The Lonely Planet Boy by Barney Hoskyns # 3 Nico

 

Music scene bashes and flirtation exercises. Men and women couple and uncouple rather than having conversations. Maybe it's the way it was and is but it's rather callously described.. Coitus is rather sloppy and unsatisfactory for all concerned parties. 

Kip goes back to his parents for Christmas and leaps around his bedroom to The Stooges. There's a little bit more wit and vivacity in this section making the pursuits of the central characters seem like a bit more actual fun rather than just bad faith, There's constant jockeying for position mind between the players on the music scene which sounds rather wearing..Music journalists come across largely as scavengers. Vultures or wild dogs feeding on bands either positively or critically to make a name for themselves. 

Kip bumps into Mina again in a recording studio cutting her new single. A Nico song which is appropriate as she seems like a mini Nico essentially in the way she's portrayed.The party scene that Kip frequents flirts with junkie chic. The pin up boys seem to be Johnny Thunders, Nick Cave and Nick Kent. People talk a lot of drooled nonesense and pose in leather clothing. The kind of thing which maybe has its lure when you're young but is obviously slightly dangerous potentially.

You get Kit's glowing review of Mina's debut album La Ronde. The prose is a marriage of Kent's and Hoskyn's own.It's packed choc a bloc with film, musical and literary reference points. Pretentious perhaps. But everything which made the music press such an education at the time. It makes you hunt things down. Kirkeggard and Rilke get namedropped and it makes you want to read them and develop an opinion. The book is getting into its stride here for me. Delving a bit deeper. Also showing a bit more heart.

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 426 Throwing Muses - Hunkpapa

 

I'm always happy to listen to Throwing Muses. This sounds a bit rambling though and a slight compromise. An attempt to make a slightly more commercial record. It gets quite bogged down at stages.Feels like one to choose songs from for a playlist.

Steely Dan - Their Thirty Greatest Songs # 2 Peg

                                

                                                 'It's your favourite foreign movie.'

Fagen described this as 'major blues.'A downer song turned bright, great and radical... Then listen to those lyrics, 'I've seen your picture. Your name in lights above it / This is your big debut / It's like a dream come true.' It's a big day. But not you suspect for Peg herself.'

One thing I've learned from doing this rundown is how much there is in every single Steely Dan song it seems. They're masters of compressed artistic expression. Here they also have a fabulous tune. I think that's The Dan I'm most prone to. If asked to choose absolute favourites I'd probably plump for this and Rikki. This also reminds me of De La Soul who sampled it famously. I'm always happy to be reminded of De La Soul. 

Mojo Collection - The Ultimate Music Companion # 562 The Verve - Urban Hymns

 

I think this is too long. It's seventy five minutes when I think it should be fifty. It's made for the CD format rather than as vinyl I think and suffers as a result. It could have been more concise and punchy. I listened to it quite a bit when it came out during an unhappy year of my life. I was doing a PGCE that led nowhere. I was unhappy in myself and associate the way I felt with the music that was popular at the time. Urban Hymns, OK Computer and Mezzanine particularly. There was a general cultural malaise and I was going through that myself.

I mean come on. Urban Hymns ?!? There are some truly great songs here but there's a sense of monumental self -importance about everything that Richar Ashcroft does which gets tiresome. Hey look at me everyine. I'm a poet. A deep thinker.  I personally find the whole agenda difficult to take seriously despite some of the incredible poetic peaks achieved here. Sonnet always really stands out in my memory.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 -1,983 Badly Drawn Boy - The Hour of Bewilderbeast

 

Still a fascinating and largely one off record from the cusp of the twenty first century. Simon & Garfunkel meets John Cooper Clarke for a Pub Lunch and good chinwag In Blackburn. Folk Soul.

It is about an hour. Just over an hour. I listened to it in its entirity this morning. It's worth the investment. It starts with what seems like a section of a brass band playing in your living room and doesn't feel like an indulgence at all. It moves on from there to all kinds of places. Light and shade.

Damien Gough allows a lot of space into his songs. I think I thought this was a bit of a curiosity at the time. Not anymore. I think it's rather magnificent. A minor mastpiece I'd say, if labels like this mean anything. Alternatively the 1,983th best album ever made. 

Song(s) of the Day # 3,684 Kid Kapichi

 

'Hastings Finest'. If that's what you're looking for . Let's face it. That place has been far too sleepy since Harold wossiface got one in the eye from the invading Normansback in the day .

Still something is stirring in those parts. At least according to a cursory listen to Kid Kapichi's latest album There Goes The Neighborhood. By my reckoning their third.

It's another slightly dystopian, directionless narrative of the kind that the UK has specialised in of late. 'Cheer up. It could be worse.  Let's drown our sorrows. Whose round is it anyway...IDLES? There are enough of them. And they're loaded...'

