Music Arcades: David Thomas: Mirror Man

Someone at the Southbank Centre likes David Thomas. I don't know whether it's David Sefton, credited as South Bank Producer here, or whether Sefton is that bloke with the corkscrew curls and the beard that often introduces 'leftfield rock' at the Centre. But Thomas keeps getting invited back there, and then there's this quote on his website

"The South Bank came to me and said here's a bunch of money, what do you want to do?" David Thomas says. "I thought about the spaces involved-- the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and National Film Theatre-- and I thought that what these spaces needed was a real mess. Not just that kind of well-conceived, artistic, placed-just-so mess you get a lot of but genuine, good ole confused disorder on a truly amateurish and liberating level. We delivered the goods."

Thus DT programmed a four-day mini-festival called Disastrodome — a mini-Meltdown, as he's not enough of a celeb to get a full one — and I believe Mirror Man was commissioned as part of that.
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In the CD booklet,

Eisenhower tried to explain in a patient voice and with small words that an interstate road system has nothing to do with getting somewhere and everything to do with time and space and the hieroglyphics of the mind.
You didn't listen, did you?

Love it.
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As the cover says, this is Act 1: Jack & The General of Mirror Man. Nothing has ever been released explicitly as Act 2, but the website claims Act 2 is Surf's Up in Bay City, so immediately this signifier forks into two albums, and Bay City.

If Bay City is Raymond Chandler, Mirror Man feels like James M. Cain.
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It goes without saying, doesn't it, that it's impossible to work out what, if anything, is going on. It feels more like a description than an acting out. To continue the parallel with Forced Entertainment, it feels more like Dirty Work. Wikipedia has a decent stab at making sense of it all.

And as Wikipedia confirms, there are eleven track points on the Mirror Man CD, spread across the fifteen distinct songs — this doesn't help.
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For this project, DT has brought together friends from all stages of his career. The Kidney brothers from 15-60-75, Chris Cutler from his solo backing band and some incarnations of Pere Ubu, both Pale Boys, Jackie Leven from Ubudoll. Then there's Linda Thompson as I'd never heard before, and Jane Bom-Bane too. Rhodri Marsden, who crops up in wildly disparate parts of my life, is credited with project management.
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I couldn't work out why I hadn't bothered to come down to London to see the original performances of Mirror Man at the Southbank. Then I remembered that I had proper work to do in 1998 and was proper busy. I have a feeling I was in America when there was a mini Mirror Man tour of the UK in 2001.