Frankmusik

1

  IT'S ALL ABOUT FRANKMUSIK
 
 
Why shouldn’t there be an intensely neurotic, glamorous, electroavid, self edited, self-selected, self-focussed, madly dedicated new pop star who arrives – with a wham bam thank you mam - on the scene:

a/ Very aware there may not be such a thing as a scene anymore, what with the way things are changing, and the internet and everything, and no one really sure anymore what a record company is, or whether the album as we knew it is dead, and whether there can be a Top of the Pops/Smash Hits type pop star in a world where there is no Top of the Pops and no Smash Hits. . . so he’ll make up his own scene, using his fired up imagination, in much the same way that art crazed, high minded, perfectionist pop stars used to do in the 20th century, only he’ll do it with the post computer, post networking, post compact disc, post MTV,  commercially crushed 21st century in mind.

b/ Who has the unsmiling, deep thinking, slightly scary, faintly tongue in cheek look of a love child of Rimbaud and Verlaine if they’d been fans of the John Foxx of Ultravox, the David Sylvian of Ghosts, the Bjork of the Sugercubes, the antics of the Beastie Boys, the strategies of Beck, the Radiohead of Creep, the Suicide of Suicide and – let’s not underestimate this part of Frankmusik’s lust for life, love and the perfect pop song in whatever sticky, ludicrous form – the Captain Sensible of Glad It’s All Over.

c/ Who’s not afraid, in fact he demands it, to talk in his interviews about fear, loneliness and anxiety, to bemoan the mediocrity of an audience that puts up with dreary cloth cap boy bands, kookie girl singers in feeble shop bought beehives, and syrupy autotuned to death r&b clones, and who’s not ashamed to say things like “I’m not selling out by making shiny, epic pop records about love and desperation for people to fall in love with. I’m just getting ahead. It’s my job to get ahead.” He also says things like “life, whatever that is” and “this thing we call the present” and “I don’t call them relationships, I call them relationshits”, in such a way that you remember how charming and refreshing it is to come across a would be pop star who has a certain kind of morbid, superior, sensation-seeking ambition. “What’s the point in doing anything by half?” he’ll announce with a look that suggests sleep is a waste of time, he means business, that he’s talking to himself but you can listen if you want, he’s on a mission, he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, its important to set the record straight, he can be a green eyed monster and so what, he’s got more than you bargained for, he’s got a lot on his mind, a lot to get done, a lot to make happen, he’s got to figure himself out, he doesn’t know when, and where, to stop and boys just want to have fun, and he always thought he should be treated like a star, and pop music isn’t over yet, because he hasn’t had his time, and he’s ready for his close up, and he thinks in 7 inch vinyl, with a 12 inch remix or two, and an album that tells a true two sided story about his musical mind, his anxious secrets, his total boldness and his craving for attention.

d/ Who was born in 1985, which means he was 14 in 1999, and brought up listening to his mothers record collection, so that he talks about pop music from before and just after he was born as if it has an alien, remote, slightly disorientating quality even if it is by the Doobie Brothers, Billy Ocean or Stevie Winwood. So he’s an electric boy who embraces the future, even if it’s a future that was being glimpsed in the past by Depeche Mode, Soft Cell and Fad Gadget, and he also matter of factly relishes the surreal glory sizzling across the sonic surface of the Electric Light Orchestra. “My favourite group. I first heard them in my mums car as we were driving to my nans in Addington Hills,” – a park located in Upper Shirley, Croydon – “ and it was Evil Woman and it was the first time I had ever heard treated strings. A whole orchestra turned into an effect! Then I heard Mr Blue Sky, and that blew my mind. Their Elderado album is their least known, but it is the most pioneering pop, and it has the kind of epic quality I love.” So he goes all gooey, and this isn’t to say he hasn’t got a tough side, when he talks about the soft centred sentimental west coast pop of Bread, but he also seriously rates the glittering Sheffield melodrama of ABC.  He gets as excited about Chicago’s Street Player as he does about MARR’s Pump Up The Volume, He can enthuse about Earth Wind and Fire’s September and love Whitney Houston, but also be a fan of Prefuse 73 and Masta Ace. He can jump as a listener from the Police to Boards of Canada and talk about Dire Straits and Busta Rhymes as if the only difference between one and the other is not their assumed coolness, or non-coolness, but the fact they speak a different language, and both in the end say the same sort of things, about love, sex, money and the time of day or night. “I hate the idea of splitting music into genres, as if you can only like a certain type of music because it is in your favoured genre. What the music I love has in common is that it works not because it is in a particular genre but because its great pop produced in an inventive way. I don’t want to belong to a particular genre, because that seems to reduce what I do. I make pop as fantastically as I can for people who like fantastic pop of whatever style and however they hear it, buy it and play it. ”

