There's a royal wedding on, apparently, but how best to soundtrack this great event? With an album about a fox marrying a phantom cat-bride, set to a reggae beat, of course ...
The royal wedding has prompted many musical tributes, from the balladeering of Blake to Taking Over the Dancefloor by Nadia Oh, who, presumably unlike Carol Ann Duffy, rhymes "Kate Middleton" with a popular tequila brand. But best of all is Moon Wiring Club's Somewhere a Fox Is Getting Married, which refracts the already odd pomp and ceremony into a parallel dimension where "greedy, wryly unwholesome, non-paying animal-faced entities" attend a phantom wedding on 31 April 1911.
"Often in charity shops you'll find royal wedding souvenir LPs," explains Ian Hodgson, aka Moon Wiring Club. "My favourite one is for Princess Anne and Mark Phillips: you have this lushly produced gatefold souvenir of a marriage that didn't work out. But this year I can't see there being an official BBC souvenir vinyl LP, so I thought I'd do one. People's reactions are just, 'I hate the royal family' or 'Isn't this absolutely joyous', but no one is saying, 'Well, what is this?'. The whole thing is quite peculiar.
"There are centuries-old carriages that have been locked away and are brought out just for the royal wedding," Hodgson continues. "You see aristocrats you never see in other circumstances; it seems to be the same people who are dusted down and brought out each time. And you see the magazines at the newsstands referring to it as a 'fairytale wedding'. I find that interesting ? a lot of fairytales are incredibly disturbing. So when you have these headlines that say 'inside the fairytale', my thought was: 'What if it really was inside a fairytale?'"
Simon Reynolds discussed MWC's work on this blog recently (he's also written about the royal wedding, oddly enough) but to be brief: Hodgson's sample-heavy music (composed entirely on a PlayStation 2) is set in Clinkskell, a fictional village full of sinister spirits, beautiful women and quaint sweet shops. His last album focused on a card game in which the winner would get to marry into royalty; on this album, the fox-faced spirit who won is claiming his prize, a dotty feline called Princess Jackie. "Composing music for an insane, fashionable phantom cat-bride, set to a reggae beat, or for what a cavalier fox is thinking while being trapped in a hat-prison: I can do that," says Ian.
The resulting imagery and music is rich with references to English folklore and aristocratic idiosyncrasies, from phantom weddings in the Lake District to links between the ruling class and the lowly fox. "I'm not making a political statement, but one of Britain's most recognisable, popular creatures is something that is brutally hunted by the aristocracy, so if the fox plays a trick and becomes heir to the throne, he's disturbing things," says Ian. "In fact, since I decided that the groom would be a fox, I've noticed that Prince William has started to look more like one. I was in the Co-op and he was on a biscuit tin, looking a bit foxy."
Has Moon Wiring Club let loose a mischievous vulpine spirit, keen to hijack Kate and Wills's big day? Probably not. But amid the bland patriotism and kneejerk republicanism, he has managed to capture some of the gilt-edged, inbred weirdness of this rare national event.
Somewhere a Fox Is Getting Married is available to pre-order now as a souvenir LP with commemorative poster. You can hear Sly Gavotte, a track from the album, here.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/apr/28/moon-wiring-club-tribute-wills-kate
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