Courtney Barnett

Almost certainly person of the year. I had a nice moment in a local record store while browsing, (as I do), this week.. They were playing her record, a great thing in itself. After a couple of minutes one middle aged customer came and asked the assistant who it was. A conversation ensued about the resemblance of one of her songs to Rebel Rebel (the song concerned is David, posted below, it could equally be Jean Genie). After a couple more tracks he was back to the counter with more questions and ended up buying the record. The word spreads. Nice interview and I particularly liked her comment about our obligation in life to compete and how we all fall in line unknowingly to conform.

From pizza delivery girl to Jimmy Fallon: Courtney Barnett's star is on the rise

Music

Date

September 26, 2014

• (0)
                   

Craig Mathieson

 

    

Courtney Barnett: ‘‘I don’t feel I know everything — or maybe anything — about myself.’’
 

In the last year Courtney Barnett, the local singer-songwriter feted by the alternative music industry at home and abroad, has toured for up to three months straight as introductory forays become return visits. For most musicians this would be a giddy event, but the genially gifted 26-year-old is having to live her life in contravention of her defining instincts. Home, for Courtney Barnett, is where the art is.
"I hate going anywhere," admits Barnett, sitting down to an organic vegetarian lunch on Fitzroy's Brunswick Street in Melbourne. "I'm really excited to travel and play all these different places, but if I had it my way I would stay inside, maybe go to the back garden or walk around the corner to the shops. That's it."

Many of the references to people and places in Barnett's music can be geographically pinned to in and around her local shopping strip, High Street in Thornbury in Melbourne's inner north. However, the intimate has started to become universal with a growing fanbase that's expanding quickly in North America and now Europe even as she hits unexpectedly quick milestones at home such as a forthcoming run of sold-out shows at Richmond's Corner Hotel and the Oxford Art Factory in Sydney.

Success shouldn't be an issue for Barnett's ego, however. "I'm self-deprecating – I spend a lot of time telling myself that things are OK, as opposed to having to tell myself to get over things," she says.

 

 

Barnett is a storyteller for the modern age, stringing together deadpan puns and droll observations that she sings with detached persuasiveness above a churning foundation of her serrated, unpredictable guitar and the rhythm section of bassist "Bones" Sloane and drummer Dave Mudie. Bob Dylan circa 1965's Highway 61 Revisited is often cited as a forebear, but imagine the amphetamine energy replaced by laconic drinks beneath the Hills Hoist at dusk.

"I don't know anything else other than what goes through my head," notes Barnett, and her songs suggest that's a great deal. One of her best compositions, the urgent History Eraser, is an extended suburban fever dream – "I touched on and off and rubbed my arm up against yours," she sings, experiencing attraction on public transport, "and still the inspector inspected me" – that builds to a delirious level of whimsy and social observation.

The song has four verses, but Barnett originally wrote 30 of them over three days when she retreated to Hobart to stay with her parents and get away from outside distractions. Barnett is often labelled a slacker, both for her nondescript demeanour and laid-back outlook, but she's matter-of-fact about dedicating herself to songwriting when required and working her way through the subsequent touring.

It would be more accurate to say that she's unimpressed by the totems of success. In April, Barnett made her American network television debut, playing her breakthrough single Avant Gardener to the 4 million viewers of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. It signified Barnett's elevation far beyond her contemporaries and was greeted by many here as the occasion for a victory lap. Barnett was not one of them.

"Not to sound like I'm ungrateful, but it wasn't my goal in life to do that," she says. "We're a very success-driven culture, which is such a downer at times. Even if you don't think that way, you're forced to think that way. Everyone is trying to subconsciously out-do everyone else."

Barnett hasn't had that mentality since she was a competitive tennis player as a teenager. She grew up in Mona Vale on Sydney's northern beaches, the younger of two children to a ballerina mother and graphic designer father. Barnett was "the biggest tomboy" in ballet class, throwing it in for tennis at age 10, which she played with a temper she inherited from her dad.

At age 16, less her older brother, the Barnett's relocated to Hobart, where she finished high school, started a fine arts university degree, delivered pizza to places she graded on the "I might get stabbed here" scale, and had an epiphany watching Magic Dirt's Adalita Srsen perform at Hobart's Republic Bar.

"Until I was 18, music was a CD that comes from America, and you'll never be able to do it because you're not a famous person that comes from America," Barnett says. "Then there's a women from Geelong, howling and smashing her guitar into the roof. I was like, 'What is this? It's awesome!'"
What's happening now, eight years later, is occurring with Barnett's recently recorded debut album not due for release until March or April of next year. Her current release, the self-descriptive The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas gathers together her early work, and has already sold more than 20,000 copies in North America. Barnett's independent mindset has her licensing her music through Milk Records, the label she runs with her partner, singer-songwriter Jen Cloher.

