Not actually mentioned in the novel just yet but it's in the playlist that James has made in relation to the book. Well worth a play, as is the album it comes from.
It took me a while to come to this. Uncompromising and different and a local artist to my adopted home town Newcastle, who's having a well justified pop at Sting.
Richard Dawson: Geordie songwriter who found a voice in his local library
Singer says his eye condition means he sees things differently – and, when you hear his music, what he’s saying makes sense
Richard Dawson’s latest album - Nothing Important – contains just four songs. Photograph: Domino Records
At a time of year when the music industry is fixated more than ever on commerce – generating buzz for its priority acts for the forthcoming year, shifting vast piles of box sets and mass market albums to Christmas gift buyers – there is something heartening about the slowly rising profile of Richard Dawson.
The 33-year-old Geordie singer-songwriter released his album Nothing Important last month, to a level of acclaim that would surely have seen it featuring on end-of-year lists all over the place had it come out a little earlier.
It is a far cry from the other male singer-songwriters who have featured in success stories this year, though – there’s nothing of Ben Howard or George Ezra or Hozier about Dawson.
Nothing Important contains just four songs: two instrumentals either side of two 16-minute songs, the title track and The Vile Stuff, which offer long, impressionistic, hugely detailed and sometimes disturbing reveries of childhood. It’s an extraordinary record: a strange, discordant reconfiguration of English folk traditions.
“It’s not folk music,” says Dawson, sporting those great signifiers of folk music – a beard and a cable knit sweater – over a cup of tea on a December morning. “I call it ritual community music, and I’m more interested in experimental music.”
He points out its links to Tuvan throat singing, enthusing about an album called 60 Horses in My Herd, to heavy metal, to the ritualistic patterns of African music.
And he blames the folk tag on his previous album The Glass Trunk, the one that lifted him from regional obscurity to national obscurity, which was based on material he found in the archives of the Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums, and featured a lot of a cappella singing.
Before that, he says, “I was writing love songs, but I don’t know much about that topic, and it was disastrous.”
Dawson is partially sighted – he and his brother Iain, a world champion paratriathlete, both have a genetic eye condition called X-linked juvenile retinoschisis – and he says that has hugely informed his music.
On a practical level, it meant he qualified for working tax credits, which enabled him to spend more time on his music. At a more metaphysical level, it means “faces take a long time to come into form, and there are some interesting hallucinations. You almost have a head start in seeing things as blurred, because it’s important not to be black and white about things.”
He points to the edge of the table we’re sitting at, and explains that while I’m seeing it as a crisp line, to him it’s something much softer.
When you hear his music, what he’s saying makes sense. There’s an almost hallucinatory clarity to his writing.
The Vile Stuff tells of a disastrous year seven school trip to Featherstone Castle, “and some poor wee scallywag’s brung/ A Coca-Cola bottle containing a spirit” – the titular Vile Stuff.
One boy gets into bed with a female teacher, “much to the chagrin of the deputy headmaster/ Whose scarlet skull is firmly wedged between her thighs”.
There are multiple injuries and a “no-win, no-fee solicitor/ Thinking of relocating to a Buddhist monastery in Halifax”.
It’s all, Dawson says, sort of true. “It was a pretty disastrous trip, I’ll say that. But a little scratch might become a cut, and a cut might become a wound …”
But trying to write honestly about real lives across The Glass Trunk and Nothing Important brought its own demands.
“You’re dealing with other people’s stories and you have a duty to do right by that. But part of that duty also involves being creative.”
Dawson’s ears were opened to the possibilities of music not by questing parents, but by the local library. That was where he found the jazz albums that encouraged him to move on to experimental music and improv; it was where he heard the Ali Farka Touré album that “opened a whole can of worms”; it was where he first listened to classical music.
All that feeds into his own musical celebration of the north-east, whose characterisation as a land of “humble worker bees” he disdains.
“There’s a really crass side to it, which is the side flagged by Sting, for instance. I don’t want to be in the business of calling other musicians, but I think I’m on safe ground with Sting.
