In the final lines of the impossibly beautiful Argyle Square, Al Joshua's happiest song to date, the narrator marvels, standing in his little box room, "the window faces west—and from there, anywhere." It is a crowning moment of wonder in a song filled with and defined by it. As the lines in Leonard Cohen's Ballad of the Absent Mare go, "The world is sweet / the world is wide..."
In Peacocks, written on the heels of the Orphans & Vandals record, an adult looks back on childhood. The narrator ends the song embraced by a sky of stars, but the directions he might take are circumscribed: "I do believe / you will be bereaved / piece by piece, over time, / first your things and then your mind, / up the ladder as you climb."
The song Souvenirs postdates, presumably, the tearing of the heart that made a silence of many years between I Am Alive and You Are Dead and Out of the Blue. A person's life is likened to a subway train that cannot help but cleave to its one track, in the one tunnel.
Given this gradual closing-in, you might think that the next set of songs would be about people like Nell and Nagg in Samuel Beckett's Endgame, confined to the urns they will die in. Not so. The characters of Anomalous Events escape.
The theme figures so frequently that I'll just take it song by song, in playing order. And maybe writing things out this way will give an indication of how brilliantly Al Joshua develops themes on an album scale. They recede and come to the fore, now larger, now smaller; examined from that angle, and from this; spoken of directly, or through symbols, or through stories.
Figures in the Rain
There in the refrain: "I'm going off with those figures in the rain."
The early verses list things that will be left behind when the narrator indeed goes off: the trappings of conventionality, or the detrita of the life the narrator is about to break out of. All are forsaken for a kingdom of mist.
In the second half, there is talk of a school ("in Kenya, was it... in England, or Spain") and a young student who walks out beyond the school gate, into the mist, to join the indistinct, looming figures who, for a moment, had stood outside the fence looking in. He is visible one moment, invisible the next. Like the narrator of Terra Firma, he divests himself of the markers of the ordinary, familiar world of homes, habits, and predictability: "I take my keys out of my pocket, my phone and my wallet, I put them on the pavement, and I leave them there." But in Terra Firma there is the intimation of suicide. The exit made in Figures in the Rain is disquieting but perhaps not tragic or even altogether unhappy.
The song itself is a gateway to another world. It must have been the only real candidate for album opener.
The Kings and Queens of England
"Through fields of rape and barley / us two made our escape / and fled through foreign apartments / and I still full of sleep..." The opening lines. There is something All Along the Watchtower-esque happening here. The line that follows is, "He cried, 'We've been through this before!'" So we have, but only if we've listened to Anomalous Events once already. Its closer, A Bird Flew In, also opens with two boys escaping, and the mention of barley hearkens back/forward to Green Valley, the final-song-but-one.
The Killing of a Swan
A mirror image: "Through streets of white winter, I pursued the boy / with antlers on his head." If someone is giving chase, it means someone else is escaping. The boy is caught and killed. But, as elsewhere on Anomalous Events, death is not necessarily final. See the next song. And at the end of this song, the narrator realizes that, having performed the murder, he will now become a quarry himself: "I run in silence at the setting of the sun— / oh, they never will forgive the killing of a swan."
The Boy with the Pigeon Chest
The boy of the title seems to be the survivor of a bloody calamity. Upon meeting the narrator, he asks, "Where have the others gone? ... What happened to the others?"
Later, years after their separation, the narrator learns that the boy was pursued, killed, and that "when he died, he turned into a swan... I don't know, it sounds pretty weird." But the narrator thinks of this supposedly murdered lover as if it were obvious that the boy/swan has in fact escaped that fate: "I know he's gone the distance, I know he's passed the test."
Skipping Rope
The narrator is a fugitive, of sorts: "One false move and it's back to Hove."
When We Broke into the Garden
The narrator and his lover (if lover is the right word) sneak past the—presumably not yet dead and rotten—angels and their flaming sword, escaping into the mythic or supra-natural past, into the empty garden of Eden.
My Queer Heaven
Escaping destruction, "this piano survived the war."
I Get the Urge to Destroy Everyone
That would be one way to get away from them.
Father of Flies
The narrator is murdered and dismembered, his youth and his form stolen, but even that doesn't put an end to things: "It was many, many hours 'til I escaped, and when I did, it was very, very hard. But I did it anyway."
Green Valley
In the only song on the album to feature an instrument other than voice and incidental percussion, the narrator seems to have wandered mistakenly out of Anomalous Events and into the world as you and I (think we) know it. He searches for an unnamed but cherished figure. "I wrote a letter to him in 1995. I put it to him, 'I think you are still alive. They saw your body, but they did not see you die, and I think you took that moment to escape, in the blink of an eye.'"
A Bird Flew In
See song premise. As in The Kings and Queens of England, the opening line sets the scene: "My true love and I were escaping..." And the two do manage to shrug off one kind of doom, if only by shouldering another, the survival of the flesh paid for with the death of intimacy.
I'm realizing that I don't have much to say about Anomalous Events that is conclusive or necessarily insightful. I have collected references and observations and lined them up. What it all may add up to is something I will need more time and close listens to discover. But I'll be glad if my series can serve as an impetus or guide for those who have neglected Anomalous Events because its arrangements decline to meet a listener halfway. May these write-ups of mine help direct and focus your attention as you live in the album yourself.