The Specials, The Streets, The Arctic Monkeys, Sleaford Mods. Dry Cleaning, IDLES. Yard Act. Now this. It's a bit cheerless and despairing frankly. And the records get slightly more hopeless and directionless. Meet me on the corner at closing time and I'll kick your head in. Mindful. But nevertheless ggression and violence. 

The sound of fear. There are more questions than answers. This record  is treally just cries of alarm. One after another. It would be nice to see Kid Kapichi dig a bit deeper. .Perhaps they will do next time.  But not a bad album.  

The Lonely Planet Boy by Barney Hoskyns # 2 Jacques Brel

 

On the front jacket of The Lonely Planet Boy there's an endorsement from novelist Jonathan Coe. A great favourite of mine. It says 'As good as they come.' 

This is overstating things slightly. Coe's own The Dwarves of Death, which I've reviewed on here recently is far better. It has novelist's guile,and depth, which this lacks.

In this section Kip Wilson finds his love interest. Her name is Mina. She's Nico essentially. If she'd been born Austrian and not German. And born in the late fifties, not the late thirties. The doomed glamour and despair are essentially the same. 

Kip is deeply smitten. Sees her live where she threatens and performs a partial strip onstage. She also does a version during the set of this Brel number. Kip interviews her and writes a rave review. It's all a rather palid young male fantasy. Hoskyns should know better and supply greater depth and critical comment. It's evident how much basic misogyny pervades the music scene during these years.

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 427 Chaka Khan - I Feel For You

 

Well that was delightful. The first time I'd listened to this whole album all the way through. Took me on a sea of bubbly synths and funky instrumental rhythms from my ten o'clock meeting to my half eleven

lesson.It feels like you're swimming in souffle. A much more pleasant sensation than the description might suggest. 

 

Steely Dan - Their Thirty Greatest Songs # 3 Kid Charlemagne

 

The rise and fall of what Becker called 'An Owsley-esque figure, an outlaw acid kid of the 60s.' And in a groove that bubbles like a Bunsen-fired beaker, that rare falsetto flip from Fagen and a slalom guitar solo from Karry Carltin and you've got one for the ages.' Perhaps. I can appreciate this but I don't like it much. This is too muso for my personal tastes. The constant noodly solo-ing did my head in after almost five minutes.

Mojo Collection - The Ultimate Music Companion # 561 Madonna - Ray of Light

 

          'I'm trying to affect people in a quieter way.'

Possibly the last Madonna album I really engaged with. Or I think I tried to at the time. I think I bought the CD. As I don't listen to my CDs anymore its a murky area of my past. But before I started re-listening this morning I could only remember the tite track, the single and its promo video.

Ray of Light sounds very much a product of its time in 2024. It's full of Pre-Millenial preoccupations and studio values. A certain tension and longing for escape. It reminds me somehow of The Beach. The film. But also the novel it was drawn from. People really imagining they're going to find lasting peace from lying on a beach in 'paradise.'.

 Madonna brought in William Orbit to help out here, to give the record some peace and space. As its very much the prouct of the CD age I didn't feel too bad about not making it all the way through and going off for a morning swim. The single still sounds like genuine epiphany though.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 -1,984 Cage The Elephant - Cage The Elephant

 

I don't really know Cage The Elephant. My only encounter with them when I listened to one of their records in a short car ride with my boss years ago from Tynesdue to Jesmond. Listening to this this morning my instant reaction was 'urgh!' I'm not going to be able to listen to this.' The first couple of tracks sounded like members of Fishbone , Spin Doctiirs, Arctic Monkeys and Red Hot Chili Pepers setting off on an impromptu jam. I, naturally fled.

Song(s) of the Day # 3,683 Beans

 'Beans, beans are good for your heart !!!' As the old schoolyard chant used to assert. I'm not even going to open that particular can of worms.I'm sure logical cause and effect chains could probably be cited but right now it seems neither the time nor the place.

So let's move on. To Beans. If in doubt these days, in want of something to listen to, checking out the latest Australian guitar band coming own the Conveyor Belt of Pop is never the worst option.

Beans are a hairy and muscled looking quartet from the Wadarrung Country, around the garage scene of Geelong. They're immediately closer to the King Gizzard tradition than the Courtney one. Theirs is a well oiled roadfit sound.

New album Boots N Cats is a fascinating proposition. A series ofPsychedelic Funk  work outs that reminded me at various points of The Meters, Can, Funkadelic, The James Brown Band, Witch and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. 