“He has written a disgusting musical; it’s really bile-making – he’s singing in this cod Geordie accent. Arts money is pumped on to vast projects which supposedly celebrate [Newcastle], but it’s the same things they’re rolling out – these overplayed, trite Geordie accents.”
In recent months, Dawson has appeared on the cover of The Wire magazine, and been celebrated at length by The Quietus website, which would tend to mark him out as a maker of “difficult music”. It’s odd and disquieting, certainly, but also beautiful in its strangeness.
“I aim to be as accessible as possible, for sure,” he says. “But it has to be what it has to be. I think about symmetry a lot, the notion of reflection – but a broken mirror making a slightly distorted reflection.”
And what does his family make of it all? He laughs gently. “My dad came to the launch gig. He left halfway through to get the last train.”
Back to Australia. So much great stuff coming from there. This lot are from Brisbane, home of The Go Betweens. The two bands don't seem to have much in common except for a gift in melody and in the song below a debt to Television as they channel Tom Verlaine through Sonic Youth. Their album from last year, Grassed In, is much recommended.
I like the idea that this blog has shifted, gradually from what it initially was to an archive of memory as reflected by the quote across the top of the page. This song reminds me of David Laurence who I did Drama 'O' Level with when I was a fairly hopeless and directionless youth heading to the mid-teenage years. Whatever happened to David Laurence? I'll never know. I have many memories of David, one of them going back to his leafy house on the Sheen Road to listen to this album, which he'd just bought. Joy Division, affected youths from fortunate backgrounds. The other was being in a pub on Richmond Hill a few years later, drinking beers while I was at university when I suddenly had a lucid waking dream and realised that life was not short as we were always being told, at least not for those of us that were that fortunate enough to be conscripted, but very, very long. I had a vision of a hot air balloon rising, into an indescribably colourless sky which I'll never quite forget. David, I raise my glass!
From one Modern Lovers influenced band to another. The video has a bunch of middle aged people dancing round a kitchen. The whole lyric is worth quoting.
'It’s raining and the wind is ruthless I’m old and cold and tired and
useless and toothless But I’ll get by with a
little bit of you, Alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, ephedrine, and orange
juice
The radio sucks balls I don’t relate to any of the music they’re playing
at all But I’ll get by with a little bit of you, Alcohol, tobacco,
caffeine, ephedrine, and orange juice
There’s shit all over the street You can’t even walk, there is nowhere
left to set one’s feet But I’ll get by with a little bit of you, Alcohol,
tobacco, caffeine, ephedrine, and orange juice
And life doesn’t have a meaning Anything goes, you might as well be
dreaming But I’ll get by with a little bit of you,'
Former singer for indie, Modern Lovers followers Hefner. He obviously also has time for Big Star. This is a beautiful replication of the sound of their first two albums. The song is from his new record Chants for Socialists.
Eighty pages in and this book is gripping me tighter than any one I've read for ages.
'The bass creeps up on me from across the road. It sounds like he's been playing the same song all day. It sounds like another song about me, but there's probably two dozen women in Jamaica right now and another two thousand in the world who think the same thing anytime a song of his come on the radio. But Midnight Ravers is about me.'
I become more enamored of this album, her debut, which came back a couple of weeks back, every time I hear it. Such a beautiful, modern reinvention of early Seventies soul, with a touch of Tapestry about it too.
I could have chosen any number of Peter Tosh songs but liked the sound of this one. The backing vocals are oddly reminiscent of Dexys. He doesn't seem a particular fan of the city.
I've just started reading this. A real tombstone of a hardback based around the Bob Marley assassination attempt of 1976. It's immediately an incredibly evocative read. Here's the first song it mentions when talking about Kingston ghetto life at the time. To quote from the book. 'Better Must come. But worst come first.'
