'Snakedriver is a scream - the dark underbelly of The Beach Boys...'
Thursday, September 9, 2021
Song(s) of the Day # 2,783 Toner
Oakland band do that Big Star, Teenage Fanclub, Ride, Dinosaur Jr., My Bloody Valentine thing to a tee on latest album White Buffalo Roam. Utterly derivative but rather likeable.
Wednesday, September 8, 2021
Songs About People # 1,301 Lux Interior
Seeing as we're in Akron, Ohio, here's another favourite son.
Album Reviews # 99 DEVO - Duty Now For The Future
At my secondary school one day in the late Seventies, our Music teacher Mr Trumble tried something different. He was a nice guy and looking back, must have had the patience of a saint to deal with a bunch of hormonal teenagers who were never likely to take music lessons remotely seriously for a minute. Anyhow, one afternoon he let us bring in Pop singles that we liked and played them, also playing singles of his own from back in the day, Peter & Gordon I seem to remember, Naturally we were dismissive of such outdated fluff. We had The New Wave after all. One of my classmates, Simon Daniels, now in New Zealand ,brought in DEVO's The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprise. Mr Trumble didn't think much of it but I did. It sounded good to me then. It still does now. It was a good lesson anyhow. The kind that teachers don't often teach. One of the most memorable from my time at secondary school.
DEVO found it hard to be taken seriously when they first emerged in the late Seventies from their hometown Akron, Ohio. No wonder really. Despite having proper heavyweights in their corner, the likes of Bowie and Eno, (and later Neil Young), they never really stood much of a chance against the massed ranks of music critics who expected something more transparently 'serious'.
Their disdain I think was largely because DEVO appeared with a fully fledged concept that appeared on the surface to be a fad and there's nothing a music critic enjoys swinging a wrecking ball at as an artist trying to get above their station. They were the true intellectuals after all. The judges and juries for all creative and cognitive endeavour. The Village Voice's Robert Christgau, one of the most self-inflated and pompous of this breed derided DEVO as 'Kiss for college kids.' Dave Marsh in a completely withering review of Duty Now For The Future was even more damning 'sort of the Rock equivalent of Kurt Vonnegut, taking off from premises it only half understands.... '
DEVO have stood the test of time better than most of these crabbed and rather embittered slurs. Their basic idea was pretty straightforward and seems to have been borne out by the passing decades. The fact that the human race is devolving rather than evolving as we're commonly encouraged to believe. Erm, Donald Trump?
The formation of DEVO came from a big idea, a big moment in American history the Kent State Shootings of 1970 where future band members Gerald Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh and Bob Lewis were studying at the time. The idea that the armed guard who were there to look after you might turn their guns on you if push came to shove and blow you away. More than enough to make you question the very basis of your own culture and society and want to make a statement about it.
DEVO built their package, uniforms and live performance and presentation organically over the next few years. Then Punk arrived and with it, their moment. Unusually for a band they often had a couple of brothers Casales and Mothersbaugh in their ranks, (three Mothersbaughs at one point), though you couldn't tell them apart anyhow as they consistently presented themselves in mass uniform outfits.
Other writers at the time, (generally younger ones), were more supportive and charitable to their cause than the likes of Christgau and Marsh. Jon Savage and Paul Morley particularly. DEVO were very Punk and openly confrontational onstage but they were also just great fun which naturally led them to being considered disposable and throwaway by many. But they were the kind of thing a fourteen year old kid could readily understand and Rock and Roll is ultimately aimed at ,fourteen year old kids rather than thirty year old music critics, and quite rightly so.
By the time of their second album Duty Now For The Future in 1979 DEVO were quite an established entity particularly in the UK where they'd signed initially to Stiff Records who readily marketed them as a gimmick, a novelty, from where they moved on to Virgin who were scooping up all the New Wave acts they could at the time. Even with corporate backing though DEVO were still not taken 'seriously' in the same way as contemporaries Pere Ubu or Talking Heads, (who also had an ironic slant), were.
