This was meant to be in a book, but I believe the book isn't happening now...
How Welcome Is Death To I Who Have Nothing More To Do But Die
Tesco Organisation TESCO 102 (CD/2LP, 2016)
Mike Dando’s English power electronics project CON-DOM reached its zenith with this gruelling comeback mic drop, exploring the protracted, undignified death of his mother.
The snazzily grim booklet for How Welcome Is Death features photographs chronicling Nora’s obvious suffering, under the yoke of the miserably attritive-sounding Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. An incurable neurological condition, it did for Dudley Moore and Peter Sarstedt and, at the time of writing, is gnawing at Linda Ronstadt. In short, this situation is far from the quirky world of 2023 film Quiz Lady’s rebellious care home prison-breaker.
While leftfield artists Hannah Peel and Ian William Craig have dealt extensively with relatives’ degenerative illnesses, power electronics is the ideal setting for examining the brutal physical and psychological effects of these conditions on patients and their families. They have been referenced in PE before, but How Welcome Is Death is the genre’s heart-on-the-sleeve statement on the subject. Dando credits the influence of Atrax Morgue in the sleeve notes. However, the album’s more direct ancestor is US noisers Macronympha’s legendary Bananafish interview, wherein Joseph Roemer shared photos of his dying father, and talked about having the latter’s life support turned off. It also reminds us of John King’s Shipman-skewering novel White Trash (‘He did not know what to say to this walking skeleton, felt sick just looking at him’); and of the astute closing sections of Nick Tosches’ Dino, wherein Dean Martin drifts in and out of lucidity during palliative care.
For PE, How Welcome Is Death is the equivalent of a late career classic rock album. As Bruce Springsteen and Loudon Wainwright III matured in their navigation of life’s stages, so did Dando, for whom the album is akin to his own Transformer Man, as he holds hands with Neil Young and peers under the tree canopy dappling their loved ones’ ability to communicate. A lot of time and a lot of life had elapsed between 1984’s Calling All Aryans and 2016:1 as Noise Receptor zine put it, How Welcome Is Death holds ‘a mirror up to the fallacy of the oft faux celebration of strength and the overt obsession with death that preoccupies so much of the post-industrial underground’. What else was Dando going to address in his transgressive art, when the worst horrors faced him at home?
The medicinally bitter taste of British national treasure Clive Dunn’s anodyne 1970 novelty hit Grandad begins How Welcome Is Death, before bleeding into the wounded feedback and Maurizio Bianchi-style rumbles of the first of the album’s lengthier pieces (which are interspersed with brief field recordings from Dando’s mother’s care setting, a TV dumbly blaring throughout). In Living Death, Dando imagines his mother’s thoughts on her predicament: “I have come to this.” The title track is written from a similar perspective, but moves from the minutiae of care towards Nora’s thoughts of loneliness and death after the loss of her husband: “No point with him gone.” We don’t know how much comes from real conversations and how much is imagined, but it all rings true.
The first act concludes with one of two presumably surreptitious recordings of Nora’s roommate, Sarah, adding ‘colour’ while demonstrating the unappealing, unsane, unacceptable conditions for patients in the underfunded UK care sector. They also beg questions regarding the ethics of their inclusion. One imagines Nora was unaware of her son’s project, but it was initiated by someone who would be regarded as having her ‘best interests’ at heart. This cannot be said for Sarah, much as she or her loved ones will probably never be aware of her
cameo. Those whose naked photographs are viewed by paedophiles are considered violated, regardless of whether they are aware of the abuse, but on the other hand images made of mental patients without informed consent have positively influenced that sector. Albert Maisel’s disturbing Bedlam 1946 Time photographic series, regarding two US state hospitals,came complete with leading captions such as ‘despair’, ‘forced labor’, and ‘neglect’. It led to much pearl-clutching and determination to do better: rulesbent in extreme circumstances. Whatever one makes of the record, it is clearly not meant as entertainment or prurience; rather, it is Dando’s cry of pain on behalf of two helpless old ladies.
The second act begins with How Welcome Is Death’s centrepiece, Chocolates, which reads like a mixture of the personal histories which the healthcare system cruelly punishes families into repeatedly giving; and Nora’s suicide note. Dando is clearly spoken here, the case history crisply laid out on clean white hospital sheets. T4 then steps outside Dando’s immediate situation, referencing the Nazi scheme of involuntarily euthanising the incurably sick. The booklet mirrors his family’s situation with that of a family under the Nazis, pleading for a mercy killing, while the Office of Racial Policy issues posters questioning the point of keeping the sick alive.
The third and final act abruptly switches to Dando’s own perspective, opening with the grinding Just Fuckin’ Die (the ‘hit single’), in which he is uncompromisingly honest about his own feelings on the state in which illness has left his mother. Dando is thoroughly humane (he was with his mother in her dying days, after all), but there are no sugar-coated memories of good times here; just a husk, a man at the end of his tether. And so to the inevitable elegy: the alien, windswept, near-instrumental Ending (Nora). One thinks of the drum and bass maverick Goldie, playing his hour-long composition Mother while visiting his mum in the chapel of rest.
For British listeners, if the album started with Dunn, then it must end with future Fall member Julia Nagle, alongside future actresses Sally Lindsay and Jennifer Hennessy, on 1980’s inane school choral travesty There’s No One Quite Like Grandma. Degenerative illnesses do not only affect the elderly (as per the book and film Still Alice), but Dando questions the tone and content of Britain’s most beloved paeans to them. If the album had been recorded a few years later, nonagenarian pandemic celeb Captain Tom’s hit could have featured, his not-so-dulcet tones standing in for Sarah’s anguished cries.
The falling apart of the sainted NHS. The systematic deaths of the UK care sector (Crass’ “System, system, system/Death in life”). The ashamed thoughts of “This sinner”. Swearing at and rejecting carers, like Anthony Hopkins in The Father. The interplay between love and hate; love and duty. “How welcome her death to I.” An old lady, soiled, fallen on her bedroom floor, head cracked open, crying “Kill me”. Wee. Poo. Pads. Accidents. Catheters. Puckered flesh. Wee. Poo. “My arse hurts.” Reality and Codeine dreams merged: “I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.” “I want to go home”; “You are home”. All of that which came before corroded and forgotten. Exhaustion. Waiting. Death? How welcome.
