Pluckin' A

The death of Cardiacs frontman Tim Smith, a couple of days ago, came as a real shock and I’m still trying to find a way of putting the words together.

I’ve read some beautiful words about Tim in the last few days, many from those who actually knew him, and although I feel I have no hope of adding anything genuinely new, I know that I should at least try – because Tim is one of my greatest musical heroes. 

I’m listening to the 1989 Cardiacs album On Land and In the Sea as I type this, perhaps in the hope that this obituary piece might turn into a magical stream of bizarre compositional genius in the manner Tim might have created in musical notes. But I know that won’t be happening – because Tim was, unquestionably, utterly unique. No-one else on earth writes like he did, and we will never see his like again. Flashes of his influence can be seen far and wide, but I doubt even the most fervently Cardiacs-inspired musicians would ever actually profess to be “like Cardiacs” – acknowledging their influence is one thing, but it seems a sort of unspoken rule that no-one is truly “like Cardiacs” and to those of us who love their music, to suggest otherwise is sacrilegious.

Tim Smith was a musical mind that I find almost impossible to make sense of. I remember my first exposure to the masterpiece that is 1996’s double Cardiacs album Sing to God, and it became my favourite album pretty well instantly. I can’t see that it will ever be replaced. As I listened, I was struck by the incredible breadth and expansiveness of the compositional technique and the sense that, stylistically, it was totally unclassifiable and absolutely nothing was off the table – and, more than anything, the way it was often so incredibly complex and intense but never, at any point, seemed to be reading from the same playbook as any of the other complex and intense music I knew.

When we think of highly elaborate rock music, the typical image is perhaps prog-rock. Long-form compositions, often very ‘schooled’ musicianship and, even speaking as quite a prog fan, it can seem a bit po-faced – and when not done well, it leans into being uncomfortably pretentious. Cardiacs are the absolute opposite of all that. For a start, Smith’s lyrics are not of this earth – particularly in the later stages of his active career, when they were often cut together from various disparate sources, absurdist to the core and very intentionally disjointed. Usually cloaked in ambiguity, the words were intriguing to many – but were also frequently derided as outright nonsensical. And as for the notes themselves… Sing to God is best described as a vast journey through all that is sublime, and ridiculous, in music. There’s beautiful simplicity to be found in places, but then other parts are head-spinningly, mind-bogglingly difficult, bizarre and (here’s that word again) absurd. All of the above is delivered with a sense of gleeful abandon and no pretension whatsoever. Tim Smith was the opposite of pretentious. Everyone who knew him says that, personality-wise, his music was just an extension of him. It’s absolutely authentic.

As far as I know, Tim wasn’t a ‘schooled’ musician. He wrote his compositions out in notation, but was self-taught in doing so. He once said “I had no idea; the tunes just happened, they just come out of my stupid head.” People have since analysed some of the music and found various compositional traits which pop up time and again in his writing, many of which are very interesting and have seen him compared to leftfield 20th century classical composers such as Olivier Messaien. The staple Cardiacs diet of tonally ambiguous, faintly unsettling but unfailingly melodic chord progressions, frequent use of hemiola, rhythmic displacement and odd time signatures, notable affinity for the Lydian mode and the whole-tone scale, as well as the masterly orchestration and production, lends the music an otherworldliness that makes it incredibly distinctive – some common threads which tie together the band’s otherwise freakishly diverse, multi-faceted sound. And while he might have been happy that people cared enough to work that out, I suspect Tim probably wouldn’t have given much of a toss about any of it. He was a virtuosic composer (without ever consciously acknowledging it) but it seems as though he just wrote the way that he wrote. That ranged from almost nursery rhyme simplicity, through blissfully strange melodic pop, to the kind of thing that a troupe of deranged Satanic clowns would have written in a conscious effort to be as difficult as possible.

That’s not even to speak of the Sing to God track ‘Dirty Boy’, often seen as the most astonishing piece of music Cardiacs ever released… and probably the high water mark of all recorded music, for me at least. And avowed Cardiacs superfan Mike Vennart of Oceansize agrees:

“This is a prime example of just how powerful music itself can actually be. I think the first 10 or 20 times I heard it, I couldn’t grasp the pattern or the melody or the form anywhere, but when it clicked, oh my God. Dirty Boy is my most favourite song of all time. It is all at once grandiose, relentless, loud, beautiful, sensitive and ridiculous. The use of the signature Cardiacs trick of never-ending key changes has never been more perfectly utilised than here. The mid section employs a chord sequence that, somehow, manages to repeat itself whilst moving steadily upwards in key with each rotation. The tension and drama this creates is absolutely agonising… When you get to the end of this song, ask yourself what could have been done to make it any more spectacular. Where do you go from this? It’s the last fucking word… it is truly the sound of the world ending.”

[from loudersound.com, 2015]

But Cardiacs were never taken to by the media, or indeed by much of the public, throughout the 80s and 90s when they were releasing albums on a semi-regular basis. They tend to receive a polarised reaction, and are often quite virulently disliked. The only contemporary review of Sing to God upon its release awarded it a churlish 0/10. But those who love them REALLY love them, and it’s a broad church that includes the likes of Blur, Radiohead, Faith No More and the Wildhearts. Their influence has stretched further and wider than many realise – but as discussed earlier, no matter what, there will never be another Cardiacs. Tim is irreplaceable. I’m just thankful that we have so much of his music to hold onto.

It was common knowledge that Tim was suffering ill health – a heart attack in 2008 left him with rare neurological condition dystonia, which occurs when oxygen is cut off from the brain and leads to, amongst other things, frequent and painful muscle spasms. It also robbed Tim, not of his mental acuity but, sadly, of his ability to speak and to play and create music in the way he was used to. There was hope, however, that his condition might improve enough for him to be able to return home and perhaps oversee the completion of the unfinished Cardiacs album LSD as he had wanted to. Despite his great and numerous difficulties, there had been some tentative improvement reported in his condition in recent years. Certainly, there seemed to be no indication that he was critically ill, but it seems that another heart attack took him, quickly and quietly, while he was asleep. He had recently turned 59.

Tim’s impossibly wonderful, but inarguably bizarre music, and his equally bizarre, brutal onstage persona have formed his public perception, but it also seems that everyone who was closer to him remembers him as an unfailingly supportive, kind soul – a man who always said that his favourite music was his friends’ music. The world has undoubtedly suffered a huge loss, but thankfully there is no shortage of love for Tim any more, his music finally having begun to receive the attention it deserves in more recent years. There’s no doubt that he will endure.

I hope this has been a decent enough read, but I know that really, no words I can say will quite do justice to Tim Smith and his legacy. I suppose it’d be best to leave this with another wonderful piece of music from the man himself. This is another highlight of Sing to God for me.

Rest in peace, Tim.