Throwing Muses, particularly Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly meant a lot, and led to a lot. For sure, it segued into a whole discovery of East Coast alt rock, but more than that was part of a catharsis that made music much more real.
Despite bands like The Smiths, by the mid 80’s it had all somehow turned into entertainment for me – safe pop music on Top of the Pops. The performers were plastic and ‘other’ – not like us ordinary people. After the Muses, it was real people in airless concert halls; smell the sweat and love it.
The cause of this epiphany was no single song. Throwing Muses been going for a while already, but like the adverts for holidays in Ireland, this was how I discovered them. Others might disagree but I didn’t even find huge stand-out tracks in Hunkpapa.
Compared to others in their canon, the production is weedy and over-lush at the same time and frankly sucks. The essential factor, the thing that made it like a hit off a crack pipe, was the way that the writing pulls worms and wires from Kristin’s living psyche. This level of complexity forced its way into my mind so that I had to keep going back to try and solve it, if that makes any sense at all. The ‘it’, the puzzle, was more than just words; it was the whole thing, the performance, all of it vomited up in my face. Of course, much has been written since about Kristin’s bi-polar condition and her overwhelming and compulsive need to get the music out of her. Her book ‘Rat Girl’ is revelatory, I had no idea at the time of the barely controllable need to get this music out of her self, but it all makes sense. What a curse and what a blessing. There she was pulling debris out of a well, for me and a thousand others to try to make something of it. In ‘Fall Down’ for instance Kristin sings “I showed this girl my stitches, she said she had some too”. Even served with this, I still didn’t quite get how raw all this material really was. At the risk of appearing boy-band incoherent, all I knew was that it somehow moved me.
A huge part of this whole equation was a punching realisation that this rock music, that had me by the nuts, was coming out of the hearts and minds and mics and electric guitars of women. Like a new continent, I had discovered and found that I loved the voice of literate female rock music. Loved it to such an extent that these days I find it hard to be enthused by yet another lad-fronted indie band, even if they’re called Arctic Monkeys or Oasis or something.
The funny is that at the time I had the firmly fixed idea that the Muses were global huge, easily as big in my mind as say, The Smiths or Nirvana. I understand now, with the benefit of hindsight, that maybe they weren’t quite such globe striding colossi, but to me and my musical awakening, they were right up there. Maybe that’s a whole subject for debate, the influence of alternative bands like the Muses, often much more influential than is ever realised at the time, like underwater mountains affecting the weather.
A few years later, Tanya was off, first with Belly then later on her own. The slow fuse lit in me was such that before long I was dragging myself and at times my family to places like ULU to fuel the now fully fledged need to be in the front row. It took years longer before before I saw Kristin, way after the Muses became just one of three or furrows she was ploughing and her solo stuff was garnering the plaudits. I love Throwing Muses. I have to love them because of the way that they have become part of my psyche and part of me.