Retaining control can come at a literal price however. Barnett set the postage cost for buying The Double EP on vinyl (her preferred format) through the Milk Records website at $10, the same figure that they used for Cloher's 2013 album In Blood Memory. But Barnett's two-disc release weighed twice as much as Cloher's, and they made a loss of up to $40 an order on the postage for some of the international sales.

"If I make a wrong decision I worry what might have been. I stress out over very insignificant things," says Barnett. "I have a few fears because I'm a stressful person who worries about everything. I'm worried about general life-wasting and I'm really bad at decision-making."
Nonetheless, Barnett continues to gain career momentum. From mid-October there's two months of touring in North America and Europe, now as a four-piece with addition of previous occasional live collaborator and now album co-producer Dan Luscombe (the Drones), before the focus turns to 2015's debut album. What does it all mean? Mainly less time for her back garden.

"I don't feel I know everything – or maybe anything – about myself," decides Barnett. "You grow up thinking you'll figure out what you want to do and what person you want to be, but right now I feel all right with not knowing."
.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/from-pizza-delivery-girl-to-jimmy-fallon-courtney-barnetts-star-is-on-the-rise-20140923-10ko2l.html#ixzz3Es2cce1b

September 30th 1942 - Frankie Lymon

 

Child doo wop star born this day. Died tragically young aged 25 in 1968 from a drugs related overdose.

Debbie Harry

 

Not sure how many pictures of Debbie Harry I've printed but they keep on coming down the pike. Here's one taken of her by Chris Stein from a forthcoming exhibition.

Song of the Day # 255 Frank Sinatra

 

My birthday today. One short of the big 5 oh. Here's as good a song as any to mark it. Released the year I was born.

Songs About People # 54 Ry Cooder

 

 Humdrum day at work. Such is life. Still I heard this, and the album that gave it birth. Post rock apparently. Enjoy!

 

 

 

29th September 1935 Jerry Lee Lewis

 

The Killer. Born this day. Still alive!

Numbers - 78

 

Hipper than thou late nineties stoner anthem. An album I loved at the time but which hasn't left its CD case for years as with much of the stuff I bought in the Nineties. Why is that? Me or the records?

 

 

Song of the Day # 254 Opal

 

As a follow up to the Mazzy Star review I posted yesterday here's a complete gem from the band David Roback was in just before with Kendra Smith, formerly of The Dream Syndicate. The song was later covered by Leeds band The Pale Saints.

28th September 1991 Miles Davis

 

Miles died today in 1991.

Mazzy Star - Postscript

 

As a follow up to my review below I found this paragraph in the Rough Guide to Rock that summed them and their sound up for me quite neatly.

 

'Although Mazzy Star have managed the neat trick of updating psychedelia for the 1990s without sounding dated, if you're looking for blissed-out music with a happy smile on its face you might want to think twice before taking the plunge. When guitarist David Roback wraps his shards of feedback and drawn-out crescendos of reverb and distortion around Hope Sandoval's laconic vocal delivery the results can indeed be trance-inducing. But their music is as much a disengagement from real life as an investigation of alternate realities and the druggy states they evoke are comfortably numb rather than euphoric.'

Album Review # 33 Mazzy Star - She Hangs Brightly

 

There are few things quite as sad to me as friends lost who shouldn't have been lost. People you met at certain points of your life who occupy a specific space who you had important  conversations with that you've lost contact with. It feels like something of a death to remember them years later. Especially when you play a piece of music that reminds you of them

 

I woke up this Sunday morning intending to write a review while having my breakfast and ended up thinking of Paul Burnand, a university friend of mine from the late eighties. He was from Leeds and was resolutely Northern in every respect so stood out a bit in a rather Southern university and faculty in Norwich. I think he looked at the rest of us with a certain amount of cynicism and detachment but for some reason seemed to except me from that judgement and we became good friends. We shared common interests. In literature and culture most obviously, as that's what we were studying, but also in politics, in music, in sport. Generally there was a bond there and I wish we were still in touch. I imagine he's back in Leeds.  Paul was not the kind to go on Facebook and all other internet searches I've tried have been in vain. I'll keep trying to track him down but in the meantime here's a review that thinking about him has partially inspired.

 

 

In my final year before I graduated I was still lacking the direction and drive to go trotting down the career path that life tries to condition you for. At that time Paul was working in a Record Shop in the middle of Norwich and it seemed as desirable a place to be as any other. I would pop in and chat to him during the day and he'd put on choices like Pere Ubu's Non Alignment Pact to keep the customers lively while we did so. Generally he would talk about Neil Young who he had developed a consuming passion for and was in the rapid process of buying each and every album by, a brave pursuit given some of the records that Young had put out.

