Of all the phenomenons I've encountered throughout my years as an internet junkie, none have proven more personally enlightening than than the strange and devoted cult followings surrounding the great British institution of the public information film, or PIF. To put it bluntly, there are numerous people out there who are weirdly fascinated by those grim and often downright grisly educational videos that took big wet (and possibly rabid) bites out of their psyches as children; when I discovered just how deep that fascination ran, I felt a peculiar sense of belonging. It was as if something I'd been carrying around with me since early childhood - more specifically, since the point when some road safety gurus came to my preschool and gave out colouring books filled with images of unwary nippers getting plowed down by cyclists - had finally clicked into gear and found its rightful place in the world; as if some confusion I'd buried deep within my soul had suddenly attained clarity. At long last, I was with my people.
The allure of the PIF, on the surface, has to do with the dark side of nostalgia and the omnipresent disturbance that hung over what were supposedly our salad days. The PIF taught us that death and destruction were lying in wait in the most mundane of places, and the malaise it triggered was so deep and pervasive that we feel almost inclined to give ourselves a pat on the back just for having survived to adulthood. I would argue, however, that a significant part of that fascination lies less in the surface horror than in a deeper unease still, one that as children we were unable to articulate or comprehend and wound up lugging around with us in our subconscious; that is, the mystery as to why the adults would be so sadistic as to inflict such images of terror upon our tender young minds in the first place. Perhaps that was the most troubling aspect of all regarding the PIF - the sheer incongruity of having this distastefulness forced upon us by the very authority figures we were encouraged to see as respectable and upstanding (teachers, police officers, librarians and their ilk). I suspect that, on a unconscious level, those early PIF encounters might have seen the birth of our very first experience in not quite trusting authority; the folks who assure us that they've got our best interests at heart and that this tiny bit of psychological scarring isn't going to hurt (much). These were the demented minds who supposed that the best way to reinforce the concept of road safety awareness among small children was to gift them with images of colour-in carnage. In the same way, the PIF reveals the sickness and sadism of authority even when they're looking to present what would appear to be perfectly laudable messages.
Electronic musician Cate Brooks is one PIF devotee who took this malaise and channeled it into an art form; in her case, into a project known as The Advisory Circle, which to date has released five albums via the Ghost Box label, whose mission statement, according to the official website, is to explore "the misremembered musical history of a parallel world." The Advisory Circle's debut album, Mind How You Go, which saw the light of day in 2005 (and was later repressed as a revised edition in 2010), displays a particularly evident love/hate fixation with the PIFs that dogged the nightmares and afternoon teatimes of the Dark and Lonely Water Generation. Distrust of authority is a recurring theme throughout, right from the short opening track, "Logo", where a slightly off-kilter female voice assures us that The Advisory Circle is all about "helping you make the right decisions". It becomes particularly salient in the track at the very heart of the album, a beguiling curiosity piece entitled "And The Cuckoo Comes". Here, another slightly off-kilter female voice chips in atop a slew of swirling and discordant synths to recite a pseudo-educational passage on the comings and goings of the seasons. The owner of this voice is, alas, not credited, but she sounds innocuously reminiscent of Vicky Ireland narrating a segment on the BBC Schools program Words and Pictures, only crossed with the bristling contempt of a school headmistress who's grown weary of her charges. Her voice is ostensibly non-threatening enough that a casual listener may not even pick up on the track's trickery to begin with. And yet, with attentive listening its sinister nature becomes apparent. The implicit message of "Cuckoo" is to be wary of the voice of authority, for here authority is selling us a pack of lies. This is what she tells us:
In the summer...well, it's usually cold and sometimes it snows. The winds blow. In the autumn...the flowers are out, and the sun shines. In the winter...the leaves grow again on the trees. And in the spring...the winds blow, and the leaves fall from the trees. And the sun shines.
The leaves grow again on the trees and sometimes it snows.
And the cuckoo comes...
Joseph Stannard, covering the album in an article on The Quietus, identifies this track as, "the point at which the voice of authority becomes the voice of confusion. Common sense breaks down." But there is something a lot more troubling going on here than the sheer wrongness of the dialogue. "Cuckoo" is disturbing in its presentation of the cycles of nature, which have been purposely carved up and rearranged so that the seasonal cycle feels less like an unending process of renewal and regeneration than one of inescapable chaos. It represents the seasons as being at constant loggerheads, with each new season disrupting or contradicting what has come before it. The leaves grow on the trees in the winter only for spring to come along with its cold winds and blow them all down again. The autumn brings flowers and sunshine but the trees will remain bare until winter's fleeting return. In the end, the seasons all blur together into one eternal stretch of deadening futility. Creation is followed by destruction, nothing lasts for long or flows in any coherent sequence and the very fabric of reality begins to break down. And "Cuckoo" impassively coaxes us into accepting this as the natural order. For not only is the seasonal cycle in "Cuckoo" severely out of whack, but there is something eerily hypnotic about the track's increasingly garbled mantras, as if its true purpose lies in convincing the listener to surrender everything they understand about the world and to accept this distorted vision of reality in its place. With enough beleaguering, authority could convince us that black is white and get us killed on the next zebra crossing. If it didn't have our health and safety so firmly at its heart, of course.
And the cuckoo? It is likely a reference to this traditional rhyme (which also - one assumes - provided the basis for Simon & Garfunkel's "April Come She Will"):
"The cuckoo comes in April,
She sings her song in May,
In the month of June she changes her tune,
And in July she flies away."
The above rhyme is likewise concerned with the cycles of nature and the passage of time, and with the inevitability of change but also the consistency with which these annual patterns are able to keep on replicating themselves. In The Advisory Circle's track the cuckoo's appearance is presented as a punchline of sorts; on the surface, the coming of a cuckoo sounds like a laughably innocuous way to round of its sequence of dread, and yet "Cuckoo" depicts it as the inevitable culmination of this never-ending chaos, so that the harbinger of spring becomes the harbinger of doom. This sinister presentation plays into the split personality of the cuckoo (or at least the personalities we have ascribed it), as a bird that is, on the one hand, synonymous with spring and with new life and regrowth. And yet this romantic emblem is also a brood parasite whose breeding habits fly in the face of everything we assume to be true about maternal instinct. If you happen to be a reed warbler then the coming of the cuckoo would be a very disastrous thing indeed. The brood parasitism of the cuckoo evokes nature at its most freakishly topsy turvy - as many an ornithologist can attest, the sight of a tiny reed warbler raising an enormous cuckoo chick is borderline surreal, the adult bird going about its business entirely oblivious to the fact that this gigantic imposter has mass-murdered its own biological offspring. "And The Cuckoo Comes" is a track about distortion but also duality, and the chaotic undercurrent it suggests is perpetually lurking beneath the apparent blissfulness of green and pleasant Britain, and which might occasionally manifest itself in the absurd (yet sinister) sight of that infant cuckoo occupying the warbler's nest. There is a strange and unfriendly world out there, which is precisely why the oversight of an authority like the fictitious Advisory Circle should prove so appealing. And yet Mind How You Go also evokes the paradoxical manner in which such authority, in attempting to impose order and understanding upon the chaos, merely heightens our confusion and sense of dread. Ah well. Stay safe. And if it's summer...don't be tempted to cut across any frozen ponds as you make your way home tonight.
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