And to follow that up, here's a link to a BBC documentary about the recording of Towers of London for Black Sea in 1980. And here's the song that resulted.
'Every time I go to London. Go on a tubeway, or go across a bridge or something, I never think about what a nice scene or whatever. I always think about the people who put it up in the first place. I love the old Brunel-ly type pictures of people putting a railway together very clean lines, and a big clean stone, teethed in railway lines with the ultimate in technology puffing along it. I find all that very exciting. But nobody seems to thing about all the people who did it. Imported navvies and nothing short of slightly paid slaves. So I thought I'd write a song with a bit of a dreamy feel to it. It ended up sounding rather sixties more than dreamy but still the sixties you can only remember in dream 'cos they're not here anymore. It's a kind of a dreamy, homage to the people who put it all up song...'
There's a book about Andy Partridge just out at the minute where he discusses his body of work and individual songs that he's written. The writer consistently records his own belief in Partridge's genius. I'm not personally convinced of this, it's such a subjective term anyway, but do agree to Partridge's considerable and very English talent. XTC produced any number of great songs from both Partridge and Colin Moulding to chuck into the pen of those already recorded by The Beatles and The Kinks.
Partridge was once described by Nick Kent as a grown up version of Piggy from Lord of the Flies a book which in Partridge's case Piggy won. His songs speak of his ability to maintain his innocence and write from that perspective. Rock and Roll's 'child man'. Here he is talking about himself in an NME interview from 1980.
'I don't know how to put it without boasting, but I think I'm quite mature and intelligent. At time, I've kept the things I appreciated as a kid in my head. I think a lot of people lose that. And they lose a big part of their personality. I still love toys.'
'Time is like a dream. And now for a time you are mine...'
In 1994 Morrissey got together with one of his heroes, Siouxsie Sioux to record a duet. They chose to do Timi Yuro's Interlude. Naturally, they didn't get along, but they certainly can't be criticised in terms of their taste. Yuro is one of the great go-to artists for the dramatically romantically inclined. Yuro's original recording was for a soundtrack for the 1968 film of the same name, starring Oskar Werner, Barbara Ferris and Donald Sutherland and also featuring John Cleese and Derek Jacobi in minor roles.
I guess this falls under the banner of Jazz if you had to label it. Whatever, it is, its quite remarkable. The second album from a trio of musicians who are also the second set of artists I've posted today who hail from Norwich, following Beth Orton's lead earlier on in the day.
Floa is generally familiar, with touches of the flavour Monk, Mingus and other Jazz greats, but it's also appealingly creative and distinctive too. This is mostly on YouTube and it's on Spotify too. Go get it!
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I was directed here, as with others of my post by the wonderful Inkwell record shop in York, so thanks to them for the recommendation.
And as for that Beth Orton record, it's just great. Harking back to the initial burst of Trailer Park, marrying the inspirations of folk and the clubbing scene, it'll probably only be those of post-thirties generations that will be impelled to dance around their kitchens and living rooms to this but I have no doubt it will happen.
I was never really part of the nineties dance culture that fed in to Orton's music like some new Age of Aquarius but I do remember just how good Trailer Park sounded when it came out and how it acted as the soundtrack to much of a year that I spent in Brighton in the winter of 1997 and spring of 1998. Kidsticks has much of the same vim, naturally tempered by twenty years of experience and the occasion of motherhood. It's mature and ingrained in life's inevitable lessons and all the better for that.
I'm listening through to it now as I type and somehow it has the cocksure assurance and momentum by Track Four that you feel sure it's not getting to let you down. It's heartening when an artist comes back a couple of decades down the line with work that revives and renews the spirit of what made them so interesting and refreshing when they first came along while putting down something entirely fresh and new that speaks long and loud for itself at the same time. I'm not going to win hipster badges for endorsing Beth Orton in 2016, but hey, I'm on the wrong side of fifty which is probably too old to be wearing badges of any description or looking for claps on the shoulder for having impeccable, cutting edge taste. Kidsticks is just wonderful and Beth will soundtrack my summer in 2016, just as she did in 1998.
