Richard Wolfson; Towering Inferno co-founder (Great)
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 10/02/2005) Telegraph
Richard Wolfson, who died on February 1 aged 49, was the
co-founder of Towering Inferno, one of the most original and
provocative performance-art bands of the 1990s.
Their sole album Kaddish (1993) was a shocking and
unforgettable piece which they described as "a dream history
of Europe in the wake of the Holocaust". It reflected a
melange of influences that Brian Eno characterised as
"existing on the cusp of art and commerce, a cusp we did not
know previously to exist". Eno was an early and very vocal
supporter of Towering Inferno, and told them that Kaddish
was "the most frightening record I have ever heard"; the
performances of the album became multimedia spectaculars,
and met with rapt reviews.
Wolfson and Saunders originally released it on their own TI
label, but with the phenomenal cult attention that it
attracted, they were soon signed to Island. Kaddish was
performed live at all the major opera houses and concert
halls of the world.
Richard Jonathan Wolfson was born on April 25 1955 and grew
up at Solihull, Birmingham. His father, an Orthodox Jewish
dentist, died when he was 14. He had piano lessons from the
age of five with a teacher who rapped his knuckles with a
wooden ruler if he made mistakes; he soon gave up and never
had a classical training.
He was educated at Solihull School, where Neil Megson
(creator of the performance-art character Genesis P-Orridge)
was three years ahead, in his brother's class. Richard was a
decadent schoolboy, contemptuous of authority and stubbornly
setting his own educational agenda. His reports said "he is
far too interested in Eastern Religions", and referred
disapprovingly to his declared interest in "Rock, folk,
blues and unmusic".
As a teenager he learned guitar and performed around
Birmingham with a folk band, and at 17 he met the (then
heavy metal) guitarist Andy Saunders. Their mothers knew
each other through the Jewish Graduates' Society, and when
reluctantly the sons agreed to meet, they were overwhelmed
by the convergence of their musical tastes and talents. They
formed the experimental band Missing Morris.
Wolfson studied Music and Theatre at York University, where
he formed the rock outfit Warm and Wet, delighting his fans
during gigs at the Lowther Hotel with his hour-long fuzz
guitar solos. On graduating he moved to London, where he
lived in Brixton as a practising Trotskyist. In 1979 he
co-wrote and performed the music for Red Door Without a Bolt
(1981), which had its West End run at the Comic Strip,
alongside comedians such as Rik Mayall and Alexei Sayle.
In 1982 he and Andy Saunders formed Art Hammer Duo, with
Wolfson on piano and Saunders on sax, performing music
culled from South African jazz, and three years later they
formed Towering Inferno. The master plan behind the band was
to turn the conventional concept of a rock gig on its head,
transforming the egocentric musician into a ghostly
technician bathed in multiple projections, through which the
audience could enter the world of dreams and the
subconscious.
They toured Europe in a Ford Transit, with four slide
projectors and 50 super 8 projectors, filming as they went.
Wolfson proved a brilliant cameraman - some of his shots of
statues in Italy and the derelict Brixton Synagogue have
since been shown at film schools. In 1986 they met the
Hungarian poet Endre Szkarosi, whose coded work, challenging
Communist repression and examining central European
identity, prompted them to explore the origins of the
melancholia in their own work. The album Kaddish, composed
over the course of five years and reflecting their diverse
musical influences, was the result of this probing of their
past.
In the late 1990s, as well as working on a second album, The
Other Side, Wolfson studied for an MPhil at The Royal
College of Art, entitled Towards a Theory of Live Music/Film
and Performance. He also established himself as a brilliant
and perceptive journalist, writing regular music reviews and
features for The Daily Telegraph, and on film and music for
the Financial Times. He had a gift for decoding the
complexities of modern culture, and for explaining and
illuminating difficult work.
In the studio he was immensely driven and stubborn, away
from it he was calm and kind. His time scales were
luxurious, his lifestyle bohemian, and he swung swiftly from
schoolboy humour to intense intellectualism.
In the final two years of his life he met and fell deeply in
love with Laura Charlton, who survives him.
Bill Schenley
> 49, was the co-founder of Towering Inferno, one
> of the most original and provocative
> performance-art bands of the 1990s.
> Their sole album Kaddish (1993) was a shocking
> and unforgettable piece which they described as
> "a dream history of Europe in the wake of the
> Holocaust". It reflected a melange of influences that
> Brian Eno characterised as "existing on the cusp of
> art and commerce, a cusp we did not know previously
> to exist". Eno was an early and very vocal supporter
> of Towering Inferno, and told them that Kaddish
> was "the most frightening record I have ever heard";
> the performances of the album became multimedia
> spectaculars, and met with rapt reviews.
In December of last year ... you posted the obituary of documentary
film maker, Arthur Howes, who was the visual director for Kaddish's
multimedia shows.
I don't know if that's important ... but I remember this stuff ...
