openpolitics.com

But this simplicity helps to conjure a strange feeling of resignation – music written in a state of gnostic exhaustion, when only the sweetest, most direct language would do.

..  ‘We live in a troubled time when Western society, daughter of the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church, is invaded by the shades of ungodliness, a thousand times more barbarous than in the days of Paganism, and seems near to perishing.’

.. Somehow Satie managed to stage Uspud as a shadow theatre piece at the Auberge du Clou. He also petitioned the Opéra. When the director didn’t respond, Satie challenged him to a duel, which frightened him enough to give Satie a hearing; but then Satie declared that if he was going to allow the Opéra to take the piece, work on the production would need to be vetted by a committee of forty musicians, hand-picked by him and Latour. The plan seems to have stalled there.

.. . She kept two cats to whom she fed caviar on Fridays and described as ‘good Catholics’, as well as a goat, who ate any art she wasn’t pleased with.

.. His despondency slowed down his rate of production. For at least two years, his friend Augustin Grass-Mick recalled, he ‘did absolutely nothing at all’. He came into some money in 1895, and immediately blew almost all of it on seven identical chestnut-coloured corduroy suits with matching hats, acquiring the nickname of ‘velvet gentleman’ from his friends.

.. Another was La Mort de Monsieur Mouche, a three-act play by Latour for which Satie composed the music: all that remains of it are a few sketches which reveal that Satie was working with figures derived from ragtime, more than a decade before Debussy did the same in his ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’.

.. Perhaps the best way to see Satie is not as a classical musician who failed to become a great composer, but as an art-rock star avant la lettre. His career contained all the phases of 1970s art-rock history, though not in the same order: a proggy occult phase, a glam phase, a Bryan Ferryish lounge pop phase, a Brian Enoish ambient phase, a David Bowieish decadent nightclub phase; Bonjour, Biqui, Bonjour! was his punk phase.