Friday, January 31, 2025

Marianne Faithfull 1946 - 2024

 


It Starts With a Birthstone - Albums For January

 

It Starts With a Birthstone - Songs For January

 

David Lynch's Favourite Songs # 11 Roy Orbison

 





500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 112 Electric Light Orchestra - Time

 


It's ELO innit.




Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,674 The Dandy Warhols - Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia

 


Bohemian Ride. Narcotic ride and some great songs of youthful and probably slightly unnwise abandon. Which let's face it is what youth us unvented for,




1985 Singles # 21 The Loft

 


The Loft were exactly the kind of band I would have goobbled up given half a chance. Literate, guitar dreamers who took their cues from The Velvet Underground, Television and The Byrds and knew their Camus from their Rilke. 

But they were gone before they could realise their clear promise. In the most explosive circumstances, (if Indie bands break ups can really be described as explosive). Onstage at the Hammersmith Palais during a support slot for The Colourfield.

Forty years after they've reformed. Finally recorded their debut album and they're off on a tour. I'll see them in a few weeks time at The Cluny. In the meantime this, their second and final single remains golden. Exemplary.




Song(s) of the Day # 3,990 L.S.Dunes

The last day of January. The sun coming up as my bath runs and I make my way towards my half seven esson with incredible busy medical salespeople and professionals. Always one of my most interesting classes of the week.

I find myself listening to L.S.Dunes new album Violet. On the front cover a skeletal figure stares out from a small wooden boat beset by tempestuous waves. It seems like an apt metaphor for these times.

As for the record. It's not entirely to my liking.L.S.Dunes are a modern band. And they genre hop at will. There are guitar solos that we have not heard since Brian May was in his mid seventies pomp. The band flirt with metal and there are sounds whuch would alarm a mother for the wellbeing of her dearly beloved offspring  if she heard them coming out of their bedroom late on a weeknight.

The singer meanwhile howls at the moon like a gelded calf. I gave this my undivided attention for 15 minutes. But now it's time for my bath. I'll pass on this one. 

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,675 Cake - Fashion Nugget

 


Definitely leftfield and different.




1985 Singles # 22 Prefab Sprout

 


Pow! 'As obsolete as warships in the Baltic !' 'Every mother's son's romantic ! Every mother's son!' This wasn't a hit. Pearl before swine.Never mind. It's # 22 here . In with a bullet. It's the start of a long list of should have been hits.How long have you got !






500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 113 Virginia Astley- From Gardens Where We Feel Secure

 

If you have hlf an hour minutes, listen to this. It's an independent record from 1983 that garnered quite a bit of attention at the time of its release and has continued to do so ever since. A collection of impressions and sounds from a day in the British countryside, it's an honest, courageous and moving expression of the feelings we all share just through being alive and experiencing the sensations of nature and time around us. An object of still but thrilling beauty.




Song(s) of the Day # 3,989 The Gentle Spring

 


The Gentle Spring. 'Let's be 'aving you...' As a slightly paralytic Delia Smith berated the Norwich City crowd at half time on Sky Sports some years back. Precisely Delia. Come on Gentle Spring,  'Let's be 'aving you...' So while waiting for that, and I have to say, as I'm writing it's dark outside and rather cold in here. The Gentle Spring's Looking Back at The World is indeed 'gentle,' unpretenious, and quietly winning product.

The Gentle Spring do what they say they will on the The Gentle Spring tin, This is wistful, sensitive nostalgia from Indie stalwarts. Generic but heartfelt strummed songs. Featuring Michael Hiscock who was a cofounder of Field Mice those much loved Sarah Records dreamers. This is lovely, unpretentious, meaningful product about the passage of time and trying to maintain the 18 year old self.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,676 Johnny Cash - American III : Solitary Man

 


I don't like all of these songs. But I like the way Jonny sings them. Sometimes you need an old testament prophet. He's Ezekiel.