As part of my nocturnal activities I went to a local jazz club last night to see the Safe Sextet a local jazz ensemble led by Don Forbes who have been playing in the region for many years. They were playing selections from Stan Tracey a great British musician and arranger who died just recently. It was really to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Tracey's album Under Milk Wood one of the best British records ever made. Here meanwhile is a picture of Laugharne where Dylan Thomas wrote the original Under Milk Wood which acted as partial inspiration.
Viet Cong, who are touring the UK have the whole Post Punk package. They've got the right name and sound. Their guitars clash and chime like an amalgam of the Gang of 4, Pere Ubu, Wire, PiL, Joy Division and Television. The question you'd have to ask as with previous Songs of the Day I've chosen recently is why do something that is such a close approximation of what's been done before over thirty years back? I suppose the answer lies in the quality of the songs. These two are pretty good.
Into the weekend with one of the spookiest, evocative singles ever made. Apparently it was a Warhol favourite and he had it on repeat play while he worked. Here's a pretty good take from Julian Cope's Heritage website on what makes it so powerful.
From Patti's last album Banga. Sometimes the record topples over into pretension, always a risk Patti runs but here on the opening track she gets it just right. She casts her spell. For one of the earliest and most important explorers of the New World and his voyages of discovery.
Just to give a further plug to Twerps new album Range Anxiety, which I posted a song from three days back. It's a thing of beauty and takes me to a place of calm in a week that I needed it though it will remind you of umpteen things that have jingled and jangled over the last thirty years. I've decided right now, that for me at least, this is a very good thing. Three songs out of thirteen doesn't give a full impression of what a great listening experience it provides but give a fair flavour. Highly recommended!
Song that name-checks, without being fully about the Country Singer songwriter. By Vic Chesnutt, deceased Athens, Georgia artist. Michael Stipe recently covered it live. It might have been written for him.
One of the blessings of writing this blog is how much new music it has exposed me too. When I started this particular series, over a year ago, almost all of the choices were selections from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. Now, a great many of them are current, like this, from D'Angelo's new album, Black Messiah, which is out later this month. His first for fourteen years. It's obvious the tradition it comes from. Prince, Sly Stone and George Clinton's influence are all over it. But he makes a very good job of it.
The Teardrop Explodes had a thing about melody. One of their more obscure songs from a late phase on British television. Julian Cope contributes distinctive dancing right the way though.
Sometimes you're in half sleep and hear the most unaccountably beautiful sounds ghosting out of your radio. Like here. Swedish band. From their third album of the same name. Out in a couple of weeks. Who says they don't write them like they used to?
A Tuesday morning planning lessons and listening to songs from this wonderful band. I'm on a tea break now. So here's a Guardian article detailing their latest split and choosing a few tracks from a band that just spat them out!
Guided by Voices: how do you pick their five best songs?
The insanely productive lo-fi heroes from Ohio have split, again. To mark their passing, we’ve selected five tracks that fit different categories of ‘best’
Captain Bob … Robert Pollard onstage with Guided by Voices in 2002. Photograph: Hayley Madden/Redferns
So farewell then, again, Guided by Voices. The Dayton, Ohio, band have announced their second split. “Guided by Voices has come to an end,” they posted on their website. “With 4 years of great shows and six killer albums, it was a hell of a comeback run. The remaining shows in the next two months are unfortunately canceled. Our sincere apologies to those that have purchased tickets and made travel plans. Thanks to everyone who has supported GBV.” Of course, it wasn’t the first time GBV have fallen apart. In 1997, leader Robert Pollard replaced the entire line-up with a new set of musicians. He did the same, keeping only one member, a year later. And the band folded completely for the first time in 2004. Now, alas, it appears the wildly overproductive kings of lo-fi are gone forever. Without having returned to the UK in this second life (boo! Hiss!). So here we celebrate their life with a definitive list of the best GBV songs, which clearly isn’t definitive at all, but pretty random. Because rather than picking the most tuneful songs, we’ve tried to represent the full spectrum of Pollard and co by picking different categories of best …
The best song title
So many contenders! The Ids are Alright, The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet, Titus and Strident Wet Nurse (Creating Jeffrey), Unleashed! The Large Hearted Boy, and so many more. Every GBV song title speaks to Robert Pollard’s love of words and the way they sound, and no matter how random his titles might appear they often convey vivid, if disturbing images: a Leprechaun Catfish Fighter, anyone? But our winner is one that captures both GBV’s whimsy and the sense of disjuncture from the world: Everyone Thinks I’m a Raincloud (When I’m Not Looking), from the 2004 album Half Smiles of the Decomposed.
