Since Sufjan Stevens became the poster boy for a certain kind of American indie fan, there’s been no little speculation about what grand project he’s going to embark on next: which State might be worked over so fastidiously; whether the album about birds might ever come to fruition. In this context, his first album since 2006’s “Illinois” appendix, “The Avalanche”, is a slight anti-climax, in that “The BQE” was first premiered nearly two years ago at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music. Typical of Stevens, it’s an extended suite which is very geographically specific – a majestically orchestrated piece designed to evoke the 12 and a half mile-long expressway connecting Brooklyn and Queen’s. “The BQE” is symphonic in concept and scale, and Stevens’ voice is nowhere to be found amidst the massed horns and strings. Anyone looking for the intimacy of his previous work may be disappointed, but there are still plenty of familiar tropes amongst these 13 movements and interludes. Stevens’ long-obvious love of Phillip Glass and systems music gets an extended workout for a start, though he’s canny enough to avoid the obvious trick of locking into some hyperspeed classical motorik. Instead, the repetitions are often more languid, and mixed in with some very romantic flourishes. After a couple of listens, the standout track here appears to be “Movement II: Sleeping Invader”, an overwhelmingly beautiful series of graceful string progressions overlaid by chattering horn parts. Those shrill horn voluntaries that he also favours are pretty frequently used, from the “Introductory Fanfare For The Hooper Heroes” on. The fanfare, though, only comes after “Prelude On The Explanade”, tense ambient noise that provoked comparisons with Eno & Fripp’s “No Pussyfooting” here. Often, “The BQE” feels like Stevens has isolated the more classical passages from his previous work, and used them as jumping-off points for new adventures. So “Interlude I: Dream Sequence In Subi Circumnavigation” begins with familiar wordless harmonies before swelling into sturm und drang orchestral bombast. And the lovely “Movement III: Linear Tableau With Intersecting Surprise” feels like the intricate skeleton of a song like "Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois", which keeps building until it segues into “Movement IV: Traffic”, which pits the orchestra against some elastic electronica reminiscent of mid ‘90s Aphex Twin. A partial return to the textures of “Enjoy Your Rabbit”, maybe? That album’s evidently on Stevens’ mind, since his next slated release involves new versions of those songs rearranged for string quartet and retitled “Run Rabbit Run”. In turn, the techno dissolves into “Movement V: Self-Organizing Emergent Patterns”, which eventually transforms into a big band vamp with faint echoes of Neal Hefti’s Batman theme. Again and again, Stevens appears to be throwing everything at the wall and, against the odds, watching most of it stick. It’s a maximalist approach which many will probably dismiss as pretentious or over-ambitious (or, from the other side, as modern composition for indie dilettantes). From here, it sounds like bright, rich, expansive, evocative, playful and stirring music. What next, though?

In issue 3 of the unfortunately short-lived UNCUT DVD, we ran a piece called The Curse Of The Mullets. It was a particularly funny account of the scandalous fall from grace of the Brat Pack actors and the whirl of sex-tapes, alcoholism, drug busts and straight-to-video hell that engulfed them following their mid-Eighties peak. As hilarious as the piece was, it feels somehow emblematic of the way these films, and their stars, have become viewed over the last quarter of a century. Which, sadly, detracts from the importance of those films and the achievements of the man behind them – John Hughes, who has just died at the age of 59. Hughes’ greatest accomplishment, perhaps, was that he took teenagers as seriously as they took themselves. Across five films, made in a three-year period between 1984 and 1987, Hughes’ established himself as Hollywood’s principal observer of adolescent angst. Crucially, this run of films (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Some Kind Of Wonderful) spoke directly and sympathetically to their audience. Hughes understood, with a depth of focus I can’t see in any other filmmaker’s work, the hormonal teenage mind. It’s perhaps no accident that Hughes’ simple yet genius idea of identifying his characters by stereotype – the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess and the criminal – helped make The Breakfast Club his most iconic and influential movie. The Breakfast Club is, indeed, an extraordinary film. John Robinson’s just brilliantly described it to me as “Waiting For Godot in a high school” – a film in which nothing of any note actually happens for a considerably long period of time while a bunch of characters sit around talking. The shadow The Breakfast Club casts is immense; every high school film owes it some kind of debt, from Heathers (surely the anti-John Hughes’ film) to Election (which starred Ferris Bueller’s Matthew Broderick) or Cruel Intentions. It became the cliché, but with good reason. On some fundamental level, it was true. But I suspect, perhaps, that part of the reason why Hughes’ films have become so derided in some quarters is because of the time they were made. Writing a few years ago in trade magazine Variety, Peter Bart described Hughes’ films as “perfectly crafted for the Reagan era.” Hughes was born in 1950, and saw his generation politicized by Vietnam, the assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights movement. The subsequent wave of teenagers growing up in the Eighties had no such moral weight or sense of purpose; they crested a wave of prosperity, consumerism and big, big, big. A lot of this, you could say, is reflected in the off-screen antics of the Brat Pack themselves; Hollywood’s new alpha elite appeared to represent that generation’s crassest instincts for hubris, self-regard and excess. But that’s not to say this generation weren’t entitled to their own opinions, thoughts and feelings, of course. Which is what Hughes’ brilliantly captured. For every admittedly dated shot of the breakfast clubbers doing excruciating Eighties dancing to some wretched version of “We Got The Beat”, there’s Molly Ringwald’s Andie, struggling with her unemployed, depressed father (Harry Dean Stanton) in Pretty In Pink, or the sublime, wordless art gallery sequence in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, elegantly sountracked by Dream Academy’s cover of The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”. In fact, music was a crucial part of those movies. Hughes, himself a massive Dylan and Clash fan, identified the phenomenal power of pop music as a marketing tool in the emergent MTV age. While we now consider, for good or ill, the blockbuster soundtrack tie-in to be part and parcel of the multi-media experience, Hughes was the innovator here. Think, after all, of Pretty In Pink: a song that became a film title that in turn then made the song an international hit. Until Hughes came along, teenagers had never been so well – or so directly – served in movies. The pre- and early teen audience had been reached with ET (1982), The Goonies (1985) and Stand By Me (1986), while Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High, from 1982, had found the slightly older end of the teen market. But the work Hughes did identified what’s subsequently become the core demographic for multiplex filmmakers. Isn’t Twilight, however bad a film it may be, simply The Breakfast Club with fangs..? The movies he made after – particularly the Home Alone series and Planes, Trains And Automobiles – saw Hughes move away from his teen audience. The results were certainly successful – the four Home Alone movies made over $900 million at the box office while Planes… is arguably the last funny film Steve Martin made. But Hughes’ five teen movies are pop culture touchstones. He not only caught the atypical combination of romance and cynicism, conventionality and rebellion that characterised the MTV generation. He put his brand on them, in the way Scorsese described mob movies or John Ford defined Westerns. Leave your comments about John Hughes, and his films here... Cheers, [pic: rex]