reviews of for all and none

the passage & how to get there

if it's a successful study in contrasts you're looking for, then the passage are definitely for you. on one hand there's accomplished multi-instrumentalist dick witts, 28, full featured and soberly groomed, happy to communicate but a careful chooser of his words. on the other there's untutored guitarist andy wilson, 16, a laconic mumbler with a sub-oakey sweep of black hair topping his slight frame, dressed in a tatty old suit bottomed out with almost ludicrously clumpy unpolished working boots.

appropriately enough the odd couple come from very different backgrounds. witts' past includes playing tympani for the halle orchestra, training as a composer in radical experimental music, and a stretch as merseyside's officer for music and dance.

witts was introduced to rock music by the fall. exasperated by the apparent futility of playing experimental music to uncomprehending audiences, he was struck especially by their honesty and directness. (ex-fall members tony friel and carl burns were early partners in the passage, which first saw the light of day in march 1978).

"the fall were very direct, very simple and very straight," witts recalls, "and i liked that. also they really are quite radical in their use of existing types of music-the way they assimilate it, the way it comes out is definitely the fall. also i like the way mark (smith) delivers the words. really strong. i love the fall - they really are exciting."

wilson, meanwhile, had joined his first band at the age of 13, raw schoolkids but also members of the manchester musicians collective which witts had started. they supported the passage a couple of times and when witts saw wilson again in another later band the upshot was an invitation to join.

"i couldn't actually play guitar at the time," he remembers. "the band i was in was supposed to be an improvised funk type thing and i just did little rhythmic bits in it. it didn't call for any ability at all but dick had seen me play guitar so he assumed i was a guitarist!"

with the help of other erstwhile members, two eps were released on the manchester independent label object music, followed by the critically acclaimed "pindrop" lp which witts now prefers to regard as a "preface".

working from the outside in, the band next formed their own label night and day (now manufactured and distributed by virgin) and with the help of now-departed drummer joey mckechnie, recorded two singles and the excellent current lp "for all and none".

easily among the frontrunners for album of the year in this writer's opinion, "for all and none" is a varied collection of melodic songs with both tension and depth plus lyrics that successfully avoid the twin pitfalls of either preaching propaganda or simply chanting a litany of problems. as the title of the opening song "dancing through dark times" suggests, they're like parables which make their uncomfortable point without doing your protesting for you.

critics - who are hot on words and ideas but mostly (self included) musically illiterate - have tended to assume that the music is simply a vehicle for the lyrics and made all kinds of wild claims and comparisons. witts, who writes both words and music, views these with a mixture of bewilderment and amusement.

"there's always the three things being worked on at the same time," he explains. "there's the music, there's the words and there's the structure. hopefully that's why the passage's songs never meander. if they ever do meander, it's deliberate - honest!"

structures are important to witts, and passage music is full of deliberate undercurrents and recurring themes (both lyrical and musical) which gives them an overall unity.

eleven, for instance, is the important number for "for all and none". there are eleven pictures on the sleeve and eleven songs on the album. also on the sleeve is a pentatonic scale with eleven notes, whose inverted curve shape also corresponds to the flow of fear and hope - the key words for the album - through the songs, and so forth. if this sounds like bad news, the good news is that it's so skilfully done that you wouldn't notice it unless you looked for it.

despite the fact that the lyrics contain outspoken statements about controversial topics like british troops in ulster and manchester's bible-bashing chief constable john anderton as well as dealing with more general oppression, socialist witts and anarchist wilson are very reluctant to talk about specifics. perhaps it's wishing to avoid further misrepresentation but they clearly prefer to take refuge behind statements about how it's not the time to write nice escapist songs any more.

would they describe themselves as political animals?

"politics is our relationship with other people," witts offers. "it's social-it's the way we organise our lives with other people."

"everything you do has political repercussions in some way," wilson continues. "we don't ignore it."

"that's the difference," agrees witts. "generally music is a tool of repression i think. certainly a tool of escapism, which seems to me the same thing. it's a safety valve and worries me."

music, witts opines, is philosophy in sound, and a means of liberation as words are a means of deception.

wincing somewhat at such off-putting clichés as "repression" and "liberation" - especially as they sit so ill with the skilful lyrics and sublime music on the album - i ask whether they feel that music, to update marx, isn't the new opiate of the people?

"it's used like that," wilson answers, "but it has the potential to heighten the consciousness, to inspire thoughts in people, as opposed to removing the need to think. it has that potential - that's what we're trying to realise."

"music is something that connects the physical and mental sides of our lives in a much strange way than any other creative act," witts concludes. "music can't create a revolution but it can ask the right questions."

ian cranna

witts (left), the socialist, and wilson, the anarchist.
"music is a tool of repression, certainly escapism..."

the face, october 1981