Review: Ren Harvieu - "Through the Night"

There's a heron in the music video and her online biography is funny: Ren Harvieu

Ren Harvieu has a single out - Through the Night. It has singing and drums and a promotional video shot using the instagram app for iPhone. I think it is the sort of thing the cast of (new) Dr Who would listen to in-between takes. Here is Matt Smith sitting on a hollow plastic gravestone listening to Ren Harvieu on the radio; once again he is trying to find the courage to be eccentric in a way the Americans will enjoy, in a way they will think of as quintessentially British. The red-haired sidekick woman creeps up behind him wearing a cyberman mask. She grabs his shoulder. Matt jumps. In a robot voice she says: 'straighten that bow-tie you cunt, we've got a scene in five minutes.' She drops the mask and falls about laughing. Matt Smith watches her with a set expression. There was a time when he found her attractive...

One remarkable thing about 'Through the Night' is, there's a heron in the music video.

If you want to see the heron, but don't want watch Ren having a sexual epiphany in the shadows, the only apparent stimulus being the sound of her own singing voice, skip to 53 seconds, then press stop at 55 seconds. Remember to press stop at 55 seconds.

I give the song 5 herons out of 10 (herons), and at least two of those herons are down to heron in the music video. To put that score in context, I only gave Florence and the Machine's last single 2 herons. Some people said 2 herons was harsh, but what those people didn't realise is, that review was only out of 3 herons.

I used to know someone whose surname was Heron.

 

This is the end of my music review.

This is the beginning of my review of Ren Harvieu's biography - her snivelling, portentous biography - which you can read here.

It is very funny.

At the top of the page, there are two quotes from selected press reviews:

“A voice to die for“ Grazia

“She reveals her remarkable voice, a tender and muscular organ, that evokes some of the great divas of bygone years.” The Observer

Whoever wrote '...tender and muscular organ...' had porn open in another window.

The biography is too long to go over line by line (which is funny  in itself), so, for ease of slyness, I have identified four broad categories of things to pick fun at. The categories are as follows:

1. Assertions that Ren is down-to-earth.
2. Lines so hokey, it's hard to believe they weren't intended to be funny. 
3. Cynical and repeated evocation of back injury. 
4. Claims on the supernatural/that Ren is exceptional/that the hand of god is at work.

There is also an informal fifth category: things that can only have been written by Alan Partridge. I will highlight these as they arise by underlining them.

Here are five examples from each category (my comments are in [] brackets):

1. Assertions that Ren is down-to-earth

1. ...her manner as down-to-earth as the streets of Broughton in Salford, which is where she was born [what a stroke of luck to be born in the exact place you just happen to be as down to earth as. I'm as down to earth as Donetsk in the Ukraine, but I was born in Bristol]...
2. ...schooled in dusty youth club contests rather than star-spangled pop schools...
3. Although Ren loved music, she wasn’t a diva in the slightest. She just wasn’t arsed, she laughs [it's a strange thing, not being arsed to be a diva].
4. She was happier in lock-ins with friends than out in the spotlight.
5. She’ll remember her Dad’s stories, his old lessons in stagecraft: ‘back against the wall, chest out, hit ‘em’. She’ll remember the teachers who told her she couldn’t sing, who have recently tried to befriend her on Facebook – she clicks ignore when she sees them, and beams broadly as she does so [needless to say, Ren had the last laugh].

2. Lines so hokey, it's hard to believe they weren't intended to be funny.

1. So here she still is – and how she sings.
2. her voice transports us to a place where youthfulness becomes yearning, where dreams become dramas, and music aches longingly, full of beauty and power.
3. [This whole paragraph] Her first song was Through The Night, and she still hears a shy girl in its old-fashioned swing [what?]. In Twist The Knife, she hears a young soul too, but also a mood starting to reach out to the ears beyond the room [what?]. Once the mood reaches you, you will hear something extraordinary [what?]. In Tonight, a new soundtrack queen finds her feet [w...]. In Do Right By Me, a country soul is set free [no]. In Forever In Blue, we return to a time of Autumn Leaves, sentimental journeys, flying to the moon [WHAT!?]. We hear an effortless vocal with no flounces or fuss, stunning us every time it soars [gnuuuuuuffffffgghhh].
4. Protective friends were told she was now like the Bionic Woman, a girl with metal in her spine, even more iron in her will.
5. Then Ren will open her mouth, and start to sing; as she does, a new angel of the North will ascend.