1985 Singles # 23 The Replacements

 


The Replacements were travelling fast and giving little care to their lungs and their livers. Such was their way. They never stood on ceremony. Unapologetic and they made a fine row. Tim came out in 1985. It was frequently raggedbut always engaging.  Kiss them on the bus,



500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 112 The Triffids - Born Sandy Devotional

 



"When we finished Born Sandy Devotional I knew it was the best thing we’d ever done, there was no question about it. The writing was much more autobiographical than anything I’d done before, I felt quite close to the subject matter. I found myself almost following the idea of fidelity as a complete all-consuming faith, to give you some sort of direction or something. And ‘Born Sandy Devotional’? It was the name of a song which didn’t make it onto the record which is about someone called Sandy… I like titles like those, they’re just a law unto themselves and they have a feeling unto themselves. Born Sandy Devotional is the culmination of our efforts trying to capture our more considered lyrical approach with a physical intensity… well not really, but that will have to do." David McComb .

This album is one of the most literary records in my collection and I've got quite a few. Many of them date back to the early to mid-eighties when there seemed to be quite a demand for this kind of thing. A lot of talented people were choosing music at this point as a medium for literary exploration. Morrissey, Robert Forster, Grant McLennan, Michael Stipe, Lloyd Cole, Paddy Macaloon, Nick Cave, Roddy Frame, Mike Scott. And David McComb who stands comparison with the best of them.



He wrote every track on here. Each song could be considered a short story or a synopsis or fragment of a novel. They're also self contained. But they're not exercises in style. They're incredibly deeply felt and realised. Not all of them are in the first person but they are all inhabited. All of life's strongest emotions are heightened on here to almost intensely painful degrees; wonder, pain itself, obsession, madness, grief, hope, love, happiness and loss.

There are times on the record when virtually everything seems to be at stake. This is a difficult trick to pull off. It could easily tip over into cheap melodrama. I was never a huge fan of the records Nick Cave released at around about the same time for example because I thought he made this mistake all the time . I felt he got too close to his songs. McComb and The Triffids knew to keep some distance. The main way I think they managed this is because the accompanying music here is so essentially beautiful and full of the light of the landscape they grew up in that the individual songs and the album as a whole never collapse into maudlin introspection or self pity. They know exactly how to sugar their pill by lacing some intensely tough subject matter with sweetness and grace.



The record cover is an aerial photograph of a beachal coastline in Mandurah, Western Australia where the band hail from. It was taken in 1961. McComb was born the following year. This is not either insignificant or inconsequential as the group and McComb in particular are immersing themselves in their past and their landscape here. His comment above about the autobiographical nature of these songs and his own closeness to their subject matter was really helpful to me in getting a fuller handle on understanding what happens on the record. His statement about the focus on fidelity as an all consuming faith is even more revealing as on closer investigation of the songs and their lyrics it can be identified as the driving obsession of the protagonists on every track on Born Sandy Devotional.



The Triffids had taken a long time to get to this point as a group, releasing countless singles, EPs and a solitary album Treeless Plain released in 1983. And all the time touring relentlessly across the breadth and depth of Australia, learning their craft and developing their vision. In order to make their great leap forward they chose to uproot themselves and move to England in 1984, following in the footsteps of fellow Australian friends and mentors The Saints, The Birthday Party and The Go Betweens. By this point they had become a sturdy, confident set of musicians, the slightly amateurish, ramshackle nature of their early records had broadened into a confident wide screen sound that few of the British bands of the time could live with either on record or live.




For opening song The Seabirds I can't improve on quoting the whole lyric because it shows better than anything else exactly what level The Triffids and McComb would be playing at here:

"No foreign pair of dark sunglasses
will ever shield you from
the light that pierces your eyelids,
the screaming of the gulls
feeding off the bodies of the fish
thrashing up the bay till it was red
turning the sky a cold dark colour
as they circled overhead.

He swam out to the edge of the reef
there were cuts across his skin
saltwater on his eyes and arms,
but he could not feel the sting
there was no one left to hold him back

no one to call out his name
dress him feed him drive him home
say "Little boy it doesn't have to end this way"

He announced their trial separation
and spent the night in a Park Beach Motel bed
a total stranger lying next to him
rain hitting the roof hard over his head
she said "What's the matter now lover boy
has the cat run off with your tongue?
Are you drinking to get maudlin
or drinking to get numb?"

