Flesh Guitar

PERFORMANCE NOTES

Bob Arnold reviews a Jenny Slade gig and decides she’s the Po-Mo queen of the guitar.

The Club Tutto, Milan: a converted small arms factory on a hot September night in the early nineties. Jenny Slade and the latest incarnation of the Flesh Guitars bounce on to the stage, an all-girl, drummerless line-up; girls who look part punkette, part pagan. They wave encouragingly at the audience, then each picks up a guitar from the stands on the edge of the stage. They strap them on. There’s the noise of jack plugs being slid into sockets, of volume and tone controls being whirled, the static of pickup selector switches being moved, the sighing of a wah wah pedal being pumped.

The audience, a thousand or so hot-blooded souls, is all anticipation, and the apparently slow start only adds to its eagerness, its readiness and willingness to be entertained. Still, the band continue to fiddle with their instruments and equipment. Amp settings are adjusted, effects boxes are switched on and off. Sometimes there’s hiss, sometimes buzz, sometimes a suggestion of muted feedback, of a sort of ambient reverb; but there is nothing remotely resembling music. No guitar is strummed, no chord is played, certainly nobody attempts anything resembling a guitar solo. The audience experience and show a little restlessness, but still the girls of the Flesh Guitars continue flicking dials and knobs, making endless minute adjustments. And then suddenly the audience gets it.

They realize they are listening to the sound, not of music, but of the conditions that make music possible, the sound of electricity, of signal to noise ratios, to the imperfections of circuitry, to interference.

After half an hour or so the whole audience is completely rapt, is in complete awe. Someone says, in unaccented English, loud enough for others to hear, ‘Lord have mercy, Jenny Slade and the Flesh Guitars are forcing us to wholly redefine our conceptions both of music and of performance.’

The show continues for three hours or so in much the same way, gathering majesty and grandeur as it progresses, or rather fails to progress, after which the Flesh Guitars receive a fifteen-minute standing ovation and, despite much pleading, decline to come back for an encore.

The performance, untitled at the time, is now universally known as Totally Tutto. It exists in at least three recorded versions. All have merit, but connoisseurs find the Milanese rendering far and away the best.

Reprinted from the Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 6 Issue 9