June 20th 1942 Brian Wilson

The Heart of Rock & Soul # 937 Alice Cooper

'In 1972, at the height of the critical infatuation with the idea that making stoopid noises can sometimes result in great rock and roll, Lester Bangs wrote a Rolling Stone  review declaring that alice Cooper would someday be regarded as the American Rolling Stones. RS reviews editor Jon Landau cut the line, and when Bangs protested, told the irate critic, 'Lester, someday you'll thank me for this.

In June 1972, Landau received a note from Bangs, who'd gone on to become the enfant terrible of noiz rock criticism at Creem. It read, 'Dear Jon: Two years ago, when I wanted to call Alice Cooper the American Rolling Stones, you wouldn't let me and said that someday I'd thank you. Thank you.'

Song(s) of the Day # 883 Nancy Pants

Nancy Pants, from Montreal do that loud, gently howling, melodic guitar thing that will hopefully make you as happy as they claim to be! 'Sonically they evoke a bunch of awesome dogs playfully tussling on a sandy beach under a palm tree that has caught fire This description comes from the band's own website and I feel I can add very little to it. Their album from 2015, Total Nancy Pants is a blast that sounds like a slightly better adjusted Kirsten Hirsch, appropriately fronting her little sister Tanya Donelly's band Belly.

Dad Rock

It's Father's Day, so here's a potted history of Dad Rock from Pitchfork. For the record my own father goes alternatively for Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash.

100 Mavericks # 58 Kevin Ayers

     
          In the early seventies, in what was left of the British counterculture there was some idea that Kevin Ayers, formerly of Soft Machine but now a solo artist, was going to sweep in from leftfield and become a huge, alternative star. Of course it wasn't to be. Ayers and the leftfield were made for each other.

The Heart of Rock & Soul # 938 Gino Washington

June 19th 1948 Nick Drake

Song of the Day # 882 John Foxx

And the cry went up from the UK playgrounds of the late nineteen seventies, 'UNDERPANTS!!!' Awash with dystopian lyrics which probably tell of too many hours reading Burroughs and Ballard. Foxx was something of a pioneer, on his leaving and replacement with the more conventionally ambitious Midge Ure, Ultravox set sail for the charts, but were never so interesting again.

Vinyl Purchases # 25 The Rolling Stones

                                       
                                   June 18th 2016 Rock Bottom Records, Whitstable £9.00

A family Saturday in Whitstable, Kent and a wander down to the specialist record shop in the high street where I'd chanced upon The Left Banke first record round about this time last year. This time a Stones B Side album released in 1973 caught my eye. With the band during the Brian Jones era on the front turning their backs and on the back brandishing weapons and masks and looking mean.

Many great songs here; Child of the Moon, Surprise Surprise, Stoned and so on. The Stones being surly and dark and menacing and tossing stuff aside with some disdain. Some nice cherry picking of things not deemed quite good enough at the time. Oh and I also was delighted to but a five quid copy of Graham Parker's wonderful Squeezing Out Sparks which I hope to review on here at greater length further down the line.

100 Mavericks # 59 Tim Buckley

                 Of course it's largely about the voice. Buckley had one of the greatest of the Twentieth Century. But it's also about the utterly fearless poetic spirit. Buckley recorded nine albums during his career and they're all markedly different. In some respects he was quite peerless!

The Heart of Rock & Soul # 939 Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes

Written by Steve Van Zandt.

'You think that's just a love song? Must have missed the seventies altogether.'

June 18th 1942 Paul McCartney

Covers - # 72 Fantastic Negrito

And here's another from it. This one dates back to at least the 1870s, but the emotion is a lot older than that!

Song(s) of the Day # 881 Fantastic Negrito

'Let's make a sandwich. Let's make a new baby.The seeds were planted long ago. Let's watch the tree grow.'

The Blues has a particular signature sound associated with it. It's a low, long deep moan that signals the expression of a particular experience that's hundreds if not thousands of years old. Most of all it expresses the idea of people in chains. It's perhaps the polar opposite of the idea of Twee that I've been writing about on here over the last few days. For Brooklyn, New York in 2016, read Oakland, California in 2016.

