I fall into your arms

He Said

“I have always considered myself pretty bitter towards music as a business, major record labels’ philosophy, and approaching music as a mere commercial matter. ”

I'm pretty sure this vision and reluctance perhaps was an obstacle to having a successful music career myself. How can you be successful if you despise pretty much everything you need to do to achieve it? I never fell in love with punk music as a genre, but I certainly have a very similar vision of what and how music should be. This is why my favorite musicians have always been very critical of the music industry these past decades and this kind of A.I.-driven one we are dealing with today.

Because of this approach, I'm always happy to find in my musical journey figures like Graham Lewis. He is the bass player of the legendary English post-punk band Wire. Despite the band's modest record sales, they are often mentioned as a major influence by many artists and bands, like one of my musical heroes, Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi, but also by Henry Rollins, R.E.M. The Cure, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Johnny Marr of The Smiths, and more recently, bands like Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party.

Naming all these bands, I unintentionally find myself once again confirming how we can in some way compare punk and post-punk music to what evolved into industrial music. They are two sides of the same coin. It happened many times in experimental music history to observe this type of evolution transitioning from using dark punk rock guitar/bass/drums structures to dark drum machine beats, synth melodies, samples, and loops. 

He Said was one industrial music evolution in Graham Lewis's musical journey. It already started with Wire, but perhaps Lewis wanted to explore more by himself. Or maybe he just wanted to be a lead singer.

As He Said, Graham Lewis released two solo albums in the 1980s. I guess the first album, Hail, released by Mute Records in 1986, is another example of how if your approach to music is of a certain kind, you will produce music that has somehow the same "genes" whatever instruments you use. In the album, Lewis used a lot of drum beats and synth. Additionally, he sang and produced it with the help of John Fryer. 

Listening to the album, I find similitudes with some of the works of Nine Inch Nails and Einsturzende Neubauten but with more melody and less noise. There are more melodic elements than in other industrial bands.

The album collaborators included fellow Wire member Bruce Gilbert and musician Brian Eno, who played a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer in the track we are discussing today: I Fall Into Your Arms.

After a few seconds from the intro of the track, it's not difficult to imagine Trent Reznor starting to scream and sing. Lewis's melody instead is dark and flirts with Eno's synth, a catching guitar loop, and ethereal female vocals and choirs. With its loops, the song floats in a circle.

It reminds me of the concept of another track we already wrote about here on hiphopelectronic.com, ironically another collaboration featuring Brian Eno, The Jezebel Spirit, taken from the David Byrne & Brian Eno album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981).

Lewis released with Mute Records a second solo album in 1989 called Take Care and then kept working with his band Wire, which is still active today.