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Opinion The hills are alive with the sound of Laibach

UP UNTIL now, I’ve been able to compile a batch of gig reminiscences and tour stories in virtually all my bimonthly columns this year, which bears witness to the number of performances I do.

But I’m off the road for a couple of weeks at the moment and this gives me the ideal excuse to tell you about a few of my favourite things. Well, one of them, anyway.

Raindrops on roses? Whiskers on kittens? Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens? No, sorry. Slovenian martial-industrial-classical-experimental fake-totalitarian musical satire, as applied to the work of Rogers & Hammerstein.

The mighty Laibach, you see, have just carried out their threat to release an album of cover versions of songs from The Sound Of Music.

The first thing to say about this utter masterpiece is that, at a stroke, it solves the dilemma of what Christmas present to buy for any Daily Mail-reading relatives you may have lurking in your gene pool, especially if they are devoted fans of sentimental old film musicals.

I mean “at a stroke” quite literally because there is a fair possibility that listening to this album will give them one. It’s not so much Rogers & Hammerstein as Rogers & Rammstein. For us true believers, allegedly scary old Rammstein are Laibach for dummies, an easy-listening sentimental tribute act, so this comment is supremely appropriate.

And, to make the whole story even more delicious, there is a very special reason why Laibach chose The Sound Of Music as the target of their latest deconstruction project. To put this in context, previous ones include transforming Life is Life by twee 1980s Austrian one-hit wonders Opus into a monolithic Teutonic martial anthem and twisting the Beatles’ Let It Be album into an experimental choral-industrial manifesto.

In 2015, Laibach managed to secure an invitation to do a gig in North Korea as part of the programme celebrating the country’s liberation from Japanese imperialism. Incidentally, their publicity machine claims that this makes them the first Western rock performers to play there but this isn’t true.

My friend Steve Drewett — singer with militant Harlow punks Newtown Neurotics — can lay claim to that honour, at the World Festival of Youth and Students in 1989. I know this because the original invite came to me, but I couldn’t go because I had a tour of Canada, so I blagged Steve the gig instead. But that’s another story.

Now the censorship laws in North Korea can be a little overzealous, apparently, and Laibach soon realised that performing their original compositions might present a few problems for the powers that be. In a truly Laibachesque act of social surrealism, the Kim dynasty had long ago decided that the best way of teaching English to North Korean children was to make them watch The Sound of Music a lot. So Laibach decided to play songs from that. Makes sense, I suppose.

The results have been documented in the fascinatingly bizarre film Liberation Day, which I endorse as wholeheartedly as I do this album. The best moment in the film is at the end, when an elderly North Korean gig-goer is asked what he thinks of the performance. “Before this concert, I didn’t know such music existed in the world,” he says. “Now I do.”

You may well be asking by now: “What does the album sound like?” It sounds like Laibach and it sounds like The Sound of Music. A bit. You can catch their version of My Favourite Things on YouTube.

But my two favourite bits on the album aren’t Rogers & Rammstein. After the title track opener there is a snatch of the North Korean national anthem as heard through the static on a short-wave radio broadcast, which reminds me of hours listening to Radio Tirana under the bedclothes in my teens. No wonder I like Laibach.

And, at the end, there is a speech by a North Korean official saying how provocative and unacceptable everything about Laibach is. It’s their welcoming speech in Pyongyang.

That’s all for this week. So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.

The Sound of Music by Laibach is released by Mute Records on November 23.

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