'That man. He cracked the whip and beat you down...'

That blues moan is all over Fantastic Negrito's debut album The Last Days of Oakland. Just out. The moan starts track after track on here and then goes on to occupy them. It's an expression that we're here in 2016, but is that actually an achievement in itself? America actually has a Black president but we're still not where we ought to be, in fact we may be heading back to a place where we should never even think of going back to. The record is an incredibly cocksure angry and considered statement. At times blues, at times punk and then by turns jazz, hip hop, spiritual, folk and every point in between. Ultimately it's just great music and an incredibly good record and document of the times we live in and the mistakes we continue to make.

'There's a bird at my window. She watches it all...'

It's soaked in spoken samples that tell its story alongside the actual music itself. Slavery, Emancipation, Klu Klux Klan, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Black Panthers. America's great historical shame. Fantastic Negrito, actually Xavier Dphrepaulez, (yes really!), spreads it all thick. This is as much an act of scholarship as one of music expression but you don't need to make your way through a reading list to catch his drift. It's an oft told tale. As I said it's 2016 and Muhammed Ali has just died.

'I've been working three jobs just to pay my bills...'

I'll be playing this a lot over the coming months and will be curious to see if it does grow, like the tree Negrito talks about on its introductory rap. It certainly deserves to. I generally don't do politics on here, at least explicitly, but I suppose I have done on this post. These are trying times, not just in America but where I'm writing from too, (a British Member of Parliament was shot a couple of days ago for seemingly racially motivated reasons). Last Days of Oakland in many ways is the best candidate to soundtrack 2016 I've heard so far this year. Onwards and upwards!

'We travel and we travel, trying to find it. We're just people, lonely people. You and I...'

Patti Smith & Peter Pan

There's another wonderful interview with Patti Smith in today's Guardian. She never gives a bad one, never repeats herself, never grows old. In London to play a concert in Hyde Park with Massive Attack, she talks about wanting to go to Kensington Gardens beforehand, to visit the statue of Peter Pan.

'Have you seen it? Oh, it's so wonderful! He's got a pipe and there are fairies about!I used to go and see it in the 70s. I still do. When I was younger, I wanted to be just like him and never grow up. So whenever I'm in London, I always go say hello to Peter Pan.'

100 Mavericks # 60 Sky Saxon

Born Richard Marsh in Salt Lake City, Sky Saxon led The Seeds one of their very finest of all the mid-sixties American Garage Punk bands. The Seeds distilled everything that was great about that scene down to its most basic and thrilling ingredients. Bored, pissed off, frustrated, spaced out and vaguely paranoid. But most of all young. A simple, but quite timeless sound. Every song on their debut album sounds almost exactly like their hit single and signature tune Pushin' Too Hard. Except for the one posted below.

Marsh changed his name in tribute to Errol Flynn because he felt Sky Saxon had a similarly star-like allure. The Seeds lived the life, took drugs, pumped out singles and albums all drawing from the same template of shaken mania as if there were no tomorrow between '66 and '68 and then were gone. Saxon, joined a religious sect continued to make music under names such as Source, Yodship and YaHoWha 13 the line-ups of which featured the musicians Djin, Octavious and Sunflower Aquarian among others. He reformed and toured with The Seeds late in life.

June 17th 1944 Chris Spedding

The Heart of Rock & Soul # 940 Jessie Hill

'Nobody's ever cut a more joyous version of the New Orleans parade beat, and it's hard to beat a lyric in which the singer vows to drive his lover nuts and backs it up with a series of genuinely demented yowls. There's nothing more to Ooh Poo Pah Doo than that, but then, why would there need to be?'

Song(s) of the Day # 880 Kid Congo & the Monkey Birds

One of the more exciting prospects of the coming week is getting back to Newcastle next week and seeing Kid Congo & the Monkey Birds playing next Wednesday at a small but excellent music venue. Kid Congo is definitely a legend of sorts, having trodden the boards with The Gun Club, The Cramps and The Bad Seeds to name but three. I'll report back from the front line on proceedings in a week but in the meantime here are two selections of typically primordial ooze from Kid & the Bird's latest record La Arana Es La Vida.