Bobbie Gentry deserves at least one song dedicated to her. One of the absolute iconic figures. So here's a fine tribute from Beth Orton, (strangely spelling Bobbie's first name wrong, at least below), which lifts the string sound and some of the key changes to Ode to Billie Joe along the way. Beth meanwhile, has her new album Kidsticks, out just now.
Someone who makes a quite full-on, unabashed claim for inclusion in this particular category and has done throughout his entire career. Whether you find it all rather mannered, (which it irrefutably is), and I have done rather a lot over the years, he gets Peter Buck's vote and ultimately that's good enough for me so he's getting mine here. I'm certainly quite partial to the Soft Boys, who definitely deserve kudos for going utterly against the prevailing grain during their time in addition to their wonderful guitar sound, something Hitchcock never quite recaptured in his solo years. Plus he's sure to make even the most cynical smile at some point along the line. Here's one of the very best songs he's written.
File next to Camera Obscura in the dreamy, melodic indie guitar pop folder. Vancouver's Twin River are highly reminiscent of that band vocally and pretty much in every other department. Still, they know their way round a melody. Here's a song from their forthcoming, second album.
'What I'm reading now, and it's just great. A historical and cultural investigation into a particular sensibility taking in all the great writers, artists and musicians who have championed a gentler way of doing things. Taking in Walt Disney, Anne Frank, J.D.Salinger, Truman Capote, Jean Seberg, Jonathan Richman, Edwyn Collins, Morrissey, Wes Anderson and so on. Every sensitive icon you could possibly want. Wonderfully written and encyclopedic in its scope, it's sure to act as the source for a lot of the music I'll post here over the coming months.'
I first wrote this about Twee just yesterday and a day later I'm through it, partly owing to a long train journey, but partly because it utterly enthralled me until its denouement. On Pop Culture, encompassing mostly music, television, film and fashion as its title suggests, Spitz is quite excellent, both in terms of his choice of key players who have played their part in contributing and shaping the sensibility and in assessing exactly what they added to the construct. The chapters on Richman, Collins, Morrissey, Cobain and Murdoch and the bands they led are original, perceptive and hugely pleasurable for anyone who treasures these people's records. Me for starters!
From this point on, one hundred pages from its end destination I found my attention began to wander and I even resorted to skipping paragraphs and sometimes pages. Partly because Spitz's main focus moved from music to film, the internet, the technological revolution we've all experienced in the last twenty years and how they inform the Twee phenomenon he was at pains to define. The focus here becomes relentlessly American, where it hasn't been before with Spitz jumping with some authority from New York to the UK over the preceding five decades. Boston also gets a look in with Richman and the Modern Lovers but according to his account Twee remains a predominantly East Coast concern in the States until it spreads nationwide after the millennium, much as punk had spread accross the country from its initial CBGB's base in the eighties.
As for the what goes on in the remainder of the book, with the exception of Wes Anderson, who I do think is, and will continue to be seen as an important figure, I was either unfamiliar with many of the players or cultural products he was discussing or, for example with the films Garden Stone and Juno, I feel that despite their basic enjoyableness, comment on an idea that is being set in stone, put on display like an exhibit behind glass. Something is just not nearly as exciting as it was. A basic process of passivity and consumption is setting in. Because so much of the best stuff in this tradition has been produced already and now it's most of all about collecting, refining, complementing in the minutest detail and most of all revering the canon. Or else, if there is an act of creation going on aping and mirroring what has gone before in ever diminishing circles
So while Spitz makes a splendid case in defining the idea of Twee, he's on shakier ground when attempting to justify using the term Revolution in relation to it. While I applaud the set of records and related culture that he extols, (it's pretty much me to a large extent, or certainly a sizable proportion of me), he does, and this is not a direct criticism of his book per se, make you yearn for more of the sheer creative, engaged energy that he describes in the first two thirds of the book.
One of a raft of 'death discs' recorded in the early to mid-sixties. This one was banned by the BBC as a result of belonging in that category which probably denied it the chart success it would have achieved and deserved, as it's a great single. Sylvan's only record, but she went on to co-write a host of hits, including Tom Jones' Delilah as well as the theme tune to the 1972 series of Morecombe & Wise.
And while we're here... Perry himself should probably be on the maverick countdown too, but of course I'm making that up as I go along so we'll have to see how things turns out!
