Reviews

Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem by Benjamin Piekut

thecommonswings's review

5.0

First of all, I appreciate that reading this as someone whose music education ends at piano grade 3 is like someone reading a book of film theory with no knowledge of the finer points of that medium. Having said that, Piekut is so good a writer that this doesn’t honestly matter that much at all. I skimmed through the heavy theory bits that obviously necessitated some knowledge of how music works, but still managed to get the thrust of his argument. This has always been my high watermark of academic writing: some jargon is inescapable because it essentially is about precision, locating an idea in a very focused and not generalised manner. And when Piekut uses jargon it’s for precision purposes not for showing off. And as such it’s remarkably similar to how the story of Henry Cow unfolds

Because Piekut as a writer has a humanity that in several tellings of this story the band sorely lacked. Henry Cow seems to be a band so focused on their vision of equality and political activism in theory that in practice they miss, you know, actually being able to talk to each other. There’s several ironies here: Frith being surprisingly horny, but probably unaware of actual communication within the band; the theoretical feminist stance of the band running counter to how they actually treated the women in the band being but two. In many ways it’s a very sad story of a band being so hyper focused they can’t actually appreciate the humanity in their music

But despite all this, Henry Cow and their many later incarnations and splinter formations and related bands have produced music that is literally sui generis (see, I can do jargon as well) and this book absolutely celebrates this. But it’s also a very human book that deals with these strange people with a great deal of love and affection. And as an academic work it’s also brilliant at placing the story in a wider context. It’s a stunning book