The Dead C in Paris, June 2023, L-R Bruce Russell, Michael Morley, Robbie Yeats — All rights reserved by by Hans van der Linden

New knowledge: The Dead C. in Europe

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Q: How can a ‘rock group’ be a research project? A: When its collective practice consciously attempts to up-end every piece of received wisdom around how ‘rock groups’ conduct their careers.

Through more than thirty-six years of continuous collaborative effort; Michael Morley (Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic) and Bruce Russell (Ara Institute of Canterbury), along with Robbie Yeats, have pursued just such a quixotic career path – with ongoing success. The most recent outing for the Dead C. was a short European tour in June 2023 alongside solo guitarist Roy Montgomery (himself an academic at Lincoln University). The tour took in Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and finished in London.

The group’s approach eschews hierarchy by broadly rejecting ‘musical composition’ in favour of collective improvisation, embracing noise and distortion as key constituents of its work at the expense of harmony and musical structure (or indeed identifiable tonality). From its inception there has been a widespread audience assessment that ‘it’s not music’, and a persistent feeling that the members are ‘having a laugh’ at the public’s expense. On the other hand, a strong body of international critical opinion has it that the Dead C. may be the only really worthwhile rock group in existence, and they have established a solid boutique fanbase through constant recording (about 35 albums) and regular if infrequent touring.

It is this polarization of response that powers their ongoing relevance. How many enduring and successful creative careers are built on simultaneously subverting audience expectations, delivering work that most people find aesthetically quite unappealing, and actively refusing to ‘improve’ in any way? To put this in academic terms borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu; the Dead C. have consistently positioned themselves at the most autonomous pole of their field of practice, seeking only to sustain their chosen direction while rejecting any recuperation by dominant market forces. In this way they have maximally-leveraged their cultural capital over the ‘long game’, in the process becoming almost the classic case study of how that strategy can be managed in music.

And what new knowledge was gained from yet another tour of Europe in 2023 (the group’s first since 2018)? The significance lay in the underwriting of the tour through two residencies in clubs in Paris (two nights) and London (three). Most tours are anchored around a single show at a festival, with a scattering of club dates in other countries built around that. As a result, few audience members in the northern hemisphere see the Dead C. more than once in a decade. In contrast the tiny New Zealand South Island fanbase might usually see the group two or three times a year and obtain a deeper understanding of their methods. Understanding of the process through which the Dead C’s work is generated cannot be gleaned from recordings, because the interactive process and even the instruments being employed defy conventional expectations – you have to see how it’s done in real time to marry the evidence of eyes and ears. 

And even in witnessing one live performance, the most attentive listener will struggle to tell how much coordination and premeditation is involved. Most groups compose and rehearse, very few spontaneously generate all their material in front of the audience, every night, de novo. For this reason, performing successive nights in the same setting offered a new experience to repeat witnesses. Over two or three nights in succession they could see the work being made anew, how it ebbed and flowed, how it was different every time, and yet still the same. And that was the thing that they expressed most strongly after the shows, that they had finally seen ‘under the hood – how the machine worked’, and that this was a surprising revelation.

The degree to which this provided even established ‘fans’ with a new experience with collective improvisation was a discovery we did not really anticipate and could not have made any other way. Do the work; reflect on the work; do the work again. Fail, fail again, fail better. That’s the point of it all.