Quite definitely not for everyone, but in terms of pushing the boat out, Momus is definitely up there. There's more being said and attempted in single songs of his than many manage in entire careers. Still pouring out material three decades on, his website is here and speaks of someone utterly committed to a singular, dark, narcissistic comic vision. When he first appeared in the eighties and put out his first records on Creation he was so far from the script that everybody else was reading from that the reaction was general bemusement. But ridicule is nothing to be scared off. He's stuck, remarkably to his guns. Hats off to him!
In addition to his acting, Anthony Perkins, (here Tony), also had a singing career. This was an American Top 40 hit for him in 1958 a few months after Nick Noble had had similar success with the original. Elvis kitsched it up on the Blue Hawaii soundtrack, but this is better, particularly as we now know Perkins was shortly off to Bates Motel. Something of a precursor in that respect to The Doors' Moonlight Drive.
Immersed as I am in this Twee book, I'll use the opportunity to re-post this review from last June of one of the ultimate Twee albums, The Left Banke's first album, a major source of Stuart Murdoch and Belle & Sebastian's founding inspiration.
'This is a vinyl purchaser's story. I'm down south for a family get together this week as my mother has had a celebration for her eightieth birthday. The party for this took place yesterday in Canterbury. A good time was had by all though I don't imagine that you're taking notes. All in all a fairly special experience in the best sense of the word the kind that triggers memory and emotional duct blood-flow in all kinds of ways you never quite expect. Today, a good part of the clan gathered again for lunch and a walk around Whitstable, fifteen minutes drive down the road on the coast where my brother's family who live in Miami have a holiday house.
After lunch, we wandered down the beach. A beautiful, sunlit day. Of course, being the person that I am, which this blog attests to, half my mind was wondering if we were likely to chance upon a record shop as we ambled across pebbles and took ice creams. On the way back we made our way past Whitstable's impressive selection of second hand and gift shops. The place has gentrified in a good way over the past fifteen years as it's been soaked into the overflow of London and the south east's ever accumulating wealth and reach.
A stone's throw away from home I saw what I'd been looking for. A collector's shop with the right kind of records on display in the window. Those who might read this, who care about this kind of thing, will know what I mean. Having eventually found the entrance to the place, in a side door, my oldest American nephew Ben, (who is fast-developing his own interest in such things), and I had a look through the well organised racks of records there.
There was plenty of good stuff. Reasonably priced. But nothing that really grabbed me. And then halfway down the second rack I came upon this album. I kind of stopped in my tracks because I'm well enough versed in stuff like this to know when I chance upon something pretty unusual. What appeared to be an original version of the first Left Banke record. The one named after their two best known songs, Pretty Ballerina and Walk Away Renee, both tracks placed not insignificantly on track one of Side 1 and Side 2 respectively as well as sharing the title of the record itself. The one that taught Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian a great deal of what he needed to know when first he decided to embark upon a career in music.
I took it to the record shop owner who was perched behind the counter, to make the basic inquiries. The album had a couple of small stickers on it. 'Original Issue! Plays Fine!'. and '£29.99'. My initial feeling was that if the first statement was correct then the price was by no means unreasonable. The brief conversation we had was enough for me. Like all proper record shop people he was first and foremost a music fan.
He shared my surprise at the fact that he even had the album. This kind of psychedelic wave cultish stuff barely made it to British shores in the late sixties, never mind landing up on a shelf for sale in decent condition almost fifty years later. He mentioned Love, the Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Chocolate Watchband as particular favourites of his. All of this stuff strangely seals a deal. It was clear that a trip to the nearest cash-point was required and proper.
It's difficult to describe the strange sense of anxiety I felt when going to get the money needed, returning to exchange it for the record and how I've been in the couple of hours since before getting round to writing this. This might be something quite peculiar to record buyers although perhaps it's a fluttery sensation that might also be understood by those who amass antiques or classic cars, or mechanical engines, or first edition books .There's a slight twinge of guilt involved but also a realisation that you actually had little choice in the matter. That the object and you were supposed to be together.