3. Repeated, cynical evocation of back injury.

[Now, it really does sound like a terrible accident, but I think the author has chosen to present it in a cynical manner. Ren is being sold to us as 'the girl who recovered from a back injury' just as much as she is 'the singer with talent'. The story has been drawn out to a morbid extent and it has a kind of sinister, ingratiating tone...which is quite funny. It's basically one of those x-factor back (no pun intended) stories.]

1. ...only four months after she thought she would never walk again, she is walking back to us.
2. How close these came to these being her first and only recordings; how close she came to these being her legacies.
3. She remembers every moment: the voices around her, the lack of feeling in her legs, the sensation that this was it, this is how it ends.
4. In this specialist unit, she had the worst injury on the ward, and many of her fellow patients had been told they would never walk again. 
5. Ren’s brush with death has given her life so much more depth, she says. She was determined before; just imagine how much she is now [when I try to imagine, I just see  herons].

4. Claims on the supernatural/that Ren is exceptional/that the hand of god is at work. 

1. She had no idea why she kept performing; something kept her going [this 'she did not know why' stuff crops up several times throughout the biography, and, interestingly, as a lyric in Through the Night – which makes me think Ren herself is the author].
2. She was shy as a child, observing everyone while the world whirled around her [I hear it was the same with Leonardo Da Vinci], soaking up the music she loved like a sponge [sponges soak up water, not music].
3. By a miracle, she calls it – her first one, before the huge one [meaning her recovery] – manager Paul Harrison chanced upon her page, falling in love with her lovely young blues [' lovely young...soft, yielding, boob-– BLUES'].
4. She was a strange one, she knew that [Ren uploads bathroom mirror shot to facebook. The caption: I'm a strange one].
5. [The night the accident happened] It felt strange from the start, she says; as if something was going to happen.
6. But somehow, Ren could feel things. Doctors kept asking if she had any sensations; one day she was able to move her legs like she was cycling. After six weeks, she wheelchaired [WHEELCHAIRED] herself into the kitchen to make a cup of tea; her doctors shaking their heads, not knowing how this was happening [the kettle wasn't even plugged in]. The day she washed her hair by herself, she knew she would be alright. She left the hospital in August, walking with a cane; she is now getting better, slowly but surely, every day.

There needed to be six in that last one.

The biography puts me in mind of Darth Vader's hypothetical bum flap. On the one hand, it has been designed to look all sleek and stern, painted a particularly evil shade of black by a team of grim-faced Imperial engineers with British accents, but on the other hand it's a bum flap. And bum flaps are funny.

Imagine Darth Vader's changeless facial expression, that sick, raspy breathing. At last he is alone. His gloved hand creeps toward his chest plate. He fingers the glowing red button, the one that nobody is allowed to ask about – it's the bum flap release. He presses it. The bum flap falls open behind him. More laboured, mechanical breathing. A bloodless Sith bottom marked by strange scars and dead veins protrudes through the newly opened orifice. It seems tentatively to sniff the air: an uncertain badger on the cusp of twilight. He's been needing this dump for ages.

Impressions of Manchester: A Transcendental Perspective

I have never physically been to Manchester, but one evening, meditating on the reflection of a candle flame in a bowl of Sasquatch milk, I believe my consciousness went there.

[You can replicate the experience by following this procedure:

• Prepare strong black coffee
• Spread poo over signed photograph of Jack Duckworth
• Get into lotus position
• Place dirty photograph on knee
• Hold breath for three minutes
• Exhale like affected spiritualist
• Quickly drink coffee
• Look up at light bulb (>80w)
• Sneeze
• Do candle/sasquatch milk meditation (see Fig. 1) 
• Make up lies about consciousness going to Manchester]

Fig. 1

 At first there was a kind of infinite nothing, only not a perfect nothing because it smelt like a catered holiday to Majorca – a mix of super-sweet orange  juice, sun tan lotion spread over fat backs, and pale slabs of veal bleeding under heat lamps – then I was in Manchester. It was pretty weird.

There were lots of red brick houses all squashed up into long rows, and each house had a look of defilement on its face, as though it didn't like being touched by the other houses. The roofs of the houses were hippopotamus-grey and seemed to sweat...like hippopotamuses. In the distance, there were tall blocks of flats that looked like strips of yellowing graph paper, complete with rubbed-out pencil marks where someone had messed up the scale for the y-axis more than once.