None of this seems to matter forty years on. DEVO had the last laugh. Their albums are still not for the most part seen as Rock classics. They still don't always make critics lists. Perhaps the one you need most is debut, Q; Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! That and a Greatest Hits. Duty Now For The Future is a worthy enough consolidation on Are We Not Men? but it's hardly a smooth listen. It's probably not meant to be. It's often a jerky irritant, pure and simple, definitely not the kind of music your parents would want you to listen do or catch you dancing around your bedroom to.
DEVO peaked in the UK at around about this point and then began to make inroads on the American market with third album Freedom of Choice, the advent of MTV and particularly the Whip It video, where they experienced their big commercial breakthrough. They started making inroads into the Mid west heartlands, which frankly must have been deeply gratifyng for them.
In 2021 the DEVO story continues. Although Bob Casale died recently, they are still an active concern. They have been nominated for inaugaration into the Rock and Roll of Fame twice in recent years without success. It's probably about time they were welcomed in.
Ever Fallen In Love - The Last Buzzcock Tapes - Pete Shelley # 8 Buzzcocks - Everybody's Happy Nowadays
'Life's an illusion. Love is a dream...'
A line from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. 'It espouses the idea... that if you want things you can't have, that's going to make you unhappy.' Pete Shelley
Best Ever Albums - Top 1,000 Albums - 889 David Bowie - Young Americans
A rather neglected Bowie record. The one that helped him make serious inroads on the American commercial market.
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 398 Red Hot Chilli Peppers
'one of the toughest, tightest psych-funk noises that ever forced a rock fan to move dem hips.'
Song of the Day # 2,782 Half Gringa
A rather lovely way to start the morning. New song from Chicago artist.
Tuesday, September 7, 2021
Songs About People # 1,300 Jane Goodall
Not perhaps what you might expect of a track called Jane Goodall. She deserves a few songs anyhow.
Album Reviews # 98 Television - Adventure
Marquee Moon is the one Television album that every music fan needs. It has a very good claim to being the best guitar record ever made. It's certainly my favourite in that particular respect and will always be one of my five favourite albums ever recorded. But their second, Adventure, which came out a year later in 1978 has certainly got plenty going for it.
I wasn't aware of the band at the time this came out. I was only 12, hadn't started to form my own music tastes and Television certainly weren't high enough profile at the time for me to know who they were. I was taking most of my leads at the time from Top of the Pops and the singles charts. I was pushed towards buying Marquee Moon in round about 1983 when R.E.M. who arrived with Murmur that year started name-checking them relentlessly in music paper interviews and led me towards making that purchase. Spurred on from there. I bought Adventure a couple of years later at the end of my first term at university.
It's no Marquee Moon. Very few albums were or are, but it's certainly worth a listen for anyone who went for that. It has their trademark sound, developed into something else and apart from their debut. In many ways it sounds like their daytime album to Marquee Moon's nightime one.
It's certainly not a bad record although it must have been a disappointment to many of 'the legions of pale boys (who) sloped off en masse to purchase Moon...' (Barney Hoskyns), inspired by Nick Kent's astonishing page long review when it came out in The NME.
Time though has been kind to Adventure . There was obviously some disquiet in the camp at the time with the highly egocentric and slightly aloof Tom Verlaine trying increasingly to take over the band and growing apart from his main foil and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd, while the other band members Billy Ficca and Fred Smith, who always took a backseat role, struggled to keep the peace.
That disquiet is evident listening to the record. There are parts of it that still don't work for me and sound rather out of focus. But I can certainly go wth 2/3 of the record and it has plenty of my favourite Television of all. First two tracks Glory and Days for sure.
Glory still sounds magnificent, even though in many ways it's a rewrite and less incendiary statement than the first track from Moon, See No Evil. But there's plenty of fire here, The guitars sound just great as you'd expect, plenty of Verlaine's triple entendre lyrics and singing like a goat that had had its throat slit, (Lloyd). It's a great start to any record.
Days is also fabulous and a slight departure for the band. Slowed down and spacious, Television were phenomenally influential, with the likes of Subway Sect, Magazine, the Bunnymen, U2, The Go Betweens, Triffids, That Petrol Emotion and plenty of others taking their lead from them. They laid down a number of paths for others to follow, on Adventure as well as on Marquee Moon. Days is another one of them.
