I've heard a lot of nonsense about The Clash in the last few years. That The Damned were better than them. That they were just a London thing. That they weren't Punk Rock. That they were just about selling trousers. 'Oh I don't like Joe Strummer's voice.' Lots and lots of Pish & Nonsense.
The band signed to a major. They didn't play Top Of The Pops. They were a mass of contradictions and a fantastic, fantastic thing from start to chaotic end. There's not a band on earth, still, that can hold a candle to them. They offer heroism in spades.
This is what television's were invented for . To play whimsical, joyful albums on. Well done John Logie Baird ! A whi,msical compilation of fine and tender pieces. From the Japanes underground of the early Eighties to the warm embrace of Stephen Pastel. Get away from the herd.
Domestic Bliss? Surely an oxymoron A vain imagining. But in this case it happens to be the latest album from Voka Gentle a band for London who may be in the gutter and poseurs of am expressive dayglo sort but at least they're looking at the stars as they head for the hills as Dr.s Wilde and Bowie would prescribe, Even if the album cover is bad Salvador Dali and no mistake !
This is a bit of a ragbag but isn't lacking in daring or ambition. Even though occasionally I'm reminded of The Thompson Twins. Doctor Doctor !!! It's not running on the spot at least. It might be lacking in shape and substance on occasion but its decorative, varued and throws shapes. I give it 7.5, it's It Starts With a Birthstone's song / album of the day. I salute its bravura. Who precisely is Torpedo Mike and why are Voka Gentle staring back down my telescope ? Your guess is as good as mine.
You gotta pick a pocket or...... I don't really care how Elastica are viewed these days. Strangely enough for such a bunch of brazen arriviste chancers, I think a case could be made that they were actually ahead of their time rather than behind it. As for their belated follow up to this glorious debut when they decide they would actually rather sound like The Fall than Blondie, Wire or The Stranglers. Hmm.....
Music isn't always particularly in 2026 I must say. Take Jalen N'Gonda's latest album Doctrine of Love. It's Neo Soul of the coolest stripe. They follow the Motown template to the tee. All the T's crossed and the I's dotted. But you wonder why to listen to this rather than a classic which came out in 1972. I'm not entirely sure how to answer you.
Joni's only Top Ten US Singleshit. About the act of falling in love. Not an easy thing. Joni was somewhat dismissive of this but said it 'sounded good on the radio.' I'd say she's selling a thing of great beauty somewhat short.
Well we'd better get going on this. I know very well that we're not yet halfway through July. But these things don't write themselves and it strikes me as time to get going as we make our way to December . This is a lovely way to kick off our countdown.
'Love is the strangest thing,,,,' Scrub love for life. I've been working since eight on a screen. Almost five hours in all. Teaching, or more accurately in my case, trying to learn from students in Dussledorf, Amsterdam and Hamburg. I learned a lot. I hope they did.
Then I nipped down to my local library to seek some supplementary information. More leads. Diversification, never a bad idea. The case is never closed regardless of what Tom Verlaine thought, The one thing I know is I'm happy behind my desk. I never really plan to do anything else. Never back at an office. Back on the chain gang.
On the way back I nipped into the record shop acriss the road. A record sleeve grabbed my attention. That's what record shops are for. Surabaya. Indonesian outfit Thee Marloes second album Di Hotel Malibu. A reminder which is always welcome that the world is impossible exotic, and mystical.
I'm back at my desk now, The album is on and it's enchanting fare. Sultry, stuff to lure you onto the dancefloor and into a Seventies dream
'Look at that mama spider crawling on the bouganvillea'
Day Two of the World Cup. And while I eagerly await witnessing the bast football team Canada have ever produced at 8 o'clock according to reports. I'm listening to The Landfill Fruit Bats twelth album. It's a comforting record. Distinctly old school. As if Dylan and Van the Man and Harry Nilsson are still in their prime and putting out excellent product.
The 2026 World Cup is due to start in twenty minutes. Mexico versus South Africa. I will watch it. But first I will listen to this. I have changed when it comes to football. I am closer to Stereolab's way of thinking than Ian Wight's these days though doubtless it will feature on my radar over the coming month.
