So while we're here, another from the same record. One for Franz!
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Songs Heard on the Radio # 131 Jealous of the Birds
Nom de Plume of Irish singer-songwriter Naomi Hamilton from her debut album Palma Violets released last month. An interesting talent.
100 Mavericks # 69 Laurie Anderson
Best known perhaps for her partnership with Lou Reed and her Number 2 UK hit Superman from 1982. Should really be best known for the rest of the work she's done in her own right. Here's something from her 1989 album Strange Angels.
Song of the Day # 871 Jackie Opel
Barbadian singer who died at just 32 in a car crash in Bridgetown. This was his only American single in 1965 and sounds like a small classic to me.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Things Found on my Local's Jukebox # 133 The Clash
English Civil Wars are very quiet ones for the most part. Except for the one almost four hundred years ago. But with the countdown to the EU vote which is only a couple of weeks away and with so much at stake it feels like the gloves are finally off again. If only for a moment. Here was the first song I put on, on a fairly quiet night, tonight at Rosie's.
100 Mavericks # 70 Michael Stipe
On to today's.Not the later, flamboyantly 'out there' Stipe, with coloured stripes across his face or the current enormous beard. I have to say, I don't really go for that. He's no longer an 'outsider' artist, much as I think he'd like to be. But I still have a soft-spot for the early incarnation, chronically shy, (important in itself, and still highly unusual for someone fronting a rock band).behind enormous glasses, a mane of ringlets or, for the Fables album tour, bleaching his hair and writing 'dog' on his forehead.
Also for his lyrics and the manner of their delivery on those first R.E.M. records. The fact that they were initially an incoherent blur on Murmur was almost unprecedented. They weren't supposed to be pinned down - feeling, emotion and personal interpretation were all. That the listener if they chose to should make an investment too. It all had a great and lasting effect on me when I chanced upon the record, on its release in 1983 and felt for a long time that it was all my own, very personal discovery.
As Stipe opened up on the next couple of albums the persona and what he was writing about became more enticing. A vision of the South as a magical, mysterious place which I was already drawn to as a reader of McCullers, Faulkner and O'Connor novels. R.E.M. nailed something important, specific and odd in those first few records and Stipe was always very much at the creative heart of things.
CBGBs
Yesterday's maverick Klaus Nomi outside CBGB's in 1977 with Christopher Parker and Jim Jarmusch. Photo taken by David Godlis, one of the most important chroniclers of the scene.
Song of the Day # 870 The Hykkers
Seventies African funk grounded music of course is a pretty much bottomless well. Here's Nigeria's Hykkers from 1970. Very Sly Stone and with a title and threads to match.
Monday, June 6, 2016
The Heart of Rock & Soul # 951 The Beatles
I have a vested interest here, in terms of thinking this one of the greatest pieces of music recorded in the last hundred years for a number of reasons, but will leave it to Dave Marsh, not a hater on any level, (he sprinkles Beatles songs liberally throughout his countdown), to make his case for ranking it so lowly.
'Given my interest in rock and soul music as creative responses to the project of recording music in the studio, rather than making it before a live audience, it's perhaps surprising that I don't think more highly of the Beatles' greatest aural montage. But while I'd never deny its virtues, Strawberry Fields remains a record whose virtues are somewhat more conceptual than actual. After all, if montage per se is the issue then R.Dean Taylor's Indiana Wants Me means more in the history of Motown than many a Holland-Dozier-Holland dance classic.
In fact, montage matters only after more basic issues - a strong song and a big beat foremost among them - are taken care of. And while Strawberry Fields is one of the most stupendous feats anyone accomplished during the sixties, its virtues are not among my idea of the Verities. There's a beat here, all right, but amidst the cellos and calliopes and English horns, the tapes running backwards and out of phase, the aural gimmickry that astonished every teen with a tape deck, it doesn't seem lost so much as secondary. and while the lyric has enormous resonance if you're interested in Lennon's life (as who ain't?), there's no way it moves from the personal to the universal with anything like the grace of, say 'Help' or for that matter 'Don't Let Me Down'. unless you'd rather work a rebus than dance.