I've never cared for Foxhole, the lone single from Adventure. Again, it sounds like a rewite of a song from Marquee Moon to me. This time of Friction without approaching that track's uptight perfection. It always sounds rather shrill to the point of pain to me.
Fourth track Careful, one of the band's earliest songs always comes as blessed relief. It's laid back Television to the point of being horizontal. Television by numbers perhaps but it always works for me.
Last track on Side One, Carried Away is another I've never greatly cared for. It sounds like Verlaine straining for a solo career. Neat guitar solo and some evocative lyrics but it still doesn't stick with me and certainly doesn't bear comparison with Guiding Light or Torn Curtain where the band were going for something similar.
Turn it over. Just three songs. It certainly sounds like a band winding down once and for all. The Fire again sounds almost like solo Verlaine. Some nice effects and plenty of mood and atmosphere and again good lyrics without ever landing the killer punch.
Ain't That Nothin' though is one of the best things the band ever did. Prime Time Television and possibly the stand out track on Adventure. Both Verlaine and Lloyd are operating at the peak of their powers, Ficca and Smith as always provide full back up support. It feels like something is about to combust and closer to The Stones somehow than anything the band ever recorded .It's one of the few tracks on here that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Marquee Moon though perhaps it fits better here.
On to last track The Dream's Dream another of my absolute Television favourites and in many ways the perfect sign off song from a truly great band. Long intro, the brief lyrical interlude and then on to what they did best and an area where they had very few equals, before, at the time, or since. The sound of guitars meshing and interlocking and jarring and expressing emotion to a greater and more compelling degree than words ever can. I always find it incredibly moving.
Television split shortly afterwards after sign off tours in the US and UK. They'd run their course and knew it. They got together in New York's Chinatown and agreed to go their separate ways apparently on a full moon, the same way as Moby Grape, one of their great Sixties guitar precedentts had. The original four got back together again in 1992 and made another good album, the eponymous third.
Since then they've toured occasionally but it seems Verlaine and Lloyd no longer get on well enough to work together. Verlaine has enlisted another great guitarist Jimmy Ripp, who plays his parts fine, (I saw them about ten years back and they were excellent), but seems to know that he is quite clearly and always will be Number 2. Television were at their best as a creative force when Verlaine and Lloyd effectively functioned as equals. They sparked off each other and both brought something quite irreplaceable to the mix.
Choctaw Ridge - New Fables of The American South 1968-1973 # 2 Chris Gantry
Chris Gantry, an associate of the Outlaw Country genre.
Ever Fallen In Love - The Last Buzzcock Tapes - Pete Shelley # 7 Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've?)
Buzzcocks best known moment and biggest hit single. Apparently at least partially inspired by a line in the musical Guys & Dolls.
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 397 Janet Jackson
'funkily and arrogantly sensual...'
Song of the Day # 2,781 Peggy Lipton
American singer, actress and model. Was married to Quincy Jones. This comes from her eponymous, 1968 debut album. A rather, lovely, wistful reord. Typical of it's time. Not a million miles from Bobbie or Dusty but worth a listen for its own considerable merits.
Monday, September 6, 2021
Album Reviews # 97 The Specials - The Specials
The Specials, The Specials as good a statement of British multicultural intent and unity as any record ever made. It didn't arrive completely alone but as part of a movement. There were similar declarations at round about the same time from other bands who were on or associated with the Two Tone record label The Specials formed; Madness, The Beat, Dexys Midnight Runners, Selecter.
But Specials were the band who highlighted the racial factor to the greatest degree and had fabulous Number One singles that took the temperature of the times while doing so. They arrived at just the right time for me. When I was 14 or 15. I wasn't necessarily crazy about them at the time, didn't buy their records 'til later but I was politically conscious as were my friends at school and it was clear that they were a very, very good thing.
Their front three was pretty much unbeatable Neville Staples, Terry Hall and Lynval Golding. At a time when black footballers were starting to breakthrough properly into English football despite the full on racist reaction from the terraces. They were a statement in itself. My school was hardly inner-city multicultural, there were a few Black kids, a few Chinese ones, a few Indians and Pakistanis but one thing nobody was was racist.
