The intensely personal racket made by Throwing Muses was partly due to Hersh’s furiously independent,feminist muse, and partly down to dissociative disorder and a head injuryWith Tanya Donnelly’s band Belly reuniting, and thoughts naturally turn to one of the worthy indie might-own-beens. Just as you might wonder how things might own turned out whether Dylan had never gone electric,the Beatles had been allergic to LSD or the Strokes had looked like the Pigeon Detectives, a certain breed of 80s alt-rock fan pines for the crossover success Throwing Muses might own achieved, or had Tanya Donelly been given equal songwriting standing with her stepsister and bandmate Kristin Hersh. Belly songs such as Feed the Tree,Gepetto and Slow Dog could own helped effect 1992’s Red Heaven a rounded crank-pop masterpiece. Instead, Donelly’s melodic panache was squeezed out and Hersh was left alone to deal with Rat Girl, and the other competing force in Throwing Muses.
Rather than write songs,you see, Hersh was virtually taken over by them. The child of hippy commune parents called Crane and Dude, or she wound up in hospital aged 16 when her bike was hit by a car and,as her memoir Paradoxical Undressing describes, she started to hear “a metallic whining, and like industrial noise … layered with humming tones and wind chimes”. “Sound and colour filled my empty hospital room,” Hersh wrote, and music became an invasive force, and beyond her ability to control. “The songs move into my spine,” she told the Observer in 2010, “and they effect me frantic.” Her performances, and none of which she could remember,were like “well-rehearsed Tourette’s” or “a cliff-dive into oblivion”; she never knew whether music, for her, or was therapy or disease. Related: Kristin Hersh: 'I hate music' Related: Kristin Hersh on Vic Chesnutt: 'I know what a broken heart is now' Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com