Bonniwell's Musical Mess

I got this album the other day for my birthday and gave it my first listen last night. Its a collection of the Bonniwell Music Machine's songs that have fallen far from anyone's attention. And for quite obvious reasons. The music is a fucken mess. Its garage rock from the late 60's, all those sounds are in there - fuzz guitar, farfisa organs, thudding drums - the ideas are in there, the voice is there but not a single one of these elements seem to fit together in any way, shape or form.

The Music Machine had a hit in September 1966 with the song "Talk Talk", breaking into the top twenty and making a television appearance that showed them wearing - according to Sean Bonniwell, the band's lead singer/songwriter, to avoid all gimmicks and to embrace their originality - matching black suits, mop-tops and, to really stand out, a single black glove on either their right or left hand. Fucken wild, hey. Their next single flopped, Bonniwell blaming industry clashes and the band put themselves through years of hard touring, presumably on the back of the one song. They refused to play covers or, apparently even listen to any form of advice. The band would play hour-long sets without breaks, rather than stop to have requests shouted at them which smacks of some weird and confused egomania rather than some highly original or progressive musical tract.

After a while, the original Music Machine parted and Bonniwell put together The Bonniwell Music Machine, recorded some songs for Warner Bros that probably didn't see the light of day until this CD release.

The disc is basically the musical equivalent of one guy's strange, deluded insistence that he force his overwhelming originality onto an audience that existence nowhere but in his mind. An odd, maniacal journey into a pop-garage sound with not a single clue about hooks, harmonies or cohesive musical arrangement. Its astounding that this man was even allowed near a recording studio. No one could have been that hard up for bands in the late 60's that they needed to spend time on this confused mess of ideas. From the liner notes (credited to Bonniwell and written in the third person) to the untracable sounds that pop up clueless and erratic this music isn't, as is claimed, a forerunner to punk or progressive rock, its some insane, gloriously confused mess of mashed ideas made inside the supposed shape of 1960's garage rock.

And its not Beefheart messy either. Beefheart at least had something you could tap into, had enough of a flow and awareness of its own insanity that it was something you could tap into. But this . . . this is simply . . . impenetrable.

To quote Bonniwell in his description of the song "Absolutely Positively", which is about: 'Demanding that you get what you don't have without knowing what you want, is the same as wanting what you haven't got - then not wanting it after you get it." Right . . .

Now, I've met people like this - I know that they're real and that they're out there. People that are so enthusiastic and so brimming with ideas; people that are so convinced of their own originality that they loudly proclaim it attempt to draw others into audience. Unfortunately, though, these are ideas are often so confused, so lost, so misdirected that they are lost on anyone who happens to come into contact with them.

Which is why Bonniwell's music is so fascinatingly, fantastically broken and messed up. In a way, he does fit in with the idea of punk and, indeed, with anybody's ideas about freedom of thought and expression; the idea of creating your own world, of making evrything around you your own and yours to own. Its just that its such a terrifically garbled and inarticulate mess that no one can get properly inside of it to take away something for themselves. As Bonniwell sings in the opening line to "Talk Talk": "I got a complication/And its an only child." Thanks Sean, couldn't have put it better myself.