But there was plenty of it elsewhere and The Specials and Two Tone's mission was to combat it along with the Anti Nazi League, Rock Against Racism and everything else. The National Front and the racist wing of the Skinhead movement were highly visible, these were pretty violent times, though they didn't necessarily seem so growing up in a leafy London suburb.
Anyhow the records sounded great on their own. They made you want to dance and their message was loud and clear, even if racists turned up at Two Tone gigs and did their upmost to disrupt them. This was the point of all these bands. They all took their inspiration from the great Black music of the Sixties and early Seventies, Ska, Soul and Reggae but they used it to paint very contemporary pictures of what British urban working class was life at the turn of the Eighties.
The Specials first album is very kitchen sink in many ways. It's certainly black and white. It tells a lot of familiar stories. Teenage pressure and pregancies, racial conflict, night club violence. It has one false note in Little Bitch which just sounds nasty, misogynist and unforgivable now. Otherwise, it's spot on, has all the right targets and hits a string of bullseyes.
I didn't go and see the band first time round but I did when they reformed in 2009. Remarkably for the first gig of their UK Tour. Six of the original seven with only Dammers left out, probably because he didn't wanted to play the old songs as they were.
Tickets were like gold dust but a friend managed to get a couple somehow . On the night the level of expectation building up to their arrival was probably like no gig I've ever been to in my life. When they arrived they more than lived up to it. Generally you hark back to the gigs of your teenage years and early twenties as the most important ones. But this was certainly one of the best I've ever seen.
The record now sounds like a series of perfectly drawn vignettes. Statements about mantaining a positive approach even under intense provocation. The band are smart beyond their years as so many were at the time. I'm biased because I grew up then, but I'd say 1978-83 is one of the three great British Golden Ages of Pop Music along with '65-'68 and '71'-74.
In many ways The Specials spearheaded the second wave of Punk and were much needed. They were just as indignant and in many respects they had a much more focused and thought through message. Pretty much everything they recorded is essential. It has a message and sound that is at once very much of its time yet still doesn't date.
Choctaw Ridge - New Fables of The American South 1968-1973 # 1 Lee Hazlewood
New day. New series. And it might as well be another Bob Stanley inspired one. He seems to be behind most of the best Pop culture, historically related compilations coming out these days. Mostly through Ace Records. Here's one based around the surprise American # 1 Single Ode To Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry and the whole slew of songs it inspired based on the myth of the American South. Some wonderful things on here. Starting off with this.
Ever Fallen In Love - The Last Buzzcock Tapes - Pete Shelley # 6 Buzzcocks - Love You More
Written about a girl Pete went out with who worked at Woolworth's.
Song(s) of the Day # 2,780 Michelle Phillips
Victim of Romance, Mama & The Papa's only solo album, from 1977 is well worth a listen. A Rock and Roll curio, it wasn't a commercial success at the time of its release but has aged well, coming across as a vaguely melancholic coda to one of the sadder tales of the core Love & Peace bands.
Things didn't turn out too well for the members of The Mamas & the Papas all things considered once the California Dreamin^ dream curdled which it seemed to do pretty much right from the off. Victim of Romance acts as a soundtrack to much of this sadness. Produced by Jack Nitzsche, it's a collection of nostalgia hued songs written by Phillips and a number of her music biz friends.
Phillip^s voice is not particularly strong but certainly passable and the songs are sturdy and have an air of doomed romance to them. Many of them seem to hark back to Doo Wop and The Girl Group sound of the Fifties and early Sixties.
Acting as a companion piece to John Phillip's Wolf King of LA, Cass's Bubblegum Lemonade and Denny Doherty's Watcha Gonna Do. All good records. The hangover the morning after.
Sunday, September 5, 2021
Ever Fallen In Love - The Last Buzzcock Tapes - Pete Shelley # 5 Buzzcocks - Fiction Romance
Another Music in a Different Kitchen.
Best Ever Albums - Top 1,000 Albums - 892 Modest Mouse - This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About
First of four for Modest Mouse.
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 395 Blur
'a neat line in Mod-meets A Clockwork Orange threads...'
Song(s) of the Day # 2,779 BRNDA
Washington Post Punk trio BRNDA sound a bit like Athens, Georgia legends B-52's and Pylon might have had they decided to form a band togther back in the day.
