Nocturnal Butterfly: My Tulpa: How Post-punk Improved My Vocabulary

Whilst looking at my book shelf yesterday, my eyes were drawn to a book I own that I haven't read since I first finished it straight after purchasing it back in 2009: a biography of the Post-punk band, Magazine by Helen Chase. Flicking through its pages I read a page where the band's vocalist and superb lyricist, Howard Devoto, was discussing how he had come up with the idea for the song, 'My Tulpa.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_AEpDOuWk8

And almost immediately, I recalled how very much I admire this song, and had from that very first instant become fascinated by the word 'Tulpa,' a word that until then (it was about 1990, I would guess, when I bought the album it's on, Real Life, my first Magazine CD), I had never actually seen or heard of. For some reason it then immediately got me reminiscing about how exciting it was, back in my formative years, to discover words such as this, and, obviously not having Google immediately to hand, having to go and seek out their meaning in a dictionary.

The meaning of the word Tulpa (sadly, from Google, not my old dictionary):

A tulpa is a being or entity believed to be created through visualization and focused will, often described as a thought-form or an imaginary friend that gains sentience and independence. The concept originates from Tibetan Buddhism, but has also become a popular idea in internet communities where individuals create and interact with tulpas as independent mental companions.

I loved discovering this fascinating and eerie concept, and the strange lyric of the song made slightly more sense for me knowing it. But it's also reminded me just how much I learnt about language and literature from those Post-punk bands that I first immersed myself in when I was 18/19. As usual, I was pretty much completely out of step with my contemporaries and the popular musical culture of the time. This was the beginning, then rapid growth and then near saturation of indie and Madchester, and apart from my idols, James (who were so much more than just indie), in the main, I couldn't stand it. It was almost all exclusively guitar based, synth-free, it possessed lyrical drivel, ("Have you seen my polar bear? It's that white thing over there. I've never had one of those," went one particularly dreadful one by The Charlatans), politically disengaged, and seemed a very dumbed-down, southern middle-class tabloid media notion of working class culture. The more this scruffy, stoner culture became all engulfing, the more I escaped to the past. The first Post-punk band I loved were Simple Minds, and although their high-Post-punk days were behind them at this point, their back catalogue was a joy to behold, and it was through reading an interview with singer Jim Kerr that I first discovered Magazine, who Kerr namechecked in an interview and who later described them as being a big influence during Simple Minds' formative years. I still have that interview and the whole quote is quite interesting:

"Critics say we're Moderne lads with silly eye mascara, making pointless cold music - all alienated and everything. I should fucking well think we do feel alienated, coming from the Gorbals where, if you aren't totally into football and girls, there's something really the matter with you - and where it's really difficult for you to get involved with anything like music... I wish there was a decent genre, as much as I don't like them, for bands like Roxy, Magazine and us."
- Jim Kerr of Simple Minds

These recollections have had me thanking the stars that I had artists such as Simple Minds and Magazine in those days, as while most of my friends were taking vast amounts of drugs and becoming increasingly monosyllabic, probably in no small part aided and abetted by the lowest common denominator lyrics of the baggy, indie landfill bands they were losing their minds over, my attention was most definitely elsewhere, and these Post-punk pioneers not only sounded fabulous, but were also like a pre-University education in themselves. For as well as the highly literate lyrics, the entire aesthetic was artistic and sharp-minded, more post-war European than blissed out American psychedelia, and as well as discovering fascinating new words and ideas through them, authors such as Dostoevsky and J.G. Ballard also entered my world, as did the Bauhaus design museum and the philosophy of Existentialism.

- Gang of Four single,
'I Love a Man in a Uniform'

It's fascinating to me to recall how the more that The Stone Roses dirge, 'Fools Gold', or 'Step On' by The happy Mondays reverberated everywhere I went when I was out in public areas, on my headphones I had the likes of The Comsat Angels and, of course, Magazine sound-tracking and educating my mind during each and every step. Here are some of the words and ideas that I first learned through the Post-punk bands that I was avidly listening to, back in 1989/90, when I was still a very young man.

