That Time Morvern Callar Author Alan Warner Wrote About Can's 1971 Album Tago Mago

This is a revived version of a Line Out post (they were purged from the internet some time after The Stranger pulled the plug on their music blog).

Film/TV Jan 7, 2014 at 12:40 pm

Morvern Callar Author Alan Warner Takes on Can's Tago Mago

Kathy Fennessy

As an admirer of Alan Warner's 1995 novel Morvern Callar, which centers on a coolheaded Scottish drifter, I was pleased to see that he's preparing a 33 1/3 entry on Can's 1971 opus Tago Mago. That's an album—a double album, no less—that could benefit from literary exploration (though Ege Bamyasi remains my favorite Can record).

Can plays a part in Morvern's story just as they do on the soundtrack to Lynne Ramsay's 2002 adaptation. Her first feature, Ratcatcher, knocked me out to the extent that I immediately grabbed a copy of Warner's debut novel when I found out that she would be adapting it.

After catching the film, in which Samantha Morton plays the title character, I picked up the soundtrack. Naturally, it includes Can, but also two solo selections from singer-bassist Holger Czukay (Ramsay has since adapted a second novel, Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin).

Here's a mini-cut of Can references from Morvern Callar (exactly as written):

Though alone I climbed to the circular folly above the port. I put Can: Delay 1968 in my ears while I used the goldish lighter on Silk Cuts and bolted the wine...I held my arms out for a while to let the mud just dry on the skin then I climbed on up swinging the trowel to I'm So Green till I came to the big gathering of tons boulders with soil and mosses capping the tops...Near their feet I cooried down in front the CD and put on Unlimited Edition by The Can...

From her boyfriend, Morvern also inherits copies of Magazine's Secondhand Daylight, Last Exit's Iron Path, Bill Nelson's Red Noise, PM Dawn's Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience, the Golden Palominos' This Is How It Feels, Material's Hallucination Engine, and Lee "Scratch" Perry's De Devil Dead.

According to the announcement regarding Warner's Can book, "Publication date is unconfirmed at this point but look for further announcements on this blog." It's been years since I've read a 33 1/3 title, due more to a lack of time than interest, but I predict that his contribution will be among the finest in this enduring series.

Fun fact: Alan Warner dedicated Morvern Callar to Czukay and sax great Peter Brötzmann. Dec 29, 2023 update: I read Warner's book in 2017 during a trip through Eastern Europe. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, i.e. he took a memoir approach, so there's more Warner/Scotland and less Can/Germany than I anticipated. Still worth a read, though. Images from the IMDb (the movie poster) and Amazon (the book cover).