Spotlight on Anwen Crawford

Winner of the 2021 Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism

“[Criticism is] a way of deepening your own relationship with art making and of really thinking through, as another member of the audience, why a work does what it does and how it does it.”

The Monthly’s music critic Anwen Crawford won the 2021 Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism for three critical essays “New air in familiar rooms”, “Ready steady gone” and “Girls don’t cry: Arlo Parks and Phoebe Bridgers”.

The judges described the series as “engaging and entertaining. They display a shrewd storytelling ability, depth of musical knowledge, and an original perspective while maintaining an insightful awareness of how their subjects relate to the broader cultural context.”

We spoke with Anwen about the role criticism has in telling us about the world and ourselves, and writing about music in a year when you can’t listen live and communally.

Congratulations on winning the Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism. What does it mean to you to be recognised for this particular suite of stories as the best arts criticism of the year?

I think it’s important that arts criticism be recognised for what it contributes to the field of writing as a whole, and for the unique role that it plays within the wider field of journalism. Particularly over the past year when for all kinds of reasons — none of them need to be rehashed again — artists have really struggled. And there has been a sense, I think for all of us, that perhaps previous relationships that we took for granted with art forms — like being able to go and see music, or even being able to go and see a film — that those things have become materially quite difficult.

For me, that means that thinking about the value of art in our lives and the meanings that it can produce and that we can produce out of it as audiences, matters more. I think this past year has been a reminder not to take any kind of art form for granted, because we’ve come to understand that there are circumstances in which those things are rendered really difficult to do. So for that reason, I find it important in that sense. And a couple of the pieces that I submitted for the Walkleys this year did consider questions of what it means to listen to music, or a changed relationship with an art form during the pandemic.

What has that meant for you, to be a music critic in a year when you can only listen to music at home by yourself?

It’s a bit strange. I never thought that I would miss the sensation of being packed in a sweaty room with lots of people. I’ve done that enough, a thousand times in my life, to think that it would be a sensation that I missed, but I actually have quite missed it. Just that sensation of proximity and of pressure and excitement that you only get in that situation, I have actually quite missed. Not to mention live music as a whole.

One of the things I’ve thought about over the past year is the way in which it almost made me feel…it reminded me of my adolescent relationship with music in the 90s. Not that it has to be a 90s specific thing, but that’s when I was a teenager. But just that thing of feeling quite alone with whatever you were listening to, and perhaps in that sense it intensified the relationship with it, because you are alone. For most of last year, I was living alone too, which I think intensified that sense of, “Well, I’m here with my record collection and that’s that.” That was interesting to think about.

Did that feed into the broader topics that you explored, like sadness, aloneness, the passing of eras?

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the pieces I wrote was about listening to an album by Roberta Flack called First Take, which was her first album. It’s almost a live album, but not quite. As per the title, it was more or less recorded in one go. And something about that record — and there was no particular reason for me to pick up on that record — it’s just that I kept going back to it at a particular point last year, and I wanted to think through, first of all, why I was drawn to it.

I think part of the reason I was drawn to it is that it had, and I wrote about this in the piece, that it had a sense of human presence, of someone being there in a room, doing something, that felt very compelling. When I listened to the record, I could imagine that person and that set of musicians right there in front of me.

Something about that, in a year when that was as close as you could get to actually being in a room with other musicians, that was very compelling.

Then another of the pieces that I wrote was about deaths that happened last year, most of which were not COVID related, but nevertheless [it was] the backdrop of a year in which a bunch of older musicians passed away, including the great drummer Tony Allen, Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals, and Helen Reddy. I was trying to reflect on this sense of the passing of eras, which I think has been going on over the past half decade or so in music, where we’re just at the point now where a lot of those iconic performers of the 60s and 70s are now reaching their eighties and nineties and are passing away.

And what does that mean? We often think of popular music as a form of youth and it is, but at the same time, there’s a sense in which, with the passing of these generations of foundational performers, I feel very much as if there’s also a sense of mortality that’s overshadowing the form as much as anything else.

What is it that draws you to writing about popular music as a conduit for talking about culture and the personal?

Again, I think this partly goes back to adolescence and maybe having been a teenager a little before we had meaningful access to the internet. Very much formative in my relationship with music and with writing about music, with music criticism, was that sense that you would often read about something a long way in advance of actually being able to hear it, and being able to hear it was often quite an effort of research and resources. You had to go and track the thing down, and then maybe you would also try and track down the references to other artists that you would find in that writing.

Something about that imaginative gap between reading about a thing and hearing it, I’ve always found very powerful. For me, that’s certainly part of it.

It’s also just that I’ve always loved music since I was a very young child and grew up in quite a musical family. My parents were quite young when they had me, and my dad played in bands and stuff like that, so music was always around. And certainly, again, when I was a teenager, and as I’ve gotten older as well, one of the reasons I really value writing about it as an art form is that popular music, for me, is a way to think about social history.

Because it is a form that very much moves a long way in advance of things like academia, and even the news, dare I say. It’s that thing of, in music you can hear, if you tune into it, reflections and speculations on the mood and substance of the world that we live in. And those things are often happening in music or are being articulated in music long before they’re articulated anywhere else.

So, music’s interactions with social history and the way in which those things are tied together has always been really important to me.

Thinking about popular music for several decades, and writing about it, has been a way of learning about 20th century history.

Because it’s a modern art form, right? It’s an art form that’s born at the very end of the 19th century, like the cinema. And I write about film too. So for me, cinema and film are two ways of trying to think about the history of modernity as much as anything else.

What’s your key message to the Australian public about why it’s important to support good, considered writing about the arts and music?

God, that’s a high-pressure question! I would just love to see more space really. Not just as in, “I wish there was more of it,” but… Part of what’s happened in the media landscape over the past decade or so is a move away from long form criticism, much more towards capsule reviewing, and that kind of consumer guide, five stars, three stars kind of thing.

And those things have their place. But if that’s all that there is, I just think that we, as readers, and I’m thinking about myself here as a reader of criticism, if all you have is the short capsule reviews or summaries or recycled press releases, what you miss is that interaction between art and criticism that can tell you something about the world that you live in.

For myself, I always think that the job of a critic is really to be the best audience member to a work that you can be. Not the smartest, because you won’t be. Someone will know more about it than you will, but your job is to arrive at the thing in good faith, with an open mind, paying attention, and hopefully with some knowledge behind you of the form.

And then I tend to think of the critic as being a conduit between the piece and the rest of the audience. What your job is, is really to try and articulate how the thing works for the benefit of other audience members.

I think that’s why criticism is important, because I know for myself, if I go and see a film, or I read a book or something that affects me in some way, I’m curious to know how it’s affected other people.

And that’s what I’m often seeking from criticism, is for other writers and other thinkers to help me think through the effect of a work. That’s why I would like people to value criticism, because it’s a way of thinking.

It’s a way of deepening your own relationship with art making and of really thinking through, as another member of the audience, why a work does what it does and how it does it.

Is there anybody that you’d like to thank or give a shout out to, in relation to the awarding of this prize?

All my pieces were for The Monthly, and I’ve been the music critic there since 2013, so I would very much like to thank my editors at The Monthly, Nick Feik and Patrick Witton and Michael Nolan, who are production editors there. Because they are very thorough and nothing half-assed ever gets past the keeper with them. I have no doubt they made my work better than it would otherwise be, and probably saved me from some embarrassing errors along the way.

Anwen Crawford is The Monthly‘s music critic, and the author of Live Through This (Bloomsbury, 2015) and No Document (Giramondo, 2021).

The Pascall Prize is supported by