'Hey when you call my name. I salivate like I'm Pavlov's Dog.'
The only explicit nod to behaviourism in Rock that I know of.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Songs Heard on the Radio # 9 Mazes
They've already had a Song of the Day but this has just come on evening radio, first time I've heard it, and it's wonderful, so they get another plug. From their new album Wooden Aquarium
PS. This has led me to another fine song from said album Excellent!
The Monochrome Set
And to follow up Song of the day. Here's a Guardian article celebrating the same band.
The Monochrome Set: Remembering the band that history forgot
There haven't been many bands like the Monochrome Set. They should have been absolutely massive, but instead were sidelined by their post-punk peers and were too clever by half for the Noel Edmonds mainstream.
Lost in the mists of musical history, the Monochrome Set appeared in the hazy period just after punk and hung around for a good two decades, releasing clever albums full of hook-crammed melodies and coloured with a dark sense of humour. Frontman Bid's arch vocals gave the band a wonderful camp quality, and it was probably his lyrical smarts that alerted a young Morrissey to their presence; they were even one of his favourite groups before he formed the Smiths. Johnny Marr recalls first meeting Morrissey and flicking through his singles collection that Morrissey had whittled down to just 10 seven-inchs. Along with some girl groups and T-Rex, were the Monochrome Set. This must have impressed Marr, because they too were one of his favourite bands.
The Smiths have an air of the Monochrome Set about them: that brisk beat, 1960s twist, mystique, brilliant guitar tunes, and a strong sense of humour. You could say that the only difference is that the Smiths became the most important British band of the 1980s, while the Monochrome Set were relegated to such obscurity that only fevered specialists like Graham Coxon or Norman Cook (whose Brighton Port Authority covered He's Frank) would notice.
Another Monochrome Set devotee was Alex Kapranos who, in his pre-Franz Ferdinand incarnation of Karelia, coaxed Bid out of semi-retirement to produce him. When Franz Ferdinand emerged in 2002 they were bizarrely compared to Gang of Four – a band they sounded nothing like – when their most obvious role model was the Monochrome Set.
The band had formed in 1977 from the ashes of the B-Sides, whose bass player Stuart Goddard decided he would rather be Adam Ant. Initially, both bands shared an audience of freaks who were too bizarre for punk. Then Adam became a superstar.
It's clearly time we resurrected the Monochrome Set, arguably the first truly postmodern pop band.
Lost in the mists of musical history, the Monochrome Set appeared in the hazy period just after punk and hung around for a good two decades, releasing clever albums full of hook-crammed melodies and coloured with a dark sense of humour. Frontman Bid's arch vocals gave the band a wonderful camp quality, and it was probably his lyrical smarts that alerted a young Morrissey to their presence; they were even one of his favourite groups before he formed the Smiths. Johnny Marr recalls first meeting Morrissey and flicking through his singles collection that Morrissey had whittled down to just 10 seven-inchs. Along with some girl groups and T-Rex, were the Monochrome Set. This must have impressed Marr, because they too were one of his favourite bands.
The Smiths have an air of the Monochrome Set about them: that brisk beat, 1960s twist, mystique, brilliant guitar tunes, and a strong sense of humour. You could say that the only difference is that the Smiths became the most important British band of the 1980s, while the Monochrome Set were relegated to such obscurity that only fevered specialists like Graham Coxon or Norman Cook (whose Brighton Port Authority covered He's Frank) would notice.
Another Monochrome Set devotee was Alex Kapranos who, in his pre-Franz Ferdinand incarnation of Karelia, coaxed Bid out of semi-retirement to produce him. When Franz Ferdinand emerged in 2002 they were bizarrely compared to Gang of Four – a band they sounded nothing like – when their most obvious role model was the Monochrome Set.
The band had formed in 1977 from the ashes of the B-Sides, whose bass player Stuart Goddard decided he would rather be Adam Ant. Initially, both bands shared an audience of freaks who were too bizarre for punk. Then Adam became a superstar.