The best alcohol song
GBV onstage were a festival of booze. They would have a bathtub filled with cans of beer from which to help themselves. On their final US tour in 2004, buckets labelled “piss” and “puke” were left on stage so members could get through the three-hour plus sets without having to leave the stage (though on the night I saw that tour, no one had to use either). On I Am a Tree, from the album Mag Earwhig!, Pollard is audibly slurring his words – on one of the band’s best and best loved songs (even though it wasn’t actually their own: it had been brought from an earlier band of his called the Mice by guitarist Doug Gillard). But Pollard’s drinking did cause some observers to express concern for his wellbeing, and he responded to one reviewer who’d noted with slight horror the amount of beer onstage with a short song on the 2000 album Isolation Drills, called How’s My Drinking: “How’s my drinking?/ I don’t care about being sober/ But I sure get around/ In this town.” Typically, the throwaway lyric was set to a gorgeous, mid-paced swelling ballad. Pollard actually pissed away the melody.
The best opening lines
There are many, but the perfect combination of GBV’s many virtues comes at the beginning of Hardcore UFOs, one of their anthems, in which the merits of hanging around home (which is what GBV did for their first five albums), the awesome power of rock’n’roll and the weirdness of the world are brought together: “Sitting out on your house/ Watching hardcore UFOs/ Drawing pictures, playing solos til 10/ Are you amplified to rock?/ Are you hoping for a contact?/ I’ll be with you, without you, again.” No idea how or why that manages to be moving, but it is. GBV were kings of the indefinable.
The best personal song
Pollard’s abstruse writing style means looking for clues to his life in his songs is usually a fool’s errand. But sometimes the truth glimmers through, as it does on Game of Pricks – the best song on the best GBV album, Alien Lanes, and therefore possibly the best GBV song. Pollard had recently got divorced, and Game of Pricks reflected on the unpleasant and chastening experience over one of the band’s most uplifting riffs – though how “I’ve cheated so long, I wonder/ How you keep track of me” squares with “And I’ve never asked for the truth/ But you owe that to me.”
The best Beatles pastiche
It’s both the great frustration and joy of GBV that even when they were crap, they could be brilliant, and vice versa. An album of brilliant pop songs could suddenly be derailed by some throwaway skronk; an album of unlistenable crap would suddenly throw forth something that sounded like it should have been a radio staple for decades. Equally, the brilliant songs would sometimes cut short just when you had a taste for them, but long before they’d satisfied your appetite. Long Distance Man comes from the second GBV album, 1987’s Sandbox – when they were still recording at home and putting out their albums themselves to family and friends – is one such. It’s 77 seconds song, and it sounds like it should have been on Rubber Soul.
It's almost October. The weather's turning and the light's failing. At this point you start to feel the dampness gather all about you, whether you're at home or on the street the air around you telling you that Winter and darkness are closing in and you're going to have to brace yourself for the long weeks ahead. Five months before the Sun starts its recovery. All things considered, perhaps not the best time to listen to The Cure's 17 Seconds on repeat, in a darkened flat, on your own and try to write something worth saying about it. Particularly when you've got worries and concerns of your own. It seems like the kind of masochism that human beings seem prone to once they find themselves away from work. Yet, somehow, 17 Seconds is worth it. It's a particular record.
This is the best Cure album. This claim is not made from a position of authority or knowledge. I haven't heard an LP of theirs from beginning to end since Pornography was released. Since they became hairy spiders in pullovers that looked set to unravel if you gave a loose end a tug. And donned pancake mix make up and set forth to conquer The States in the late eighties.
