Wasn’t I Joe? – I’m Too Mad to Let You Know (Sign the Papers)

The news that David Sylvian would be touring the Blemish album came as a complete surprise to me. Live performance had often been decried by the singer as a far less fulfilling activity than time in studio, albeit his early ’90s work with Robert Fripp hread shifted this perspective somewhat. The 2001/2002 Everything and Nothing shows were still recent memories and with the move away from a major label, the financing required to make touring viable seemed a remote possibility – it had been borderline before with losses accumulated from the US shows in 2002.

The excitement of the announcement of the A Fire in the Forest tour soon turned to dismay for this listener when I realised that the week in September chosen for the UK dates coincided with a long-planned business trip to India. There was no way I would be able to get to one of the opening shows in Bristol, Manchester or London. Determined not to miss out, I quickly organised a trip to Brussels to catch the later performance scheduled at the Cirque Royale. My A Fire in the Forest experience would be three weeks after the tour’s opening night – but I would get to witness it. That night in Brussels would be the last of sixteen European shows performed in twenty-one days before the on-stage trio of Sylvian, Steve Jansen and Masakatsu Takagi took a month-long break ahead of an appearance as part of the Crossing Border festival in the Netherlands. Early in 2004 they would be out on the road once again to complete the itinerary with visits to Russia and Japan.

Had I been able to attend in the UK there would have been little time to hear anything about the set-list, but as it turned out I would hear the buzz regarding the performance of Blemish in its entirety followed by a varied second half with songs from across the back catalogue and three new pieces premiered – ‘Blue Skinned Gods’, ‘World Citizen’, and ‘Wasn’t I Joe?’. Interestingly it was the latter never-previously-heard song that would close the main set and pave the way for the encores, a slot reserved by most performers for something that the audience knows well and loves.

Whilst awareness of what was to come took away an element of surprise, none of the impact of hearing ‘Wasn’t I Joe?’ for the first time was diminished. A reinvented version of the wonderful ‘Maria’ from Secrets of the Beehive was the precursor, this incarnation peppered with spoken word samples, the most dominant of which was a recurring proclamation that ‘love will not die’, a reprise of a sample weaved into ‘A Fire in the Forest’ earlier in the set-list. Then came the segue into the new song, a manipulated sample from Arvo Pärt’s ‘Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten’ creating an opening lament for what’s been lost, its sole bell tolling poignantly in the far distance at various points in the song’s thirteen-minute duration.

Other notable recurring motifs are the incantations of a woman in prayer and the sound of birds flocking excitedly. These are taken from an early scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 movie Nostalghia. In the film, Russian writer Andrei Gorchakov travels to Italy to research the life of a fellow-countryman composer who lived there and later committed suicide after returning to Russia. Andrei and his local interpreter, Eugenia, travel to a church in the Tuscan hills to see Piero della Francesca’s painting Madonna of Childbirth. At the last minute, Gorchakov decides not to enter and Eugenia is left to explore the place of worship alone. Here she witnesses a woman praying to the Holy Mother for the gift of children, with birds released from within Mary’s garments – as if from her womb – at the culmination of her supplication. The episode juxtaposes the devotion of the woman in prayer with the free-spirited Eugenia and the Madonna, so highlighting a recurring consideration in the director’s work, that of the significance of motherhood and its sacred nature, as represented by Mary, the mother of Christ.

Sylvian has often spoken of the influence of Tarkovsky’s films on his own artistic outlook, with the preceding song in this live set, ‘Maria’, drawing inspiration from another of the Russian director’s movies, ‘The Sacrifice’ (read more here). Nostalghia features poems written by Andrei Tarkovsky’s poet father Arseny, who was the author of the words recited by Sylvian for Ryuichi Sakamoto’s appearance at the Concert for Japan and for the track ‘Life, Life’ from Ryuichi’s pinnacle late album, async.

The most prominent voice we hear in the introduction to ‘Wasn’t I Joe?’ comes from a third source, one that lends the song its title:

‘I was strong myself when I started … In on you … Wasn’t I, Joe? … Normal strength …’

These words are taken from Samuel Beckett’s first play conceived specifically for television, Eh Joe. The play was written in 1965 and first produced in German before an English version was made for BBC 2 the following year. It’s an intense eighteen minutes of TV which Ackerley and Gontarski describe in their Companion to Samuel Beckett thus: ‘The monologue features a man in his fifties, alone in a room, assailed by a recurrent voice in his head. As in Film [Beckett’s only screenplay] the protagonist tries to avoid the pains of being by avoiding perception…The plot is “simple”, Samuel Beckett noting “a passion to kill the voices which he cannot kill.” Joe has apparently stilled the voices of his mother and father, and is on his way to stifling this Voice, which may be as “unstillable”, Beckett notes, …as the voice of God.’

