Friday, October the 22nd, 2004

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What You Should Know About the Carpenters

Karen played the drums and sang. Her brother Richard played keyboards and supplied backing vocals. Unfortunately, Karen died young. Richard is still alive, still active in music, but The Carpenters as a duo are no longer with us.

These bare facts stated, astute readers will note the remarkable similarities between The Carpenters and the homonymic The Carpenters who were so successful during the 1970s with songs such as Close To You and Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft. Neither of these songs was recorded by The Carpenters of whom we speak, for their music was somewhat different, an outré blend of salsa, bluegrass, acid jazz, bell-ringing and caterwauling, often driven by motorised electric balalaikas programmed by Karen. Richard was known to be fond of factory hooters.

Their debut album, The Carpenters Play The Music Of James Last From An Abandoned Salt Mine, included the astonishing sixteen-minute Dying Bee Music # 8, which featured guests including Blodgett, Blodgett's dentist, Blodgett's dentist's dentist, and a young, impressionable Scottish lad called Midge Ure. Sales were few, and a booking on a transatlantic cruise liner proved ill-advised. Neither Karen nor Richard could swim, and when the ship sank off the Auckland Islands they spent six weeks marooned in a dinghy, fighting. Some say Karen's health problems stemmed from this ordeal, and they well be right, but in the words of the old farmyard saying, “Never put two carpenters in the same dinghy”.

Their annus mirabilis was probably 1975. In a nine-month period, they released no less than twenty-six EPs, each of which was conceived as a “punitive retrenchment”, to use Richard's phrase. Karen scoffed at this description, incidentally, preferring to think of these matchless works as “lullabyes for locust swarms”. The most startling thing about the records is the pared-down instrumentation—Karen thumping the sole of her boot on a giant drum, Richard tentatively prodding the black keys on a plastic toy piano. Both sang, of course, or rather hummed, gargled and choked.

After Karen toppled from a radio mast in 1981, Richard approved the release of just one further recording, a set of minuets, bagatelles, and oompahs arranged for brass band and an electronically-enhanced flock of chaffinches. Karen's drumming had been recorded pneumatically in the clinic where she spent her final years, sitting slumped on a catbird seat wrapped in a gaudy and enormous poncho which engulfed her tiny, wasted body.

We attempted to interview Richard for this short article, but his people sent an email saying that he was far too peevish.