I floated in for a closer look.

Every flat had a balcony for drying wet Manchester United towels and storing deflated footballs, and people came out and stood on them to shout WANKER at me, even though all I was doing was astral projection and a bit of shimmering. There was a scary pugnacity about the balcony people (see fig. 2), like cheekiness turned sour by repetition. I thought I could identify myself as a friend by shouting out that my favourite player was Dave Beckman, but this only seemed to anger them further.

Fig. 2

The air was a bit like church air after a long sermon on Satan's minions, and it smelt faintly of burning coal dust. The birds didn't want to fly in it, so they lined up on walls and telephone wires looking slightly irradiated but quite well fed. There was a young boy just staring up at the birds, and that young boy was Bez – a bit of time travel must have happened because Bez isn't a young boy (physiologically) at the time of writing this.

Milkmen were delivering milk, and along with the milkmen there were men delivering bread. Such a thing as a 'bread round' existed, and it was existing right in front of my disembodied eyeballs. Other men delivered pieces of scrap metal for uncles to tinker with. There were a lot of uncles in Manchester, and they all used cologne-scented talcum powder instead of lynx - despite having tried lynx last Christmas when their daughter-in-laws gave them some as part of a festive gift pack that also included shower gel and shampoo. Most of the uncles preferred lynx to talcum powder, but simply had no idea about where one might go to buy it.

Then I possessed a woodlouse and did some spying. What were ostensibly conversations between husband and wife over breakfast were, in fact, two parallel monologues on unrelated matters. The men talked about how much they hated flamboyancy, whilst the women dissected the merits of cheese and onion crisps, why the snack is good, but also bad, but also good, etc. The expressions and phrases used were creative and funny: precise, frank language is reserved only for combat.

Bez's mother comes outside. She's holding a rolling pin with bits of yellow dough stuck to it. 'You have to choose between being introspective or being a brute,' she says. Bez laughs and starts doing the Bez dance. She lets him off, again.

The Smiths are being chased by Oasis down an alleyway. Andy Rourke clatters into some bins, falls. Noel leaps on top of him, straddling Rourke in a way that looks something like the cowgirl sex position. Noel has never actually punched a man before, and he's feeling uneasy about the proximity of the craven bassist's willy to his bum hole.
''it 'im our Kid,' demands Liam in a Mancunian accent because he's from Manchester.
Noel can't do it. Instead he screams like a snapped nerd and rains down a thousand indecisive pats to Rourke's head. It looks like he's playing the fucking bongos, thinks Liam. Rourke thinks it's worse thing that's ever happened.
Morrissey escapes, though, and writes 'This Night Has Opened My Eyes'.
Then I went back to the infinite nothing. It still smelt of a catered holiday to Majorca, but now there was music – Manchester-type music. The musicians had character and humanity and the male ones made it seem okay to be male. They seemed authentic, like blues players who'd decided pop was the real thing, or punk, or post punk, or whatever. Oasis were also playing.

I came back into my body and noticed that the Sasquatch milk had turned into Sasquatch cheese. I had an erection. My mother came in – she sort of knocked and turned the handle at the same time, which was annoying.
'What's all that over your face?' She asked.
I felt my face. It was Sasquatch cheese.
'It's Sasquatch cheese,' I said.
Nothing happened; then something made me look down at my erection. She followed my eyes down and flinched when she saw it.
'Mum, I...'
'Get a job.'

But I didn't get a job: I waited until she'd left the room, then put the radio on. The DJ was using the word 'new' too much. He interviewed a band from (and by 'from' I mean 'living in') Manchester that sounded full of cheery earnestness; they were happy to be alive in a world that was treating them well. They did a song: the singer's voice was all squelchy with sham emotion and the band had used four tonnes of flashing electronic equipment to produce something that sounded like a muzak take on a bad Paul McCartney song. The DJ said 'new' a few more times, then did another little bit of interviewing. The band talked about their new music video, how it was filmed on a beach and had some CGI in it. The drummer seemed to have less soul power than the average deal or no deal audience member. My erection disappeared. It all felt bit like a New Labour party conference, somehow; the psychic landscape was the same.

Then I ate an apple and thought about the backlash.

This is Sir Ian Morgan's inaugural post for The Mancunia - he's positively our favourite non-Mancunian music writer.