 

 

 

But I also  remember us discussing and studying the wonderful cover sleeve for this, the first album by Mazzy Star, an LA band featuring David Roback and Hope Sandoval. It seemed like something quite exciting given our shared musical tastes, particularly in the music of the American West Coast.  Roback wasn't a totally unknown quantity. He'd been in The Rain Parade in the early Eighties, along with his brother amongst others. They'd been part of the Paisley Underground scene, a group of bands who'd taken my fancy after I'd discovered R.E.M. and was looking around for something else to follow in a similar vein. From the Rain Parade Roback had gone on to form Opal with Kendra Smith from the Dream Syndicate, another group from the same movement. In retrospect, they were very much a prototype for Mazzy Star. Spectral, spacy vocals. Psychedelic, West Coast guitar with a touch of Velvet Underground steel and menace.

 

But She Hangs Brightly really did seem to be offering something different even from all that Roback had done before. An updated sixties classicism for a new decade. A spooky, haunted Californian response to the Jesus & Mary Chain's doomed imaginings of what it must feel like to be in America. It seemed fitting when Sandoval and the Mary Chain's guitarist William Reid got together a few years later. Of course, the romance was doomed.

 

.

 

The album is still is a pretty effective construction of sound, voice and pure atmosphere twenty years on .It's an act of evident fandom,, the love of its influences drips from every moment of it, influences most obviously from music but also from art and literature quite evident in the songs, their titles and lyrics,  and the packaging of the record and the band. The cover photo, of a stairwell at the Hotel Tassel in Brussels is key in conveying the mood the record inspires. A deserted stairwell going up, a deserted stairwell going down and a lift-shaft. The architecture gothic and ornate Exits and departures. They're evidently aspiring to create a classic. Within the parameters they set up for themselves, I'd say they succeed.

 

 

 

Sandoval, is clearly, a key ingredient in the success of the record. She adds something new to the mix. A Hispanic dash of romance and exoticism and pure sexuality that no-one on the Paisley Underground scene of white sixties obsessed musos could offer. Kendra Smith came pretty close on some of the Opal records, I recommend them highly if you can track them down, but Sandoval's voice was incredibly affecting and fresh when you heard it first in 1990. Time and countless subsequent releases, where she effectively does the same thing, has lessened the impact. Play her next to Caitlin Rose for example who I've posted just below this on the blog and Sandoval is blown away like a wisp in the desert wind. She has a specific range which she's almost pathologically reluctant to go beyond. It works here though for me subsequent Mazzy Star releases came to be a bit repetitive.  But for the purposes of this album she and Roback are a perfect fit.

 

 

 

The first two songs on the record Halah and Blue Flower are the ones that have stayed with me most over the years. It's a blistering one two that the rest of the record sustains without ever really topping.. Halah  emphasises the sense established by the album cover that this is a song about doorways. It's a track I'll happily listen to for the rest of my allotted days.

 

'Surely don't stay long I'm missing you now.
It's like I told you I'm over you somehow
Before I close the door I
Need to hear you say goodbye.
Baby won't you change your mind?'

 

The lyrics don't really convince as true expressions of heartfelt misery, more resigned, detached ennui but having a woman like  Sandoval sing them to you is always gratifying. A moment later she mutters, 'Baby I wish I was dead', and you know immediately she doesn't mean it for a moment. She's a femme fatale, but a strangely reticent and non-forthcoming one and its a concise expression of the cool reserve that comes to define the album.

 

 

Blue Flower I'd maintain is the best song on the record. Ironic, as I recently discovered it's not actually a band composition but a cover of a Slapp Happy song from the early Seventies. Perhaps this an indication of the rest of the records lack of lyrical depth because it's the one moment where they break out of their cool reserve and really strike home. The Waiting For The Man steal of the opening riff and the mention of the unsheafed knife are the closest the album comes to actually drawing blood.

 

'Waitin' for a sign from you
Waitin' for a signal to change
Have you forgotten what your love can do?
Is this the end?

Walkin' through the city
Your boots are high-heeled and are shinin' bright
The sunlight sparklin' on the shaft of your knife
Flower in the morning rain
Dying in my hand
Was it all in vain?

Superstar in your own private movie
I wanted just a minor part
But I'm no fool
I know you're cool
I never really wanted your heart

You're keeper of the key
Nothing seems to bring you down
It's not that cool when I'm around
Flower in the morning rain
Dying in my hand
Was it all in vain?