It's clearly time we resurrected the Monochrome Set, arguably the first truly postmodern pop band.
Monday, October 6, 2014
Song of the Day # 262 The Monochrome Set
Undeservedly obscure nowadays. Released a string of great records in the late Seventies and early Eighties. This is amongst their best. Love the orchestra warming up at the start of the song. Morrissey of course, preferred the b-side, Lester Leaps In. Here's an in-depth interview where key member Bid discusses the history of the band. Great social history.
101 Best Bands
100 wasn't enough. Another quite meaningless post. Just a mental exercise as much as anything but I'd stand by most of those listed below. In no order...
- The Velvet Underground
- R.E.M.
- Roxy Music
- Can
- The Go-Betweens
- Wire
- Sly & the Family Stone
- Love
- The Smiths
- The Clash
- Iggy & the Stooges
- Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band
- Television
- The Beatles
- The Modern Lovers
- The Ramones
- Sonic Youth
- Creedence Clearwater Revival
- Dexys Midnight Runners
- The Byrds
- Nirvana
- Funkadelic
- The Triffids
- The Doors
- Misty In Roots
- The Cure
- Mott the Hoople
- T.Rex
- Talking Heads
- Suicide
- PiL
- The Rolling Stones
- Echo & the Bunnymen
- The Sun Ra Band
- The Kinks
- Elvis Costello & the Attractions
- The Undertones
- Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
- The Cramps
- Neu!
- Public Enemy
- The Specials
- Orange Juice
- The Feelies
- Joy Division
- Pixies
- Pulp
- The New York Dolls
- The MC5
- The Monkees
- Blondie
- The Small Faces / Faces
- The Beach Boys
- Neil Young & Crazy Horse
- The Slits
- Pere Ubu
- Suicide
- Minutemen
- Josef K
- Steel Pulse
- The Fall
- Buzzcocks
- The Yardbirds
- The Patti Smith Group
- The Gang of Four
- The Jimi Hendrix Experience
- The Stone Roses
- Associates
- The Cramps
- The Teardrop Explodes
- Kraftwerk
- The James Brown Band
- Buffalo Springfield
- The Band
- XTC
- Pink Floyd (sorry for brackets but with Syd)
- The B52s
- Traffic
- The Gun Club
- Big Star
- Stereolab
- The Teardrop Explodes
- Magazine
- The Beat
- Young Marble Giants
- Felt
- Led Zeppelin
- Thin Lizzy
- Pavement
- Dinosaur.Jr
- The Flamin Groovies
- Chic
- Steely Dan
- My Bloody Valentine
- The Only Ones
- The 13th Floor nElevators
- Black Uhuru
- The Who
- Super Furry Animals
- The Sonics
- The Seeds
Songs of the Day # 261 The Sundays
There are a lot of strange things about reviewing things in my collection on here. Firstly the age of some of the records themselves. This is over twenty five years old, ridiculous for something that sounds so young and which I didn't feel so young myself when I heard it for the first time. It's more than half as old as my current age. Secondly, the whole ritual of listening to music for the first time in years and finding myself hurtling back to when I first bought it and played it. That's a quite uncanny experience which I had again when playing this last thing last night for the first time in years.
The Sundays themselves were a strange phenomenon all round. Their songwriting core, Harriet Wheeler and David Gavurin were a couple of Bristol University graduates, not generally accepted fodder for Rock and Roll. They looked just like the kind of people you might find sitting opposite you on a commuter train. They'd come to the game relatively late in the day, almost as an afterthought, releasing their first single on Rough Trade when they were already in their mid-Twenties.
They made up for lost time. This record was huge in British terms when it was released. It topped the Independent Chart for two months and immediately garnered the attention of Radio 1 night-time radio and the music papers, the two requisites for breaking through then.