So why exactly does 'Strawberry Fields' have to be here? Because Lennon puts over his pretenses with such powerful singing that, for all its psychedelic obscurantism, the record acquires a pulse of its own. That is, his singing represents a total triumph of content over form, an injection of real life into a scenario that stands on the verge of 'MacArthur Park'.
100 Mavericks # 71 Klaus Nomi
That's three in a row for Morrissey favourites on this particular series. He'll be coming up a bit further on down the line. I was once told, by a law undergraduate, in my first year at university that I looked just like Klaus Nomi. I was a bit disconcerted at the time as I didn't really know who Nomi was, knew it wasn't really meant as a compliment and felt at the time, rightly or wrongly that I actually rather resembled Bob Dylan, circa 1966. I've posted a picture of myself from round about that time below the Nomi clip and leave it to the jury to decide and hope Charlie, I think that was his name, (he was a nice fellow), is doing well with his legal career, All this time later I'm not that displeased because Klaus Nomi is just great. As with Saturday's 'maverick', Jobriath, Nomi's life was cut short through AIDS in the early eighties. Remember him this way.
Song of the Day # 869 Angelic Milk
Great Pop Music, in a Shangri-Las, Phil Spector vein. From St. Petersburg. Just out!
Sunday, June 5, 2016
Covers # 67 Nico
Haven't heard this before. But I did tonight, courtesy of a long, drunken afternoon at Rosie's on a gorgeous, sunny afternoon. Courtesy of Milli, patron saint of that bar.
Songs Heard on the Radio # 130 Meilyr Jones
Including an inspired steal of Smoke on the Water from yet another talented, young Welsh artist Meilyr Jones and his new, if slightly confusingly titled album, 2013.
Cat's Eyes - Treasure House
It becomes more and more difficult for young, musically obsessed people to strike off in new directions. Take Cat's Eyes and their new, good though not great album Treasure House. They choose film soundtracks as their set off point, one of the few seams left in music for the obscurists where there is still plenty left to mine.
Drag, the pre-release single, posted ahead of the record is a good example of the album at its best. Very much in thrall to Phil Spector and the whole sixties girl group sound of doomed romance, full on melancholic atmospherics and dark romanticism.
This is a joint project between Horrors lead singer Faris Badwan and Italo-Canadian soprano and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Zeffira. Generally, and understandably it's when the latter takes centre-stage that the record is at its best. Badwan's voice is definitively weak by comparison. Never necessarily a stumbling block in Rock music, here the inevitable contrast between the quality of vocals on show lead to a definite imbalance between tracks.
This imbalance of course is generally a feature of soundtrack albums too and the record jumps all over the place in terms of the influences it draws on and the moods it hopes to convey. Nevertheless, it's mainly when Zeffira provides a still, glacial core to proceedings that Treasure House is at its best. Perhaps one to go to iTunes or YouTube for and cherry pick the record's most memorable moments, some of which I've posted here.
One for followers of David Lynch, Velvet Underground, Serge Gainsbourg, and cinephiles of course. Cat's Eyes certainly understand the drama of the moment when the lights dim and we all prepare to be transported to a world of imagination and uneasy dream.
Album Reviews # 66 The Dream Syndicate - The Days of Wine & Roses
The early eighties Paisley Underground Scene of guitar-led garage bands was a particular movement. Based around a set of like-minded and mutually supportive souls, looking more to the sixties than the seventies generally, it produced a bunch of good to middling records and perhaps one album that verges on greatness, the debut outing from The Dream Syndicate, The Days of Wine & Roses.
Built around the songwriting and vocals of Steve Wynn, but very much a group effort, it was recorded in a couple of days in late 1982 and released later in the same year. Very much indebted to the methedrine intensity of The Velvet Underground, there's even a slower Nico / Mo Tucker track, sung by bassist Kendra Smith. Wynn became increasingly defensive in response to the inevitable comparisons, (they did after all take their name from the original pre-Velvets grouping), nevertheless, it's certainly much more than mere tribute, sounding very much a West Coast record rather than an East Coast one, drenched as it is in Hollywood paranoia and cinematic angst, A series of well-crafted and impressively delivered songs of guitar adventuring.