Anyway, it's mine, and I should imagine and hope always will be. The album itself is not quite a masterpiece, no matter what anyone tells you, perhaps a minor one and certainly a grower. What makes it most noticeable, is the songwriting of main man Michael Brown, who died just recently, and the unquestionably baroque and crafted arrangement of the songs. Also of course its influence. Most notably Belle & Sebastian, Badly Drawn Boy and a whole generation of sensitive strummers with fringes, from the eighties onwards. It sounds strangely like one of the first indie records now. Time changes albums into something they never were when first released.
Peculiarly also, both the album's best known tracks were almost love letters from Brown to the remarkably named Renee Fladen-Kamm, who at that point was the girlfriend of bassist Tom Finn. She's described on the pages of Wikipedia as a free spirited blond.There's something of this unrequited loneliness, heartbreak and longing in the sound of the record and also a lack of true closeness in the playing of the musicians themselves, (they disbanded shortly after these recordings were made and were replaced by backing musicians) that actually seems to haunt the record itself. It's a 'nearly' record. But at the same time one of the great ones.
Elsewhere, it's the ghost of The Beatles influence that casts as great a shadow as Bach on things that provides the album's most obvious flaws. Things get better the further away it moves from them but occasionally the unmistakable combination of the arrangement of harmonies and the hoarse full-throated howl of Martin Caro on certain tracks gives you the uncanny sensation that Lennon has barged his way through to the mic and McCartney and Harrison have gathered behind him in support.Check out last track Lazy Day, if you don't believe me.
Still, I'm by know means complaining. Have I said before that it's mine? My precious! It'll undoubtedly be a record I return to and bond with over time and Walk Away Renee, in particular is an exquisite, pocket masterpiece of compressed emotion. Much else here falls not far short of that. The delicacy and sensitivity of the songs, the compact, simplicity of the arrangements and the knowledge that I'm in possession of an original object of such simple beauty all mean that today was a good day. And not of course just because I bought the record but equally because of the memories, company, scenery and emotions that accompanied my purchase of it. Listening to it over future months and years will no doubt send me spiraling back through time and space to that point. To the weekend of my mother's eightieth birthday party. And no, I don't think I'm being fanciful. This is the way these things actually work!'
Starting here, with one of the avatars of Twee. All this stuff is almost formalised to the point of cliche now but it's incredible looking back twenty years or now to see how fully formed Belle & Sebastian were in terms of their vision when they first appeared. Songs and lifestyle options for the awkward and shy who had been temporarily abandoned for a few years when The Smiths split. Here's a passage from Twee which I posted about just below this on the subject of Murdoch.
'Handsome pale and vastly talented, Murdoch is a Gen Twee icon and one of those courageous, sensitive, perhaps too-smart figures we will chronicle farther along in these pages. In the mid-1990s the Glaswegian dreamer was recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome and had to drop out of school and literally move back into his childhood bedroom. 'When you're down and out what you want is escapism,' Murdoch told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in 2005. 'At the period of time there was a core of groups that I listened to that took me somewhere else. And then I got into certain filmmakers as well. But then there reached a point where I wanted more escapism and more fantasy, and that's when I started to invent it for myself.'
He more than anyone else in music nailed this perspective and way of looking at life from a permanently introspective, outsider slant. Actually, highly organised and efficient, despite their apparent, wilful amateurism and also highly successful in terms of reaching out to the people they wanted to. When I went to New York in 2001 it was clear from just walking around the arty/ indie parts of the city that Belle & Sebastian were the band, articulating something that so many young hipsters wanted to buy into in terms of their lifestyle choices. They were a band that people had been waiting for, almost without knowing it. They chimed with their times.
Murdoch and Belle have charted out a stately and sustained career that belies their definitive weakness of their music. They're actually quite steely and determined. Murdoch distilled all that was great about Love, The Left Banke the quieter Velvet Underground, Orange Juice, Felt and The Smiths and the iconography associated with them all and the band ran with it over countless wonderful albums and singles over the next two decades. Murdoch was always at the very core of things. The maverick with a Protestant work ethic *.
*I can't actually verify that Murdoch's a Protestant but his Christian beliefs are fairly well documented.