He called out to the seabirds "Take me now,
I'm no longer afraid to die"
but they pretended not to hear him
and just watched him with their hard and bright black eyes
they could pick the eye from any dying thing
that lay within their reach
but they would not touch the solitary figure
lying tossed up on the beach.

So, where were you?
 "
(McComb 1986)

It's about the journey within and how the elemental landscape you find yourself in, (and there can't be a landscape much more elemental and enveloping than the one McComb and The Triffids understood so well)  can turn pitiless, rip you apart and devour you. McComb knew his literature. This reminds me of Camus' The Outsider, Paul and Jane Bowles' writing about Northern Africa (particularly The Sheltering Sky) and what I imagine Malcolm Lowry's  Under the Volcano to be like (haven't read it, should do one day).

The 'little boy it doesn't have to end this way' line is resonant because the second track, Estuary Bed, takes us back to where it started or thereabouts. 'The children are walking back from the beach'. It's about the blessed realm of childhood. How the weeks of a summer spent on the beach on the sand and in the sea can stretch out into an eternal, golden, sensory state. 'Wasting away for hours and hours and hours.' McComb is really strong on the physical sensations of being adolescent.The sun, salt and silt but the song as far as I can understand it is about the inevitable transition from that false eternity and the vain striving afterwards in the narrator's consciousness to recover what's gone forever. 'Come on, climb over your father's back fence. For the very last time take a short cut across his lawn.' Breaking the father's law not for the very last time on this album by any means. McComb studied divinity, literature and journalism and he puts it all to good use here . It's not entirely clear what occurs but we are left to draw our own conclusions  'Silt returns across the passage of flesh...I bear the stain. It won't wash off.' The landscape remains, endures and renews itself. What's human is recovered by the elements. 'What use memory covered in estuary silt?'

(I've done my best to interpret things here but much of it is beyond me. Still. This track is something truly special.Trust me. Great use of vibraphone!)




How often do we listen to our favourite records over a lifetime? Born Sandy Devotional must be among my top twenty most played albums. Possibly top ten. I've had it for almost thirty years. But I've never really heard its third song Chicken Killer before I listened to it in order to write this a few days ago. I've been thinking about it ever since

 I always thought it was one of The Triffids joke songs. They certainly produced a few. McComb was so prolific that he would dash them off and the band would spit them out and they would race on to the next. This strength was eventually their downfall in my opinion as they finally lost quality control and coughed up some real duds which fatally overtipped their final album. But that's another story.

My younger sister, and I would laugh about this track together. 'Here it comes Chicken Killeragain' just as Jill Birt, The Triffids second vocalist and McComb would rip into the chorus together, 'Here he comes the killer again. Here he comes the chicken killer again.' It was slight. And slightly ridiculous. So I thought. I've now discovered it's not!

The problem lies in the lack of  lyric sheet. This album really deserves and would be complemented by one. The words to Chicken Killer are just superb! It's a tale of madness in the Australian outback. Flannery O'Connor or Faulkner would be proud. The protagonist is the bewildered hen slayer of the song's title. He runs through the corn fields where he first courted his dead love, grief stricken, ribs poking through his yellow skin. Blasting the birds on the telephone line, scaring the local children, He's delirious in pain; driven mad by the scalding rural sun and the loss of his love. The locals gather round and try to calm him, indicating the heavens where she is now. But the chicken killer can't hear them. He makes reference to a man on a cross on a hill but knows that he himself is damned. And afterwards, destined to become the stuff of local folklore

'And the children were singing, "Here he comes the killer again
Here he comes the chicken killer again"
My ears were filled with that joyful ringing
My ears were filled with that happy singing'



For Tarrilup Bridge McComb hands the stage over more fully to Jill Burt. She's generally given every fifth or sixth song throughout The Triffids career. It would probably be accurate to say she doesn't have an operatic vocal range and would be more fairly placed in the Mo Tucker school of singing than in Edith Piaf's but this can be really effective in short doses. It provides relief here from McComb's much more intense style. Tarrilup Bridge is a suicide note. The body count is really beginning to mount up by now and I'm not just referring to unfortunate chickens.

