Shake a tail feather
Composer and polemicist Annette Peacock had to fly across the Atlantic to fully reveal herself. By Jim Irvin.
“Her breathy voice, a blend of Dusty and Peggy Lee.”
IT’S SO TOUGH to pin down what Annette Peacock does, I’ve rewritten this column three times – so please take everything I’m about to say with a pinch of salt! Born in 1941, Peacock was a seasoned practitioner in the New York jazz avantgarde by the time she moved to London in the late ’70s. She’d also been a pioneer of electronic music, with second husband Paul Bley, an early adopter of the Moog synthesizer, using it to distort and colour her singing voice as early as 1969. She is reportedly the person who turned David Bowie onto electronic music (and may have introduced him to her friend, pianist Mike Garson), while they were both signed to RCA. She made the hip I’m The One there in 1972, just after The Paul Bley Synthesizer
Show, an album entirely comprising her compositions. (Bley had form for this:
Barrage in 1965 was composed by his previous wife, Carla Bley.) In the future she’d make records that have elements of chamber music, opera, and musique concrète; her output is essentially category-free, though rooted in the mood of jazz. On a brace of albums for the curious Aura label, now reissued by Sundazed, she crafted rock and funk grooves as the basis for stream-ofconsciousness lyrics, sometimes sung, sometimes intoned like a sleepy sermon.
For X-Dreams HHHH (Aura/Sundazed) her second LP, recorded in London and released in 1978, she mothballed the synth and the free jazz and used the current cream of session musicians – among them rock guitarists Mick Ronson and Chris Spedding, drummers Bill Bruford and John Halsey and sax player George Kahn – to conjure candid ruminations about sexual politics. My Mama Never Taught Me How To Cook utilises a languid funk which Peacock wails over like Betty Davis: “I’m not good at the wheeling, not much better at the dealing, but I’m a fantastic ride.” Then she caps it with “Hey man, my destiny is not to serve/I’m a woman, my destiny is to create.” The 11-minute Real & Defined Androgens is reminiscent of Roxy Music’s The Bogus Man, a mid-tempo groove rolled around and around while it becomes increasingly noisy and frenetic, Peacock’s seductive speak-sing delivery gently turning up the heat.
Her breathy singing voice – like a blend of Dusty Springfield and Peggy Lee – is featured on the mellower second side for This Feel Within and gorgeous Too Much In the Skies, where her lyrical piano playing really connects. A sleazy, reharmonised crack at
Elvis’s Don’t Be Cruel is akin to one of John Cale’s vaguely irreverent revisits. I recall this appearing as a single in 1978 and it feeling completely at odds with what was happening at the time, but all the more weirdly exotic for it.
The following year’s companion piece,
The Perfect Release HHHH (Aura/Sundazed) is funkier musically, more ambivalent lyrically. “Life’s hopeful between the thighs,” she sighs on The Succubus, though on Love’s Out To Lunch she notes, “There’s more to love than the balling.” American Sport is scathing about capitalism, the reggaetinged Rubber Hunger appears to be about someone addicted to sex toys, and on lengthy, slapbass closer Survival she casts herself as a distaff Gil Scott-Heron speaking of personal revolution. “All leaders are opportunists… drawn by the cry of a multitude,” she declares.
These idiosyncratic albums, long out of print on vinyl, come in handsome new editions, mastered at Third Man, pressed on lurid coloured vinyl, and, in the case of X-Dreams, with added sleevenotes. Still unclassifiable, their unique spirit and mesmerising mood holds up very well.