11. Derek Bailey & Joelle LeandreNo Waiting
That was a stage further from Fred Frith, it’s the most extreme freeform… basically I stopped playing guitar after listening to Derek Bailey, only because I realised that that kind of wildness only comes from an intimate knowledge of the instrument. It’s a very weird record because sometimes you can listen to it and sometimes you can’t – it just sounds like nonsense. You have waypoints with the guitar, you have Hendrix and I’d like to add Derek Bailey on there because he’s pushed it as far as it can go at the expense of melody and all the things that we expect guitars to have. He’s chucked them all away and gone for absolute dissonance and I don’t really know what. I went to see him a few times, and one of the funniest things was he started a piece and then halfway through he just shook his head and stopped, because it wasn’t working. The internal logic to what he’s doing, nobody else was the wiser. Sometimes it sounds like a guitar being thrown down the stairs, and to allow for that is a point in music you have to have, someone has to do that. Everybody else is doing slightly less than that. Sometimes you do just laugh and turn it off.