'Cacophany':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iD8HICmmqE

This strange word first crossed my path as a piece of music and part of the title on Simple Minds' second album, Reel to Real Cacophony (1979). It also later surfaced on the James song 'God Only Knows' (I told you they weren't boring indie beigists!), and it wasn't the only word that I learned from that early Simple Minds album either, as there was also another track on it, called...

'Veldt':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fZ3DloZvhE

On Simple Minds' next album, my favourite of theirs and an unquestionable masterpiece, Empires and Dance, one that had me scratching my head was a track entitled, 'Kant Kino'. This word, infuriatingly, wasn't in the dictionary and it wasn't until many years later that I discovered it was the name of an arty cinema in Berlin. I did, however, on opening my Pearls Encyclopaedia, having found nothing in the dictionary, discover that there had been a German philosopher called Immanuel Kant, even though the song had nothing to do with him.

- Kant Kino Cinema, Berlin, 1980

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD8PIOQo8Po

As mentioned, Simple Minds had led me on to Magazine, and as well as the already mentioned 'Tulpa', I very soon discovered a few other words via them which fascinated my eager mind and imagination. Little did I realise it but the first one had connotations of murder, and potential government cover-ups, as I was to discover.

'Motorcade':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xadpwqooMv4

It's funny how a song can take hold of your imagination or world view, as, to this day, whenever newsreel footage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is shown or discussed, along with the possibility that it was an inside job by the CIA, the mere mention of the assassination and/or the motorcade that he was travelling in immediately reminds me of this extraordinary song. And what should be a pretty standard, descriptive term is now forever linked with secrecy and tragedy, as is the next one, especially given the heart-breaking fact of global warming that may make what it describes actually a thing of history, like the dinosaurs:

'Permafrost':

This has always been a controversial Magazine song, due to its lyrical content, but when I saw them live in 2009 and Devoto changed the lyric, "I will drug you and fuck you, on the Permafrost," to, "I will drug you and fuck you, on what's left of the Permafrost," it added a strange poignancy to what is already a Hauntology-drenched, mysterious song. And by the way, concerned readers, that lyric is anything but a sadistic male fantasy, which is what Devoto has sometimes been accused of, by music journalists who really don't know better and who should take a bit more time listening to the entire song before shooting their mouths off. Devoto explains, "The song started from the line 'I will drug you and fuck you' and evolved from there. It's supposed to be tender really. Trying to find a little pleasure, a little something, in a very difficult world."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ2pDwbyxTc

Over time, I then discovered and fell in love with many more fascinating Post-punk bands, including Joy Division, The Pop Group, Gang of Four, Echo & the Bunnymen, among others, and then happily discovered that a few contemporary artists were now wearing their love and influence of those late 70s/early 80s bands on their sleeves. U2 released the Berlin recorded Achtung Baby in 1991, which of course meant I had to go and discover what "Achtung" meant (it's 'attention' in German), and the Manic Street Preachers released what remains one of the greatest albums ever recorded, The Holy Bible, in 1994, and which had words in the lyrics which I am still deciphering to this very day ("Zaprudau," "Lagerstrasse," "Shalom," "Horthys," just for starters). This, along with most Post-punk, was music that either presumed you were intelligent enough to understand it, or would at least have the curiosity and be interested enough to delve further and find out more about these subjects yourself. I certainly feel that this is one of the main reasons why this music means so much to me and has struck me on such a deep level. Music that takes real attention to listen to and is rewarding for that very reason, is always going to have a deeper resonance than the blank nothings that are the lyrical content of the indie bands that were so popular at the time.

And I'm really pleased that I made this connection yesterday, as it has reminded me just how valuable those artists were, and still are, in many cases, in encouraging me to listen to music not only for enjoyment, but also for the enrichment of my mind and soul. And in those days of blanket indiedom in the 90s, where it seemed all the airways were taken up with their out of tune droning and dumbed-down lyrics, these Post-punk artists offered me an escape route in my imagination to a richer, more philosophical world that I was deeply interested in exploring. And I can still, in the autumn and winter, and early spring months, often be found, wearing my long coat as I have done since I was 19/20, strolling by the sea on grey, misty days, headphones on my ears, savouring the sounds and words of these tremendous artists. And, incredibly, their bleak, post-industrial sound and razor-sharp lyrical outlook has even more relevance now than it did back then. Which is quite terrifying, actually.