Philip Clark salutes keyboardist and singer-songwriter, John Shuttleworth, whose
unique approach to his art offers a valuable lesson for musicians.
John Shuttleworth is a versatile singer-songwriter from Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
He shuffles onstage with Bryicreemed hair, frayed slacks, herringbone jackets
with the elbows out and the sort of heavy, black-rimmed spectacles that haven't
seen the light of day since Jim Callaghan's time. As he greets his adoring audience
he's bombarded with 'chocy' bars in response to Mutiny Over The Bounty, his
song mourning the loss of the cardboard tray that until a few years ago held
the two separate bars of chocolate together in the Bounty chocolate bar. He
reprimands students for having their tea as late as eight o'clock in the evening,
and sings of his struggle against depression in a number entitled Up and Down
Like a Bride's Nightie (after apologising for 'the slightly blue lyric'). Shuttleworth
is a man befuddled by the modern world, someone who sees the world's big issues
refracted through the minutiae of obsolete brand names and his day-to-day Sheffield
existence. He's a nerd and a harmless bore.
Mauricio Kagel once told me in an interview for The Wire magazine that he'd
accept an artist wanting to produce boring music as a philosophical point-of-view,
'so long as the boringness is interesting'. Luckily, Shuttleworth isn't real,
but the brilliantly observed comic persona of the actor and comedian Graham
Fellows. The level of mundane tedium that Shuttleworth oozes is so acute that,
as he drones on about the marvels of shower gel and protests in song about the
slaughter of the whale ('Don't be naughty Norway, to kill the whale's a crime.
There are lots of other fish upon which you can dine. Have you tried a cod portion
in parsley sauce - divine'), his downtrodden naivety flips over into an infectious
fascination for his forlorn existence. If he follows a lineage in British comedy
then it's Peter Cook's monotone meaner EL Whisty ('I wanted to be a lawyer,
but I didn't have the Latin'), but Shuttleworth's unique selling point is his
talents as a performing musician.
Not that Shuttleworth plays the piano as such, rather its Betamax cousin the
Yamaha Portasound PSS68O. But as if dealing with such testy technology isn't
tough enough for Shuttleworth, his fingers aren't up to dealing with the challenges
of his tunes. He slips and slides like he's trying to scoop up notes that he's
dropped on the floor. His sense of time is at constant odds with the unrelenting
tick-tock march rhythm of his drum samples, and yet he remains gleefully unaware
of his shortcomings and throws himself into playing with gusto. Shuttleworth's
improvised breaks are best. Block chords meant to be heard as smooth tremolos
are played with all the élan of Norman Wisdom, and he finds it impossible
to get through the simplest of lines without tripping over his fingers. Preset
tempos on his keyboard suddenly accelerate alarmingly and leave Shuttleworth
floundering, and at the end of I'm A Modern Man he admits defeat. 'It's too
fast for me,' he confesses, 'a bit like Matt Bianco'. To complete the homespun
image, his granddaughter Michela then bursts into the studio and whacks his
keyboard.
To say that Shuttleworth's playing resembles Thelonious Monk is not to condemn
Monk's playing (far from it), but to praise the high level of Fellows's satire.
Although they clearly have completely different rationales for existing as musicians,
both Monk and Shuttleworth project an image of precious vulnerability that's
becoming an increasing rarity in streamlined contemporary art. Look elsewhere
in this issue and you'll see a debate about the desirability or not of Charles
Ives's alleged amateurism. The sort of conservative professionals that Ives
rebelled against are those same goons who took it upon themselves to remove
the cardboard tray from the Bounty bar in an attempt (failed) to sex it up.
Ives, Monk and Shuttleworth all pitch themselves against smokescreens of slickness
and gloss. As pianists and composers, there's much to learn from their example.