Superstar in your own private movie
I wanted just a minor part
But I'm no fool
I know you're cool
I never really wanted your heart.'

 

From here, as I've suggested, they maintain the pace and mood without achieving any particular peaks. It's almost as if their in-built detachment forbids them from doing so. There's not a weak track on the whole album as such and some of them have revealed new depths to me during the writing of this  but they're working within a formula although Roback is too versatile a musician and arranger to really let it show. Although they talk of highways and the open road this is really deeply interior music and generally quite disengaged, evoking and anticipating the decade it came out at the beginning of. This makes it both comforting but also vaguely disquieting. You can't help feeling that David Lynch would have fully approved.

Roback stretches his repertoire beyond The Doors and the Velvets to folk, blues and country and with embellishes the songs with all kinds of assured sixties touches over the course of the record. Generally it's his inventiveness that makes this a ground-breaking album. It's possible to focus solely on his constantly inventive playing and arranging and the layers of the record begin to unfurl and resonate and Sandoval drops to the back of the mix, becoming another instrument rather than the lead. He's one of the best and least feted guitarists of his generation and it's his expression and versatility that make this work so well for me.

 

 

By the time the warm, gorgeous, gospel organ of  Free kicks in second song from the end of Side 2 it's clear the record has cast its spell. It's chugging away in an assured narcotic groove all of its own. Closing song Before I Sleep kicks in with the opening flourishes of Nico's  I'll Keep it With Mine and the two clip clop off towards the sunset, their job done.

 

 

She Hangs Brightly was one of Kurt Cobain's favourite records and though it's lower down on most people's lists than on his it's well worth owning and revisiting from time to time. It evokes a particular vision of the West of America as an interior space, is perhaps the best representation of David Roback's particular virtuosity and despite my occasional slightly disparaging remarks in this review, Sandoval plays a full role too in the making of a very fine record. Listening to it on a Sunday morning has been a rewarding, immersive four hours.

 

Now, whatever happened to Paul Burnand? I need to talk to him about this.

 

 

Song of the Day # 253 Caitlin Rose

 

Classically within the great Country tradition. A pretty wonderful three minutes. This blog has a couple of de-facto mentors who are constantly directing me towards great stuff, for which I'm grateful. Thanks Stagger Lee.

Vinyl Purchases # 18 The Rolling Stones

27th September, Beatdown Records Newcastle. £20.00

 

Somehow, and I'll never know how or when  a boxful of my records have gone astray. This one amongst them.. I have it again now. This time with the classic Warhol designed zip in good working ordes. Only record obsessives with a taste for The Stones would understand that this purchase was a necessary occurrence at some point in time. This is my favourite Stones album. There's not a duff song on it It also has Mick Taylor at his best. He's a guitarist who never seems to have quite got his due. The period that he was in he band was when The Stones were at their peak in terms of musicianship I think.

 

27th September 1953 Robbie Shakespeare

 

Robbie of Sly and Robbie one of the truly great rhythm sections has his birthday. They've played on countless great records. Including this.

Vinyl Purchases # 17 Funkadelic

 

September 23rd Reflex Records Newcastle.. £10.99. Belated documentation of this purchase. Just a superb record. Incredibly diverse. .

 

Things I've Found on My Local's Jukebox # 32 Jim Croce

Very much of its time but all the better for that. This has been used in a number of movies, including Django Unchained and The Ice Storm partly because it sums up the early seventies so well.

Song of the Day # 252 ATV

 

Starting the weekend off listening to The Skids second album Days in Europa and I'm finding it  pretty bracing so perhaps we should have a Punk song to keep up the momentum. Here's an absolute classic.

September 26th 1969 The Beatles

 

Abbey Road released today in 1969.

Song of the Day # 251 Phosphorescent

 

I discovered this and the album it hails from, Muchacho, yesterday by chance. It came out last year. I'll probably have to buy it now as it's quite excellent.  Not so much a band so much as a moniker for  a singer-songwriter named Matthew Houck, originally from Alabama, but now based in New York after a spell in Athens, Georgia. I could have chosen two or three tracks from the album but this one really struck an immediate chord. It captures something of the spirit of Gram Parsons who casts such a huge shadow over so much modern music . Houck doesn't shy away from the harsh realities. Another album to fall in love with.

25th September 1955 Steve Severin

 

 Birthday today.

Songs Heard on the Radio # 8 Genesis

 

The ageing process plays funny tricks on you. I have no idea if I'd have liked this ten years ago. I seem to have drifted towards Jazz, Folk and Country in that time but Prog? Still, I enjoyed this when it came on the radio mid-afternoon at work. I've also been leaning towards I Know What I Like favourably recently. I think it's a grudging respect for Gabriel. Also been listening to his records of late. Watch this space.....could become a Prog Blog!