Results are slightly mixed on their latest album Do You Like Salt? They're clearly having a wail of a time and that's generally infectious but sometimes it's all rather jarring for my tastes.
Still, there's plenty of frenetic energy going right the way through. Third track Perfect World is just fabulous, reminding me of Luscious Jackson at their best.
B-52's are the clearest, upfront influence and that can never be a bad thing. Not a record I'll return to as a whole I don't think but there are plenty of individual tracks I'll spin again.
Saturday, September 4, 2021
Album Reviews # 96 Sly & The Family Stone - There's a Riot Goin' On
'For twenty five years now, Sly Stone has played out the unhappy role of contemporary music's most spectacular burnout...' (Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff)
The fact that Sly Stone is still alive seems vaguely remarkable but he is. Of all the great Rock and Roll eccentric crackpot Rock and Roll visionaries,, Syd Barrett, Arthur Lee, Roky Erikson, Prince, add your own name here, along with Brian Wilson he's probably the last man standing. His actual wheabouts, activities and well being are shrouded in some mystery. He's currently at any rate, seventy eight.
I hope he's well, though I imagine he's somewhat haunted by his past. In many ways, during his initial, extraordinary burst of fame, critical and commercial adulation he was something of a beacon of positivity. Sly & The Family Stone the extraordinary band he put together, led and fronted in the mid Sixties through the early Seventies have as good a claim as any to be the outstanding group of that astonishing period in American cultural and musical history when the country experienced incrediible turmoil, self-doubt, transformation and change of a sort it may not have gone through before or since. Their albums, between 1967's A Whole New Thing and 1973's Fresh as good as any a set of records put out by any American artists of that period as a way to listen to and try to make some sense of what happened there.
There are any number of records you might listen to which testify to his and their greatness. A Best Of compilation would probably do. A set of the most danceable, euphoric and innovative singles runs ever made by anyone. Of his albums, though several are quite exceptional you'd probably be best directed to two. 1971's There's A Riot Goin' On and 1973's Fresh. They act as companion pieces in some ways, like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Let's Get It On, though like those two, they're vastly different records.
There's A Riot Goin' On is generally considered his best album, though it's not really typical in some ways as it sounds like the most troubled. Made in remarkable circumstances that were far from the Love and Peace ones that he espoused in those wonderful earlier singles and albums. When he was'Soul Brother Number One in the charts of both Black and White America,' (Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff). This is really a Sly Stone record. Members of the Family Stone were only minimally involved and Sly brought in plenty of music buddies to play on it, Ike Turner, Herbie Hancock and Bobby Womack.Another reason why it sounds slightly different from any of the other truly great records that he put out.
Housed in a sleeve of the Stars and Stripes, (somewhat ironically I'd suspect), it's truly a soundtrack of its times and definitely a Seventies rather than a Sixties one. In some ways the record it resembles most is Miles Davis's Bitches Brew from a couple of years earlier. You can hear the rumbling turbulence America was experiencing in its grooves. Rioting on the streets, the Kennedy's. Martin Luther King and Martin X all dead and gone, Vietnam burning on. Watergate on the horizon.
Davis himself was drawn in awe and admiration to Stone during these years like a moth to a flame. But even he thought the situation Stone found himself in was far from healthy: 'After he got big he always had strange people hanging around his house.and recording sessions. I went to a couple and there was nothing but girls everywhere and coke, bodyguards with guns looking all evil. I told him I couldn't do nothing with him - told Columbia I couldn't make him record any faster. We snorted some coke together and that was it.'
Here Stone appears to be struggling with that talent and doing all that he can to keep things positive. It's an album that bubbles without ever boiling over. That's the best way I can think of to describe it. It's by turns, Funky, Soulful, poetic and reflective. It has Family Affair one of the band's best known hits on it and that song that slots in nicely on the record but has plenty of bedfellows here that are either just as good or better.
Nothing seems out of place, it has an easy flow which testifies to its high and enduring critical standing. But it seems to tell a story of Sly paying the cost of fronting the highest profile multiracial and male-female band of its time when that must have been an incredibly difficult role to bear.