So I'm no dyed in the wool fanatic., My interest stopped around 1985 when they decided they preferred New Order to themselves, just before they chanced upon their own winning formula. It all became a bit Alice in Wonderland for the masses for me. I thought they were more honest and interesting here. This was the sound of the place where they came from. The London hinterlands. They surely soundtracked them better than anyone else, before or since. Smith wrote the songs in 1979 and 1980 in his parents' house in Crawley. The band then recorded the album in 7 days, apparently without demos over daily 16 hour studio sessions to minimise production costs on a tight budget. This, regardless of what anyone else might tell you was the sound of the suburbs.
The opening song is an instrumental. Always a brave move. Called Reflections, it's the sound of very little happening very atmospherically. It sets the tone for what's to come. It's aptly named. Much of the album sounds like it's observed from behind glass, by vaguely disaffected teenagers who despite their mutterings will still come downstairs to table when called and eat supper when it's ready. Just another rainy, overcast day in the suburbs, deep into Autumn.
17 Seconds sounds different depending on the time of the day you listen to it. In the afternoon it's all dripping taps and ticking clocks and rain on the window pane. Time refusing to pass. In the morning it's more sparky, the irony and skilled songwriting comes through more clearly. For me today, at the end of a long hard day at my desk, it didn't work. It seemed petulant when I needed something adult. It's an album of mood and frankly you have to be in the right one. Of course it helps if it's raining.
Play For Today is next and it shows how far The Cure have travelled and how many literary books and artistic films have been devoured. since Boys Don't Cry. Play For Today was a BBC programme of the 70s, one off heightened melodramas of the kind Robert Smith, (always The Cure's mouthpiece and puppeteer), indulges in here. It's a display of petty, unpleasantness to make a statement of who he is. 'I take what I require...' the Punk refusal to be nice, drawing a line in the sand to demark them from the Hippies. No love out here in the suburbs.
Secrets may as well be another instrumental, as what lyrics there are Smith mutters deep in the mix. It all adds to the sense of this being a soundtrack without a film. In Your House keeps the pace up, though in this case it's quite consciously that of a metronome ticking on the shelf. Uncommunicative teenagers gather in gloomy rooms to pass time together. Slowly.
'I play at night in your house I live another life Pretending to swim In your house I change the time in your house The hours I take Go so slow ...'
And then Three, another instrumental to close off the side. If I'm making the record sound humdrum I'm not doing it justice because I think it's a minor masterpiece. It describes a certain outlook, perspective and response to existence perfectly. It's Harold's life before he meets Maud. Terry's before he met June.
'The girl was never there. It's always the same. We're running towards nothing. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again...'
Flip the record and after yet another brief instrumental A Final Sound which I never realised existed until just now, A Forest kicks the second side into gear. It's an absolute landmark moment for the band and somehow should jar in some way. A great song amongst very good ones. But it slots in perfectly here as it's cut from the same cloth as everything around it. Existential gloom. The vague sense that something awful might be about to happen but also the possibility that it equally well may not. That you just have to wait. Smith himself has been resistant when asked about the song's content. Having originally indicated that it was inspired by a childhood dream he later changed his tune and said it was a song about a forest. Personally I don't blame him. It stopped people asking the question. If it's an albatross for him it's one he wears lightly. A Forest has been played live by the band an estimated 800 times.
Listening to 17 Seconds at 48 when you first heard it at 16 is rather similar to looking back at Hamlet if you first read that at the same age. You understand the subject matter a lot more than you did at the time but are still struggling to work out what either are really talking about because you never really will. They're both deliberately, hanging question marks. Which is better? Received wisdom tells us Hamlet and I'd probably agree, (I'm being ironic here but refuse to type a winking face), but A Forest focuses on similar themes. Quite consciously talking about what it feels like to be young but feel old, to be alive but unsure of whether we actually are, to wonder whether it's worth remaining so and ponder on the nature of unknowable. All the big themes kids! Listen to it. It really does all these things. It didn't make such a big splash just because it has a good tune. It reached Number 31 in the UK Singles Chart in 1980. It should have been Number 1.It made its mark nevertheless.
