Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem

by Benjamin Piekut

In its open improvisations, lapidary lyrics, errant melodies, and relentless pursuit of spontaneity, the British experimental band Henry Cow pushed rock music to its limits. The band’s rotating personnel, sprung from rock, free jazz, and orchestral worlds, synthesized a distinct sound that troubled genre lines, and with this musical diversity came a mixed politics, including Maoism, communism, feminism, and Italian Marxism. In Henry Cow: The World is a Problem Benjamin Piekut tells the band’s story—from its founding in Cambridge in 1968 and later affiliation with Virgin Records to its demise ten years later—and analyzes its varied efforts to link aesthetics with politics. Drawing on ninety interviews with Henry Cow musicians and crew, letters, notebooks, scores, journals, and meeting notes, Piekut traces the group’s pursuit of a political and musical collectivism, offering up their history as but one example of the vernacular avant-garde that emerged in the decades after World War II. Henry Cow’s story resonates far beyond its inimitable music; it speaks to the avant-garde’s unpredictable potential to transform the world.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography

512 pages, Paperback

Published September 27, 2019

Reviews

[David Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benjamin Piekut has really demonstrated a model of engaging and engaged scholarship that walks the difficult line between the academic and the popular, a line that needs to be challenged more often from both sides. The World is a Problem is smart, informative, comprehensive, and highly detailed without ever going into a chronological litany of "then the band did this, and then this happened." Instead Piekut situates his material with the broader social and political contexts that Henry Cow were operating in and through. We get unflinching looks and reflections on internal misogyny and feminist politics, a fantastic discussion of the Eurological and the Afrological as it may be read through Henry Cow and questions of race, the band's struggle to articulate anti-fascist aesthetics in the face of punk and the Rock Against Racism movement, cogent musical analysis, and an interrogation of what it means to be a committed, collective, political entity in the arts and the attendant problems that come with it: sexual, political, and social. All of this done with engaging prose and clear storytelling.

I'm still parsing Piekut's last chapter on a vernacular avant-garde, but with this last piece, he has made an important contribution to the scholarship of the avant-garde and pushed its borders forward.

[Chris Browning · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, I appreciate that reading this as someone whose music education ends at piano grade 3 is like someone reading a book of film theory with no knowledge of the finer points of that medium. Having said that, Piekut is so good a writer that this doesn’t honestly matter that much at all. I skimmed through the heavy theory bits that obviously necessitated some knowledge of how music works, but still managed to get the thrust of his argument. This has always been my high watermark of academic writing: some jargon is inescapable because it essentially is about precision, locating an idea in a very focused and not generalised manner. And when Piekut uses jargon it’s for precision purposes not for showing off. And as such it’s remarkably similar to how the story of Henry Cow unfolds

Because Piekut as a writer has a humanity that in several tellings of this story the band sorely lacked. Henry Cow seems to be a band so focused on their vision of equality and political activism in theory that in practice they miss, you know, actually being able to talk to each other. There’s several ironies here: Frith being surprisingly horny, but probably unaware of actual communication within the band; the theoretical feminist stance of the band running counter to how they actually treated the women in the band being but two. In many ways it’s a very sad story of a band being so hyper focused they can’t actually appreciate the humanity in their music

But despite all this, Henry Cow and their many later incarnations and splinter formations and related bands have produced music that is literally sui generis (see, I can do jargon as well) and this book absolutely celebrates this. But it’s also a very human book that deals with these strange people with a great deal of love and affection. And as an academic work it’s also brilliant at placing the story in a wider context. It’s a stunning book

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Friends, I admit I was struggling through the rather academic Introduction. But have faith! Once we meet the Cows, the book chugs along merrily. There's no shortage of hilarious vintage photos with just about everyone in hippy haircuts, and outrageous and often illuminating war stories. And I can't say it better than the author:

[Dagmar] Krause's material, on the other hand, is the kind of lunar voyage that reminds one how fortunate we are that a few record execs smoked dope in the late 1960s; how else could this music have slipped through the cracks?

We need a kickstarter to supply free dope to today's record execs.

The music of Henry Cow and associates have been a major and formative part of my listening experiences. So it's easy for me to forget that, back in the late '60s/early '70s, they were young, earnest English blokes trying to navigate the space between a Cambridge background and the changes and chaos in Europe. There are lots of candid comments from the band (esp. Frith), on personal relationships and stressful situations. One more little quote:

... one of the cofounders says he joined a band to attract girls, and the other to escape them.

I understand that if the book is going to appear under Duke University Press, it would need that Afterword. But I don't have to read all of it, sorry.

[Martin Hoogeboom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a little reluctant to read this book. A music professor who is going to write a book about one of my favorite bands? That is asking for trouble. Henry Cow declared the world a problem, mixed rock with free-jazz and written orchestral music, wonderful song based albums (with singer Dagmar Krause), endless political meetings (remember the seventies?), En Passant created a quality record label (Recommended Records), created a music movement (Rock in Opposition) and then broke into many wonderful and interesting alliances.