Transient, Random Noise Bursts With Announcements is a blurred magnificent European statement. There's a band that know and have achieved so much. This is a magical start on golden reins. The metal veins. A poignant, magnificent and sustained vision. Let the games begin.
This is beginning to feel like Hopscotch between Court & Spark, Blue,Ladies of the Canon and Hejira.. Free Man In Paris is about watching Joni watching David Geffen on the move. 'Stoking the star maker machine, behind the popular song.'
I Built You a Tower, the eleventh studio from Seattle's Death Cab For Cutie is a sweet and tender record. By contrast with the Modest Mouse alum which confused and repelled me rather, a few days ago I'm finding this amenable and skipping back to the start. It's like an inviting eiderdown you return to rather than doing something more profitable with your day.
Of course you're always resigned to records at this distance into a band's journey being consumed to some degree by grief and resignation and that's the case here. In this case reconnecting with Emo . Bands like to rediscover their origins and speculate on the nature of their first acts of departure. This is neatly done. The abiding impression of the record is warmth.
Liz Lawrence has got the look and the modern sound. The new solemnity. On current album, Vespers she sounds like Phoebe, Aldous and erm Liz Lawrence. There's plenty of atmosphere and ennui. It's a damned good album that's accompanied me through a Stormy Wednesday.
The kind of thing Uncut Magazine get unfeasibly excited about . I listen and generally feel slightly underwhelmed and go back to my Echo & The Bunnymen records. I supect tonight might be a case in point.
The Cardigans is a great name for a band. The Cardigans are a great band. This is an album from 2003. The term 'mature' probably applies. But the songwriting and arrangements are pure class.
I woke up early. I listened to a record by The Delgados on my stereo while I had my breakfast. Now I'm listening to another on my television while I prepare for work.
'Hate is all you need apparently' According to the song I'm listening to. The Delgados are anything but Hateful. Quite the contrary. They're novelistic. Detailed. A Scottish Indie band from the Nineties and the early part of the Millennium who never quite got their due.
But those for the likes of me are the important ones. Love, The Velvet Underground. The Modern Lovers, Telvevision, Subway Sect, Wire, Cornershop, Stereolab, My tribe. The bands that could easily have been authors. Now there's a good name for a band. I imagine it's been taken.
There are moments on Hate where the emotional horizons expand. Where the flowers bloom and the trees burst into blossom. Where the sheer accumulation of attention to detail bears small harvests and d youmomentarily feel like you're listening to the best record ever made and you want to tell the world even if you suspect that nobody might be listening. So you continue with your day. That's what art is for/
Life remains a mystery. But it pays to explore its terrains. Its valleys and ravines. 'Slide, slide, slide. Down River....' What better companion than a Bill Callahan record. This gathers giddy momentum and post modernist resonance and you lose yourself.
I'm done for the day. I've just finishe teaching a charming young German woman called Sarah. She talked about visiting an LGBT Trade Fair in Berlin. How it was important to work for a company that reflected her own principles and ideals. We talked about the work she did and the English she needs. Had a great time together and I hope a useful time for her.
At the end of the hour I happened to ask her what kind of music she liked . She mentioned Provinz and I'm listening to them now. They're from Ravensberg in Baden Wurtemburg. I'm listening to Pazifik their album from last year now. It's much to my liking.
It exists in the same genral ballpark as Coldplay. But I don't mind Coldplay. Pazifik is a record that billows and gathers with tangible gusto. Its epiphanies are not inconsiderable .
Let's face it. The precedent for Nick Cave & The bad Seeds are - The Doors. Dark, sexy, literary. sly. I've just finished listening to Morrison Hotel. Now I'm listening to Dig Lazarus Dig !!! I find it much harder work. But that always happens !
Music is something you can lose yourself in. Like writing. Life is essentially about escape. That's why we were given imaginations. Escape. Into a memory. Into a vanished imagined world. Into yourself. A time you may not have actually experienced yourself. A relationship you may not actually have had yourself. But one which chimes with the ones you have. Or are having. Escape. Into nuance.