"Packed my bag
Left a note on the fridge
And I drove off the end of the Tarrilup Bridge.

Now you read about me in the papers
They say I'm going to be a big star
They're making a movie about my life
And you're going to play the starring part."


It's worth stating again that McComb knows his fiction, particularly American fiction,  and also, I imagine, his cinema. At various points there are echoes of Steinbeck, Hemingway and Fitzgerald in his writing. Here I'm reminded more of Film Noir (something like Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice) and the pulp fiction of Chandler, Cain or Hammett. There's not much more to the lyric than the lines I've just quoted and for the most part the music carries and conveys the atmosphere. It's heavily laden with shuddering sound effects. The song poses as many unanswered questions as an actual suicide. It doesn't particularly go anywhere like his best stuff does. Still, it's a change of pace, which I'd say is what the album requires here.


Perhaps it's just a well we've had a breather because the next two tracks are absolutely the emotional core of the record. And Joseph Conrad and cliche fans will be delighted to know that it's a heart of darkness in every respect. Andrew Mueller, the Australian born music journalist writes very well about this album on his website. He states there that

"There are parts of Australia you could drop a medium-sized European country on without hitting anybody. To drive the roads that lace these empty immensities is to confront an enormity of landscape, and a concomitant insignificance of humanity, difficult to explain to inhabitants of the northern hemisphere."

The Triffids attempt to do so here. Lonely Stretch, the closing track of Side One describes the moment when you know you are more hopelessly and irretrievably lost than you ever imagined it was possible to be. The Triffids have driven off the road into utter darkness without the remotest hope of ever finding their way back.
"Land was so flat, could well have been ocean
No distinguishing feature in any direction"
"without another living thing in sight
Without another living soul in sight."


I've always been at a bit of a loss with this particular song because I don't have the emotional data to understand the wilderness The Triffids are hurtling through here . The only reference point I could make when I was listening to it the other night and trying to understand where it was going was to Ian Curtis. I have to confess that I've never thought of McComb and Curtis as similar writers or singers before but could hear some connection in this song; there's certainly a protracted howl in pitiless darkness here that Joy Division obsessives would recognise. I can only shrug my shoulders and leave it to Mueller again as he  understands better than I ever will the emotional and physical terrain described here :
 
“Lonely Stretch” is a staggering study of white-line fever, exuberantly declaimed by McComb. He is, once again, a man gone mad, gone driving, gone bush, going nowhere: Behind him, The Triffids summon a five-minute opera in several acts, sounding in some respects like The Band, The Velvet Underground and The Birthday Party, but mostly (still!) like nothing else you’ve ever heard. As it builds to a frenetic crescendo, there’s a palpable sense of an accelerator foot pushing to the floor, and hands lifting off the steering wheel. “You could die out here,” roars McComb, “of a broken heart”.

'I took a wrong turn, I took a wrong turn
I hit a lonely stretch
Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham
Guide me back to the bosom of Abraham
So high can't get over it, so low can't get under it,
So wide can't get around it, I took a wrong turn,'




Wide Open Road has been called the Australian Born to Run a few times. I've got some time for Springsteen but this is not on. It does the track, McComb and The Triffids an enormous injustice. This song stands alone. It's one of my very favourites and my favourite in one respect in that it's the song that best describes life to me. Life as an open road is not a particularly difficult idea to understand or identify with or take on as an expression of your existence and it's been used by novelists, painters, poets and musicians and people who are none of those things as an expression of theirs. The Triffids do it best for me.

The sounds of the organ which we hear first always sound to me like dawn breaking. I play it a lot in the morning as a result. Though come to think of it, I play it a lot at midday, in the afternoon, early evening and at night time too. McComb's whispered '2,3,4' set the tapes rolling, the drumbeat starts pulsing and it's not at all fanciful to describe this as life beginning. There. I've done so! It's with the opening lyrics and the responding drum cracks though that the whole thing really kicks off.