That's an eclectic and challenging set of reference points. But Beans make it work. Remarkably. The lyrical preoccupations are consistently engrossing too. Beans create their own work from their record collections, endeavour, creativity and the Proggy jams this inspores.. An invigorating start to the day,

The Lonely Planet Boy by Barney Hoskyns # 1 Country Joe & The Fish

 

'Kip Wilson came comparitively late to Pop.

Friends had already been into Bowie and Bolan for a year when he attached himself to the little gaggle of Glam Rockers at his prep school.But it was only with the move to Dunstanwood College that he began to live for records,posters, facts about bands.'

I've always liked  Barney Hoskyns snd his writing. One of my strongest music memories is reading his interview and article on The Smiths in the NME on Richmond Green in 1984. Hoskyns was so fired with enthusiasm for the band and Morrissey in particular that he mentioned Nietszche, Barthes and Jean Genet as reference points for his ardour. It all seemed to make sense somehow.  We were all in the process of constructing ourselves.

It's why the music press was such a wonderful thing to cut your teeth to and educate yourself from in the early Eighties. It was pseudy and gauche in some ways. But those were the same qualities which made it so essential at one and the same time. We're all only seventeen once. 1980 - 1984 was a wonderful time to experience youth and for me music and the music press was at the heart of the journey.

Hoskyns came of age as an NME staffer during these years. A public school boy like more of these journalists than you would realise, he's had a notable career since and written many great books down the years, several of which line my bookshelves. Americana is generally his chosen subject matter. Tom Waits, Neil Young, The Band, Dylan.

I imagine The Lonely Planet Boy, his Rock & Roll novel which came out in 1995, is probably not the thing he's proudest of. It's a slim book and not a particularly good one. It's clichéd in the way much of Hoskyn's evident hero Nick Kent's writing is hackneyed when removed from its natural habitat, a Seventies issue of the NME. It reads like a rushed job. Punched out from the corner table of a smoke fugged office full of journalists late one afternoon in the NME office  with the deadline looming. It needs an editor and characters with genuine psychology and soul. Still, I love this stuff. It's a fun, trashy read.

The characters are the kind of slightly desperate types who gravitate towards the inner city in search of meaning and personal fulfilment. If a  a band is not going to materialise to save you from a life of 9 to 5 perhaps you can make it as a music journalist. The way women are written about is pretty shabby really. They are of objects of shag lust and little more.

We meet Kip Wilson, .The Lonely Planet Boy at Dunstinwood College in page 1. He's a fairly transparent younger version of Hoskyns himself. The first few pages are a fevered rush through his record taste as it develops throughout the decade. Starting off with West Coast Rock. Moby Grape and Country Joe & the Fish. As the decade proceeds Punk intervenes and he moves on to Ramones and Television. By page 25 he's making his way in the capital in journalism and is desperately in need of love interest. 

Steely Dan - Their Thirty Greatest Songs # 4 Do It Again

 

Steely Dan never ever sounded quite so much like a band as they do here. Album One Side One. They sound more like The Eagles, Doobie Brothers Neil Young & Crazy Horse, even The Doors than they ever do again. At least that's how I always hear this. It sounds absolutely fantastic coming out of a pub jukebox on a sunny afternoon, 

Mojo Collection - The Ultimate Music Companion # 562 Air - Moon Safari

 

I listened to this on my TV set as I rose this morning. Hadn't heard it from years. It's still a complete landmark record in every way. I bought it at the time because Mojo told me to. This is typical of my consuming behaviour pretty much since I was sixteen. It's not a bad way to be. I've got a decent record collection out of it. 

I like this more than I did at the time. I think I unerstand where it comes from better than I did when it came out . Like all the best French Pop records it's first of all very French. There's nothing quite like Gallic Cool. Sexy Boy! 

Song(s) of the Day # 3,683 C Turtle

 

Sometimes you need to listen to a record at the right time of day and in the right mood to fully appreciate, process and enjoy it. Otherwise you will have to press the eject button. Either for its or your own sake.

I experienced this emotion and feeling with London quartet  C Turtle's latest Expensive Thrills this week. It was just too unapologetically brash and jarring. Too reminiscent of spending a long alcoholic evening in a Camden basement venue in the early Nineties.

This is a band that are likely to remind you of erm.... My Bloody Valentine to hazard a guess. They are also likely to remind you of any of the waves of Indie that came in their wake but weren't nearly as good as MBV despite their individual merits.

Not an essential record. But a meandering curious one you might care to cup an ear to. Thanks once more to Darren Jones for directing me to the waters where the Turtle could be found and appreciated in its natural habitat. We chose not to fish it out and despatch it to the Captain's Table. C. Turtle swam off into clear waters, Sometimes this seems the right thing to do.

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 428 Thompson Twins - Into The Gap

 

It's difficult to make a case for Thompson Twins. They started out as an anarchist collective that invited audience members to invade the stage and wallop percussive instruments to their hearts content with them when they were performing. 