Sly clearly had his demons, you only need read any decent biography about him to find that out pretty quickly. What I love about all of his best records is that he always does his upmost not to let that show. The musical glass is always half full even when his life and those around him clearly aren't.
Stone it seems became entirely deranged during the making of There's a Riot Goin' On. Kent reports that he actually tried to have bandmate Larry Graham killed during the same period.To read Kent's slightly harrowing account of events round about that time in The Dark Suff it all sounds like the downward spiral that occurs to everybody concerned on the end section of Boogie Nights.
One more great record, Fresh (and it is a really great one), and he was pretty much done as a creative force. Cocaine had wreaked havoc on his muse and creative drive. Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield among his black contemporaries were making far more innovative and interesting records. Sly was done But when he does go he'll be remembered as one of the true greats. For a while, very few held a candle to him.
Ever Fallen In Love - The Last Buzzcock Tapes - Pete Shelley # 4 Buzzcocks - What Do I Get
The first of that trully stellar run of Pop singles. Only reached # 37 but signalled that Buzzocks brought something to the table that none of those original Punk bands, (save The Undertones, who arrived slightly afterwards), did. About, quite clearly, frustration.
Best Ever Albums - Top 1,000 Albums - 893 Tricky - Maxinquaye
One of the great and still enduringly wonderful Trip Hop records of the Nineties. Tricky did plenty of great stuff after this. His last record for instance is pretty damned good. But he has never really made anything that hit critical mass quite like his debut did.
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 394 R.E.M.
'While all America's ageing grunge dweebs were greedily exploiting teen trauma and turning Cobain's 'we' into amelodramatically miserabilist 'me' the chairmen of the board rose above such kid's stuff and provided soul solace for the masses.'
Friday, September 3, 2021
Ever Fallen In Love - The Last Buzzcock Tapes - Pete Shelley # 3 Buzzcocks - Orgasm Addict
Onto the meat of the book. The Pete talk. First Buzzcocks single after Devoto's departure. Apparantly partially inspired by William Burroughs.
Song of the Day # 2,777 Sea Power
British Sea Power are back. Though they're now just Sea Power, the 'British' bit having been dropped. Something to do with the contemporary UK political climate it seems. Anyway, this is a great new start. Anthemic, but in a good way, that not too many bands who attempt this kind of thing master.
Thursday, September 2, 2021
Album Reviews # 95 The Clash - Combat Rock
'Know your rights. All three of them...'
I had a good friend who once came round to my flat and was disparaging about the fact that I had The Clash's Combat Rock in my record colllection. He then proceeded to bang on about how much better The Dickies were. Now he was an excellent and very intelligent fellow but Combat Rock and indeed pretty much everything on it is better than anything The Dickies ever did and I'm quite sure The Dickies themselves would be the first to admit it.
I have every Clash album with the exception of Cut The Crap, the record they made after Mick Jones left, or probably more accurately was forced out of the band by Joe Strummer. It barely qualifies as a Clash record in my book as Jones was every bit as an integral Clash member as Strummer. Despite the fact that I have all these records, I don't listen to them all that often, I'm not sure why. I guess it's because I came of age musically a bit too late to be totally taken over by them as so many of my age and slightly older than me were. I still recognise their worth.
The Clash are not universally loved or even liked, even by the original Punk Generation. Clothes horses, London poseurs, bandwagon jumpers, just some of the slurs cast apart them. I think a cursory listen to any of that incredible run of albums, The Clash, Give 'Em Enough Rope, London Calling, Sandinista and this one are enough to establish exactly why they made such an indelible mark. They're just phenomenally exciting.
R.E.M's Peter Buck is always a good man to go to where these things are concerned. Serving an apprenticeship in a record shop, (record shop people generally 'know'), which is where he met Michael Stipe and started to plot the formation of the band. 'The people who listen to The Clash,' Buck said, 'either already agree with The Clash or don't listen to their lyrics at all. It's pretty symptomatic that all The Clash's hits have been, you know, Rock The Casbah and Should I Stay Or Should I Go...' As so often. I'm with Buck, who in many ways was my Mick Jones, just as Stipe was my Joe Strummer. Very different approach, but similarly astonishing results.