What I'm reading now, and it's just great. A historical and cultural investigation into a particular sensibility taking in all the great writers, artists and musicians who have championed a gentler way of doing things. Taking in Walt Disney, Anne Frank, J.D.Salinger, Truman Capote, Jean Seberg, Jonathan Richman, Edwyn Collins, Morrissey, Wes Anderson and so on. Every sensitive icon you could possibly want. Wonderfully written and encyclopedic in its scope, it's sure to act as the source for a lot of the music I'll post here over the coming months.
At the end of another day, discussing life and politics, sport, fighting and art, circulating back to the best pub in Newcastle that I've found. This song went on at the jukebox in Rosie's, and sounded just great!
And while we're on a funky tip. Sometimes just surfing down the sidebar of the YouTube page can reap dividends. Janko Nilovic, a Montenegrin pianist, poet and composer. based in France for most of his life.
Bay Area Soul Man. Released three singles during his career, all of them quite excellent and then pretty much vanished from the map for a couple of decades. All of his records have something otherworldly about them. They're spacey and eclectic, with something of the aura of fifties doo wop to them. In the man's own words,'You can hear a bit of everything. There's a little jazz and a little soul. They say if you black you supposed to have soul. I got Latin flavor in me so there's some Latin in it. Definitely got the Blues in it. I sound kinda' country but I grew up in the Bay Area.'
There's also Sly, Al Green and James Brown, the most obvious reference points. In Legs, posted below he gobbles like Screaming Jay Hawkins and almost seems to prefigure Prince on terms of the sheer strut on below. Heavily be-ringed and with a fifties quiff he cut an utterly distinctive figure. Reputed to be a pimp and engaged in somewhat shady dealings though he always remained cagey on the matter. His music is deep and resonant and quite magnificent. He died three years back, still having not quite received his due. Understandably for a man who only released three singles during the peak of his career, but the 2005 anthology Let My People Go is well worth tracking down.
Desperado, perhaps The Eagles best, most moment though also perhaps best realised in cover versions. The Langley Schools Music Project did a particularly affecting take on it. Also Susan Raye, a protege of Buck Owens who produced and sang with her.
'Holloway made her mark at Motown in a variety of ways, most noticeably by being the only non-Detroit artist of its early heyday. She came from California and this breathy, string-laden ballad has some of the grainy and husky qualities of Jackie DeShannon's pop hits of the same period. But Every Little Bit Hurts is more reminiscent of the pop-soul set pieces Burt Bacharach and Hal David were constructing for Dionne Warwick in those years. Which also marks Holloway as the first really adult Motown artist, an impression reinforced by her use of Four Preps accompanist Lincoln Mayorga on piano. Composer Ed Cobb was also in the Preps, though he rejected maturity in favor of creating the Standells Dirty Water.
And from that fertile scene to another, the first mention in this particular countdown of a representative of perhaps the most individualistic movement of all, New York's CBGB's in the mid-seventies. Oddball, geek and nerd, but always intensely artistic, The Artistics was their original name before they switched to Talking Heads. Those first four albums ares great statements about the huge strangeness of life, how we're pressured and obliged to fit in and conform and the simmering contradictory tensions bubbling all the time within us all.
From one of the most fertile music scenes of all, the Flying Nun set of independent, guitar driven groups of the eighties and nineties which is periodically revisited here. Bird Nest Roy's sound is a fairly typical Byrds inspired melodic swirl. Hailing from Auckland rather than Dunedin where most of the movement's most important bands hailed from, that slight geographical distance shows in the music and a slightly different mix of similar ingredients. They reached some small, inspired peaks.
Often dreamy, indie jangling, occasionally they turn slightly darker with echoes of Post Punk and the sound of the bleaker moments of The Clean and The Chills.Never really reinventing the wheel they have a nevertheless diverting sound. Recently re-released in the form of a Flying Nun compilation: Bird Nest Roys.
A true visionary in many respects. A documenter of working class English life and mental health issues and a man who obviously suffered in both respects. Was he ever truly considered as the next lead singer of The Doors after Morrison passed? We'll probably never know. Still uncomfortably close to the knuckle. And that's the way he'd want it!