I could go with that but in instead they slimmed down in 1982 and took a completely different route. They became a brightly coloured Pop trio instead that punched out barmy but essentially trite and meaningless Pop singles which proceeed to rule daytime radio in the mid Eighties.

Hey we should all make time for meaningless Pop. We can't all listen to Throbbing Gristle night and day. But that doesn't make this any easier to put up with now. I tried listening to Into The Gap this morning . I almost gave up the ghost halfway through the opening track. And that was Doctor! Doctor! One of the three huge hit singles on the record. Perhaps someone could demonstrate to me exactly how you are supposed to damce to this. Without a hint of irony. 

None of  Into The Gap makes any rationale sense to me. It didn't really at the time. I just wished they'd continued trying to be the Sheffield equivalent of Talking Heads rather than a children's circus act. Quick Step & Side Kick had its moments. This doesn't really. The Greatest Hits is the best bet probably. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 -1,985 Joe Jackson - Look Sharp!

 

Very New Wave. You can practically hear the thin ties and  Burton suits and picture the jerky performances. This was everywhere in 1979. Jackson went somewhere else entirely after this. As with most of his stuff it's slightly variable. This is of its time. Not distinguished from the pack. Costello, Parker, Partridge. Small town awkwardness. Nice shoes mind.

Alternatives To Valium - Alastair McKay - # 11 Rod Stewart

 

I'm coming to the end of this so I'll stop here. It isn't a narrative of Alaistair's life anymore, just a series of excellent freelance interviews he made down the years so I'm not selling Alternatives To Valium short by taking my leave today.. 

Rod Stewart is an interesting one in that he's always been around, but I've never really ever thought about him much. There's a bloke in what I still call my local in Newcastle  but don't actually go to much now because I don't really drink alcohol much anymore.

Anyhow there's a guy who drinks there. Usually with his close circle on Sunday nights. I think of him as 'Rod Stewart' because he always puts a long string of Rod classics on the jukebox at some point on the evening and is always flying off to places, Las Vegas usually, to see the man in concert.

I was a child and became a teenager in Richmond Upon Thames. It was and is still a great place to be. One of the urban legends about Richmond is that Rod Stewart was discovered there. Singing drunkenly on a  Richmond Station platform early one morning. This episode is detailed here. Apparently it's true. The song if you're interested was Howlin' Wolf's Smokestack Lightning.

Rod comes across in the chapter here as good company first and foremost. Someone who loves football but never arrives before the kick off and leaves before the end. He never worries about anything. Well he's got enough money not to have to. He's a singer with a rare ability to inhabit songs. He doesn't see the need for a Faces reunion, reasoning that there are plenty of good bands. He reminds Alastair of George Best. When he tells him this, Rod replies, 'He's probably shagged some of the same women if we were to compare notes.' We'll start a new book tomorrow. I'll decide on the book later today.

Steely Dan - Their Thirty Greatest Songs # 5 Rikki Don't Lose That Number

 

When it comes to Steely Dan songs that people know, this comes pretty close to the top of the list. It has a refrain that sounds like an advertising jingle. I imagine it probably has been one.

Like a surprising amount of Steely Dan  songs it's about sexual desire. Becker and Fagen were a lot hornier than I ever realised before I started this. 

This one was about an unrequited Fagen  crush on Rikki Ducornet, wife of his Bard College Professor. The lyrics are poignant if you listen to them closely which I haven't ever really done before this morning. Pop songs are like that. The tune is one to die for. 

Mojo Collection - The Ultimate Music Companion # 561 Stina Nordemstram - People Are Strange

 

I remember liking the idea of Stina Nordemstram andher records when they came out though I never actually heard or bought them. She was the kind of artist I was naturally prone to. An elfin Scandinavian who idn't want to be contained. 'I want to be invisible and private.' she said at one point. I like the contradiction of musicians like this.

People Are Strange came out in 1998 and is a strange of disemboied covers of very well known songs which sound like you've come across a strange girl singing to herself in a bandstand in the park. Accompanied by a friend playing minimal piano parts on a badly tuned piano.

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 429 Beastie Boys - Licensed To Ill

 

I've come to enjoy much about The Beastie Boys but immediately I was certainly not taken. I didn't care for the shouting and banging what sounded like pots and pans around. There is a lot of shouting banging what sound like pots and pans around on Licensed To Ill.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 -1,986 The Alan Parsons Project - The Turn Of A Friendly Card

 

I tend to leave records like this to the tender care of my good friend Chris Barron who I know appreciates these things more than I ever can. I'm sure he will give it a very good home.