 

 

Song of the Day # 250 Slapp Happy

 

I recently discovered that Blue Flower, the best song from She Hangs Brightly, Mazzy Star's debut album was actually by Slapp Happy an early seventies prog-ish group featuring Peter Blegvad and Dagmar Krause later of Henry Cow. Here it is. There seems to be the hint of Velvet Underground guitar here, Waiting For Your Man, or I'll Be Your Mirror here, which is really accentuated in Mazzy Star's version.

The Kinks

24th September 1967 - Traffic

 

Traffic made their live debut this day at The Saville Theatre in London.

Songs About People # 53 The Teardrop Explodes

 

A wonderful record. Stands up on its own as well as for novelty value. Plus the fact that Teardrop Explodes somehow deserve a song.

 

 

Song of the Day # 249 Scritti Politti

 

A wonderful song from their early days. Accompanied here by a brilliant and somehow appropriate clip from the film Kafka.

Album Review # 32 The Cure - 17 Seconds

 

It's almost October. The weather's turning and the light's failing. At this point you start to feel the dampness gather all about you, whether you're at home or on the street the air around you telling you that Winter and darkness are closing in and you're going to have to brace yourself for the long weeks ahead. Five months before the Sun starts its recovery. All things considered, perhaps not the best time to listen to The Cure's 17 Seconds on repeat, in a darkened flat, on your own and try to write something worth saying about it. Particularly when you've got worries and concerns of your own.  It seems like the kind of masochism that human beings seem prone to once they find themselves away from work. Yet, somehow, 17 Seconds is worth it. It's a particular record.

 

 

This is the best Cure album. This claim is not made from a position of authority or knowledge. I haven't heard an LP of theirs from beginning to end since Pornography was released. Since they became hairy spiders in pullovers that looked set to unravel if you gave a loose end a tug. And donned pancake mix make up and set forth to conquer The States in the late eighties.

 

So I'm no dyed in the wool fanatic., My interest stopped around 1985 when they decided they preferred  New Order to themselves, just before they chanced upon their own winning formula. It all became a bit Alice in Wonderland for the masses for me. I thought they were more honest and interesting here. This was the sound of the place where they came from. The London hinterlands. They surely soundtracked them better than anyone else, before or since. Smith wrote the songs in 1979 and 1980 in his parents' house in Crawley. The band then recorded the album in 7 days, apparently without demos over daily 16 hour studio sessions to minimise production costs on a tight budget. This, regardless of what anyone else might tell you was the sound of the suburbs.

 

 

The opening song is an instrumental. Always a brave move. Called Reflections, it's the sound of very little happening very atmospherically. It sets the tone for what's to come. It's aptly named. Much of the album sounds like it's observed from behind glass, by vaguely disaffected  teenagers who despite their mutterings will still come downstairs to table when called and eat supper when it's ready. Just another  rainy, overcast day in the suburbs, deep into Autumn.

 

17 Seconds sounds different depending on the time of the day you listen to it. In the afternoon it's all dripping taps and ticking clocks and rain on the window pane. Time refusing to pass. In the morning it's more sparky, the irony and skilled songwriting comes through more clearly. For me today, at the end of a long hard day at my desk, it didn't work. It seemed petulant when I needed something adult. It's an album of mood and frankly you have to be in the right one. Of course it helps if it's raining.

 

 Play For Today is next and it shows how far The Cure have travelled and how many literary books and artistic films have been devoured. since Boys Don't Cry. Play For Today was a BBC programme of the 70s, one off  heightened melodramas of the kind Robert Smith, (always The Cure's mouthpiece and puppeteer), indulges in here. It's a display of petty, unpleasantness to make a statement of who he is. 'I take what I require...' the Punk refusal to be nice, drawing a line in the sand to demark them from the Hippies. No love out here in the suburbs.

 

 

Secrets may as well be another instrumental, as what lyrics there are Smith mutters deep in the mix. It all adds to the sense of this being a soundtrack without a film. In Your House keeps the pace up, though in this case it's quite consciously that of a metronome ticking on the shelf. Uncommunicative teenagers gather in gloomy rooms to pass time together. Slowly.

 

'I play at night in your house
I live another life
Pretending to swim
In your house
I change the time in your house
The hours I take
Go so slow ...'

And then Three, another instrumental to close off the side. If I'm making the record sound humdrum I'm not doing it justice because I think it's a minor masterpiece. It describes a certain outlook, perspective and response to existence perfectly. It's Harold's life before he meets Maud. Terry's before he met June.