                                                 "Well the drums rolled off in my forehead
                                                   and the guns went off in my chest
                                                   Remember carrying the baby for you
                                                   Crying in the wilderness"

From this point on it's got a momentum that it never loses. It's about love. It's about loss. It's about hunting something down. It's about pain of the sort that someone with a background in divinity can best describe. It's about an elemental, burning landscape under a big and empty sun that tells an essential truth that your god will provide you with precious solace when everything else has spun out of control. It's about obsessive, compulsive desire and our restless need for one another to provide meaning, contact and love. It's about the next day starting and then the next after that. The seamless flow of days and weeks and months and years  For me ultimately it's about the redemption provided by the closing line 'and now you can go any place that you want to go.' I've identified with it when I'm overjoyed. I've done so when I'm despondent. And also in despair. I always find it indescribably empowering. It's The Triffids defining song. It has a good claim to be Australia's defining song. It speaks best for itself.



As a postscript it's worth pointing out that this got to Number 26 in the UK Pop Chart in 1985. As far as I know The Triffids weren't granted a Top of the Pops appearance. Meanwhile, it reached Number 64 in Australia.

After these two incredible moments all The Triffids need to do is maintain the pace. To me this is exactly what the second song on this side, Life of Crime, does. It a high quality track in itself exploring further the territory and themes that McComb has laid out previously. It's describes country love gone to the bad and reminds me most of Terrence Mallick's remarkable film Badlands which shows a couple of killers on the road in the Depression era Southern states..As Mueller suggests it veers into Nick Cave territory which is perhaps why it's not such a firm favourite of mine. It's all getting a bit intense for me under the sun. The air out here is pretty thick. I think I'll go inside.



Because of Born Sandy Devotional's incredibly clear sense of time, place and mood it always seems apparent to me where and when each song is set. In the morning, in the middle of the day, in the evening or at night, by the sea, in the fields, in the outback. Personal Things, the following track, seems to be the only song here that takes place indoors. As with allowing Jill Burt to sing Tarrilup Bridge, this provides needed relief for me.



The theme is still intense. The narrator is rooting endlessly through the personal possessions and trinkets of his lost, loved one. Where she is now remains unclear. Has she left him or is she dead? Has he killed her and found himself a new place of residence? I'm not sure if he's even of this world himself anymore. The place where he is seems to be purgatory wherever it is geographically.

Some secrets of love you take to your bed and there's
some that you take to your grave. Well I took mine
to a new address, where I took my rest, at the end
of the day.


This was one of the songs I immediately identified with on hearing the record when I was nineteen . It was easy to digest and like musically. It whispered The Doors at me and as someone who owned all six of that band's studio albums already this made it made it instantly palatable and lovable. I stand by the way I felt then.

Incredibly at this late stage The Triffids have one more straight ace up their sleeve still to play. Another completely show stopping set piece that bears honest comparison in terms of scale with either Lonely Stretch or Wide Open Road and for me pretty much anything written by anybody else too. At least anything I've heard. It's Stolen Property. Fourth song, second side. I'm quite sure this might be many true devotees of this record's favourite moment. It might be my sister's for example. Here, lyrically McComb does something he's never quite done before. More than anywhere else on the album I get the sense that he's directly speaking to the listener from their record player.