People are now writing PhDs about The Cure and getting taken perfectly seriously so I'd better stop here. I won't encroach on their territory. All I'll say is if you've ever had a dream and felt it was real and it's disturbed you by what it intimates about yourself and life, go listen to A Forest. It describes the uncanny as well as any song I know.
From A Forest to M, another quite masterful and beautiful, strummed gloom-fest pop song. 'You'll fall in love with somebody else again tonight...' Smith is very good at conveying the powerless of us all within the scheme of things and the way we all go along with life's dictates. He's read his Modernists.
'Take a step You move in time But it's always back ... The reasons are clear Your face is drawn And ready for the next attack.'
'At night. I hear the darkness breathe. I sense the quiet despair Listen to the silence . At night'
The album's winding down. At Night which follows is almost generic, so well have the band established their sound by now. It points forward to the more portentous sound of Faith an album which is played out almost in darkness while 17 Seconds is all fading light and all the better for it. It's probably the weakest of the fully developed songs on the record but frankly the standard is not dropping much.
'Time slips away. And the light fades away. And everything is quiet now.'
And so to the final track 17 Seconds itself . In many ways its three minutes encapsulates the record itself. A completely clean, assured and identifiable sound, quite distinguished by now from the early influences Wire, Magazine, Buzzcocks, Banshees and the like. They've made suburbia their own. Light fades away on the quiet tree lined avenues and there they are, behind glass, watching the shadows gather, musing on whether any of all this really matters.
As I said earlier, a minor masterpiece. Having had it on repeat play for the last few days I'm happy to stack it midway back on one of my racks for a while and let it sink back into its gloom But it's a record with very much its own statement and mood and I'll come back to it.
From here the band descended into depression and then full on, certifiable mania with Faith and Pornography Others prefer these. I'd plump for this instead. Partly for nostalgic reasons and partly because I think it stands up better now. A constant reminder for me of when I was seventeen, sitting in my attic room in my parents house, listening to my gradually growing record collection, making my way through Penguin classics, thinking about girls and trying to make head or tail of where I was going and what it was all about. Like countless others. Still not quite there yet.
A day at work listening to great Australian music. So much of it around right now. I kind of fell in love with Jen Cloher today who I read was Courtney Barnett's partner just now. Not as obvious or immediate an artist as Courtney but worth listening through to as her songs click in two or three minutes in and never stop giving from that point on.
Not a third obviously derivative Song of the Day here. Alasdair Roberts though he obviously draws on the whole Folk tradition has a singular voice of his own. He has a new album out shortly but as none of it is yet to appear on YouTube, this will do fine in the meantime.
I remember this going to Number 1. I was on the dole in Brighton. Not in a good shape. Britain didn't seem to be either. Lots of macho, lads culture nonsense. This was Blur showing Oasis how to do The Beatles. One of their best songs.
Army me with harmony. Great song. Unsure of the sentiment, ('Other Peoples Property, or possibly another use of the second P according to some basic research), but incredible momentum and wonderful use of Jackson 5's ABC.
The second, obviously derivative Song of the Day in a row.Twerps, from Melbourne, Australia are self-confessedly in others debt. They aspire to produce a song as good as 'Anything Could Happen' by The Clean. They honour The Go Betweens. Elsewhere you can hear The Chills, The Feelies, (quite clearly in this particular song), Felt, The Moles, The Jasmine Minks and so and so forth. The fact that their music is so embedded in such a well worn tradition was sufficient for The Guardian to discount their new album, just out, as bringing nothing new to the table. It doesn't. But those who love that stuff I've just mentioned will like this. Just in the way that sometimes you want to eat an old meal, tasting exactly like it always used to, there are moments when you want the same from music. Twerps provide it!
