So many things that I could say in connection with this album. Tom Phillips isn't a musician; and if you know his work, you probably wouldn't think to call him a composer either (at least not until after you'd called him an artist, writer, translator, ping pong player…). It's both a surprise and not a surprise to see how many times I've mentioned him already here (including vaingloriously crediting him as as an inspiration for both the concept and name of Music Arcades).
At least I know where to start: with TP's 50th birthday show at Sheffield's Mappin Gallery (mentioned before) around Easter 1987. On a Saturday night we were treated to not one but two performances of Irma, the first by AMM and the second by an ensemble from Blackburn College of Art, led by Phil Mouldycliff. (On the right, what remains of my ticket.) The two performances shared nothing discernible in common: not a melody, a phrase, instrumentation or duration. The AMM version was dense and had only a very brief spoken part (aside from a few 'found' voices on a radio that was occasionally turned on); the Blackburn version was sparse, much more text-heavy, and also incorporated dance. TP's sleeve notes to this CD refer to "the use of Lesbia Waltz (Op.XV) as a dance interlude".
Rob Briner and I were bewildered at what the score must look like — but failed to pluck up the courage to ask TP himself. Well, here it is (including close-ups). It's an early example of a generative, indeterminate piece, sitting between Cornelius Cardew's Great Learning and Eno's later success in bringing these principles to a much a wider audience. If Cardew were the seed and Eno the progeny, then Phillips (who was Eno's teacher at Ipswich School of Art, and later his friend) might have been the midwife. Not that there ever is a single source or origin for these ideas — cf. Terry Riley.
I have a cassette recording of those performances at the Mappin. It's terrible quality, but still of historical interest, to me.
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Irma is a from of derivative work from Tom Phillips' Humument, a treated Victorian novel that the artist has been working on since 1996. He bought his first copy of W.H.Mallock's A Human Document for threepence at a bookshop not far from here on Peckham Rye, I believe, and started reconstructing the pages by drawing and painting over them. He has since collected many more copies of the book, from which he constructs revised editions with different versions of some of the pages. I visited his studio a couple of years ago and was shown a handwritten concordance of every word in the book.
The first edition of Humument was published by Tetrad Press (owned by Ian Tyson, who lived next door to TP at the time) in 1973. You don't see many of those, and I suspect they're extremely valuable. However, I have been able to collect all four editions (first, first revised, second revised and fourth) published by Thames & Hudson, as well as the pocket Heart of Humument
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There is also more than one recorded edition of Irma. The first was released on Brian Eno's Obscure label in the seventies (along with Hobbs/Adams/Bryars, Michael Nyman's Decay Music and the original issue of Music from the Penguin Café). That was hard to get at the time (and since, though I've just saved a search on eBay for it), and Tom Phillips' sleeve notes suggest he was less than happy with that version anyway. He goes on to say,
This performance is in some way 'definitive', which does not of course mean that any other version should resemble it in the slightest: it is an instance of what Irma is like as opposed to not like. It is as if to point to a particular cat and say, this is a cat: you learn that it is not a dog but this does not preclude the existence of a multitude of varieties of cat or individual cats. Any too close resemblance to this realisation of Irma would in fact contravene the very instructions of the score.
I got this CD soon after it came out in 1988, by mail order direct from Matchless Recordings, based in the happily-named Matching Tye, Essex. For some reason I had to phone the label on some matter of detail. It was only years later that I realised I'd been talking to Eddie Prévost of AMM, who runs the label.
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I guess TP has been having an interesting few days at the Oval Test Match today, since he says this match has been a ritual for him since 1948.
As AMM tune their radios during the performance of Irma, one of the voices they pick is Brian Johnston on Test Match Special, commentating on Courtney Walsh bowling to Allan Lamb. I'd like to think this was at the Oval Test in the 1988 series against the West Indies. TP says he finds Test Match commentary a useful soundtrack to painting. In conversation at the ICA a couple of years ago, he said he wasn't alone in this and knew of another artist who recorded cricket commentary, so he could play it back a few years later when he'd forgotten the result.
In the same conversation TP discussed his love of table tennis, and issued an open invitation to anyone who fancied giving him a game. As I live only a 20-minute walk from his studio, I kind of wanted to, but failed to pluck up the courage to invite myself round (I used to be a good player when I was 12, but ping pong depends on practice, of which I've had none for year, so I feared not being able to give the septuagenarian a decent game).
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Meanwhile, Irma is by no means the end of TP's musical career. He did the libretto for Tarik O'Regan's opera adaptation of Heart of Darkness recently. O'Regan returned the favour when he was one of a stunning list of composers who wrote music for Compositions on Texts by Tom Phillips, which I saw twice in 2006, on 8 March at Oxford's Holywell Music Rooms and on 8 July at the Royal Academy. The final piece in this series, Like Running Away was by Brian Eno, and — I stand to be corrected — his first solo live performance (singing and playing) for decades. TP played it on Radio 3 last year.
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