'The girl was never there. It's always the same. We're running towards nothing. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again...'

 

Flip the record and  after yet another brief instrumental  A Final Sound  which I never realised existed until just now, A Forest kicks the second side into gear. It's an absolute landmark moment for the band and somehow should jar in some way. A great song amongst very good ones. But it slots in perfectly here as it's cut from the same cloth as everything around it. Existential gloom. The vague sense that something awful might be about to happen but also the possibility that it equally well may not. That you just have to wait. Smith himself has been resistant when asked about the song's content. Having originally indicated that it was inspired by a childhood dream he later changed his tune and said it was a song about a forest. Personally I don't blame him. It stopped people asking the question. If it's an albatross for him it's one he wears lightly. A Forest has been played live by the band an estimated 800 times.

 

Listening to 17 Seconds at 48 when you first heard it at 16 is rather similar to looking back at Hamlet if you first read that at the same age. You understand the subject matter a lot more than you did at the time but are still struggling to work out what either are really talking about because you never really will. They're both deliberately, hanging question marks. Which is better?  Received wisdom tells us Hamlet and I'd probably agree, (I'm being ironic here but refuse to type a winking face),  but A Forest  focuses on similar themes. Quite consciously talking about what it feels like to be young but feel old, to be alive but unsure of whether we actually are, to wonder whether it's worth remaining so and ponder on the nature of unknowable. All the big themes kids! Listen to it. It really does all these things. It didn't make such a big splash just because it has a good tune. It reached Number 31 in the UK Singles Chart in 1980. It should have been Number 1.It made its mark nevertheless.

 

 

People are now writing PhDs about The Cure and getting taken perfectly seriously so I'd better stop here. I won't encroach on their territory. All I'll say is if you've ever had a dream and felt it was real and it's disturbed you by what it intimates about yourself and life, go listen to A Forest. It describes the uncanny as well as any song I know.

From A Forest to M, another quite masterful and beautiful, strummed gloom-fest pop song. 'You'll fall in love with somebody else again tonight...' Smith is very good at conveying the powerless of us all within the scheme of things and the way we all go along with life's dictates. He's read his Modernists.

'Take a step
You move in time
But it's always back ...
The reasons are clear
Your face is drawn
And ready for the next attack.'

'At night.  I hear the darkness breathe. I sense the quiet despair
Listen to the silence . At night'

 

The album's winding down. At Night which follows is almost generic, so well have the band established their sound by now. It points forward to the more portentous sound of Faith an album which is played out almost in darkness while 17 Seconds is all fading light and all the better for it. It's probably the weakest of the fully developed songs on the record but frankly the standard is not dropping much.

 

'Time slips away. And the light fades away. And everything is quiet now.'

 

And so to the final track 17 Seconds itself . In many ways its three minutes  encapsulates the record itself. A completely clean, assured and identifiable sound, quite distinguished by now from the early influences Wire, Magazine, Buzzcocks, Banshees and the like. They've made suburbia their own. Light fades away on the quiet tree lined avenues and there they are, behind glass, watching the shadows gather, musing on whether any of all this really matters. 

 

As I said earlier, a minor masterpiece. Having had it on repeat play for the last few days I'm happy to stack it midway back on one of my racks for a while and let it sink back into its gloom But it's a record with very much its own statement and mood and I'll come back to it.

 

 From here the band descended into depression and then full on, certifiable mania with Faith and Pornography  Others prefer these. I'd plump for this instead. Partly for nostalgic reasons and partly because I think it stands up better now. A constant reminder for me of when I was seventeen, sitting in my attic room in my parents house, listening to my gradually growing record collection, making my way through Penguin classics, thinking about girls and trying to make head or tail of where I was going and what it was all about. Like countless others. Still not quite there yet.

'Seventeen seconds, a measure of life.'  

 

 

 

23rd September 1967 The Boxtops

 

Started a four week run at Number 1 in the States this day. The seventeen year old Alex Chilton sings. He doesn't seem particularly bothered to be there. A favourite of Madonna's oddly. I have the feeling this may be amongst the shortest ever American Number 1s.

Song of the Day # 248 Phil Philipps

 

A film recommendation. A Most Wanted Man starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his last roles is really very good. Set in Hamburg, post 9/11 it's a murky depiction of the dark and slightly frightening world we all live in now. Hoffman is wonderful. It's directed by Anton Corbjin, who given his history in Rock Music, unsurprisingly selects an excellent soundrack. Including this..

