A Saving Grace: the Performance Art of Throwing Muses’ ‘House Tornado’
Feature by Gary Kaill
In early 2020, I prepared and submitted a proposal to Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series: a long-running and well-loved series of books devoted to publishing angular and illuminating takes on key (often under-appreciated or lesser known) popular music albums. The series takes pride in the breadth of its scope and reach, turning its attention to albums such as Hole’s Live Through This or Elton John’s Blue Moves. I decided, after combing for clues two titles devoted to records I knew very well (Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville and Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out), to develop a piece based on a record I knew inside out and loved unreservedly: House Tornado by Throwing Muses. Alongside various supporting elements (blurb, table of contents, marketing plan) writers were required to provide a written sample, which is what you see below.
The proposal was great fun to write, but the submission process itself was singularly dispiriting. The only response unsuccessful writers (400 of us, apparently) received was an initial auto-receipt email. We found out we had not been chosen eight long months later in November when the publication list was announced (a strange and uninspiring selection that included albums by acts notably low on mystique like The National and ESG.) During that period, the imprint’s Twitter account remained frustratingly silent. I couldn’t have been the only sad hack hopeful who checked his emails day after days hoping for good news.
Still, after languishing in a creative pit of snarling irritation for far too long, I went back to the piece recemtly and was pleased to to be able to confirm what I had felt back then: that the commissioning editors were idiots, that the piece is still pretty cool, and that House Tornado is still a work like no other. Do seek it out if you don’t know it. It’s a difficult beast, for sure, and not for the faint-hearted, but if you can meet it on its own uncompomising terms, it will pick you up and guide you.
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The House Tornado tour began in April 1988, with a show at popular, mid-sized London venue, the Mean Fiddler, in Harlesden. With a full British leg to follow just a few weeks later, after a run of dates across Europe, the gig was a welcome re- introduction to the band for a loyal fanbase that had not had an opportunity to see them play live since supporting Cocteau Twins in late 1986. Of course, it was the first chance, too, for these audiences to hear the new songs (though the band had road- tested them at length in the US prior to the album’s release.)
Melody Maker’s Chris Roberts, arguably the band’s most vocal supporter in the UK press, had attended a show at The Rat Club in Boston the previous year, largely to investigate the work-in-progress. He was typically rhapsodic: ‘It’s the only time you’ll hear these new Muses songs for the first time. It’s the only time they’ll ever be this.’ He took time to praise the band’s adroitness with the earlier material, but it was the fresh cuts he found most nourishing. ‘It’s the world premieres that make me weep,’ he concluded.
The support act for that Boston show, the soon-to-be-huge Pixies, accompanied the band on the UK and European dates. House Tornado placed high on the UK weeklies’ end-of-year lists, but their label-mates’ full-length debut Surfer Rosa (released in the UK on the same day) took top spot with both Melody Maker and Sounds.
And so, with not a single friend or acquaintance familiar with the band, in late April I made my way to Manchester: a city I barely knew (but which I now call home.) Like many music fans in the mid-to-late 80’s, I unthinkingly romanticised the place. It was, I thought, filled with shadowy promise, and something else: an ineffable, almost threatening, watchfulness. Manchester: the cool, increasingly happening counterpart to my featureless home of North Staffordshire.
Much of that evening remains pressed into my memory, still: a series of events that, darkened by time, I occasionally pull back into view—like gently turning up the flame of an oil lamp. Despite my familiarity with, and growing love for, the music, a fearful curiosity remained: what this music might actually be, where it might take me, what it might do to me. Shuffling from railway station to bus stop, attempting to navigate a set of vague instructions offered up by a friend studying at the Polytechnic: the grimy logistics of an expedition so destined to fail. And, of course, classic: a forgetful bus driver reneging on his initial helpfulness (‘I’ll give you a shout when you need to get off, mate!’) leaving me in Rushholme, causing me to have to catch another bus back to the venue: a genuinely lonely and frightening half hour on dark and unfamiliar streets. It’s entirely fitting that this trip, to hear the record that has, from its release to the present day, remained my absolute favourite of all time, was shrouded in fear and (even if only perceived) danger.