Unlike most of the bands around them at the time The Sundays seemed quite happy with the way things were, which was pretty unusual for a British group looking to make it in the late Eighties. There was no 'Hang the DJ', 'Kiss me where the sun don't shine' or 'we want to get loaded' here. The lyrics of lead song Can't Be Sure are almost a definition of Middle England conformity.
'Give me a story and give me a bed
Give me possessions
Oh love, luck and money they go to my head like wildfire
It's good to have something to live for, you'll find
Live for tomorrow
Live for a job and a perfect behind, high time
England my country, the home of the free
Such miserable weather
But England's as happy as England can be
Why cry?'
Give me possessions
Oh love, luck and money they go to my head like wildfire
It's good to have something to live for, you'll find
Live for tomorrow
Live for a job and a perfect behind, high time
England my country, the home of the free
Such miserable weather
But England's as happy as England can be
Why cry?'
But still, it's brilliantly constructed and recorded. The way the guitars chime, the bass ticks and the drums shudder, the wonderful vocals the way its hooks are withheld. It still holds you. Beautifully contained. Second track I Kicked a Boy is astonishingly in debt to Johnny Marr, Wheeler's singing very affected, that Cocteau Twins manner that was everywhere at that point. The third track is called Don't Tell Your Mother. This was hardly The Rolling Stones.
The band went on to record an album called Reading, Writing & Arithmetic, the title of which attracted the ire of indie wild man Bobby Gillespie. I doubt if they cared. They were playing to a different constituency. They had a pretty successful career by the standards of the time, did well in the States, released records every few years on their own terms. Then Wheeler and Gavurin packed it all in to concentrate on raising a family. Their kids should be approaching university age themselves. There's talk of the band reforming.
I'm not really knocking them. It's a very contented record and a very good one. I love its still-life sleeve of bruised apples and pears. It took me back. I'm very glad I've got it, and had that moment of rediscovery with it, appropriately on a Sunday. But now it's Monday, not a very happy one judging by the raindrops streaking down my windowpane and my own conformity demands that I get going. I imagine The Sundays would understand, and possible secretly approve. Though of course I can't be sure...
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Songs About People # 57 Terry Waite
And while we're in Manchester here is The Fall's tribute to the Archbishop of Canterbury's envoy and kidnapping hostage. From their 1986 album Bend Sinister named after a Vladimir Nabokov novel. Sadly, Waite's reaction to the track was not recorded.
5th October 1980 - Joy Division
NME made Joy Division's Atmosphere / She's Lost Control record of the week. Released after the death of singer Ian Curtis, it made the UK Top 40.
Great Lines # 3 The Modern Lovers
'I go to bakeries all day long. There's a lack of sweetness in my life.'
A great title. Great subject matter. And a great line amongst many great lines. This song, as much as any set down the prototype for the early Go-Betweens. I remember reading an article in Melody Maker in the Eighties where Robert Forster talked about his admiration for the song.
Song of the Day # 260 Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66
There was a Guardian article a few days ago listen the best Beatles covers. Too be honest, I'm not sure there are many great ones Somehow The Beatles defined their own songs. I do like this though.
Saturday, October 4, 2014
4th October 1970 - Janis Joplin
She was found dead today in 1970. This song was posthumously Number 1 in the States.
Instrumentals # 14 Cluster
Cluster's 1974 album Zuckerzeit is one of those albums that the hipper than thou will wave at you as one you must hear. Plenty of choice in terms of the 'instrumental' category as the whole record is instrumental. I plumped for this. Suicide, three years before the first Suicide record came out.
Go Betweens Boxset - On the Way!
As this blog takes its name from a Go-Betweens song, it seems fitting to chart the distant arrival of their boxset which I bought on pre-release this Thursday but won't arrive at my door until January. It cost a lot of money but the way that I look at it is that it's an object that I won't regret buying in ten years time in any way. Here's a moving tribute to Grant McLennan who died terribly young almost ten years back from Village Voice journalist Robert Christgau, who is often variable in term of his taste but was faultless in his support for the band throughout their career.