Song(s) of the Day # 3,682 Ancient History

 

One of the great thrills of writing a blog like mine is coming upon records like this. Ones which will never so much as get a mention from Mojo, Uncut or The Guardian but strike me as every bit as special as the ones they cover. More often, because of what they come to mean to me.

This morning a Pittsburgh based musician named Don Ducote, who joins the dots between Lo-Fi and Experimental Indie practice on his magical latest record Dollar Consolation Prize.

A record that made me think of Beirut, Sufjan, Mercury Rev, Joanna Newsom, Dark Tea, The Shins and all those guys at different moments of its spin. Outsiders and dreamers, toiling away on seams of thought through  guitars and more unworldly instruments in upstairs bedrooms and reaching for the stars they see twinkling in the night time sky as they stare into the night from behind their net curtains.

Not a record with memorable tunes exactly but certainly one which casts a spell that traces its roots back to The Fugs, The Merry Pranksters,  Cassidy, Ginsburg and Kerouac and beyond.

I loved Dollar Consolation Prize almost immediately. It makes its own rules and drifts off from there into the starry night guided by the windpower of its dreams. An enchanting record and journey. 

  

Alternatives To Valium - Alastair McKay - # 10 Hank Williams

 

Alastair goes dungaree shopping with Tilde Swinton in Aberdeen while she's playing a part in John Byrne's Tutti Frutti. And gets a highly illuminating interview out of the process.

Swinton is very self-consciously an artist. Everything she says is an exploration and an attempt to discuss the journey of her life and its expression through her work. This offers plenty of scope for her to be dismissed as a self-absorbed luvvie by those that won't take this kind of behaviour seriously. But he does allow her to speak. And her ideas and art are always interesting. Ince their chat is done she gets herself some nice dungarees.  

Steely Dan - Their Thirty Greatest Songs # 6 Deacon Blues

 

'Encapsulates all that Steely Dan excelled at, spotless and gorgeous playing rich in the romance of Jazz, and a lyric narrated by a character that is, sad to say something of a loser.'

Mojo Collection - The Ultimate Music Companion # 560 Rakim - The 18th Letter

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 430 Felt - Me And A Monkey on the Moon

 

Felt number among the greatest underachievers of the Eighties. Frankly, it was a long list and another book I hope someone will get round to writing. I think it's interesting subject matter.

Felt were the masters of self mythology, again in a decade when any number of bands mythologised the fact that they were under apreciated and their chart positions didn't match up to what they saw as their their value.

This is Fekt's farewell statement after ten years, ten albums, ten singles. The record came out in 1989 and got as much attention and sold as many records as pretty much all of their albums. That is, not much. It's a sweet, melodic and elgaic record.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 -1,987 Metric - Fantasies

 

A slightly faceless record from Toronto band that uprooted and made their way to New York to connect with what was going on in Brooklyn. 

Song(s) of the Day # 3,681 Alison Cotton

 

You don't always wake every morning hungry to embrace Pop Tunes, Sometimes you're in the mood for something slightly more sombre to greet the sun as it it rises in the heavens outside your windows.

If that's your wish, I'd direct you towards Alison Cotton's latest album Englechen. It's one SOMBRE record, let's put it that way. Portentious is another adjective which comes to mind. One to take you back to the late Thirties perhaps. If that's where you wish to go. Forty minutes to reflect. Before war and calamity break out. On all sides. Perfect for times when all the world is talking about more wars breaking out and plenty are well underway.

Essentially a chamber piece with bonus Greek Chorus. The kind of record embraced by the likes of The Quietus, Stewart Lee and misery guts of your acquaintance.

 I quite enjoyed it myself. But then I'm prone to wrinkling my brow, stroking my chin and thinking profound thoughts myself of a morning. This makes excellent company for this kind of behaviour. Embrace your inner intellectual. 

Alternatives To Valium - Alastair McKay - # 9 Iggy Pop

                                         

                                          'The guy who puts Dostoevsky in Louie Louie...'

I ran a bath just now. When it was drawn I got in and read most of the chapter devoted to Iggy Pop within this while thinking about whether I wanted to go to church or not. Towards the end of the chapter the woman downstairs started shouting at the man downstairs. Not wishing to eavesdrop I got out of the bath and finished the chapter at my desk. I had already decided I would go to church. The alternative seemed to be to go a bar.

Alasitair McKay is an excellent writer. His writing appears to have no structure but I suspect it has lots. This is the most difficult kind of journalistic writing. The best thing about him is  his generosity. He gives his subjects a lot of space and tries to represent their ideas as truly as he can. And through their ideas them. In this second section of the book he only writes about himself as a chanel.

