Harry’s Place Arts

After a flurry of interest in Burial thanks to his Mercury Award nomination, and The Sun’s Gordon Smart outwitting himself by trying to persuade the world that the name was a pseudonym for Aphex Twin or Fatboy Slim (!!!!), the man himself has decided to reveal on his MySpace that he is…

wait for it…

drumroll….

MADELEINE MCCANN

JUST SOME BLOKE WHO MAKES TUNES.

“Hello!”

This picture he posted may or may not be him.  Who cares?

The Sun’s most recent article appeared AFTER he outed himself, and continued to speculate seemingly at random; yet all the facts about his name and the school he attended have been added to their previous article online - but only since Burial’s self-outing was brought to Gordon Smart’s attention by the rather angry Guardian journalist whose old Burial interview was passed off as Smart’s own work (the original text online read “in a Bizarre phone interview”, clearly suggesting that Burial hasd spoken to The Sun, something Smart attempted to excuse as “a subbing error”). This leaves Bizarre looking as if they correctly identified Burial on Monday yet were still speculating about his identity today.

So, Burial is from South London and he’s more into music than he is into celebrity. Well shock horror - you could’ve knocked me down with a feather.   These facts have hardly been a secret to anyone who cared to delve into the dubstep and garage scenes even a little way, and his real name and the area where he grew up were mentioned in passing in The Independent last year - although that hasn’t stopped some ridiculous speculation to the point where, allegedly, Burial himself was once chatting to someone in a club who swore blind that they “knew that Burial is a bird”. It has always been clear from his rare interviews that, while intense, he is - as he says on MySpace - a “low key” person, and also that he is very into the facelessness of dance music, of anonymous white labels, mixtapes, pirate radio and elusive parties. He didn’t conceal his identity as such: he just didn’t talk about it. It seems the only reason he’s “come out” now is that with Mercury Prize coming up it was becoming more hassle than it was worth to let people speculate randomly.

It’s all a bit sad that it’s come to this, really. I know we shouldn’t expect anything less from The Sun’s Bizarre page which under Smart’s predecessor Victoria Newton became a watchword in the media for non-stories, but this ham-fisted dealing with a diffident young artist who has never made a massive point of secrecy in the first place is stupid and lazy even by their standards: at best terribly researched, at worst a deliberate deception, and doubly silly given that I doubt 99.9% of Bizarre readers actually give a tinker’s toss who or what Burial is. Either way, none of this should be relevant.  Dance music has always been about the sounds and the crowds at least as much as it has about the “stars”, and even more than other sub-genres dubstep has thrived on a return to those kind of underground values that were cultivated by Underground Resistance, themselves inspired by Kraftwerk, when I was a teenager. Although I have no problem whatsoever with stardom and celebrity - I love a bit of glitz and gossip as much as the next metrosexual - in these over-saturated times it’s incredibly refreshing that a young man could be more concerned about the quality and craftsmanship of his work than about who he’s photographed with, what club he’s seen going to or what paper he’s been in, and I say fair fucking play to Burial for thus far reacting so calmly to all the fuss surrounding him, and here’s hoping the continued Mercuries froth doesn’t put him off making a third album as deep and wonderful as the preceding two.

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ADDENDUM: for those puzzled by the whole Burial “thing”, I would direct you not necessarily to the Mercury-nominated ‘Untrue‘ album - which, while wonderful, is very definitely a “grower”, and doesn’t exactly reveal its charms on a casual flick-through - but to this year’s heart-stoppingly lovely remix of Bloc Party’s ‘Where Is Home‘, which I think indicates very wonderful things in the future should Burial choose to work further with songwriters…