 In terms of major influences on his writing I'd suggest Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen perhaps Johnny Cash. Dylan, for example is all over the naming of the album. He's also here in this track in the sustained accusatory condemnation, I assume directed towards a woman (maybe someone who's spurned him), of somebody who sees themselves as a player, as worldly, but who for McComb isn't really engaged with what he sees as the essence of life. Somebody who is not going forward or in fact going anywhere at all. Someone with no place to go. The greatest crime of all. A life unlived. Again, I'm going to have to quote at length to try to fully show what I'm getting at here:

'You just lie around waiting on a signal from heaven
Never had to heal any deep incisions
Darling you are not moving any mountain
You are not seeing any vision
You are not freeing any people from prison
Just an aphorism for every occasion
As if the only thing that ever matters
is your place at the table
You never read the writing on the label
when you drank from the bottle
It said Keep Away From Children'


   For me this is writing of a completely astonishing skill, insight and emotional sensitivity. It takes some inspiration from Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone or Positively Fourth Street and I'd really say that this is the level that McComb is operating at here. The rest of The Triffids keep pace with him with an understated but note-perfect support. It's about our given duty to play a part. To earn our place at a table worth sitting at (clearly not the table the woman is concerned with) and never take it as given.  Never to wait for the final judgement. Because it happens every day. That's Albert Camus, not mine I'm afraid. We don't require a signal from heaven to do these things. It's down to us and it's our mortal responsibility to stay engaged.

Just saying this would be enough but McComb is still not done. The woman is banished  'she can't hurt you now... she don't belong here anymore.. learning the hard way' and the song seems to be winding down. But out of nowhere McComb comes striding back in full preacher's mode declaiming .'Pick yourself up! Hold yourself up to the light!' The idea that even the object of the song's withering contempt and judgement can be reclaimed and redeemed. Words fail me.



It must have been difficult to decide how to close this album. There's been so much intense emotional turmoil, violence and blood-letting already that to try and top it or go to the places where it had already been would have been a mistake. The Triffids are far too smart for that. Tender is the Night is the closing song and it's elegiac, a word you'll find in any good dictionary, and offers the hope that's needed although it's a hope that's hard won and uncertain. Once again McComb gives it to Jill Burt although he duets with her towards its end and here she has something much more complete and fully realised to work with than she had on Tarrilup Bridge. She makes good use of it.
The fact the title is borrowed from the name of a Scott Fitzgerald novel is not an accident at all for me. There's much of the beautiful doomed youth of Fitzgerald's fiction to the story told here.
'Surrounded himself with shiny things
First night tickets, ermine, pearls upon a string
And disappeared in all the pestilence
that sudden pleasure brings

He never asks after her anymore
He made a point of losing her address
And every trinket that she ever touched
he keeps locked away
And just burns up In the furnace of his chest'


This reminds me so much of Tender is the Night the novel and what I took away from it when I read it first for my A levels. It could almost be the characters of the book. Dick Diver and Nicole and possibly Tommy Barban who Nicole eventually leaves Dick for. At the end of the novel Dick ends up giving a hugely public display of making the sign of the cross on a crowded beach on the French Riviera after Nicole has left him, a sign of his impending emotional breakdown. I'm sure this is something McComb would have appreciated fully when he read it which I imagine he did given the use of its title here. It's how people use each other up when they're young, or even not so young, one might discard the other but both carry their love for each other within them forever. Here the female narrator is with someone else in the song, far away from the person she's describing to him. 'I left him. And I can leave you too. Baby let's go out tonight..' But she still carries the memory of the one she loved before. He will always be the first.
 'It's getting dark earlier now.
But where you are it's just getting light.
Where you are it will just be getting light.'


(This is an alternative version of the song to the one that appears on the album)

So that's Born Sandy Devotional. It's inhabited me since I decided to listen to it and write about it on a beautiful, sunny afternoon we had last Saturday. I've acted otherwise as well as I could. I've got up, gone to work, functioned in that respect as well as I was able because I have a certain internal protestant work thing going on. But inside me Born Sandy Devotional has been spinning and my internal mechanisms have been alert to their utmost because I've wanted to do justice to this. Because it matters.
The album didn't sell that much when it was initially released but was almost universally praised. The band signed to Island Records as a result of this acclaim but the records that were released after this didn't match up in any respect. It pains me to say so. There are certain songs I'd point interested parties towards; Bury me Deep in LoveTrick of the Light, Hometown Farewell Kiss, Only One Life, Goodbye Little Boy. Any of these songs could have slotted into Born Sandy Devotional and not been overshadowed and actually improved the album further in some cases. But the band lost momentum and split.