The Go-Betweens' sweeter, darker half succumbs to the undertow
Grant McLennan was in a grand mood May 6, with every reason to believe he had his best work ahead of him. Renowned and beloved though the Go-Betweens' six '80s albums are, 2005's Oceans Apart, third fruit of their 2000 reunion, had outsold them all. It also won them their first Australian Grammy, and if the category was Adult Contemporary, fine. McLennan had money in the bank. Songs were pouring out of him. That night, during a huge housewarming party that would root him in Brisbane once and for all, he'd planned to publicly propose to his girlfriend, Emma Pursey. At 4:30 that afternoon, he went upstairs for a nap. Early arrivals found him in his bedroom a few hours later. The autopsy revealed a massive heart attack. He was 48.
"One of the last real romantic bohemians. No watch, wallet, or drivers licence," recalled one of a thousand bereaved on the band's message board. McLennan reportedly went through a heroin phase and had trouble sustaining relationships with women; his melodic grace concealed a dark thematic undertow. His father, a doctor, died of cancer at 38, when Grant was just four: "You've lost your voice/You let it go," he literally moaned on "Dusty in Here" 20 years later. But the songwriter was famously modest, generous, polite, courtly. There seems no reason to attribute his loss to anything more esoteric than cruel fate.
McLennan is survived by his girlfriend, his mother, a stepfather he was close to, two siblings, and an adult son. But just as painfully, he is survived by Robert Forster, his Go-Betweens partner since 1977, who played and worked with him even when they lived oceans apart with band kaput. They didn't compose together, and both recorded notable solo albums--in the early '90s, McLennan's output was obsessive, unstoppable. But they were stronger in tandem; they complemented each other's tone, with McLennan's graver and sweeter. And even as naive new wavers, both conveyed a maturity--an adult contemporaneity--all the stranger for its origins in supposedly uncouth Oz. In retrospect, maybe it was too mature for its intended audience at the time.
Admittedly, McLennan's pick hit came early, in 1982: "Cattle and Cane," about childhood in the outback, shows up on many greatest-songs-of-all-time lists, including U2's. But now that he's lost his voice, remember 2005's "Finding You": "What would you do if you turned around/And saw me beside you/Not in a dream but in a song?" Or 2000's "The Clock": "But then the clock turns/And it's now/And its you-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou."
'The gravedigger's work is almost done. A hole in the ground, spits dirt at the sun.'
Grant McLennan, 1958-2006
The Go-Betweens' sweeter, darker half succumbs to the undertow
Grant McLennan was in a grand mood May 6, with every reason to believe he had his best work ahead of him. Renowned and beloved though the Go-Betweens' six '80s albums are, 2005's Oceans Apart, third fruit of their 2000 reunion, had outsold them all. It also won them their first Australian Grammy, and if the category was Adult Contemporary, fine. McLennan had money in the bank. Songs were pouring out of him. That night, during a huge housewarming party that would root him in Brisbane once and for all, he'd planned to publicly propose to his girlfriend, Emma Pursey. At 4:30 that afternoon, he went upstairs for a nap. Early arrivals found him in his bedroom a few hours later. The autopsy revealed a massive heart attack. He was 48.
"One of the last real romantic bohemians. No watch, wallet, or drivers licence," recalled one of a thousand bereaved on the band's message board. McLennan reportedly went through a heroin phase and had trouble sustaining relationships with women; his melodic grace concealed a dark thematic undertow. His father, a doctor, died of cancer at 38, when Grant was just four: "You've lost your voice/You let it go," he literally moaned on "Dusty in Here" 20 years later. But the songwriter was famously modest, generous, polite, courtly. There seems no reason to attribute his loss to anything more esoteric than cruel fate.