If you have to read seventeen pages about Iggy Pop you could do worse than read these. Iggy and the state of his soul doesn't seem to have changed much since he was seventeen. That's greatly to his credit. He was alreay grown up by the time he was seventeen. He's still struggling just as much as he ever was with how to engage with society. The most difficult thing of all. He's devoid of self pity. The definition of bravery. The definition of an artist. He also does jokes.

Steely Dan - Their Thirty Greatest Songs # 7 Aja

 

I saw that this rundown's # 7 was eight minutes long. So I tipped out the eemainder of my cup of tea down the sinkand brewed myself a fresh cup. Carried it back to my desk so I could appreciate it in full at my desk with the volume pitched high and my headphones on. 

'Their impeccably produced Jazz Rock zenith,' according to Mojo. It's certainly impeccably produced. Possibly a precednt for The Nightfly, It;s wistful. I always like a bit of wistful. 'Music to luxuriate in over the long distance.' Sometimes it's better to lift someone else's words if they choose them better than you coudl. Not my favourite Steely Dan. I prefer their tunes. This reminds me of the kind of Jazz I get a bit impatient with. Because it doesn't seem to go anywhere. But it's very well done.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 -1,988 Michael Jackson - HIStory - Past, Present & Future Book 1

 

I wouldn't mind listening to a couple of Michael Jackson tunes this morning. Off The Wall and Billie Jean come to mind. But I couldn't bear to have to endure the whole descent. Into trauma, abuse and navel gazing, So on secon thoughts I didn't go there. Looking down the tracklisting now I'm glad I didn't. Off The Wall isn't on it.. 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 431 The Damned - Strawberries

 

I seem to remember I almost bought this at the time. I think I read a good review and was coming alive to the fact that I was a late developer and perhaps needed to make up for lost time..

Listening to it now I'm glad I didn't, even though it's got its moments. The Damned never made their minds up exactly what kind of band they wanted to be. A Punk, One, a Psychedelic One, a Goth One a Metal One. Or none of these things. They ended up none of them most of the time and often an unearthly mess. Best sampled on singles or stand out album tracks.I'd say The Stranglers are a more reliable option.

 

Mojo Collection - The Ultimate Music Companion # 559 Alabama 3 - Exile On Coldharbor Lane

 

Song(s) of the Day # 3,680 Oldfield Youth Club

 

I do love bands that start their albums with anthems about themselves. Intended to be sung on football terraces. I also love albums with self written reviews on stickers attached to record sleeves. Written by people like you  or record company pluggers, also a bit like you, that wish to draw you into their universes. Hoping to change you. Forever. Or at least until next Thursday. 

A couple of weeks back I was browsing through the racks. In the Beatbox Record Shop which lies directly across the road from my flat in Central Newcastle. A record took my fancy. Largely because of the feverish, faintly rabid review of it on the sticker attache to its sleeve.. The Hanworth Are Coming, the debut album by Oldworth Youth Club. 

The Go Betweens. Vic Godard's Subway Sect were mentioned as fellow travellers. I didn't really need to read the rest. I knew I'd enjoy the record without bothering to do so. I was their natural constituent.

Now I'm listening to the record on a Friday morning in my parents house in Canterbury and writing about it for you. It's a very English record despite its nods to McLennan, Forster, Morrison and Vickers. Particularly Forster at his most arch I'd say. But the record itself is more English than Australian. It has that essentially English sense of underachievement to it.

For this is a record which comes out aiming itself first and foremost at people who stiill haven't quite recovered from the first time they heard Another Girl, Another Planet. Critics and the type of people who attend Indie gigs in the damp upstairs rooms of small pubs. An album which clearly has no intention of scaling the upper reaches of national charts. That would be undignified. Being Number One in its own head in its own chart will clearly always be more than enough.

Oldfield Youth Club I imagine would be more than happy if Marc Riley played their songs a few times on his evening shows. If he invited them in to record a session they would probably have kittens. What more could they want? Luke Haines turning up unexpectantly at one of their gigs possibly. Nodding appreciatively in his shades at the lip of the stage in his shades.

Oldfield Youth Club are the kind of people you know have record collections and bookshelves like yours. Lined with Kinks albums and well thumbed Penguin Classics. Made by people who would be wonderful company to drain a couple of pints with at a downtown microbrewery surrounded by people like you. Sometimes this is enough. Oh btw I love the record. For its organ sound. For its backing vocals. And the way it speaks to the likes of me about my life and tastes. Lifestyle choices.

Songs About People # 1,382 Shane Warne

 

Back to Lord Esme. I'll just repeat myself. The best song about a recently departed spin legend you'll hear this year.

Alternatives To Valium - Alastair McKay - # 8 Nirvana

 

A short but wonderful chapter where Alastair meets and interviews Cobain and Novolesic while Nirvana are playing support to Tad in Newcastle shortly before Nirvana break big and have such an impact so immediately.  A number of things become clear. What a great writer McKay is to get this all down. How smart both Cobain and Novolesic are. How Kurt is in genuine pain. Of course we now know it will kill him. That his talent and his sensitivity and pain are always going to.