The band draw on Punk and New Wave in addition to the sixties. Wynn and lead guitarist Karl Precoda duel in a manner not dissimilar to Television's Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd but their interplay is intentionally more ragged and open-ended, (and occasionally awash in feedback), than that band's recorded output and nods its head to Crazy Horse, Dylan and Creedence too, while The Fall were also an influence that Wynn has repeatedly mentioned in interview. He was also apparently an avid fan of Postcard Records, Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. He applies his own, half-spoken, drawled vocals, telling a set of tales of vague, existential dread of lives spinning irretrievably out of control, played out under the unrelenting Californian sun. In addition to all this, the album acts as something of a pre-cursor to Sonic Youth, who were just forming at the same point and preceded to take things to an altogether more unhinged extreme in the following decade.
The Days of Wine & Roses, seen on its own terms, is a pretty much perfect guitar album. Never quite as inspired as Reed, Verlaine or Young, Wynn's songs nevertheless operate highly efficiently in their slipstream and Precoda's playing particularly elevates the record to its own equisite heights.It very much sounds like the work of a band on the uneasy cusp of adulthood and laying down their own path.
Setting off with the creamy Tell Me When It's Over, each track on here keeps up the pace and occasionally, when the band really let rip, they set down a template that has barely been matched since. Wynn is an observer of life's strange tribulations, troubled, but also detached and occasionally the band lock into an inspired almost jazz like hazy, opiate groove.
Going at cross-purposes to much of the New Wave which was turning on mass towards synth-pop, The Days of Wine & Roses revisits and renews the glorious potential of guitar driven Rock and Roll. The Dream Syndicate were far from alone, at least in the States. The Replacements, R.E.M. Husker Du and The Minutemen along with countless others had embarked along similar roads but they were all very much underground concerns at this point, with the possible exception of R.E.M. who immediately began making chart inroads the same year with the release of Murmur.
The Days of Wine & Roses is a record with limited commercial appeal. The Velvet Underground, regardless of Wynn's protestations, the guiding influence of everything on here, were never meant to top the hit parade. Nevertheless, the record did open up a whole field of exciting possibilities which those with like-minded sensibilities leapt on, in Europe as well as the States.
When I personally started hearing this music myself, round about the time, when I was forming my own taste and starting to buy my first records, it was a revelation. The influence of Punk was beginning to dim, with 1982 and New Pop probably its last direct immediate impact on the mainstream. The Smiths emerged to offer an alternative route along with The Go-Betweens, Prefab Sprout, Aztec Camera, The Triffids and Lloyd Cole & the Commotions but there were also all of these American bands, though, again with the exception of R.E.M. they didn't gain much footing over here except for touring occasionally in small halls to appreciative audiences.
Several of the other Paisley Underground bands were worthy of note. The Rain Parade, True West, The Long Ryders and The Bangles for example. But it was The Dream Syndicate who most successfully built a bridge from the sixties to the eighties with this record. Sadly they never quite matched it, signing to A&M and worked with big-hitting producer Sandy Pearlman on their second album The Medicine Show. In comparison with their first outing, they worked painstakingly on the record's sound but despite having great moments, (it's a fine 'nearly' record, particularly the mighty John Coltrane's Stereo Blues), overall it failed to match the sustained, inspirational peaks of its successor. The Days of Wine & Roses remains the band's definitive statement. It still sounds quite wonderful today, more than thirty years on!
100 Mavericks # 72 Mary Margaret O'Hara
Another Morrissey favourite. She contributed her distinctive vocal warble to his November Spawns a Monster. Virtually inhabiting the term 'maverick', her 1988, self-titled debut gained acclaim and attention on its release but she never followed it up properly, apparently dissatisfied with the way it turned out. Still sings live and occasionally contributes to tribute albums and performs duets in addition to acting almost thirty years on.
The Heart of Rock & Soul # 952 Jan & Dean
I'll pass on this one, the B side to Drag City, but hats off to Dave Marsh for striking off on an original path.