McLennan is survived by his girlfriend, his mother, a stepfather he was close to, two siblings, and an adult son. But just as painfully, he is survived by Robert Forster, his Go-Betweens partner since 1977, who played and worked with him even when they lived oceans apart with band kaput. They didn't compose together, and both recorded notable solo albums--in the early '90s, McLennan's output was obsessive, unstoppable. But they were stronger in tandem; they complemented each other's tone, with McLennan's graver and sweeter. And even as naive new wavers, both conveyed a maturity--an adult contemporaneity--all the stranger for its origins in supposedly uncouth Oz. In retrospect, maybe it was too mature for its intended audience at the time.
Admittedly, McLennan's pick hit came early, in 1982: "Cattle and Cane," about childhood in the outback, shows up on many greatest-songs-of-all-time lists, including U2's. But now that he's lost his voice, remember 2005's "Finding You": "What would you do if you turned around/And saw me beside you/Not in a dream but in a song?" Or 2000's "The Clock": "But then the clock turns/And it's now/And its you-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou."
Village Voice, May 23, 2006
Numbers - 9
The original version of a song later covered on The Last Splash by The Breeders. Ed's Redeeming Qualities, a contemporary folky band were probably not planning on achieving such commercial success given the name they chose. One for fans of whistling on records. Here they are doing it live .
Streets & Avenues
This has been another Australian week on here. Courtney Barnett, The Go-Betweens (I couldn't resist, I pre-ordered the box set), and Nick Cave and Jubilee Street. So in honour of this last, here are some more songs about streets (all of these are about real locations as far as I know). All pretty good songs too!
1. Simon & Garfunkel - Bleeker Street
Beautifully evokes not only sense of place but time of day. New York has to be rationed on a list like this as there are so many songs named after its streets.
2. Lloyd Cole & the Commotions - Charlotte Street
One of the most poignant songs on a beautiful record. There's also a track named Down on Mission Street on Rattlesnakes so it was clearly a lyrical concern of his. Charlotte Street is a street in the centre of Glasgow. It was never Lloyd's intention to stay so long.
3. Van Morrison - Cypress Avenue
Van sits in his car and watches the girls walking home from school. The jury's out.
4. The Rolling Stones- Route 66
5. Love - Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale
6. Donovan - Sunny Goodge Street
7. Tom Waits - Virginia Avenue
8. The Beatles - Penny Lane
9. The Ramones - 53rd & 3rd
10 The Gun Club - The House on Highland Avenue
Song of the Day # 259 Jeff Buckley
Sometimes I struggle with Jeff Buckley and Grace. The histrionics, the kitchen sink production approach. Too much Led. Too Rock. But I'm starting the weekend with Side 2 of that record. Hallelujah, Lover You Should've Come Over, Corpus Christi Carol, Eternal Life (which I'm struggling my way through now) and this and some of it is just remarkable. This is the one song in his canon that's quite explicitly about his father, and one that cuts through a lot of the crap to talk about the things that matter. Perhaps cynics might disagree but for me it really taps a vein. Appallingly sad and quiet eerily prescient of what was coming for him.
'There is a child sleeping near his twin
The pictures go wild in a rush of wind
That dark angel he is shuffling in
Watching over them with his black feather wings unfurled
The love you lost with her skin so fair
Is free with the wind in her butterscotch hair
Her green eyes blew goodbyes
With her head in her hands
and your kiss on the lips of another
Dream Brother with your tears scattered round the world.
Don't be like the one who made me so old
Don't be like the one who left behind his name
'Cause they're waiting for you like I waited for mine
And nobody ever came...
Don't be like the one who made me so old
Don't be like the one who left behind his name
'Cause they're waiting for you like I waited for mine
And nobody ever came...
Don't be like the one who made me so old
Don't be like the one who left behind his name
'Cause they're waiting for you like I waited for mine
Nobody ever came
Nobody ever...