Hyfler/Rosner
11 April 2005
Richard Jonathan Wolfson, musician, composer, film-maker and
journalist: born Solihull, Warwickshire 25 April 1955; died
London 1 February 2005.
Richard Wolfson was a musician, composer, film-maker, critic
and journalist, best known as one half of the uncompromising
music group Towering Inferno, which he formed in 1985 with
his lifelong friend and musical partner Andy Saunders.
Five years in the making, their 1993 album Kaddish was a
harrowingly intense concept album which used the Holocaust
as a central theme, realised through an ambitiously eclectic
range of musical styles, from a cappella singing, Jewish
cantor and acoustic folk music to thrash-metal, jazz-rock
and avant-garde classical modes.
It was widely acclaimed upon its small independent release -
most notably by Brian Eno, who marvelled at what he
considered "the most frightening piece of music I have ever
heard" - and eventually secured a wider audience a few years
later when it was reissued by Island Records. Between 1995
and 1999, Wolfson and Saunders toured the work intensively
around the world with an 18-piece band and a multi-media
show, playing at opera houses and concert halls, climaxing
with three sold-out performances at the Melbourne State
Opera House.
Richard Wolfson was born in 1955 to Eric and Elizabeth
Wolfson, an Orthodox Jewish couple of respectively Polish
and Russian descent. The youngest of three brothers, Richard
was brought up in Solihull, where he developed a hatred of
authority at an early age thanks to the brutal methods
employed by his piano teacher. He soon stopped taking
lessons, and never pursued classical training again.
His experiences at Solihull School followed a similarly
autodidactic route. Despite their misgivings, he shocked his
teachers by acquiring grade A A-level passes in English and
Music, and a grade one in S-level English, without
apparently doing any work.
At the same time, Wolfson's earliest musical obsession was
with the Scots mystic folk duo the Incredible String Band,
whose songs he performed around Birmingham with a small folk
group. In 1972, he met Andy Saunders, with whom he formed
the avant-rock band Missing Morris, a furrow-browed
distillation of the era's most "difficult" musical
influences, from Messiaen and Miles Davis to English
art-rockers such as Henry Cow and Soft Machine, and
groundbreaking German ensembles like Can and Faust.
Between 1974 and 1977, Wolfson studied Music and Theatre at
York University under Wilfred Mellers, whose teachings
reinforced his determination to break down the distinctions
between classical and pop music. Moving to Brixton upon
graduation, he worked with groups such as the Sadista
Sisters and Fischer-Z, although his most significant musical
alliance of the period proved to be with his old friend
Saunders in the sax/piano jazz outfit the Art Hammer Duo.
The duo became part of the capital's modern jazz scene,
working most fruitfully with the expatriate South African
jazz community whose number included Julian Bahula and the
great alto and tenor saxophonist Dudu Pukwana. Over the next
decade, Wolfson and Saunders toured widely throughout Europe
and around Britain.
In 1985, the duo instigated the Towering Inferno project
with the film-maker Arthur Howes and visual director Roger
Riley. The intention was to devise a platform for the
juxtaposition of diverse music genres, from rock to ambient,
folk to jazz, pop to classical; and to present this eclectic
mix within a performance context that utilised the music as
the driving force behind a series of visual projections,
many of them incorporating 8mm and 16mm film footage shot by
Wolfson himself on Art Hammer Duo and Towering Inferno tours
of Europe.
An encounter with the Hungarian poet Endre Szkárosi at the
1986 D'Art Room Festival in Bologna convinced the duo to
investigate their own Jewish roots, an interest which led to
the development of Kaddish, a grand work exploring "the
contradictions of barbarism and civilisation, innocence and
corruption, seduction and repulsion, promises and lies, hope
and despair".
Between 1988 and 1993, they brought in various drummers,
string players and cantors to help realise their vision,
along with art-rock heroes of their youth such as the Henry
Cow drummer Chris Cutler and the Soft Machine saxophonist
Elton Dean, recording much of the album in the Regent's Park
Diorama. It was some of the most uneasy listening music ever
put on record, dividing opinions starkly, but leaving no
room for apathy. Using triple-screen back-projections, the
live performances were just as confrontational as the music,
blending old documentary footage of Nazi parades with
holiday home movies, foreign television commercials, slo-mo
footage, buzzwords like "Sex", "Power" and "Hate", and
flaming swastikas and Stars of David.
Some critics found the approach lacking in subtlety, but
Wolfson defended its impact. "We tried to avoid clichés, but
some of the imagery is very one- dimensional," he explained
in an interview at the time. "A burning swastika held there
for two or three minutes does something quite interesting -
it's simple and full of evocative resonance."
Following four years of touring Kaddish, Wolfson
successfully studied for a master's thesis, "Towards a
Theory of Live Music/Film and Performance", at the Royal
College of Art, and also established himself as a film and
music critic for the Financial Times and Daily Telegraph. At
the time of his death, he and Saunders were only months away
from completion of their follow-up project, The Other Side,
on which they had been working for five years.
Andy Gill