The best thing a musician can learn from Tim Smith’s music is that every single moment is a chance to do something. Tim’s music isn’t all crammed with frantic detail—though of course a lot of it is—but each song is a series of decisions, without a single provisional moment or missed opportunity. The thing no one should bother doing, though, is to try to use chords like he did.
THAT WAS TIM’S GREATEST INNOVATION: WINDING THROUGH WILDLY INVENTIVE COMBINATIONS OF STANDARD MAJOR AND MINOR TRIADS, SO AUDACIOUS, SO
TOTALLY AGAINST
STANDARD HARMONIC PRACTICE,
BUT ALL SO NATURAL AND SATISFYING, AND SO EXCITING.
There’s nothing like it anywhere else in rock, and I don’t believe anyone in jazz or classical music has ever attempted anything like it either. I wish I’d asked Tim how he did what he did with those chord combinations, over and over again, so inventively, hundreds and hundreds of times, but I’m sure he’d have said he didn’t know. It was a compositional approach unique to just one person, and he did it so brilliantly, and no one will ever do it again.
I think Tim’s music has always been about the conflict between sonorities, the thread that runs through all his work. He has this in common with most of my favourite musicians and composers: Zappa, Ives, Stravinsky, Penderecki, Gorecki, Messiaen, certainly. Composers who seem to adore the collision of light and shade, of dissonance and diapason. And yet at the same time, and in common with Zappa, Tim’s aesthetic seeks above all to develop transcendent melody and harmony. Thus, he develops ideas such that they fall sweetly on the ear or land with a smarting blow. And it was always thus, because for most of our lives he and I have eagerly traded musical observations. In my memory, we pursued that most intangible thing, to come to a right understanding of what makes this music good. Sometimes hard going, but I firmly believe it was the nourishment of all those hours listening to, thinking through, and talking over what we were hearing. I’m sure that this led him to later consider and reconsider his “process,” a system of refinement that only intensified as each new piece of the puzzle surfaced.
Once Cardiac Arrest was summoned up into its first form, happily I was on the receiving end of its very earliest output, and much of it I still have to hand. The band was in short order off and running with material that promised much. New work thrilled me completely, and so after a
year or so of band activity in its initial form, I was grateful for the opportunity join in the fun. Now, I could appreciate that process at first hand both in the rehearsal and recording contexts. I forget so much these days, but I still have vivid memories of how that second wave of work that became Toy World came into being. At first by discussion and negotiation, but later by some unnameable process, we would all just buy into an idea and run with it. Tim’s success as a composer was in great part due to this trust, and you could trust him completely. If you struggle, then you cannot be hearing it right. That’s all.
Over the years that have yielded such a diverse and brilliant body of work, I hope I have come to understand a little of what drove Tim as composer. It was never any use asking him directly what sustained that difficult and fractious process as, in common with most creatives, he never had a satisfying way to describe it. Drawing as he did upon such a broad palette, perhaps that is not surprising. I found it better to just be immersed in those creations much as I do with any composer’s work that is particularly special to me, and if I need to unpack it from within, then that’s what I do.
MARK CAWTHRA
Mark Cawthra, Tim Smith, and Jim Smith
I became a bit obsessed with Cardiacs at one time. I went on my own to see them at the Marquee Club and found it all totally intoxicating. I loved everything about them.