I feel afraid and I call your name
I love your voice and your dance insane
I hear your words and I know your pain
With your head in your hands and her kiss on the lips of another
Your eyes to the ground and the world spinning round forever
Asleep in the sand with the ocean washing over
Ah do you meet the one I love
and smell the one who loves you
Dream brother, dream brother, dream, dream
dream asleep in the sand with the ocean washing over.'
The pictures go wild in a rush of wind
That dark angel he is shuffling in
Watching over them with his black feather wings unfurled
The love you lost with her skin so fair
Is free with the wind in her butterscotch hair
Her green eyes blew goodbyes
With her head in her hands
and your kiss on the lips of another
Dream Brother with your tears scattered round the world.
Don't be like the one who made me so old
Don't be like the one who left behind his name
'Cause they're waiting for you like I waited for mine
And nobody ever came...
Don't be like the one who made me so old
Don't be like the one who left behind his name
'Cause they're waiting for you like I waited for mine
And nobody ever came...
Don't be like the one who made me so old
Don't be like the one who left behind his name
'Cause they're waiting for you like I waited for mine
Nobody ever came
Nobody ever...
I feel afraid and I call your name
I love your voice and your dance insane
I hear your words and I know your pain
With your head in your hands and her kiss on the lips of another
Your eyes to the ground and the world spinning round forever
Asleep in the sand with the ocean washing over
Ah do you meet the one I love
and smell the one who loves you
Dream brother, dream brother, dream, dream
dream asleep in the sand with the ocean washing over.'
Jeff Buckley
Friday, October 3, 2014
Songs About People # 56 Christopher Columbus
No excuse needed to play Burning Spear as Friday afternoon at work winds down. Here's a reclaiming of territory.
Things I've Found on my Local's Jukebox # 34 Al Green
“Memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive are tied up in memory.” Nick Cave
Had a bit of a session at Rosie's last night and it was fruitful in that I found Nick Cave and this during it. I had a jukebox session where I put on what the hell I wanted just for me, so there was Big Star, Triffids, R.E.M, Television and Dion too, and enjoyed the football and the company . This particular song has a deeper personal meaning for me than any other I can think of. I won't trouble you with the story behind it here. Enough to say that every time I hear it the mechanisms within me kick in, my body churns and tears well. It's painful too but it's somehow important to hold on and re-experience those emotions occasionally to try to be true to the ones and things that you love. Music and memory are quite miraculous, inexplicable things.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Song of the Day # 258 Urge Overkill
I bought Urge Overkill's Saturation album about twenty years ago when I was living in Dortmund. Orange vinyl is one of its many features. On Geffen records so it's still a slight mystery why it wasn't enormous, although perhaps it doesn't have the consistency to really merit it. Still, a lot of great things on their not least this track. Now it's magnificent cover is staring at me from the front of one of my racks so the band gets Song of the Day as we wend our way towards the weekend. They played their instruments as if the Seventies had never ended. They took their name from a line in a Funkadelic song. They had a drummer called Blackie Onassis. What more do you want?
Things I've Found on My Local's Jukebox # 33 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
'And here I come up the hill, I'm pushing my wheel of love
I got love in my tummy and a tiny little pain
And a ten-ton catastrophe on a sixty-pound chain.'
I got love in my tummy and a tiny little pain
And a ten-ton catastrophe on a sixty-pound chain.'
I've been thinking a lot about Nick Cave this week. He's made a wonderful film, is on my local's jukebox and I played him for the first time tonight to good effect. At least for me. I'm not sure anyone else even noticed. This song works. It mines the myths. The video cheapens the sentiments and pure poetry of it for me. Too literal. But that doesn't detract from the original five minutes as it's best heard without visuals with the listener's imagination fleshing out the scenario. The video is here if you prefer.
