Film Score

Currently a film script is being developed for  'Cathedral' the album by a small team of filmmakers. For more info keep and eye on this page. email: richard@edlaurie.com

'Cathedral' - A review by Christopher Grey

The Pinnacle of Inspiration

CATHEDRAL

A new album by Ed Laurie

Much of today's pop music is closer to advertising than art. You don’t buy the music; you buy the message. You follow the artist on Twitter, you friend him on Facebook, you become a part of the movement. You feel close. Pop music has become nothing so much as a way for the insecure masses to feel loved. The gulf that used to exist between artist and fan is disappearing, and the unintended consequence of this is that the artist, facing ever greater obligations to his digital audience (amplified and accelerated by the speed of online interaction), is losing the necessary distance from his source of revenue to create great work. He begins to take his cues as to what is good or bad, right or wrong, from his own listeners. He cedes the role of artist to become an executive. His art becomes product.

The world is turning into one gigantic focus group, and that can only lead to mediocre results when artists come to rely, not on themselves, but on their public for inspiration.

If technology is still in the process of changing the role of the audience, it has already changed the music. The proliferation of digital methods to record and refine music is sucking the life out of sound. Voices are compressed and tweaked and layered and end up with a surface like white gloss paint, shiny and without depth. Instrumental parts are chopped and diced and puréed until the sounds, so clean they are now like mush, have severed any relation with their original instruments. What the listener of the digitally enhanced song is presented with is a vacuum, solid space, an impenetrable cube.

The listener, who through his own imagination and interpretation of the music once enjoyed a vital two-way exchange with the songwriter, is being permanently shut out.  Technology has taken away the listener’s right to engage with the music, and in its place is offering a bogus online relationship with the artist.

The consequence of all this? Pop music is stagnant. The professional critic, formerly the judge of what was good and what was grating, has been replaced by the online herd, who simply haven’t earned the intellectual right to judge artists and whose habitual analysis falls into one of two camps: 1) I’m crazy about it; 2) I hate it. There’s nothing constructive about that, and it’s having an effect on what is produced—less risk-taking and more complacency. Concepts that have proved themselves are used again and again with slight modifications. The snowball of mediocrity grows, gathers speed, and flattens all opposition. Consensus and laziness reign. Where will originality come from when there is no demand or need for it?

Which brings us back to the songwriter Ed Laurie, who recorded his new album Cathedral live on a stage, complete with real guitars, strings, percussion, and the sound of breathing. Real musicians playing real instruments in a real environment, with lots of gaps and fades. This is not jackbooted music with a mechanical rhythm track. It’s all real, and it is exhilarating to listen to. This is music that seeps into you, permeates you, gently, almost hazily. Like a dream, it wants to offer you endless possibilities.

Music industry executives who have listened to Cathedral have said that it is amazing (so amazing they don’t know what to do with it). That it bears serious listening (but nobody listens seriously anymore). Yes, they say, they would love to get behind Cathedral (if only they still believed in their instincts—but they don’t). What the industry wants is someone who dresses like a circus performer and has a gift for cheap rhyme and cliché. What they don’t want is a modest, sincere artist who has an oblique view of the world. Obliqueness, ambivalence, heterodoxy are out, definitely. The industry powers-that-be just don't know what to do with ambivalence. You cannot sell ambivalence, although it has been an integral part of great art since the dawn of time. So fearful are the industry bosses of nurturing a talent that does not fit into the major food groups of pop music that they want nothing to do with it. Take it away, they cry, before it pollutes us! An artist like Ed Laurie needs the kind of record company that thrived in the Sixties and early Seventies—Chrysalis, Island, Charisma. Such companies and their maverick owners took pains to find and nurture offbeat talent. But they have long gone, or exist now in name only.

Is it possible, then, in this environment, for an intelligent, thoughtful artist to succeed? One who does not dress for the sake of outrage or to show his membership of a tribe, who does not swagger or bluster, and who writes songs that evoke the spirits of literature and art as much as the pop standbys of love and loss? Who through his music and style brings to mind Tim Buckley, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Van Morrison?

We must have faith. We must have confidence that the world will find Ed Laurie, with or without the help of the music industry. His work, like the Dutch artist Vermeer’s, is subtle, enigmatic, and haunting. He delights in avoiding the obvious. He opens windows that give onto endless vistas. In the way he creates tension through understatement, he recalls the great film directors Antonioni and Tarkovsky, the masters of omission. It is the spatial quality of his songs that makes Ed Laurie’s music so special. This space permits the listener to exist inside the song—to inhabit it and make it his own. In the music of Ed Laurie we discover a freshness of feeling that is light years away from the manipulative affectations of today’s popular music.


Cathedral is a gift for the future from a thoughtful past. It has been created with looseness, longing, poesy, and exuberance. This music will bring many things to your mind, if you still have one, but it will never tell you what to think. So close your eyes, keep them closed, and listen. You may be in your house, your car, wherever. It doesn’t matter. You won’t feel like you are inside anything. And I guarantee that you’ll say to yourself, this is really something.

Christopher Grey