Much of the group sloped off to nine to fives. Fair enough. I do nine to five myself. Less than ten years later though McComb himself was dead. The circumstances of his decline and death were deeply upsetting  and  depressing whichever way you choose to scrutinise them. I don't want to go into it here.  Like Cobain and Curtis he clearly meant it. The Triffids have recently reformed and continue to tour with guest singers but this is something that's beyond my understanding because The Triffids without McComb upfront makes no earthly sense to me. Good as they were as a collective McComb was their guiding rudder and reason for being. They won't and this won't be forgotten!



Song(s) of the Day # 3,988 Brown Dog

 

Brown Dog in the ring. La, la, la, la, la. Hardly in this case. Brown Dog are glummer , more introverted and contradicted than that. A record called I Thought I Was Gonna Dance with a road to nowhere on the picture on the sleeve and songs of melancholy and guarded hope on the record.

I can't tell you much more about the record or the band. I have a location. Berkely, California That wlll do. We're all citizens of the world regardless of how we might like to construct walls .I Thought I Was Gonna Dance doesn't choose to do so. Instead it heads oof on the road. Guitar strumming. Gentle backdrop. Invoherent mumbled lyrical sentiments.

 Another fine album suggested by Darren Jones  and enjoyed by me and forwarded to you on It Starts. There's sadness here. But also pride. Determination. Put that in your pope and smoke it this Wednesday. Thanks Darren. 

* Not on YouTube, So no clips.

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Songs About People # 1,411 Rebecca Latimer Felton

 


Writing this blog on a daily basis is by turns a spur and a hindrance. I'm constantly on the trail of the next but also unable to play records I really like and come across as much as I would like. Benjamin Booker's magnificent, spare  LOWER is a case in point. Here's another song from it, apparently concerned with Rebecca Latimer Felton a campaiger for progressive reform but also it needs stating, a slave owner. 


Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,677 Blondie - Eat To The Beat

 


Eat To The Beat is Blondie on top of the world and boy do they sound like they're enjoying themselves. It has emotional depths that perhaps they hadn't explored before. Listen to Layla. Greater range than prevoiusly, The Hardest Part, Union City Blue, Die Young,.Stay Pretty/Then on to perhaps the band's ultimate peak - Atomic. They're firing on all cylinders. And then some 




500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 113 R.E.M. - Document

 

                                                         'Fire on the hemisphere below...'

I've been listening to this a bot recently. Particularly Finest Worksong which sounds more and more monumental and other worldly every time I hear it. Bruce Springsteen or U2 never did anything like this.It's an Art statement. It shows you how extraordinary R.E.M. could be. Even as their star rose. There are any number of fantastic, magical moments elsewhere. They stuck to their principles and I still find them incredibly inspiring and think of them as 'my band'. 



1985 Singles # 24 The Fall

 


Mark E. Smith was settling into his throne of not particularly benevelont dictatorship by 1985. The Fall singles were charting in the mid Nineties and mum's were knocking on the bedroom doors of surly teenage brats and asking them to turn off John Peel and get their heads down because it was a school day tomorrow. I went for this, a B Side because I prefer it to the flip, Cruiser's Creek which frankly didn't deserve to get into the Eighties of the Pop Charts or attract the attention of Simon Bates or Steve Wright,


 

Song(s) of the Day # 3,987 Geowolf

 


Geowolf''s The Child. An album with a young lady with a dreaming, elsewhere expression lying on a backdrop of party balloons. A record of tunes that woudn't have seemed completely out of place on a David Lynch soundtrackaimed at disaffected teens .

The work of an Australian artist Star Kendrick with a frizzy mop of hair and astyle that seems to place itself at a mindway point between Hope Sandoval and Kylie. This is a curious record that it strikes me would make a good soundtrack for a roadtrip into the outback to sit under the stars and enjoy one of the legendary barbies. Not an unappealing thought if you're sat in a dark Newcastle flat at the end of January waiting for the sun to rise in the heavens of the darkened street outside.  