Professor Benjamin Piekut did a wonderful job. Drawing on 90 interviews with Henry Cow musicians and (remarkable in a rock bio) crew, letters, notebooks, scores, journals and meeting notes, Piekut traces the groupś pursuit of a political and musical collectivism.

Personally, I find the descriptions of the creation of group improvisations, a regular part of the HC concerts, very interesting and educational. Piekut has written an infectious book. An interesting insight into the - sometimes troubled - lives of interesting musicians.
In the seventies a beacon for us ordinary mortals.
And what a wonderful opportunity to play those beautiful records again.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe a little TMI in some areas, but this book was inspiring to me, as someone who was involved in making rock music on the fringes. It shows how HC really laid the groundwork in so many areas, not only musically.

[Donal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extensive research went into this book which is heavily detailed and interesting to read. One of the finest ensembles of avant-rock, whose interaction with experimental music, free improv and rock was combined with political engagement and experiments in collectivism.

[Markus Svensson · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a self-proclaimed fat book charting the birth, life and painful death of the vernacular avantgarde rockband Henry Cow this might sound like heavy reading. But once your through the academic framing of the book, you´ll find a highly interesting tale of a self-conscious and idealistic rockband on a crash course with the music industry, each other and with the world as a whole. The world is a problem, indeed, and will continue to be so. But it´s more important to try than not to and that is what you, as the reader, will bring with you in the end - the importance to keep on pushing the boundaries of what a rockband can be.

[Christopher Heckman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Henry Cow is one of those bands that you don't hear much about. When I saw mention of this book, which analyzed some of their music, I decided to put it on my "to read" list.

Unfortunately, there isn't that much musical analysis. More of the book is taken up by descriptions of meetings where the band members discussed how they were going to approach composition and improvisation, and they even wrote *essays* about their philosophy and political viewpoints.

It makes an interesting read, because the alternative is looking through newspaper and magazine articles and other such documents, and this book ties these things together.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dense academic consideration of the politically progressive English band Henry Cow.

[fletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A monumental achievement in scholarship, in which Piekut describes a new framework of analysis for a kind of music he calls "vernacular avant-garde".

(minus one star for lack of a discography)

[fairleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly seems like they’d be soo annoying to hang out with lol

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coming to this book with a moderate interest in a band and several individuals I knew little about, I somehow came away from "The World Is A Problem" with much more and still less than I had hoped for. On the one hand there is a wealth of fascinating history collected here about an isolated period in the 1970s when a ragtag group of young disgruntled UK intellectuals could get signed to a major label and yet, I can't help but feel that the specific subject of Henry Cow is merely window-dressing for Piekut's larger ideas in a book bearing their own name.

Those larger ideas are highly provocative and critical and laid out in a dense, academic style that felt circular to me on a macro level. Piekut's enthusiasm felt most evident in the introduction and afterward which had little to nothing to do with the subject of the band or members. Again, this is not to damn the ideas he lays out in those portions by any means but I wish that they formed the basis for a separate book.

Less forgivable for me is that the book willingly neglects to explore anything involving the band after its demise in 1979. For example, it isn't even mentioned that Lindsay Cooper passed away in 2013 or that Hodgkinson, Frith and Cutler performed in NY for a couple of nights at the Stone for the first time in decades (i.e. what circumstances, mindsets or impetus allowed that to happen).

As far as favorable surplus perspectives are concerned, the story of Henry Cow had a lot to offer on the subjects of group dynamics, intellectualizing performance practice (especially in a Rock context), gender politics in bands, young communists, over education and so on. Not much has changed in the seedy conditions surrounding life as an artistically oriented musician as far as I can tell and mid-20s something intellectuals -- despite genuine earnestness, talent and effort -- clearly lacked a grace and efficiency for living as much then as now. To that last point, the members of this band frequently came across as absolutely insufferable, petty hypocrites with a bevy of interpersonal deficiencies and complexes that were only exacerbated by the conditions of a collective work environment. Put another way, there didn't seem to be much joy in their story.

And I say all of that firmly in love with the work of Henry Cow from a sonic perspective. The book did foster a new appreciation for the level of detail used in constructing their music. "Living in the Heart of the Beast" is a monumental, singular achievement in music from that time and I don't feel the band ever garnered the recognition it deserved for creating such material. They never seemed able or willing to just stand back and let achievements like that breathe and radiate on their own. It's what my roommate might refer to as "control-freaking" perhaps or it's just that such rigid personalities found the notion of success itself threatening. The greatness apparent to me in LISTENING to their work seems to be a footnote to the unwieldy grand narrative which the band so direly needed to uphold at all times. Ironically, this seems to be similar to Piekut making the band's story a footnote to his enormous questions. Hmph.