The play was described as a ‘spoken mime’ because the character we see on screen, Joe – played by Jack MacGowran for the BBC 2 version, never speaks. The monologue is given by Voice, whom we hear but has no physical presence. That role was performed by Siân Phillips and it is her voice that interjects within Sylvian’s composition.

Voice is inside Joe’s head, a product of his experience and imagination, recalling a relationship which he deserted, and others in his past, including another lover, ‘the green one,’ who later committed suicide. Her reference to starting ‘in on you’ recalls the beginning of her pronouncements to Joe from within his own mind.

‘Voice…is mounting the strongest attack possible,’ states Ackerley and Gontarski’s Companion, ‘and since she is an extension of Joe, he finds that hell is not only other people but himself. Samuel Beckett noted, “Voice should be whispered. A dead voice in his head. Minimum of colour. Attacking. Each sentence a knife going in, pause for withdrawal, then in again”.’

As Sylvian closed the main set of the live show, he returned to the subject matter that sparked the opening numbers, the confusion and isolation of separation.

‘And the minutes last a lifetime
They’ve mastered ways of moving slow
She took the children and the cheque book
Should I have really let her go?’

The precise parallel Sylvian was drawing with Beckett’s play is a matter for the listener’s consideration. There are the references to being alone, as was the protagonist in Eh Joe, and entering into an internal dialogue whilst processing changed circumstances:

‘There’s a moving recitation
Played out inside my head
With an eloquence I don’t possess
I think it better left unsaid’

The sorrow is palpable…

‘Don’t stay away too long love
I know that something’s wrong
There’s a sadness I can’t live with
Don’t stay away too long’

…and with that expression the song kicks into a new phase with Steve Jansen’s fevered electronic percussion turning up the intensity, as the singer reflects on the significance of a single day (‘the day before I met her’ providing a counterpoint to the later Nine Horses track ‘The Day the Earth Stole Heaven’). Freeze-frame images from his immediate surroundings are laden with significance.

‘Today’s the day before I met her
Now these things pass unrecognised
These are the shoes, that was the workplace
And this the car in which we cried’

Thoughts become personified as the troubled mind seeks rest…

‘So many hours of conversation
I doubt there’s anything left unsaid
The hope of reconciliation
Slowly paces round my bed’

Just as Joe can find no rest in a place that should be his safe haven, there’s a sense that this protagonist is caught in the setting of past altercations, the current stillness undermined by the traumas the space has witnessed.

‘And the walls echo disturbance
They’re screaming from the inside too
You left with everything we lived for
The everything of me and you

I was strong myself when I started
Wasn’t I Joe?’

As Sylvian himself sings the lines that Beckett gave to Voice, we are left questioning whether his identification is with Joe, or with the Voice within Joe’s head – the presence of past mistreated lovers. Maybe the allusion doesn’t need to be that precise. Certainly Beckett’s Joe is hard to love, both his character and conduct dubious. Yet Joe is the religious one, and Voice is the doubter, her reference to Joe’s Catholicism – ‘On Mary’s beads we plead her needs and in the holy Mass’ – calling to mind the prayer offered before the Virgin’s image in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia.

Whereas Joe has silenced the voices of his father and mother who inhabited his head long before Voice, Sylvian’s protagonist invokes his parents as reference points for the present situation.

‘And I’ll be nothing like my father
We’ll wash the sheets as if by hand
And you’ll be nothing like my mother
We’re abandoning the plan.

Aren’t we Joe?

Wasn’t I Joe?’

(The line ‘Aren’t we Joe?’ appears in Hypergraphia but as far as I can work out was not sung in the live performance. It doesn’t appear in Beckett’s text.)

