These ghosts have voices that come in the form of lament, of pleading and praying, apology and anger. They are strange and unfamiliar, foreign. They are not, in other words, the soothing, comforting, joyous, or even protesting, sing-a-long voices of popular music; but voices that carry a different kind of weight. They crack the surface of the present to release the air and spirits of another reality. Some ways of comprehending the coming together of these voices, apparently ventriloquized or orchestrated by Brian Eno and David Byrne, are more commonplace than the one that might take us to the core of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ essential truth, which might be something along the lines of we are of the world, yet apart from it.
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Read an excerpt from the ‘Introduction’:
Julien Temple, the earliest chronicler of the Sex Pistols, has described the first time he encountered them as being akin to witnessing an alien visitation: four figures, silhouetted against the light, making a racket of a noise inside a darkened warehouse that was located amid the ruins of London’s docklands – a site, in fact, that had been deemed irrelevant and redundant just a few years earlier. Johnny Rotten, the singer of this group, with his unusual spiky hair – which might have been dyed green, perhaps orange – was clad in a fuzzy striped mohair sweater and a pair of trousers that disobeyed the current fashion for denim flares that skirted the floor. He contorted himself into unnatural shapes.
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