e/ Who’s one of those working class/public school dj/remix/producer behind the scenes whiz kids creating a brand based around his own body, sense of rhythm and ego - the type Madonna likes to musically mate with -   who’s rode BMX bikes, flirted with the Beat Box, been to drama school, studied fashion and sculpture, mashed up Missy Eliot and Vangelis in his bedroom, but he doesn’t want to stay in the conceptual shadows, like Daft Punk or Basement Jaxx, because, “I don’t want to be in the background. I want to be the front man. I want to be an entertainer. Whatever happens in the world, as we went from theatre to radio to tv to cinema to pop, as technology and fashions and centuries changed, there’s always been a place for the entertainer. I want to show that with my music I do it all. And here I am you can see me do it all. This is the project – Frankmusik – and I am the face of the project. I’m not going to hide.”  

f/ Who has a love for eccentric, complicated Englishmen, the nutters, the crazed vain ones that suffered for their art, for their entertainment, who went through pain and anguish to be different, and his list goes from Tolkien to Tommy Cooper, from Joe Orton to Kenneth Williams. Who has a love for the spirit thieving Simon Cowell, because he’s making things so bad eventually there has to be a correction – there always is – and if pop music is getting so bad, so weak, so lacking, so desperately removed from the strangeness and mystery that pop should be, so  X Factored, where you can’t tell the show from the commercials, then imagine how striking and avant it’s going to be when the reaction comes. Imagine how ferociously futuristic it’s going to be when the anti-Leona arrives, when the monstrous Il Divo’s and the chimney sweep talent show dancers crumble into miserable dust. Vincent of Frankmusik licks his lips at the thought of what must come because Cowell and Co. have turned pop into such a factory of banality, at the magnificent rebellion that must surely follow this period of obedience, and he might yet play the role of the ruthless assassin in whatever downfall finally obliterates Cowell’s pop power.

g/ Who uses his audition – when asked why is he so important, what qualifications has he got to be a pop star – not to be nice, to demonstrate how he will do what he’s told, and be a good boy, and sing what he’s given, and follow the hair, costume and make up guidance of his mentors, and join in with the marketing onslaught without admitting to his own culpability in the commercial production, but to admit that “I think too much. I’m emotionally paranoid. I’m a complete ego-narcissistic maniac. I don’t write music when I’m happy because I’m happy. When I’m happy all I can do is be happy. I write music when I’m angry about something. It all gets inside the music I make. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but that’s the way it is. I’m infatuated with the 1980s – it’s so long ago, but somehow so near – but I wouldn’t want to live there. I just like to visit and bring things back with me that I can use in my music. I want to be a pop star at a time when the idea of the pop star is perhaps on the verge of being a little dated, but on the other hand the kind of pop stars I always loved were infatuated with the future, and I can still see a future where pop stars are important. I want to be a pop star not to be famous but because to be a pop star is better than being merely famous. And then I can go really wild.”


h/ Who calls his debut album Complete Me, because he’s honest enough to admit that the record is all about him, it’s all his own work, it’s the complete him, me, me, me, all his dynamic insecurity and resounding self-confidence as seen from his point of view, in the great tradition of the great self centred self advertising pop stars  – however many collaborators and colleagues are involved, it’s all about him making himself up for a world that may or may not care, and turning that risk into sound, for better or worse. It’s called Complete Me, because he needs listeners, lots of them, as many as he can round up considering that the pop world’s going through this big change that no one really talks about. He needs fans and the adoring many to complete him. He wants to get inside you, so he needs you to be there. And Frankmusik say:  have it my way.