Numbers - 3

 

I'm always a bit curious when people dislike Nick Drake. In a way perhaps its understandable. There's something of the portentous, 'I know more than you', hippie mystic about him and his music. Some of his early imagery and characterisation doesn't stand up. He did well to pare it down to he absolute bare bones for Pink Moon. Giacomo and Jeremy in this song sound frankly irritating. But the guitar, the arrangement and above all the space do it for me. Nobody created quiet space and stillness quite so effectively as Drake. Silence too if that makes sense..

22nd September 1946 King Sunny Ade

 

Born this day.

Song of the Day # 247 The Fall

 

I imagine most people have a detested vegetable from childhood that they still find difficult to stomach even now, merely through association. For me that vegetable is the brussel sprout. And The Fall have always been my brussel sprout of bands. Mark E. Smith's approach always seemed akin for me to being shouted at by the loudest, most aggressive person in the pub. However, as time winds on and I'm obliged to spend less time in the pub I find myself coming round. This is just brilliant. From their first album where other musicians and talents could be heard just as loudly as Smith's. Wonderful drumming, playing, lyric and delivery. Still not keen on brussel sprouts though.

Love in a Car

Doing rude things in cars. A particularly British indie obsession over a decade. Set in motion most forcefully by Morrissey with 'the leather runs smooth in the passenger seat,' 'I just want to be seen in the back of your car', leading to 'take me out tonight.... take me anywhere, I don't care, I don't care...driving in your car, I never, never want to come down', and 'in the darkened underpass, I thought oh god my chance has come at last.'

 

The House of Love took up the theme a couple of years later and seemed to take a more spiritual, less physical approach to the matter.

 

 'Deeper than any sea'

 

Then Suede turned their attention to the theme on their debut album a few more years down the line. It wasn't clear whether the Breakdown of the title applied to the car itself or those inside it.  'Does he only come in a Volvo?' Ooh err! This, unsurprisingly seemed to bring a full stop to this min-genre.

 

21st September 1950 - Bill Murray

 

Bill Murray's at least as Rock and Roll as anything else. It's his birthday. Happy Birthday Bill! From the karaoke scene in Lost in Translation Here's the Roxy Music song which is a special three minutes too.

 

Song of the Day # 246 Immigrant Union

 

The Australian groups keep coming. Most great new bands now seem to come from North Carolina or Australia. It's hard to fathom. Courtney Barnett and her band were with this bunch at one point. They're from Melbourne too. They also boast in their ranks a former guitarist of The Dandy Warhols. This is beautiful in its simplicity. Simple emotions, simple chords. This is for my sister who shares the same name as the song title x!

Album Review # 31 House of Love - House of Love

 

An anecdote. A small club in Hampton on Wick some time in 1987. I'm there with my sister. We live across Bushy Park in Teddington and we've come here to see Primal Scream. Not many people have joined us. Enough to give the feel of a small crowd but the sense of anticipation is hardly feverish.

 

Those here sport the indie look of the time. Frizzy hair, black, hooped, polka-dotted and paisley shirts, skirts and pointy boots. It later becomes a cliché, makes it across the Atlantic and colonises a fair portion of the indie/ college scene there, catered for by countless shops and stalls. At this point it still seems quite authentic, chosen by those who wear it. Hardly Punk, but definitely a scene, and one of the few I flirted with during my lifetime. I still very much love a lot of the records associated with those times. You can read all about it in the recently published book A Scene in Between.

 

 

Amongst the scrum of people around the low stage for the support band are the posse of Creation Records main-players themselves. Label owner Alan Magee, Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie, other members of the band, and their entourage. The Primals are here to play in support of their debut album Sonic Flower Groove which doesn't walk the walk and is not selling. The support are a somewhat less hip outfit than they themselves, clean cut, their haircuts and clothing neat, their playing likewise. Primal Scream meanwhile have swallowed the whole Rock and Roll lexicon and are living the dream inside their heads: Love, The Doors, The Byrds, The Stooges, MC5. However, at this point it is very much just within their own heads. This bunch don't pass muster in their eyes,

 

 

They come to the end of their frankly non-descript set and announce that they'll do one more. The lead singer says, 'This is a song by The Byrds, called 'Feel a Whole Lot Better'. This causes an outbreak of superior, snobby mirth from the Creation contingent behind us. It is clear the support are not cool. The fact that they announce it this way casts them into the abyss. That they choose this well-known track from The Byrds early period rather than some obscurer, more psychedelisied selection from a year or two later probably seals their fate. The Creation inner-circle in these early days were impossibly hipper than thou and unnervingly assured in their own sense of destiny. Yet they still sold no records.