One of my most abiding memories of catching the tour at Cirque Royale, Brussels was witnessing one of the technical team at the rear of the auditorium completely freaking out in dance to the beats of ‘Wasn’t I Joe’ as Masakatsu Takagi’s videos created a backdrop that exploded from the stage, illuminating the audience. It was quite incongruous, the frenzied movement of that individual contrasting with the relative stasis on stage, this being for the most part a laptop-based performance with Steve’s drum sounds created by deft finger taps on his Roland HPD-15 Handsonic percussion pad, his undemonstrative stage presence creating a pulsating torrent of sound.

All then falls quieter for the tender close:

‘And sometimes life is frightening
And everything comes on strong
So we’re holding on for dear life
‘Til something better comes along’

I find this track truly mesmerising. I think it’s the combination of an innovative arrangement that swells from quiet to frenzy and then back again, the touchstone references to art in other genres, and a lyric that conveys heartfelt emotion. Unfortunately Sylvian has stated that there is no studio version lying on a hard-drive somewhere awaiting future release. The song, he says, ‘only exists as a live recording,’ adding, ‘I don’t personally have a copy’ (2022). Samadhisound did try to licence the footage broadcast on Japanese TV of the performance at Showa Women’s University Hitomi Memorial Hall, Tokyo on 24 April 2004 for an official DVD soon after the tour was over, but for whatever reason that never came to fruition. So our only source for retaining the memory of this song is amateur capture of the TV show – thank goodness for those who preserved the images.

Looking back with the benefit of ensuing releases one can see how ‘Wasn’t I Joe?’ signposts forward to the Nine Horses project with its complex beats and time signatures changing the musical landscape from the percussion-free Blemish, Steve Jansen and David Sylvian combining their skills in sound design to craft tracks such as ‘Atom and Cell’ and ‘Darkest Birds’.

On Christmas Eve 2022 David Sylvian posted on soundcloud ‘an undeveloped piece from the Nine Horses sessions,’ describing it as ‘an off the cuff mix of a demo from 2004,’ the year the A Fire in the Forest tour drew to a close as it visited Russia and then Japan. Once again, the brothers combine to produce an irresistibly rhythmic composition, this time accompanied by some terrific thick-as-treacle bass playing from Keith Lowe.

Only the faintest of hope now lingers in ‘I’m Too Mad to Let You Know (Sign the Papers)’, the gulf has now grown too wide…

‘You’ve been gone a lot
I’m tired of spending time alone
We could sort it out
I’m too mad to let you know’

…the harsh reality points to the ‘teeth of lawyers’ of the forthcoming Jansen/Sylvian penned ‘Snow Borne Sorrow’…

‘You can sell the lot
Sign the papers’

Keith Lowe was as delighted as anyone at the surprise upload. ‘I was thinking of this exact session/tune about a year ago and wondering if it would ever see the light of day,’ he told me at the time. ‘Steve and I worked really hard on this one getting all that random whammy pedal bass stuff into shape.’

‘Wasn’t I Joe’

Steve Jansen – synthesisers, electronic percussion; David Sylvian – synthesisers, vocals; Masakatsu Takagi – video

Music by Steve Jansen & David Sylvian. Lyrics by David Sylvian.

Played live on the A Fire in the Forest tour, 2003/4

The performance at the Showa Women’s University Hitomi Memorial Hall, Tokyo, 24 April 2004, was broadcast on television in Japan. The featured image and shot of Steve Jansen are stills from the programme.

Contains samples of Eh Joe, Samuel Beckett, BBC 2, 1966; ‘Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten’, Arvo Pärt, from Tabula Rasa, ECM, 1984; Nostalghia, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983

At the time of writing the full Beckett play can be viewed here. Tabula Rasa can be purchased as a download here and in physical format here. Nostalghia can be obtained in physical format here.

lyrics © copyright samadhisound publishing

‘I’m Too Mad to Let You Know (Sign the Papers)’

Keith Lowe – bass; Steve Jansen and David Sylvian – all other instruments

Uploaded to the samadhisound soundcloud account, December 2022

Music by Steve Jansen & David Sylvian. Lyrics by David Sylvian.

lyrics © copyright samadhisound publishing

Sources and acknowledgements for this article can be found here.

‘If the company that you keep is good then the touring itself can be a pleasant experience although, having said that, there’s no doubt that travel has grown increasingly torturous since 9/11. The conception of any given performance tends to be guided by the audio content of the show. We have to be a little humble in our staging as it isn’t easy to break even financially even without elaborate lighting etc., so we work within a tightly constrained budget.’ David Sylvian, 2004

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