Covers - #71 Scarlett Johansson

Yes, of course the fact that you know this is Scarlett Johansson is a considerable part of the appeal of this. Such has always been the way going back to Gainsbourg, Monroe and beyond and so it will always be. Here, Johannson does the femme fatale thing very well indeed.

June 16th 1986 The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead

                     
 Some anniversaries really hit you and this one is hitting me more than most since I realised it hit today about half an hour back. The Queen Is Dead is exactly thirty years old today and I go spinning back to the summer term of my first year at university, my first and only time in court, my first really important relationship, all those incredibly important friendships and experiences you make and have at that point of your life. Oh and The Queen Is Dead an album and band that have utterly mushroomed in significance in the intervening years, (and they both felt extremely important to those in the know at the time). I'll listen through to the whole damned thing now. It's a phenomenal record of light and shade. You get a song that has a fair mixture of both.

Andy Partridge Plans to Join the New York Dolls

Turning into a small XTC day. Here he is talking about the New York Dolls. Morrissey was not alone.

'I was a huge fan of the Dolls. So much so that you probably know that I penned a letter to actually join them.'

No, I don't remember that story.

'Oh, Yeah! I was such  a huge Dolls fan, around '73 or '74 when they first came out that I thought, 'Wow! This is the band I want to be in. And I actually wrote a letter - I never plucked up the guts to post it - and my pseudo-name was 'Lord Andrew English'. You know along with Syl Sylvain and Johnny Thunders and Killer Kane I was going to be Lord Andrew English!'

Instead of which he did this...

XTC - At the Manor

And to follow that up, here's a link to a BBC documentary about the recording of Towers of London for Black Sea in 1980. And here's the song that resulted.

'Every time I go to London. Go on a tubeway, or go across a bridge or something, I never think about what a nice scene or whatever. I always think about the people who put it up in the first place. I love the old Brunel-ly type pictures of people putting a railway together very clean lines, and a big clean stone, teethed in railway lines with the ultimate in technology puffing along it.  I find all that very exciting. But nobody seems to thing about all the people who did it. Imported navvies and nothing short of slightly paid slaves. So I thought I'd write a song with a bit of a dreamy feel to it. It ended up sounding rather sixties more than dreamy but still the sixties you can only remember in dream 'cos they're not here anymore. It's a kind of a dreamy, homage to the people who put it all up song...'

Andy Partridge

100 Mavericks # 61 Andy Partridge

There's a book about Andy Partridge just out at the minute where he discusses his body of work and individual songs that he's written. The writer consistently records his own belief in Partridge's genius. I'm not personally convinced of this, it's such a subjective term anyway, but do agree to Partridge's considerable and very English talent. XTC produced any number of great songs from both Partridge and Colin Moulding to chuck into the pen of those already recorded by The Beatles and The Kinks.

Partridge was once described by Nick Kent as a grown up version of Piggy from Lord of the Flies a book which in Partridge's case Piggy won. His songs speak of his ability to maintain his innocence and write from that perspective. Rock and Roll's 'child man'. Here he is talking about himself in an NME interview from 1980.

'I don't know how to put it without boasting, but I think I'm quite mature and intelligent. At time, I've kept the things I appreciated as a kid in my head. I think a lot of people lose that. And they lose a big part of their personality. I still love toys.'

The Heart of Rock & Soul # 941 Foreigner

June 16th 1965 Bob Dylan

Recorded this day in 1965.

Covers # 70 Morrissey & Siouxsie

And here's the cover.

Song(s) of the Day # 879 Timi Yuro

                                   'Time is like a dream. And now for a time you are mine...'

In 1994 Morrissey got together with one of his heroes, Siouxsie Sioux to record a duet. They chose to do Timi Yuro's Interlude. Naturally, they didn't get along, but they certainly can't be criticised in terms of their taste. Yuro is one of the great go-to artists for the dramatically romantically inclined. Yuro's original recording was for a soundtrack for the 1968 film of the same name, starring Oskar Werner, Barbara Ferris and Donald Sutherland and also featuring John Cleese and Derek Jacobi in minor roles.