 

 

The House of Love arrived on the label at round about this time and probably occupied a similar space in the minds of the Creation elite as the support band we saw. They lacked the required inner-city urban cool. They lacked the record collections Their reference list was a little too obvious, The Doors, most obviously but also Leonard Cohen who has fingerprints all over half of Guy Chadwick's lyrics without the sense that Chadwick has plumbed the emotional and literary depths that brought forward Cohen's masterpieces. But what Chadwick and The House of Love indisputably had, which no-one else on the label at this point of time had, was the songs. This album their debut, is brimming with them and they still stand up all these years later.

 

 

From the bruising, brilliant guitar of Christine. Chadwick throws lines around like 'chaos and the big sea' and 'the whole world drags us down' and they don't really stick but the band are clearly surfing their wave. That pretty much holds for the length of the record. Five songs each side. Lean, spare and effective. It's all pretty much a suburban view of existential existence with the templates clearly being the debut albums by The Doors and The Velvet Underground plus the obvious writers. They take their name from an Anais Nin novel or a Doors song also named after it  Take your pick. But it's a very British take on all this decadence.

 

The House of Love's secret weapon is Terry Bickers who stands brooding behind Chadwick on the record's excellent sleeve, the bassist and drummer are relegated to the back cover. Bickers is an enormously versatile dark presence (he had something of Keith Richard's swagger, high-praise indeed), probably the best British guitarist at this point in time after Johnny Marr and his playing makes the record a joy to listen to. Hope, Road and Sulphur follow Christine. Faultless pop songs all. One word titles. Man to Child ends the side, Chadwick rifling through his Cohen songbook. Jesus, Mother, Father, God and Love all get a mention. Frankly too Sixth Form to pass muster but the band have build up good credit by this stage and on the second side they ride their wave again.

 

 

First song, Salome is a great Rock and Roll heroine and song title and 'I love the way she cries...' a class opening line. Chadwick is at his best when he keeps it simple and doesn't nourish his inner poet too much. He keeps it very lean here. The song is come and gone within two minutes and is all the better for it. Blistering.

 

'I love the way she cries
Skin is red and muscles stretch
And loose in love, oh happy death
I love the way she cries

I'm walking on the street
In a crowd but not alone
Cool and sharp, I've really grown
I'm walking on the street
Like someone

Peel away your dream
Take a finger, use a tongue
You're not alone, you're not alone
Just blow away those darker dreams

I'm walking on the sea
Salome is dead, the king is free
Oh not a man without greed
I'm sailing on the sea, back to me'

 

 

And so to Love in a Car where the album probably reaches its high watermark . This is assured, clinical song writing and playing of the first rank. The band know exactly what they're doing and come within touching distance of their heroes' work. If House of Love were to get castigated as thin, generic, white indie, (and they're undoubtedly very white, there's not an ounce of funk or black soul on here), I'd put Love in a Car, as first case for the defence. One of their very best songs and as good as anyone in this particular field was producing at this point in time.

 

From this point on the band just need to maintain a certain standard and the record's status is assured. They do so pretty effortlessly. Happy and Fisherman's Tale keep the pot boiling without bringing anything particularly new to the feast. The ingredients are well-established by now. Touch Me polishes things off. It's a well judged, enclosed, cleanly produced,  'Outsiders' Independent Rock album.

 

 

The record was sufficiently good, (though it didn't sell enormously), to start an industry fire around the band. When they followed it up with the one off single Destroy the Heart, (their genius moment), a few months later, it was clear they were on the cusp of breaking big, but more importantly of realising Chadwick's dream of teenage, bookshelf existentialism taking shape in a fiery, melodic, vaguely dangerous English Rock and Roll band.

 

It never happened. They were swallowed up by the machine. They left Creation for Fontana and ate up a huge budget for their second album. Gobbled up on drugs for the most part. They didn't sell enough or make good enough records to justify the excess. For the full, sordid, slightly Spinal Tap-ish story read My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize. Most crucially, Bickers and Chadwick fell out and the former left the band. They were not The House of Love without him. He had provided the spark and heart that made them a genuine prospect. Without him, Chadwick and his poetry were exposed. They were yesterday's papers.

 

This is their best record. I've been spinning it for the last couple of hours while writing this and it still stands up. It evokes the feel of being 17 and having a raft full of conflicting emotions, a shelf of Penguin paperbacks, a stack of records, certain clothes, and looking for a band and a record to soundtrack those intense, yearning, rebellious, angry, in retrospect slightly foolish, but nevertheless real teenage emotions. Those are very pure feelings, which those of us who have experienced them never quite lose regardless of what life does to us with the passing years. The first House of Love record soundtracks all that as well as any other record. Remember them this way.

 

'Steal a car, the highway calls
Stick some pins in your toes
Suck your cheeks
Dance, boy, down the road '