Still, listening to Combat Rock now I understand fully why I bought it when it came out, my first Clash record. I like the lyrics just as much as the tunes but then I do agree with The Clash politically and don't think for a moment that it was just a pose, the band's generosity to their fans, particularly in their early days was legendary. I have another good friend who went to see them in those early days, befriended them after the gig and travelled round with them on tour for a while, roadying for and generally just hanging out with them. I imagine he still swears by the band.
No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones, in 1977...' , sang Strummer, famously in the year and song of the same name, on the B Side of debut single White Riot, Unlike many of his peers, I'm fairly sure Strummer loved all of those. But he knew a good slogan when he wrote it. What he was decrying was the lack of such excitement in the days he was living through and drawing a line in the sand and marking out a Year Zero was the best possibly way to express it and bring some of that excitement back.
The Clash, more probably than any of those original bands did just that. They also stayed the course, more than any of their contempories and got better. London Calling is probably the high water mark of their achievement, though Sandinista has its adherents too. This is one mean record too. Clearly trying to break America at this point, they played Shea Stadium, supported The Who, got into early Hip Hop and all the most cutting edge current Black music and hung out with Scorsese and the like. They'd always been completely in thrall to American music, despite 'I'm So Bored With The USA'.
Evidence to this effect is all over Combat Rock. It's certainly their most American album. Some saw this as a sign of them 'selling out', but The Clash had been being accused of selling out ever since they signed to CBS. It's all nonsense. Much more a matter of getting their message across to a wider audience. They understood the contradictions right from the off better than most of those around them.
Their records and Strummer's message got stronger so how could the path they chose possibly be a bad thing. Strummer got new teeth and the band developed a Rock and Roll look that frankly wasn't a million miles away from The Who. They understood well that it was all really about the quality of the music and there's plenty of evidence to that here .
The record has twelve tracks, far less than either London Calling and Sandinista but frankly despite their greatness, there's also an element of overload about both those albums. I can listen right the way through to Combat Rock, which frankly I never do to either of those.
As I said I'm no hard core Clash fan but their back catalogues is just wonderful and Combat Rock,does nothing whatsoever to tarnish that legacy. It's tough as nails. I'll leave the grand theorising to others. This record is more than enough for me. As for The Dickies. Pah!
PS. I could have gone into the strengths of this album in more detail, but frankly it speaks of them starkly enough for itself. There's plenty of insurrection in Know Your Rights and Rock the Casbah, (check out the video with a Jew and an Arab raving it up together in a cadillac), and Should I Stay or Should I Go has plenty of Rock and Roll muscle. Plenty of pure genius too, just listen to Straight To Hell. They stayed true to their ideals right to the end.
Covers # 175 The Triffids
Currently going through one of my intermittent Triffids obsessive periods. This time after listening to a wonderful podcast about Born Sandy Devotional. This is a loose cover of a Dylan song from John Wesley Harding.
Best Ever Albums - Top 1,000 Albums - 895 The Clash - Combat Rock
This inspires me to write a review of this album on here soon.
Ever Fallen In Love - The Last Buzzcock Tapes - Pete Shelley # 2 Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks, form play those legendary early gigs and put out the Spiral Scratch EP, one of the most important records ever released.
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 392 Huggy Bear
'Her Jazz is prime X Ray Spex / Slits lo-fi noise irritant mixed with some Manics sloganeering...'
Song of the Day # 2,776 The Shivas
Old school Rock and Roll from Portland, Oregon band. An album to follow at the end of September.
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Ever Fallen In Love - The Last Buzzcock Tapes - Pete Shelley # 1 The Velvet Underground
Another month, another book. This time Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks. Two Forewords by Henry Rollins and Pete's wife and then into the back story. Shelley and Howard Devoto meet at Bolton Institute after Devoto puts an ad on the notice board there asking if anyone is interested in meeting up to try to 'do a version' of this.
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 391 Radiohead
'definitive hymn to adolescent self-loathing.'
Song(s) of the Day # 2,775 Friendly Boyfriend
They're called Friendly Biyfriend. They're from Gothenberg. They have a four song 7 inch single called Pick Up! out. One of the tracks is an artfully out of tune cover of The Clean's Beatnik. The rest sounds as you'd imagine it to. Throwaway, but likeable.
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