and we are happy, now what was it you wanted to do? We can do anything, we are kissed by the sun and loved by God, we have our forebears behind us and our children in front, many people have lived and felt like us and they died for it, maybe we'll be different, let's just try, let's mean it this time, love is so right when it can be put to good use, are we finally one? We call it love so it is love, even if I can't touch you sometimes, what other people have is not real, the other people are the monsters, we are the normal people because we know who we are, we don't care who they are anymore, we don't care about anyone or anything, we have each other, and that is enough.
———
While not many people know about this album today, it hasn't been completely forgotten. Will Oldham, Mr. Bonnie "Prince" Billy himself, counts Babble as one of his absolute favorite records and even went as far as performing the album in its entirety (while clad in footy pajamas) as an opener to his live act in 2010. His Dagmar Krause, you ask? None other than Angel Olsen! Check out this video to see how different their show was from the original. [LINK] This is no longer a piece of theater; it's a tribute act. Divorced from their original context and performed straight, the songs are still just as emotionally potent, though, admittedly, some of that may be due to Olsen's natural talent.
Babble is beguiling. It is a testament to how one can use Pop to inflate emotions to the size of hot air balloons, allowing their tiny contours to be more easily seen. Photographs of the two artists grace the sparse backside of the LP, but the front, ostensibly a parody of a poster one would see for a stage show (maybe it was even used as an advertisement for the real production!), has two drawings instead. The drawings resemble Coyne and Krause, or maybe Brady and Hindley, though their hollow black eyes and simple faces make them look more like characters than real people. The drawings' neutral expressions, coupled with the bright pink text, uneven zigzagging lines, and TV static background, give the release an off-putting yet still beguiling aura. Other than this article and whatever you may find on the web, there's nothing else to build expectations upon, save for the sub-title on the back: "songs for lonely lovers."
Sources:
http://kevincoynepage.free.fr/BabbleArticles.html [huge repository of Babble ephemera and articles]
http://www.thislongcentury.com/will-oldham [Will Oldham on touring as the Babblers]
https://www.furious.com/perfect/coyne.html [overview of Coyne’s work]\
http://www.morgan-fisher.com/miniatures/2021/02/16/m1-48-kevin-coyne/ [Friend of Coyne looks back]
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/kevin-coyne-676188.html [Coyne’s obituary]