Glass crunched beneath my feet as I eventually entered the venue—a sense memory that surely belongs to a different age. Manchester International was, much like any club or student union venue of the time, a low-ceilinged, characterless sweatbox. Airless and smoky, no less dishevelled than the denim and DM-clad crowd. I could hear Pixies from halfway down the street, setting the warm air a-crackle. Once inside the hall, I felt assaulted, brutalised. It seems ridiculous now, but their stage presence was genuinely unsettling—they played recklessly, and with a shocking violence. I had been to dozens of gigs in the previous few years, but this was my first experience of live music in a setting even vaguely left-field—outside of halls or arenas. It was wholly unnerving, but—crucially— strangely edifying.
I saw Pixies perform many times over those next few years, as Doolitle and then Bossanova turned them into arena-fillers. But, in the same way that they never again captured the grievous confrontation of Surfer Rosa, I never saw them play like that again: an inch way from simply collapsing in on themselves. Pop music in extremis. Performance at the cliff-edge. I recall stumbling to the bar while they screamed exultantly in the background words that chiselled their own sense of, well, sense: ‘Tony! Tony! Tony!’
But it was the Muses that the large and attentive audience was (primarily) there to see that night, and they were spellbinding, playing with guile, with a gut-punch precision. At first reserved, inward, a little on edge, yes—but that was their peculiar, winning focus. A weirdly attentive performance mode—no letting loose, even at their most intense, there was simply too much in their songbook that required holding down. Kristin Hersh later offered wry asides as she tuned her guitar, displaying the warmth that would later come to underpin her relationship with an impeccably loyal following.
As ‘Saving Grace' galloped towards its spin-on-a-sixpence tempo change, slowing to a deathly growl, the ambition of the record became clear: its advanced song-craft an exercise in exacting self-belief. Hersh replicated the recorded version’s most perfect line (‘I’m spellbound when I can’t move, I sta-a-a-a-a-aand in front of you, I’m flipping through the pages of your calendar and your books, And your childhood and your looks...’), squeezing a half dozen syllables into a single word. That she would later come to change her vocal style, and adopt a grizzled lower pitch on later records, remains a subject of frenzied discussion for Muses devotees. But at this point in her fulsome history, it was that clean, distinctive alto—a beautiful, oscillating instrument—that beguiled.
When people came, as they inevitably did, to call the music of House Tornado ‘difficult’, it was seeing it performed live that reminded you that the description addressed not just the challenge for the listener. The songs were a bitch and a half to play. (Again, Chris Roberts in his largely ecstatic review for Melody Maker admitted he would understand if friends asked him to turn the record off… but would still most likely just kill them. But, tellingly, in that earlier piece on that Boston preview show, he had ‘gambled his legs on it being the album of the century’.)
As a forensic examination of domestic distress, a howl-around catalogue of the chaos that might accumulate between any four walls, House Tornado was nothing less than perfectly titled. The intro to ‘Downtown’, performed every night on the tour, heralded the set’s centrepiece. Was this the album’s most testing, most obviously least beautiful moment? Perhaps. Certainly that opening arpeggio, as desperately mournful as its counterpart on, say, REM’s ‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull’, remains a piece of artful misdirection—the song expanding, re-shaping itself as it teases out little melodic side-roads, introduces unexpected and delightful counterpoints.
Years later, Hersh would pay tribute to indefatigable, profoundly gifted bassist Leslie Langston for being her onstage ‘map’—whenever she found herself lost, she would look to Langston, who would calmly lead her back into the song. Such a mesmerising joy: watching Langston cooly finger-pick her way through ‘Downtown’, as the band whirled around its fraught central section, Hersh lost in that ‘I can’t remember when, can’t remember when, can’t remember when...’ mantra, before launching them into its (yet another) deftly-applied gearshift.
As the band set in motion the cannonball rattle of ‘Marriage Tree’, or converged around album opener ‘Colder’ with its wired, maze-like middle eight of sorts, the apparent depth of their burgeoning musicality staggered. These songs! Keeping them afloat and moving, functioning as their needlepoint logic demands, was an undertaking both profound and crazy—like throwing a sheet around a whirlwind.