Song(s) of the Day # 868 Jack
During the eighties the journalists at British music weekly Melody Maker persisted in championing a series of bands always most likely to be remembered for making decent student and bedsit music than for storming charts of any kind. Jack were a fine example of such a band. They barely generated a ripple commercially but twenty years on the records they made are still worth a listen, particularly first album Pioneer Soundtracks.
Fed by dog-eared paperbacks, the arty films of their formative years and introverted, outsider music down the decades, Scott Walker and Tindersticks spring most immediately to mind, Jack summoned up a particular, downbeat pessimism which appropriately went down well with the French, who after all pretty much invented this resigned poetic worldview.
Formed in 1992 around singer Anthony Reynolds and guitarist Matthew Scott, Jack sound as if they'd fit best kicking up a storm onstage in a book shop. They were only built for independent success probably but Tindersticks had already taken that particular niche for themselves. Nevertheless, if you're ever after glum romanticism on a rainy afternoon, Jack and Pioneer Soundtracks might tick the right boxes.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Songs About People # 196 Muhammed Ali
And fittingly on the day when one of the very greatest sportsmen of them all died, a song for Ali though Ali might not have been happry with him using his slave name..
100 Mavericks # 73 Jobriath
Defiantly odd but undoubtedly deeply talented American Glam Rock would be star of the early seventies who was on the receiving end of an enormous record company marketing push but his country wasn't ready for him. Much loved by Morrissey, he was gone less than ten years later, an early victim of the AIDS virus. His self-titled first record is particularly worth tracking down.
4th June 1976 The Sex Pistols
The Pistols perform at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Virtually everybody in the small audience is inspired to do something of their own as a direct result.
Song of the Day # 867 The Gentle Good
Welsh folk artists. This has touches of Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left and Bryter Later to it.
Friday, June 3, 2016
Dave Swarbruck 1941-2016
The fiddler for the finest English Folk band bar none.Only one song to play really.
Things Found on my Local's Jukebox # 132 Sailor
Sailor in 1976. Ripping off Roxy Music. Still, they could have made more of this song by making it a minute and a half longer and extending the piano riff.
The Heart of Rock & Soul # 954 The Chi-Lites
And in a similar vein...
'Chicago's answer to Give Peace a Chance. One of the first big synthesizer-fed dance numbers, a nice twist on post Norman Whitfield harmonies and though the rhetoric is dated (and surprisingly reactionary in spots - i.e., 'So whatever you got, just be glad you got it'), the proposition stands as fundamentally correct. Plus there's no Yoko on the B side.'
3rd June 1942 Curtis Mayfield
It's another big birthday day today. You've got Allen Ginsberg, Ian Hunter, Michael Clarke, Micky Finn and Suzi Quatro. But you get Curtis. One of the absolute greats. I was fortunate enough to see him play, shortly before the tragic stage accident that eventually led to his too early death.
100 Mavericks # 74 Bo Diddley
Bo of course. Just ask Mo Tucker.
Song(s) of the Day # 866 Shintaro Sakomoto
'Ersatz lounge pop' as Pitchfork describes it. Shintaro Sakamoto is something of a Japanese Beck and his most recent album is a treasure trove. Here are just two selections to prove the point.
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Three Years Old and Rising - Things I've Learned
I'm proud of reaching this small, personal milestone, and am now looking towards five as the next, immediate one. Here are a few things I've picked up along the way.
1. Write often. I started with the idea of reviewing albums that I loved but it all became too unwieldy. Now I make sure I post something every day and it feels like it has a more natural flow.
2. You'll never get to the bottom of music or stop discovering things that you love. Writing this, and searching for things to post has broadened my taste incredibly and taken me away from falling back always on the stuff I first loved in my formative decade of the eighties.
3. Do it for yourself. I don't advertise the blog much and get little support apart from a select few who post on here. It is what it is. I like doing it so I'll carry on because it's achieved a natural, habitual momentum of its own.
4. Do what you want, make it your own thing. Personal music blogs are a space where there are no rules and you can set your own. They're a small, wonderful gift to the trainspotters among us.
5. If you're going to write at length, write about what you know. I've realised through this for example that I don't really write very well about Black music, much as I love it.