I am listening to Modest Mouse's new album An Eraser & A Maze. It's not a particularly enjoyable experience but I shall persist. Modest Mouse are apparrently Pacific Nothwest legends. That's news to me . My idea of a Pacific Nothwest legend is The Sonics. Or Jimi Hendrix.
An Eraser & A Maze is the band's eighth album. A key member has just died which of course is regrettable and apparently the lyrical themes circle and come back to grief. The band are currently intoning 'Life's a dream...' from my TV set. All I can say is if it is, if that's true, I hope the dream's a bit better than this album.
I keep listening because I think I must be missing something but nothing seems to stick. It seems very clever. But not remotely tuneful. Everything is clever these days. It all sounds like the audio equivalent of a shelf of tasteful paperbacks in a house in the suburbs. Vigiania Woolf, Pynchon and Carver, toni Morrison, Cheever and David Foster Wallace. But actually it all feels more like a cry of desperation .From a whisper to a squeak !
We pause for breath here. The author is taking a hiatus. But first Trout Mask Replica. A record I've never listened to before. It's relentless eternal motion. For many a sacred text. I surprised myelf and was smitten.
I've always been reistant to this album for some reason even though I love the Good Captain. But today I just sat at my desk , Put on my headphone. Listened to the album in its entirety . It's like leaping into a highly polluted river and flowing downstream with the debris. And I found the experience highly thrilling.
I need a record store converstion every few days. To feed in to what I write here and generally to feed my soul or what I like to think passes for one. So today, I chatted to Nick. He went to see Midge Ure last night and apparently Midge was fab. So now I'm listening to Rage In Eden and the vox lads are going through their Mittel Europa motions. I fancy a beer. In a pint glass. The way the Czechs pour them.
I confess I find the angular cheeks and vivid sidies rather preposterous, but I'm pleased Nick had a great time. I know Midge has been there and done it all. But Rage in Eden still sounds all pose and little meat on the bone to my ears. An approximation of Robert Musil in cartoon form
Being in between. Hearing crickets call. The insecurity of not knowing what the response might be. But also the artistic permanence of the statement. And the peace.
I'm sitting in my living room listening to Heron's second album Twice as Nice & Half the Price. It's a double. It came out in 1972 on Decca Reccords.. It's the definition of Pastoral charm and carried me back to my own childhood in the Seventies.Visits to Grandparents in Dorset and Sussex.
My Grandmother on my mother's side retired to a Cul De Sac bungalow in Eastbourne in the early Seventies. . My grandfather had died just before she moved there and she went on with life as well as she could for twenty years before she herself passed in the early nineties. .Though she must have been terribly lonely sometimes. My mother called her every day. I keep the tradition alive and call mum daily to see how she is keeping. Half five on the dot.
I have special memories of visiting my grandmother. Her succession of labrador companions. We used to walk them in the neighbouring avenues. Drive them up to the Sussex downs early in the morning with rabbits scuttling across the road into the ditches at our approach with the labrador bounding up and straining and frothing against the window.
Penguin Chocolate Biscuits. The different colours . My Uncle's model cars and aeroplanes, kept in the back bedroom in the cupboards. A memorial sabre sword displayed above the mantelpiece. The Moscow Olympics which we watched together. Steve Ovett. Sebastian Coe. Athletes from the Eastern Bloc trailing in their wake. The arrival of my Uncle Malcolm and Aunt Linda and their bounding red setters and their newborn arrival Alexander.
My mother held Alexander in her arms and I asked her 'Would you swap places.'She said 'Yes I would.' But almost fify years on I wouldn't. I wouldn't swop places with anybody. I think it's important to be happy with where you are and who you are. What you are.
Records like Twice as Nice & Half the Price help me feel this way. It's an ordinary record.Ram light. But it's its ordinariness is extraordinary. Comforting
It's the lead review in the current issue of Idler magazine. There's a picture of John Lennon and Paul McCartney from their Beatles peak on the cover. Idler is a magazine for people like me. Of a certain age and disposition..
That's exactly what Twice as Nice & Half the Price is. Music for people like me. People who want to live in the moment and enjoy their day. This was recorded at a farm in Devon.. Listening to this you feel like you are there. Transported to exist in the moment.