There are certain countries and scenes that I feel I could begin to post from and almost never come to an end. Brazil and France come to mind and also Japan. I perused and ordered Julian Cope's Japrocksampler a couple of days ago, all the while listening to some of the extraodinary bands from the sixties and seventies that he writes about. Speed, Glue & Shiki among the most remarkable, and frankly unbelievable of them all, but yes they actually did exist.Perhaps best to leave Cope to write say more about them in his quite inimitable way.
'Speed, Glue & Shinki ... now, there's a name to
conjure with. Talk about wearing your influences on your sleeve, this lot named
their band after their drug habits. Put crudely and succinctly, which is the
only way to talk about anything to do with this bunch, Speed, Glue & Shinki
were a drug-addled early-'70s Japanese free-blues power trio whose eulogies to
snorting speed, shooting heroin, taking marijuana and sniffing paint thinners
and Marusan Pro Bond glue manifested in such songs as 'Sniffing &
Snorting', 'Stoned out of My Mind' and their debut single 'Mr Walking Drugstore
Man', which concluded with the unaccompanied voice of the singer hissing at his
audience: 'Hey, d'you wanna buy some speed? I mean ... d'you wanna buy some
speed?'
'Starting as they meant to go on, or what? Indeed, with just a few
notable exceptions (degraded sex, glimpses of nirvana, alcoholic oblivion)
there are only three recurring song themes that emerge from Speed, Glue &
Shinki's entire canon of work, namely: 1) I'm taking too many drugs; 2) the Man
is a Bitch so I'm taking too many drugs; and 3) my Bitch is a Man so I'm taking
too many drugs. Moreover, Speed, Glue & Shinki's overall sound was the
sloppiest and most unrestrained garage noise of its time, bringing forth an
Ur-klang of extremely abrasive and repulsively degraded rock'n'roll riffs
played in the grindingly trudgeful style of the Move's 'Brontosaurus' and 'When
Alice Comes Back to the Farm' via the Beatles' 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)'.
With the single exception of the almighty land almightily underrated) Leigh
Stephens-period Blue Cheer, heavy blues never lent itself much to free rock
until Speed, Glue & Shinki came along three years later and reduced the
blues' three chords to just one, snottily flouting all of the tense white boys'
rules so painstakingly amassed by the likes of Mountain's Leslie West and
Cream's Eric Clapton. Indeed, comparing Speed, Glue & Shinki to heavy
contemporaries such as Mountain and Cream is pointless because, whereas those
guys - even at their lowest ebb - at least always remembered to repeat their
riffs the same every time, Speed, Glue & Shinki were far too wayward and,
urn, individual to muster up such consistencies.
And seeing as they were
powered by a Filipino singing drummer with a bad amphetamine habit and a
propensity for setting his kit on fire with paraffin, inconsistency became the
band's byword, their benchmark, their modus operandi, their raison
d'être, as the ecstatically disjointed moves of their brilliant but erratic
percussion powerhouse informed the rest of the band and everyone who worked for
them. It was as though even the recording technicians involved with the band
became temporarily zombified with that same inconsistency malaise, recovering
only long after the session was over. A typical Speed, Glue & Shinki track
would not only speed up and slow down radically during the same song, but it
could also become extremely loud at points, tailing off just when you least
needed such an effect. If ex-Iguanas drummer Iggy Pop had remained behind the
drums when he became lead singer of the Stooges, you'd probably have already
heard something close to Speed, Glue & Shinki.
But then, even 5'1"
Iggy would have fitted in with the Japanese rock'n'roll scene better than these
barbarians. For, in a society where 5'7" is considered tall for a guy,
these three rizla-thin loons were each well over six feet tall. Yup, these Joey
Ramones wuz born to stand out. There's a town in southern Spain which shoulda
been the home of Speed, Glue & Shinki. It's called Moron de la Frontera,
and these guys were truly morons at the frontier of rock'n'roll. '
The only representative from those Brit Pop times. Luke Haines, the first on the list doesn't really count. In retrospect, much of the music from that period was pretty conservative at best. But Jarvis deserves a place at the table, for his contributions as a person just as much as the music he was a part of. His 'N Hers, Different Class and This Is Hardcore, still sound to me like a better depiction of Britain and all its oddities and simmering tensions than anything that Martin Amis generally offered.
'We can't help it. We're so thick we can't think ...'