6. Try not to be pretentious. I'm not quite sure what that is always, but I try not to be. Don't pretend your a music journalist. Try to write from the heart. All of these are vague maxims but I at least think I know what I mean.
7. The importance of memory in all this Coming upon that Nick Cave quote that's the tagline at the top of the page was a small turning point for me. It's quite remarkable and slightly indescribable what hearing a song or record that was important to you in the past will do to you.
8. Focus on what you like if you can. Seeing the line up of Glastonbury this year and checking things I wasn't aware of the other day, brought me to the realisation of exactly what an enormous ocean of quite meaningless, bland, mainstream bilge there is out there. Just an opinion! Best to not worry about it and concentrate on what you do appreciate as there is still more than plenty.
9. Set yourself manageable targets that mean you will think about things and subsequently write more. I do this myself via finite and non-finite related series.
10. Keep posting!
Three Years Old and Rising!
It's now three years to the day that I started this blog. Here's my first post, from June 2nd 2013.
'I suppose to start a blog you need a concept. I have a very simple one (though I wouldn't dare suggest it to be original in any respect) and am going to try to go with it to see where it takes me. The concept has been partly inspired by an event I've been attending at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle these last two years hosted by a very good bloke called MrDrayton http://meladdo.blogspot.co.uk/ Mr Drayton's concept is simple too. He plays a classic record on vinyl, uninterrupted from start to finish accompanied by a slideshow of photographs and art related to the artist/band we are listenng to. This is followed by a quiz and drink fuelled discussion of what we've heard. It's not academic, or muso, just enormous fun and I've formed some good friendships with similarly minded souls through it. It has attracted a band of almost messianic devotees while also bring down a whole range of newcomers for specific evenings drawn in by the appeal of a particular album. It's invariably one of the highlights of my week and numerous others would say the same.
My discovery of these evenings coincided for me with moving in to a new flat in Newcastle and being reunited with my record collection after having to banish them for the best part of fifteen years to my parents' attic while I lived an itinerant, drifting life abroad as a teacher and trainer in Europe. During this time I hauled great piles of CDs along with me but the experience was nothing like the rich relationship I have again with music now thanks to a small investment in turntable, stylus, amp, cables, speakers and precious vinyl.
I'm also fortunate (or perhaps this isn't coincidental at all), that my rediscovery of this unbeatable concept in that my epiphany has coincided with a rediscovery in society as a whole of the joys of this format, a rejection of processed, packaged ipad vision of the modern hipster and return to listening to music as it was originally intended to be listened to by the artists that created it - in entirity and in sequence. Newcastle's few remaining record stores are placing increasing emphasis on their vinyl racks and stock and the range of newly released and second hand records and the wide eyed enthusiasm of those who work there for it is a joy to behold. Long may it continue.
To finally get round to the concept I'm proposing for this blog.I'm going to focus on selected records in my collection one at a time, sit through them from start to finish and post my feelings and reflections on them, sometimes entwined with personal memories from when I listened to them first and links to related things which might interest others. Hardly genius! This will be the sole focus of my writing. * Certainly not planning to publish my diaries.Hopefully I'll master the intracisies of blogging while I do so. Can't be that difficult! So apologies for any typos, mis-spellings and I hope there'll be something along the way that you appreciate and would like to comment upon. Here goes... launched on the sea of blog!
* Post Script (added a few months later). I've broken my pledge and will make other posts not solely reviews of my record collection. Always music related and generally inspired by the reviews I'll write.'
'I suppose to start a blog you need a concept. I have a very simple one (though I wouldn't dare suggest it to be original in any respect) and am going to try to go with it to see where it takes me. The concept has been partly inspired by an event I've been attending at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle these last two years hosted by a very good bloke called MrDrayton http://meladdo.blogspot.co.uk/ Mr Drayton's concept is simple too. He plays a classic record on vinyl, uninterrupted from start to finish accompanied by a slideshow of photographs and art related to the artist/band we are listenng to. This is followed by a quiz and drink fuelled discussion of what we've heard. It's not academic, or muso, just enormous fun and I've formed some good friendships with similarly minded souls through it. It has attracted a band of almost messianic devotees while also bring down a whole range of newcomers for specific evenings drawn in by the appeal of a particular album. It's invariably one of the highlights of my week and numerous others would say the same.