Utimately this opts for Pop rather than making its wayOutside of Society and lost me slightly, But it made a nice diversion as my bath ran and I made my way towards my 8.30 with Dussledirf Insurance People. 

 

Monday, January 27, 2025

David Lynch's Favourite Songs # 10 Ringo Starr

 





Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,678 Led Zeppelin - In Through The Out Door

 


My brother had a copy of this. I thought and still think about it as older brothe rmusic. When I listen to it, I find it state of the art but rather tired and slighty directionless. I'd find it duffucukt to get through the whole album. An excercise in an enormous hanger. I prefer to go back to their early pomp where they're completely committed and engaged.






500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 116 Scritti Politti - Songs To Remember

 


When this album came out it was talking about things that I was going into. Talking about Gramsci and Walter Benjamin.Or at least pretending to know about them in an attempt to impress others. Doscussing Jacques Derrida while appreciating good Pop Tunes. I was never really earnest enough to invest fully in Green and his cadre. Roddy Frame, The Go Betweens, Lloyd Cole, The Smiths and R.E.M. were my go tos. I was never a real academic or a 'on the barricade's frothing at the mouth tract guy. I liked being Middle Class. But I liked this record and there's certainly lots of wordplay which indicates perhaps that the Green never took it that seriously himself and always knew that the human heart was the thing.  




1985 Singles # 25 New Order

 


New Order prevailed with their gradual transition. From Joy Division to themselves. Some of their product seemed a little faceless. Barney's voice was weak but he turned weakness into a strength, Some of the lyrics. 'Tonight I shoud have stayed at home. Playing with my pleasure zone...' Their sound though was completely uncompromisong,


 

Song(s) of the Day # 3,986 The Lavender Flu

 What d'you mean the Lavender Who? Get with the beat baggy. I've written about these guys on here before. Back in 2018 when the world was young. Before CoVid came along and confused us. Possibly terminally. They seemed cool back them. Like some kind of cross between The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Flamin Lips and Sonic Youth. Brian Jonestown Massacre if they didn't have that irritating, deadbeat front guy.

The Lavender Flu's frontman Chris Gunn seems like a much more amiable type. The songs on latest album Tracing The Sand By the People is insnpired. The parts are great, the whole stipendous. As if Hunter S. Thomspon, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Rick Moody formed a band. After sitting in the Californian desert for a while doing mescaline. Howling at the moon. I know this is all rather far fetched. Or else just awful writing! I'm just trying to give you an idea of what this soinds like. In fact I'm not sure I'm not doing it justice. This is great stuff. 

This has always been what America has been best at, No I don't mean starting or inciting cospiracy theories. Or taking liberties with the English language I mean Rock & Roll the great American invention and its related codes. Genuinely liberated thinking and behaviour. The Lavender Flu point the way forwards. And I don't mean to February. Thanks to Starbuck (Darren Jones) for this latest suggestion. Help yourself at the grog barrel lad. But it might be an idea to steer clear of The Lavender Flu's stash. As good as.The Sand By the People sounds. Their diet seems slightly inadvisable. 

Sunday, January 26, 2025

David Lynch's Favourite Songs # 9 Laura Marling

 





Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,679 Run The Jewels

 


Run the Jewels have a genuine swagger and cool insouciance. You can pretty much choose at random from their body of work and follow the trail.






500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 117 The Replacements - Let It Be

 


The Replacements journey was one of the great if ultimately doomed and slightly sad journeys of the Eighties. Their torch was lcast aside in the gutter of Rock & Roll and picked up by Kurt Cobain and the others in Nirvana for their own brief journey. Even greater and even sadder and leading to a quite uneccessary, tragic and avoidable end.

I love much about The Replacements.Bit I wonder. Did they really need to drink quite so much. Drinking is fun but should it be seen as a religious quest. I'm not sure. There's time to put the bottle away or at least cut down and focus on things that matter. They did a lot of great and less great stuff, Some of it dowrnright sloppy. Let It Be  is generally enough for me. It tells you all you need to know.