Tangela Tricoli’s epic outsider album ‘Jet Lady’: when a fighter pilot is struck down by divine music
“I’ve got the supermarket blues, last night I got an urge to satisfy a craving for cheese,” Tangela Tricoli sings on Jet Lady with a wavering vibrato that implies she’s in the midst of having her abdomen wobbled with all the violent turbulence of a Skoda going over a cattle-grid by a faulty ab-vibrator purchased from a shopping channel. It’s an opening lyric right up there with Patti Smith’s “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” when it comes to announcing yourself.
Unfortunately, it also introduces a sudden fear of flying in listeners as they struggle to reconcile the waywardness of the performance with the steady head you expect from those in charge of airliners. And that’s a dichotomy that never resolves itself as you listen to one of the maddest records of all time created by one of the most competent pilots the world has witnessed.
Her real name is Angela Masson, and she began flying somewhere above the sunny skies of California at the age of 15. She was a natural. A mere six years later, she set the record for the fastest youngster to fly coast to coast in a high-performance aircraft. Somewhere in amongst that, she also started her art career, returning to her roots in Italy for some form of exhibit where her creative persona, Tangela Tricoli, was born.
However, this left side of her brain lay dormant for a while as she ploughed on through the clouds, growing tired of training fighter pilots without being allowed to join the airforce, before turning her attention to commercial skies and becoming the world’s largest airline’s highest ranked female flier. in the process, also becoming the first woman to be officially licensed to fly a Boeing 747. The skies were now all but conquered, so she set her sights on improving Albert Einstein’s famed Theory of Relativity, a feat she is confident she has cracked but is yet to hone her workings to a point where she is ready to submit to a peer-reviewed academic paper.
All of this amounts to one extremely talented pilot, but one day, she was suddenly shot down by a bout of artistic divinity. She scrambled from the cockpit to a studio where she put down all her wisdom in song. For instance, ‘Stinky Poodle’ sees her create a wall of noise akin to a lobotomised Phil Spector as she harmonises with overdubs of herself and an unnamed singing child, “My favourite food is [inaudible madness] and a side of cheese.”
But then this divine blast of musical inspiration went away after she recorded her 1982 record Jet Lady, and Tricoli transmuted back to Masson, took to the skies once more, got a PhD, and seemingly entered the agricultural trade, as she explains herself regarding the revived relic of her music: “I only pressed 1,000 copies, most of which were distributed through Tower Records. A few years later I ended up running a farm in Texas, and I put my remaining 200 copies in storage.”
But the tale didn’t stop there, as she continues: “However, the storage man ran off with a bunch of my stuff, including the LPs. Ten years later I did a Google search to see if any albums had resurfaced, and there were hundreds of web pages devoted to Jet Lady. I realised people had been searching for me and were trying to re-release the album. It was weird!”
Indeed, weird is the word. Of all the records you’d expect a pilot to create, it wouldn’t be the avant-garde, unstable weirdness of Jet Lady. Nevertheless, when those two absolutely incompatible elements collide, they create a brilliant tale that typifies the appeal of outside music.