Song of the Day # 257 Hookworms
Within five seconds of this starting, you know where you are. You hear Suicide, The Modern Lovers, Neu, Sonic Youth, Spacemen 3, Stereolab and you're oriented, on home territory if these are among the things that float your boat. But there's sufficient evidence in the six minutes that follow, which race by, to prove that Hookworms are embarked on a journey of their own. I like it! Playing at Newcastle at the end of the month and I might try to get down.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
October 1st 2014 - The Go-Betweens
The namers of this blog are having a boxed set of their early work plus related literature and rarities released soon. This creates a painful dilemma for devotees like me who may well own the vast majority of tracks here already on vinyl and often cd too but crave the little they don't have, the literature and the product itself. The first six hundred get a book from Grant McLennan's personal collection, an object which I crave even more. Thanks a lot Domino! Here's a song.
.
Domino are honoured to announce the upcoming Autumn 2014 release of an extraordinary anthology for one of the most beloved and influential Australian groups of all-time, The Go-Betweens. G Stands For Go-Betweens Volume One extensively documents the band’s origins in an ambitious box containing four vinyl albums, four compact discs and an extensive 112-page book, featuring a trove of archival photos and extensive historical liner notes from founding member Robert Forster, along with additional pieces from guest essayists, fans and contemporaries.
The box set captures the band’s output from 1978 through 1984 and includes the first vinyl re-pressings of their first three studio albums in over thirty years (Send Me A Lullaby, Before Hollywood & Spring Hill Fair), all re-mastered from the original analog tapes. G Stands For Go-Betweens also brings together their early classic and collectible singles together on a fourth vinyl LP entitled The First Five Singles, featuring new artwork from its creators. Additionally, the set comes with four compact discs of rare, hard-to-find and unreleased demos, recordings, radio sessions and a complete live concert radio broadcast from 1982. If that’s not enough, the set comes with a silkscreen of their first promotional poster for their debut single, “Lee Remick”, as well as a reproduction of their very first press release from their own Able Label.
The box set captures the band’s output from 1978 through 1984 and includes the first vinyl re-pressings of their first three studio albums in over thirty years (Send Me A Lullaby, Before Hollywood & Spring Hill Fair), all re-mastered from the original analog tapes. G Stands For Go-Betweens also brings together their early classic and collectible singles together on a fourth vinyl LP entitled The First Five Singles, featuring new artwork from its creators. Additionally, the set comes with four compact discs of rare, hard-to-find and unreleased demos, recordings, radio sessions and a complete live concert radio broadcast from 1982. If that’s not enough, the set comes with a silkscreen of their first promotional poster for their debut single, “Lee Remick”, as well as a reproduction of their very first press release from their own Able Label.
Songs About People # 55 Ernest Borgnine
Perhaps not on the surface the best song from John Grant's recent album Pale Green Ghosts. But his records are generally about the whole and need to be listened to as such rather than their individual parts while this has diverting saxophone, is a grower and is after all at least partially about Ernest Borgnine who is a necessary subject for a song by someone. It also has one of the album's hardest hitting lines, "Doc ain't lookin’ at me, says I got the disease/ Now what did you expect, you spent your life on your knees."
Nick Cave 20,000 Days on Earth
I went to see the Nick Cave film on Monday evening. Though I've never been a huge fan of his music or previously of his persona, I thought it was just superb and it's been rattling round my head ever since. It's compelling from beginning to end, managing to make life seem larger than we're generally able to imagine it and somehow also represent it as deeply, fundamentally important, a matter of life or death even. That's a realisation it's easy to lose sight of and it's generally art as much as life itself that brings that fact back to us.
Much of the film focusses upon the most fundamental subject of all, the sensation of being alive itself, much else of it on something almost equally interesting, the act of creating of art, and manages to say something actually worth saying about it without being precious which is actually pretty rare. A beautifully crafted and shot piece of work. Here's a review from The New York Times which sums it up pretty well, though I'd question whether to say he once flirted with Christianity is an accurate depiction of the anecdote Cave tells during the film. Otherwise, although slightly descriptive, (possibly because he's not hugely well-known in the States), rather than actually a review, it focuses on many of the main themes represented. I couldn't recommend the film more highly! It's also led me to listen to Cave & the Bad Seeds current album and really rate bits of it which I'd never have seen coming.
