Paul Morley Deconstructs an Entire Album of Silence

I want to make a personal confession. Every day, when dusk comes, when the gloaming visits, bringing its promise of illicit pleasure in the alleys of northern towns with vital independent music scenes, I look up from my desk and say — allowing myself a wry chuckle as I do — “Hello darkness, my old friend”. I say this out loud but it is said to no-one because no-one is with me. I work alone, at the coal face of literature and criticism, extracting truth with my pen as I so ardently wish my ancestors had extracted coal from England’s dark, satanic mills. In fact, they were slave traders to a man. I greet the darkness and I laugh at my words, my laughter punctuating the silence that envelopes me as silence must envelope anyone who seeks to find meaning in the practice and appreciation of art. I hear this silence. I hear my words in this silence and I’m drawn irrevocably back to Simon & Garfunkel’s pre-post-punk classic “Sound of Silence”.

The problem, of course, with “Sound of Silence” was that it was not actually the real sound of silence. It was the sound of two hippies playing haunting, quasi-medieval, folk-inspired pop music. This is part of the charm of the song — the possibility, both terrifying and magical, of actual silence — but it is also where it falls short. Far better to make a long-playing record consisting entirely of silence, a record that captures the places in-between, the things unsaid, the reconciliation never brought about because Trevor Horn stopped replying to your emails and then pretended he’d changed his address. Luckily, Italian label Alga Marghen has done exactly what I told them to do (in my mind) and has released an album of silent or mostly silent tracks.

Crucially, the record features Crass’ searing indictment of 1970s British record pressing plant workers, “Sound of Free Speech”, which, in its all-encompassing silence, replaced a song thought to be blasphemous by the unwitting agents of this nation-state’s all-seeing, all-censoring elite. The sound of free speech is, after all, the sound of silence because free speech in this world of jackboot-wearing fascists and Greenwald-harassing apparatchiks is an oxymoron. The only time I feel able to truly speak freely is within the pages of my newspaper and magazine columns, in the books I write, on television documentaries about post-punk, on online vignettes about the importance of pop, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in the comfort of my own home, in the dales and valleys of the north of England with my pack of pure-bred Whippets, in the house of my close personal friend Peter Hook, outside Trevor Horn’s house when I’m pleading to be let in, on the tram, on the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage, at the butcher’s, in church, at the local Indie disco, outside Trevor Horn’s private members club and on the highways and byways of this island. So, as you can see, Morley is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

The LP also features choice cuts from ex-Beatle and deceased popular music icon John Lennon, funk and soul pioneers Sly & the Family Stone, dyslexic hip-hop giant Afrika Bambaataa, post-modern transportation obsessives Orbital and white-haired pop art deity Andy Warhol. Yves Klein, inventor of silence as music, is of course represented but there’s no place for the entry-level appropriator of silence, John Cage. A good thing too, as Cage’s presence would have shown this record up as a gimmick when in fact each track explores the true and vital essence of silence. If a tree falls in the wood and no-one is there to hear it, then it makes a sound. But if a record of pure silence plays on a turntable and someone is there to hear it, then it makes the purest sound of all, it makes the sound of humanity re-finding itself in the word unsaid, the noise unmade. For, in a world populated by trolls and ambulance chasers, rabble rousers and soapbox preachers, to sit back and say only the things you are asked to say on BBC 4 explorations of the importance of Magazine or The Durutti Column, is to say something meaningful. And when I write, “something meaningful”, I mean “nothing”. And when I write “nothing”, I mean “silence”. And when I write “silence” I am brought to the limits of ecstatic thought, raised above a cloud of meaning I didn’t realise existed outside the old docks of Liverpool, the chip markets of Pontefract and the flat cap emporiums of Burnley.

As an old man reminded us in the magisterial Irish bromance (I say “bromance” because the film is a romance between a man and silence, and silence is a man, as in, “the strong silent type”) “Silence”, “Whenever you sing a song, the first note comes out of silence and the last note, when you finish, falls back into silence. And they say that, however many songs you sing, there’s no cure for silence”. During my long and illustrious life I have tried many cures for silence – noise cancelling Bose earphones, the terrifying racket of Slayer in their pomp, a mixture of barbiturates and dog food biscuits I called “Paul’s gold” – but I have come to realise that no music, not even the music of Joy Division, can compete with the profundity that a really good silence gives you. The future of listening is listening hard…to nothing, and everything, at all.

As told to Oscar

Follow Oscar on Twitter @oscarrickettnow

Paul Morley Deconstructs the New David Bowie Video