How genuinely revolutionary Smells Like Teen Spirit is. How it will change everything and nothing like all the best music. How genuinely sad the Kurt story is. How he is still missed. 

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 432 Van Halen - Women & Children First

 

I have my blindspots. Irrational prejudices and sticking points. Heavy Metal for starters. What is commonly called Heavy Metal.I like Led Zep, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath as well as the next man. Would anyone really wish to make a case that any of these are Heavy Metal, Thin Lizzy certainly.Quo occasionally. All have their moments and memories. 

Not so for me, Dio, AC/DC. Tygers of Pantang, Iron Maiden, Saxon, Def Leppard. Sorry but no thanks. And you can add Van Halen for that matter. Or certainly not what I've heard or seen of those guys. They just look the kind of jocks who would have made the walk down those locker lined corridors you always see in High School movies seem like a true rites of passage exercise each and every time. Running the gauntlet. And what for. So a bunch of weak and cowardly people can bond? Sorry Van Halen fans.

I always found those scenes in those films where the sensitive guys got picked on quite chilling frankly. For the likes of me who always felt they might run the risk of being bullied and possibly pummelled if they caught the wrong guys eye at the wrong moment. I'm not prepared to let it go quite yet. I'm not willing to forgive and forget the O'Bannions. I've met them in the workplace since.

Perhaps I'm holding a grudge too stubbornly but I grew up during an era where you chose your sides instinctively at fifteen. Plus I listened to this record yesterday. Or as much as I could stomach. Never liked the look of David Lee Roth and still don't really. And never liked the sound of Eddie Van's guitar. No matter how highly he's rated. 

Steely Dan - Their Thirty Greatest Songs # 8 My Old School

 

Tune. We all maintain a thing about our old school. Fagen and Becker first met at Bard College, a bohemian school in upstate New York. In 1968 the local fuzz busted dormitories of long-haired students for marijuana possession, including F&B.'

Mojo Collection - The Ultimate Music Companion # 558 Bob Dylan - Time Out Of Mind

 

I still generally listen to new Dylan music. And usually rate it. Remarkably for an artist of his venerable age he's not quite done even now I'd say. He generally has and what's more deserves the respect accorded back in the day for Old Testament prophets who appear suddenly from the desert with something new to say after years away.

Time Out Of Mind is one of the more highly rated albums he's put out since his sixties and seventies heyday. It still takes some endurance levels for a non obsessive devotee like me to listen to start to finish. I didn't make itjust now I confess. I listened to a few tracks, felt 'It's alright I s'ppose.'. Wishing I were listening to Blonde on Blonde, Desire or Blood On The Tracks for the most part though. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 -1,989 ABBA - The Album

 

I was raised in a household with very few records. When ABBA invaded Europe from 1973 onwards with their musical equivalent of Total Football my parents responded by buying most of their albums. Starting I suspect with this one. They were played on repeat in our house for years on our primitive Fidelity sound system. If I hear some songs they can still make me cry.

So they were my formative musical education in many ways. You could have many worse. This is a wonderful, wonderful record. Tell me otherwise. They ruled the charts for years and with good reason.

Song(s) of the Day # 3,679 Lord Esme

 

Welcome to the World of Fragile Indie. Where gamine girls with wondrous, flowing hair and wardrobes full of floral dresses, dance to Felt tunes with blokes who dream most nights of being in the Byrds bashing a tambourine like Gene Clark and singing heavenly harmonies. That's if their haircuts are anything to go by. 

A world where everybody is polite all the time and people let you through to the front at gigs when the band starts to play. One where every Fourteen Iced Bears release makes the Top Thirty and gets played all day on Daytime Radio.

WAKE UP INDIE LOSERS! YOU'RE DREAMING YOU BLOODLESS WASTRELS! But never mind. You might like this. It's Lord Esme, Sydney, Australia's latest Indie sensation. Their debut album, the thrillingly entitled, A Nice Sit Down is just out and it's Indiepop Heaven in a glass! 

The sleeve has a hearty looking lady with wavy hair and wearing a lovely frock. She surveys her pint and regards the viewer at one and the same time, with studied indifference through psychedelic shades. Promising. 

The record itself? It's ripper peeps ! Setting off with Shane Warne. The best song about a recently departed spin legend you'll hear this year and proceeding winningly from there. Lord Esme is all about having a gentle good time with your besties and never showing more urgency than is absolutely necessary.

Male and female players harmonise winningly and a wonderful time is had by one and all. Melbourne clearly doesn't have a complete monopoly on alternative guitar fun.