My discovery of these evenings coincided for me with moving in to a new flat in Newcastle and being reunited with my record collection after having to banish them for the best part of fifteen years to my parents' attic while I lived an itinerant, drifting life abroad as a teacher and trainer in Europe. During this time I hauled great piles of CDs along with me but the experience was nothing like the rich relationship I have again with music now thanks to a small investment in turntable, stylus, amp, cables, speakers and precious vinyl.
I'm also fortunate (or perhaps this isn't coincidental at all), that my rediscovery of this unbeatable concept in that my epiphany has coincided with a rediscovery in society as a whole of the joys of this format, a rejection of processed, packaged ipad vision of the modern hipster and return to listening to music as it was originally intended to be listened to by the artists that created it - in entirity and in sequence. Newcastle's few remaining record stores are placing increasing emphasis on their vinyl racks and stock and the range of newly released and second hand records and the wide eyed enthusiasm of those who work there for it is a joy to behold. Long may it continue.
To finally get round to the concept I'm proposing for this blog.I'm going to focus on selected records in my collection one at a time, sit through them from start to finish and post my feelings and reflections on them, sometimes entwined with personal memories from when I listened to them first and links to related things which might interest others. Hardly genius! This will be the sole focus of my writing. * Certainly not planning to publish my diaries.Hopefully I'll master the intracisies of blogging while I do so. Can't be that difficult! So apologies for any typos, mis-spellings and I hope there'll be something along the way that you appreciate and would like to comment upon. Here goes... launched on the sea of blog!
* Post Script (added a few months later). I've broken my pledge and will make other posts not solely reviews of my record collection. Always music related and generally inspired by the reviews I'll write.'
100 Mavericks # 75 Beck
Talking of Beck. One of the very few 'moderns' to really cut it. Though, despite all of the truly great things he's done since, he might never have surpassed his extraordinary first statement.
Song of the Day # 865 Scott 4
A fairly minor British combo from the late nineties at least commercially if not critically but what a great couple of songs. Named after a Scott Walker solo record, his fourth coincidentally, and generally thought of as his best.
Melody Maker loved them. There was a definite Beck influence there, particularly in their first single Deutsche Record LP, which I can't find a direct link to but is here if you'd like to hear it. The sound and smells of London in the late nineties.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
June
At my local Year of the Cat came on the jukebox automatically and sounded just great. So here's another Al Stewart about the last day of June on the first day of June.
100 Mavericks # 76 Mark E. Smith
A friend of McCulloch's and just above him in this countdown. Here's one of their greatest songs and pretty much their manifesto as well as one of the greatest set of Rock and Roll lyrics ever written. A true Faustian pact and set of rules to live by. Outside the system they were born into and going that way for life, if they can make it. I just have a live version to post here. Go to Dragnet for the original document.
''Shhhh
We are private detectives onward back from a musical pilgrimage
We work under the name of the Fall.
Who would suspect this?
It is too obvious.
Our office is secluded.
Those there to suspect
Would not see the wood for the trees
We were six like dice but we're back to five
Up here in the North there are no wage packet jobs for us
Thank Christ
While young married couples discuss the poverties
Of their self-built traps
And the junior clergy demand more cash
We spit in their plate and wait for the ice to melt
I must create a new regime
Or live by another man's
Before the moon falls
I must create a new scheme
And get out of others' hands
Before the moon falls
I could use some pure criminals
And get my hands on some royalties
Before the moon falls
A problem of this new scheme
Is answering obscene phone calls
Before the moon falls
Gotta stop drifting around
Kill this ugly duckling
We've got the power
And must not misuse it
Cos life is short and full of thought
I use the power
And will forever end this reign of terror
Before the moon falls
Before the tide subsides
Before the moon falls for the fifth time
Before The Fall swoons'
Song of the Day # 864 The Courteneers
Good, old but new punk sounding stuff from a few years back. Courtesy of a quiet night at Rosie's. Barman Sean's selection.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
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