Mammal Hands - Floa

I guess this falls under the banner of Jazz if you had to label it. Whatever, it is, its quite remarkable. The second album from a trio of musicians who are also the second set of artists I've posted today who hail from Norwich, following Beth Orton's lead earlier on in the day.

Floa is generally familiar, with touches of the flavour Monk, Mingus and other Jazz greats, but it's also appealingly creative and distinctive too. This is mostly on YouTube and it's on Spotify too. Go get it!

,

I was directed here, as with others of my post by the wonderful Inkwell record shop in York, so thanks to them for the recommendation.

Beth Orton - Kidsticks

And as for that Beth Orton record, it's just great. Harking back to the initial burst of Trailer Park, marrying the inspirations of folk and the clubbing scene, it'll probably only be those of post-thirties generations that will be impelled to dance around their kitchens and living rooms to this but I have no doubt it will happen.

  

I was never really part of the nineties dance culture that fed in to Orton's music like some new Age of Aquarius but I do remember just how good Trailer Park sounded when it came out and how it acted as the soundtrack to much of a year that I spent in Brighton in the winter of 1997 and spring of 1998. Kidsticks has much of the same vim, naturally tempered by twenty years of experience and the occasion of motherhood. It's mature and ingrained in life's inevitable lessons and all the better for that.

I'm listening through to it now as I type and somehow it has the cocksure assurance and momentum by Track Four that you feel sure it's not getting to let you down. It's heartening when an artist comes back a couple of decades down the line with work that revives and renews the spirit of what made them so interesting and refreshing when they first came along while putting down something entirely fresh and new that speaks long and loud for itself at the same time. I'm not going to win hipster badges for endorsing Beth Orton in 2016, but hey, I'm on the wrong side of fifty which is probably too old to be wearing badges of any description or looking for claps on the shoulder for having impeccable, cutting edge taste. Kidsticks is just wonderful and Beth will soundtrack my summer in 2016, just as she did in 1998.

Songs About People # 200 Bobbie Gentry

Bobbie Gentry deserves at least one song dedicated to her. One of the absolute iconic figures. So here's a fine tribute from Beth Orton, (strangely spelling Bobbie's first name wrong, at least below), which lifts the string sound and some of the key changes to Ode to Billie Joe along the way. Beth meanwhile, has her new album Kidsticks, out just now.

100 Mavericks # 62 Robyn Hitchcock

Someone who makes a quite full-on, unabashed claim for inclusion in this particular category and has done throughout his entire career. Whether you find it all rather mannered, (which it irrefutably is), and I have done rather a lot over the years, he gets Peter Buck's vote and ultimately that's good enough for me so he's getting mine here. I'm certainly quite partial to the Soft Boys, who definitely deserve kudos for going utterly against the prevailing grain during their time in addition to their wonderful guitar sound, something Hitchcock never quite recaptured in his solo years. Plus he's sure to make even the most cynical smile at some point along the line. Here's one of the very best songs he's written.

The Heart of Rock & Soul # 942 Elton John

June 15th 1933 Waylon Jennings

Song of the Day # 878 Twin River

File next to Camera Obscura in the dreamy, melodic indie guitar pop  folder. Vancouver's Twin River are highly reminiscent of that band vocally and pretty much in every other department. Still, they know their way round a melody. Here's a song from their forthcoming, second album.

Pop Culture Books # 4 Twee

'What I'm reading now, and it's just great. A historical and cultural investigation into a particular sensibility taking in all the great writers, artists and musicians who have championed a gentler way of doing things. Taking in Walt Disney, Anne Frank, J.D.Salinger, Truman Capote, Jean Seberg, Jonathan Richman, Edwyn Collins, Morrissey, Wes Anderson and so on. Every sensitive icon you could possibly want. Wonderfully written and encyclopedic in its scope, it's sure to act as the source for a lot of the music I'll post here over the coming months.' 