What a day ! I'll spare you the gory details. As my friend David puts it. 'Some days are out to get you.' And then you come to rest. It's not quite as bad as it seems. And then you put Yo La Tengo on knowing it's a double album and you have nothing to do but listen to all four sides and it all seems that much better as the evening stretches ahead of you. Yo La Tengo are a hipsters treat !
I've been fond of Widowspeak, an Indie band from Brooklyn, New York and previously Tacoma, Washington, for a while now. They have a new album Roses just out where they pick further at a familiar seam on Rock & Roll's Goldmine. The shaft that connects Mazzy Star to The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan's 'Wild Mercury Sound'
A lot of these sings sound like your're getting the Motherlode. As if the Middlearth Wars are being enacted in your living room The Riders of Rohan are charging.
This is why I bought Hissing Of Summer Lawns I realised . Because The NME told me tii, Because I knew what I wanted to be. I want to be sophisticated and live life to the full. I'd read Fitzgerald and struggled through Hamlet. This is what Joni had for me. She was impossibly cultivated. Erudite, Bellow, Vidal, Didion. In a long iced fluted glass.
There's a first time for everything. I'm listening to a Kylie album. I won't listen to another one. It's non-descript. It's the one with Can't Get You Out of My Head , which isn't, on it.
I think I'm going back. Got to keep going back. For surely that is how to best go forwaed. Try to pit one foot in fromt of the other. Walk the straight path. This morning Leaf Hound. Listed on Wikipedia as Heavy Metal, Hard Rock, Stoner Rock, Psychedelic Rock. Call it what you will. I know what Billy Joel would say....
The band's name comes from a Ray Bradbury short story anbout a dog that came back from the dead covered in leaves. I'm listening to Growers of Mushroom which was iriginally entitled Leaf Hound. It was relased in 1970 then rereleased in 1971 as Growers of Mushroom with additional tracks. It's so of its time that you're transported back there immediately on listening to it.
The Seventies is a foreign country. They do things differently there, If you don't believe me take a listen to The Roches self titled album. Released in 1979. An album like this could not and would not be made now. Or ever again frankly. It exists in a different light and space..
I get the sense that XTC took a while to become the band they wanted and needed to be. Drums & Wires their third record was frantic and nervy. Very New Wave. But not altogether coherent.The best thing about it is probably its sleeve,
The songs here for the most part seem not entirely sure where they are going. Production is sharp but most of this is destined for evening radio shows. Except for Nigel the band haven't fully worked out how to write sings. They improved vastly when they did.
Tom Jones must have had a song in the Top Twenty every couple of months for the second half of the Sixties. This wasn't the worst thing in the world surely.
My heart leaps like a salmon through a circus hoop help a metre above the lake. Cornershop. I adore Cornershop. People go on about Oasis. They do go on and on. Bit let's face it we're not talking Cornershop. Inimitable !
There's an intricacy and intimacy about the songs from Blue. He went to California and wrote a letter . Which he posted in a box. Imagine. How romantic. This has all the characteristics of the most deeply worked on and posted love letters.
Tyler Ballgame's is a Berklee College Music dropout. He dusted himself down and For The First Time his debut album is just out, It's an easy going amiable genre hopping.record that could probably have slotted in comfortably on Seventies AOR radio,
It's clear the man has done his ground work,. There's plenty of swoon and shiver here. A touch if the old west Perhaps sometimes a bit close to pastiche for comfort. but it has some lovely oranges on the cover and gets a thumbs up from here.
I have a seat at a desk where I write these blog entries and stare down at the pavement opposite me. Watch the people come and go. The record player is spinning and I'm listening to Court & Spark as I make my way through my day. The Roland Garros French Open is on and Court & Spark spins like an absorbing rally between Vilas and Borg back in the day.
God descends on It Starts With a Birthstone. Well Pentecost is fast approaching. And as all Germans know. Pentecost. means. A day off work! . So here comes Sister Irene O'Connor with her acoustic guitar,
Fire of God is a weird collection of Folk Spirituals from 1973 with echoes of Vashti Bunyan and Space Lady. It's playing on my television set as I make my way through my morning. It's all really rather lovely