The Hanging Stars - On a Golden Shore

 

The Hanging Stars. A bunch of relaxed guitar strummers with a great name. Easy going Cosmic Cowboys you get the feeling Alan MacGee might be prone to and get slightly dewy eyed if he caught them by chance playing in his local on a Friday night. Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. Big Star and Gram.

I almost saw them playing in the Brandling Arms in Gosforth a few years back. Pretty much a local of mine where I live in Newcastle. A short bus ride from my front door anyhow. But the gig came just as the point that the curtain was coming down for Lockdown and the gig was called off at the last minute just as it was being decided that human beings could not congregate safely together for a while.

The Hanging Stars soldiered on. Kept gigging and putting out records.  On a Golden Shore is the latest and it joins the dots in the Rock & Roll Colouring Book. From Roger and David to Gram to Alex and Chris to Teenage Fanclub. It's all impeccably written, played and wonderfully mellow.

This is another set of songs that say Take It Easy whether The Dude likes it or not. The steel pedal is used, but judiciously It's polite and melodic, doesn't outstay its welcome and the band stays behind to clear away their bottles and help polish the surfaces before closing time. My kind of record and people frankly,. 

Alternatives To Valium - Alastair McKay - # 8 The Pogues

 

After an earnest chapter where Paul Weller, Mick Talbot and Billy Bragg furrow their brows and consider the best way for us all to get to Socialism as fast as we can, we return to some kind of Pop normality. With Shane McGowan at his most argumentative. He is wearing a badge which states, ' You piss me off, you fucking cunt...' The discussion which ensues lives up to the badge.'

Steely Dan - Their Thirty Greatest Songs # 9 Any Major Dude Will Tell You

 

'Like Woody Allen and Neil Simon, Becker and Fagen use the 70s comic trope of the New Yorker transplanted in Los Angees  uncomfortably awah in sunshine and alfafa sprouts.'

500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 433 Motorhead - Ace Of Spades

 

I bought this. A mangy, worn second hand copy. I've barely played it and if so probably just played the title track a couple of times. I don't do heavy. I'm sensitive and not ashamed of the fact.

Mojo Collection - The Ultimate Music Companion # 557 Cornershop - When I Was Born For The Seventh Time

 

'There's dancing. Behind the movie scenes...'

An album I bought and very much loved at the time. On CD of course. I saw the band shortly afterwards. Playing at the Brixton Academy on a splendid Indie bill with my sister. Playing with Teenage Fanclub. Gorky's Zygitic Mynci and Warm Jets. I'm glad I was there.

Listening again this morning  was a proper treat. My idea of a BritPop album. Eclectic. Of its time. With an acute sense of the past but living in the here and now. Cornershop have always been intent on that.

There's so much here. It's like a stall of household knick knacks on proud display on a Sunday morning car boot car sale. In a field in the middle of nowhere. Allen Ginsberg, C&W, Bollywood, Beatles. And much much more besides. 'Mine's on the 45 ...'

 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 -1,990 Modest Mouse - Building Nothing Out Of Something

Pretty much what you would expect to find in the lower positions on the countdown of the Best 2,000 albums ever made. A band called Modest Mouse of all things  

that make Pavement seem almost conventional. An opening song called Never Ending Math Equation.

Let's face it these gutys are all American Geeks. The kind of people that would never fit in anywhere. Save perhaps for an American Indie Guitar band. Or else a Dungeons & Dragons Club for going nowhere teens.

This is not even a conventional studio album. But a collection of B Sides and such like. The Modern Obscurantism writ large.

 

Song(s) of the Day # 3,678 Bleachers

 

Bleachers is a very American English word. You don't quite understand it if you're English. Have to look it up to check. Two nations divided by a common language. For interested parties Bleachers are the uncovered part of sporting stadiums. The cheap seats.

Bleachers are also an American Rock band and their debut album is called .... er Bleachers. It has a picture of an all Anerican guy grinning out at you from its sleeve.Leaning proudly on his prized car.  Muscled, tanned. But pleasant enough looking. A jock but not one of the ones that bully freshmen. A good bloke.

The record itself is a very American one. Somehwere between Springsteen and The National. Bleachers are from New Jersey and they instinctively understand the importance of having a good car, and taking care of it are to the male American psyche. 

Some things change. Some things never will. This is a smart, thoughtful record with any number of cared for, well turned out songs. Not a reinventor of a wheel that certainly doesn't need reinventing just yet for the most part. Occasional they stray from the Girls & Cars path and try something a bit more modern and dancefloor. It's all interesting.

I really enjoyed this. It wear its heart on its sleeve, never tries to be anything other than what it is for fifty minutes and fourteen songs as it makes its way down the modern American highway.