      I first wrote this about Twee just yesterday and a day later I'm through it, partly owing to a long train journey, but partly because it utterly enthralled me until its denouement. On Pop Culture, encompassing mostly music, television, film and fashion as its title suggests, Spitz is quite excellent, both in terms of his choice of key players who have played their part in contributing and shaping the sensibility and in assessing exactly what they added to the construct. The chapters on Richman, Collins, Morrissey, Cobain and Murdoch and the bands they led are original, perceptive and hugely pleasurable for anyone who treasures these people's records. Me for starters!

     From this point on, one hundred pages from its end destination I found my attention began to wander and I even resorted to skipping paragraphs and sometimes pages. Partly because Spitz's main focus moved from music to film, the internet, the technological revolution we've all experienced in the last twenty years and how they inform the Twee phenomenon he was at pains to define. The focus here becomes relentlessly American, where it hasn't been before with Spitz jumping with some authority from New York to the UK over the preceding five decades. Boston also gets a look in with Richman and the Modern Lovers but according to his account Twee remains a predominantly East Coast concern in the States until it spreads nationwide after the millennium, much as punk had spread accross the country from its initial CBGB's base in the eighties.

As for the what goes on in the remainder of the book, with the exception of Wes Anderson, who I do think is, and will continue to be seen as an important figure, I was either unfamiliar with many of the players or cultural products he was discussing or, for example with the films Garden Stone and Juno, I feel that despite their basic enjoyableness, comment on an idea that is being set in stone, put on display like an exhibit behind glass. Something is just not nearly as exciting as it was. A basic process of passivity and consumption is setting in. Because so much of the best stuff in this tradition has been produced already and now it's most of all about collecting, refining, complementing in the minutest detail and most of all revering the canon. Or else, if there is an act of creation going on aping and mirroring what has gone before in ever diminishing circles

    So while Spitz makes a splendid case in defining the idea of Twee, he's on shakier ground when attempting to justify using the term Revolution in relation to it. While I applaud the set of records and related culture that he extols, (it's pretty much me to a large extent, or certainly a sizable proportion of me), he does, and this is not a direct criticism of his book per se, make you yearn for more of the sheer creative, engaged energy that he describes in the first two thirds of the book.

Death # 11 Sylvan Mason

One of a raft of 'death discs' recorded in the early to mid-sixties. This one was banned by the BBC as a result of belonging in that category which probably denied it the chart success it would have achieved and deserved, as it's a great single. Sylvan's only record, but she went on to co-write a host of hits, including Tom Jones' Delilah as well as the theme tune to the 1972 series of Morecombe & Wise.

Songs About People # 199 Lee Scratch Perry

And while we're here... Perry himself should probably be on the maverick countdown too, but of course I'm making that up as I go along so we'll have to see how things turns out!

100 Mavericks # 63 Momus

Quite definitely not for everyone, but in terms of pushing the boat out, Momus is definitely up there. There's more being said and attempted in single songs of his than many manage in entire careers. Still pouring out material three decades on, his website is here and speaks of someone utterly committed to a singular, dark, narcissistic comic vision. When he first appeared in the eighties and put out his first records on Creation he was so far from the script that everybody else was reading from that the reaction was general bemusement. But ridicule is nothing to be scared off. He's stuck, remarkably to his guns. Hats off to him!

The Heart of Rock & Soul # 943 The 5 Royales

June 14th 1961 Boy George

Song of the Day # 877 Tony Perkins

In addition to his acting, Anthony Perkins, (here Tony), also had a singing career. This was an American Top 40 hit for him in 1958 a few months after Nick Noble had had similar success with the original. Elvis kitsched it up on the Blue Hawaii soundtrack, but this is better, particularly as we now know Perkins was shortly off to Bates Motel. Something of a precursor in that respect to The Doors' Moonlight Drive.

Peanuts

Songs Heard on the Radio # 132 Rufus Wainwright

Wonnderful, flowing Wainwright track from 2005's Want.