In ‘20,000 Days on Earth,’ Nick Cave Is on the Move
“Memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive are tied up in memory.”
So observes the dour songwriter Nick Cave during an interview with the noted British psychoanalyst Darian Leader, in “20,000 Days on Earth.” The film, a fusion of documentary and drama directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, is a fictional re-creation of the 20,000th day of Mr. Cave’s life, when he started recording his 2013 album, “Push the Sky Away.” It is as intimate and honest a portrait of a rock artist’s creative roots as any film has attempted.
The pervasive mood is a brooding hyperawareness of time and the brevity of existence. Sensationalism and salaciousness are minimal. Mr. Cave’s onetime heroin addiction is mentioned but only in the context of Christianity, with which Mr. Cave, when asked about religion, says he flirted with during that period. Adolescent sexual experiences are mentioned but not graphically described.
What Mr. Cave fears most, he muses to the doctor, is losing his memory. He knows that for any writer, memory is the source of creativity and the seat of identity. His narrative songs, he says, constitute a whole world created out of “those original precious memories that define our lives: memories that we spend forever chasing after.”
Sooner or later, he might have added, a writer must also confront the uncomfortable reality that everything he puts down on paper comes out of his own head and no one else’s. Even if the words are borrowed, they are still chosen. The film awakens a queasy awareness that there is no escaping from the self.
Mr. Cave is matter of fact about the ruthlessness of the creative process, confessing to “cannibalizing” his marriage to Susie Bick, the British model he wed in 1999, and to “tormenting” her. (Ms. Bick is barely glimpsed during the film.) In the movie’s most emotionally extravagant outburst, he rhapsodizes about their first meeting while we see a montage of legendary beauties. No other major relationships are mentioned.
Mr. Cave, who will turn 57 on Monday, was born in Australia and now lives in Brighton, England, where the turbulent weather reflects his churning, gothic musical melancholy. The film opens with a spectacular three-minute montage in which streams of images from his life are clocked as a counter speeds to the number 20,000, after which Mr. Cave is shown waking up in the morning on that magic day.
He drives around Brighton in a car, in which various collaborators and friends materialize. One is the actor Ray Winstone from the 2005 film “The Proposition,” whose screenplay Mr. Cave wrote. Others include Blixa Bargeld, a former guitarist with his band the Bad Seeds, and the Australian pop star Kylie Minogue, with whom he had his only major hit, “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” from his “Murder Ballads” album in the mid-’90s.
He visits his archive and sorts through memorabilia and drops in on Warren Ellis, a songwriting collaborator and band mate. They share memories of attending revelatory concerts by Nina Simone and Jerry Lee Lewis. Reflecting on his childhood artistic inclinations, Mr. Cave suggests that his father’s reading him the first chapter of “Lolita” helped set him on his path. The grown-up Mr. Cave belongs to rock’s poète maudit tradition of Jim Morrison, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. But despite a large following in Europe, he is not well known in the United States beyond a small, fervent following.
Despite snatches of songs here and there, it is not until the end that the film bursts into a flood of music with a symphonic performance by Mr. Cave and the Bad Seeds at the Sydney Opera House: a grandiloquent finale in which his agonized introspection finds transcendent release.
Song of the Day # 256 Lena Horne
Not her best song but endearingly quirky and reminds me of a friend who's past on, Keith Crombie who owned a Jazz joint around the corner from me where I spent some of the best evenings of my life. He played this one evening between sets. There's a film coming out about him in a few months. Here's the trailer. I'm there, about a minute in, clinking glasses with Keith.
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