The Left Banke - Walk Away Renee / Pretty Ballerina

Immersed as I am in this Twee book, I'll use the opportunity to re-post this review from last June of one of the ultimate Twee albums, The Left Banke's first album, a major source of Stuart Murdoch and Belle & Sebastian's founding inspiration.

'This is a vinyl purchaser's story. I'm down south for a family get together this week as my mother has had a celebration for her eightieth birthday. The party for this took place yesterday in Canterbury. A good time was had by all though I don't imagine that you're taking notes. All in all a fairly special experience in the best sense of the word the kind that triggers memory and emotional duct blood-flow in all kinds of ways you never quite expect. Today, a good part of the clan gathered again for lunch and a walk around Whitstable, fifteen minutes drive down the road on the coast where my brother's family who live in Miami have a holiday house.

After lunch, we wandered down the beach. A beautiful, sunlit day. Of course, being the person that I am, which this blog attests to, half my mind was wondering if we were likely to chance upon a record shop as we ambled across pebbles and took ice creams. On the way back we made our way past Whitstable's  impressive selection of second hand and gift shops. The place has gentrified in a good way over the past fifteen years as it's been soaked into the overflow of London and the south east's ever accumulating wealth and reach.

A stone's throw away from home I saw what I'd been looking for. A collector's shop with the right kind of  records on display in the window. Those who might read this, who care about this kind of thing, will know what I mean. Having eventually found the entrance to the place, in a side door, my oldest American nephew Ben, (who is fast-developing his own interest in such things), and I had a look through the well organised racks of records there.

There was plenty of good stuff. Reasonably priced. But nothing that really grabbed me. And then halfway down the second rack I came upon this album. I kind of stopped in my tracks because I'm well enough versed in stuff like this to know when I chance upon something pretty unusual. What appeared to be an original version of the first Left Banke record. The one named after their two best known songs, Pretty Ballerina and Walk Away Renee, both tracks placed not insignificantly on track one of Side 1 and Side 2 respectively as well as sharing the title of the record itself. The one that taught Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian a great deal of what he needed to know when first he decided to embark upon a career in music.

I took it to the record shop owner who was perched behind the counter, to make the basic inquiries. The album had a couple of small stickers on it. 'Original Issue! Plays Fine!'. and '£29.99'. My initial feeling was that if the first statement was correct then the price was by no means unreasonable. The brief conversation we had was enough for me. Like all proper record shop people he was first and foremost a music fan.

He shared my surprise at the fact that he even had the album. This kind of psychedelic wave cultish stuff barely made it to British shores in the late sixties, never mind landing up on a shelf for sale in decent condition almost fifty years later. He mentioned Love, the Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Chocolate Watchband as particular favourites of his. All of this stuff strangely seals a deal. It was clear that a trip to the nearest cash-point was required and proper.

It's difficult to describe the strange sense of anxiety I felt when going to get the money needed, returning to exchange it for the record and how I've been in the couple of hours since before getting round to writing this. This might be something quite peculiar to record buyers although perhaps it's a fluttery sensation that might also be understood by those who amass antiques or classic cars, or mechanical engines, or first edition books .There's a slight twinge of guilt involved but also a realisation that you actually had little choice in the matter. That the object and you were supposed to be together.

Anyway, it's mine, and I should imagine and hope always will be. The album itself is not quite a masterpiece, no matter what anyone tells you, perhaps a minor one and certainly a grower. What makes it most noticeable, is the songwriting of main man Michael Brown, who died just recently, and the unquestionably baroque and crafted arrangement of the songs. Also of course its influence. Most notably Belle & Sebastian, Badly Drawn Boy and a whole generation of sensitive strummers with fringes, from the eighties onwards. It sounds strangely like one of the first indie records now. Time changes albums into something they never were when first released.

Peculiarly also, both the album's best known tracks were almost love letters from Brown to the remarkably named Renee Fladen-Kamm, who at that point was the girlfriend of bassist Tom Finn. She's described on the pages of Wikipedia as a free spirited blond.There's something of this unrequited loneliness, heartbreak and longing in the sound of the record and also a lack of true closeness in the playing of the musicians themselves, (they disbanded shortly after these recordings were made and were replaced by backing musicians) that actually seems to haunt the record itself. It's a 'nearly' record. But at the same time one of the great ones.

Elsewhere, it's the ghost of The Beatles influence that casts as great a shadow as Bach on things that provides the album's most obvious flaws. Things get better the further away it moves from them but occasionally the unmistakable combination of the arrangement of harmonies and the hoarse full-throated howl of Martin Caro on certain tracks gives you the uncanny sensation that Lennon has barged his way through to the mic and McCartney and Harrison have gathered behind him in support.Check out last track Lazy Day, if you don't believe me. 

Still, I'm by know means complaining. Have I said before that it's mine? My precious! It'll undoubtedly be a record I return to and bond with over time and Walk Away Renee, in particular is an exquisite, pocket masterpiece of compressed emotion. Much else here falls not far short of that. The delicacy and sensitivity of the songs, the compact, simplicity of the arrangements and the knowledge that I'm in possession of an original object  of such simple beauty all mean that today was a good day. And not of course just because I bought the record but equally because of the memories, company, scenery and emotions that accompanied my purchase of it. Listening to it over future months and years will no doubt send me spiraling back through time and space to that point. To the weekend of my mother's eightieth birthday party. And no, I don't think I'm being fanciful. This is the way these things actually work!'

Covers # 69 Jimmy Scott

Jimmy Scott does Talking Heads. Quite remarkably!

100 Mavericks # 64 Stuart Murdoch

Starting here, with one of the avatars of Twee. All this stuff is almost formalised to the point of cliche now but it's incredible looking back twenty years or now to see how fully formed Belle & Sebastian were in terms of their vision when they first appeared. Songs and lifestyle options for the awkward and shy who had been temporarily abandoned for a few years when The Smiths split. Here's a passage from Twee which I posted about just below this on the subject of Murdoch.

'Handsome pale and vastly talented, Murdoch is a Gen Twee icon and one of those courageous,  sensitive, perhaps too-smart figures we will chronicle farther along in these pages. In the mid-1990s the Glaswegian dreamer was recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome and had to drop out of school and literally move back into his childhood bedroom. 'When you're down and out what you want is escapism,' Murdoch told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in 2005. 'At the period of time there was a core of groups that I listened to that took me somewhere else. And then I got into certain filmmakers as well. But then there  reached a point where I wanted more escapism and more fantasy, and that's when I started to invent it for myself.'

He more than anyone else in music nailed this perspective and way of looking at life from a permanently introspective, outsider slant. Actually, highly organised and efficient, despite their apparent, wilful amateurism and also highly successful in terms of reaching out to the people they wanted to.  When I went to New York in 2001 it was clear from just walking around the arty/ indie parts of the city that Belle & Sebastian were the band, articulating something that so many young hipsters wanted to buy into in terms of their lifestyle choices. They were a band that people had been waiting for, almost without knowing it. They chimed with their times.  

Murdoch and Belle have charted out a stately and sustained career that belies their definitive weakness of their music. They're actually quite steely and determined. Murdoch distilled all that was great about Love, The Left Banke the quieter Velvet Underground, Orange Juice, Felt and The Smiths and the iconography associated with them all and the band ran with it over countless wonderful albums and singles over the next two decades.  Murdoch was always at the very core of things. The maverick with a Protestant work ethic *. 

*I can't actually verify that Murdoch's a Protestant but his Christian beliefs are fairly well documented.

Twee

What I'm reading now, and it's just great. A historical and cultural investigation into a particular sensibility taking in all the great writers, artists and musicians who have championed a gentler way of doing things. Taking in Walt Disney, Anne Frank, J.D.Salinger, Truman Capote, Jean Seberg, Jonathan Richman, Edwyn Collins, Morrissey, Wes Anderson and so on. Every sensitive icon you could possibly want. Wonderfully written and encyclopedic in its scope, it's sure to act as the source for a lot of the music I'll post here over the coming months. 

The Heart of Rock & Soul # 944 Howard Tate

June 13th 1940 Bobby Freeman