An old style Englishman from a bygone age.
Friday, June 24, 2016
Song of the Day # 887 Flavor Crystals
I wake up to find the country changed and in a dreadful way. Strangely, I'm living in a small island within my own country that didn't want to do that. Wonder how long it will take for those who have changed it to realise this fact.
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Things Found on my Local's Jukebox # 135 The Smiths
'We cannot cling to the old dreams anymore. No we cannot cling to those dreams...'
100 Mavericks # 54 Jeffrey Lee Pierce
And appropriately after last night's activities, onward with this series to Jeffrey Lee. A troubled soul to say the least and perhaps not one to invite home to meet your mother but certainly a considerable talent. Gun Club were true trailblazers and never got the attention and success they deserved but that was largely because of Jeffrey's uncompromising and self-destructive personality. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine The Pixies for one existing without them. He also clearly lived the life his pained dark, poetic and often quite inspired songs speak of.
Kid Congo & the Pink Monkey Birds
Kid Congo and his Pink Monkeys were wonderful, as I'd suspected they would be at The Cluny in Newcastle last night. I shook the great man's hand as he was tuning up and muttered something incomprehensible about Blondie's first album which I'd been listening to non-stop the previous couple of days. Sensibly, he completely ignored me. He was wearing a fur-lined cape, an ill fitting but splendid suit and a dramatically coloured shirt and tie. The stuff of legends though he's spent so much of his life playing support to great frontmen, namely Jeffry Lee Pierce, Lux Interior and Nick Cave. Frankly, given the calibre of these people it's understandable but he deserves his time in the spotlight even if he gets less media attention now than he did during his time in those bands.
I retreated to the bar and the friend and pint I'd left there but pretty soon the music led me to desert him to return to the front of the stage to bury myself in loud amplified noise. It's good to be in the company of people playing who understand the key to this kind of thing. Rootsy, raw, sexy and funny guitar driven Rock and Roll that makes you glad to be alive. That's what I got!
I'm looking up and God is saying 'What are you gonna do?' I'm looking up and I'm crying, 'I thought it was up to you.'
I also got this.
Covers # 75 The Divine Comedy
So while we're here, here's his cover of one of the most remarkable songs of all. The original was by The Associates, one of the most remarkable bands. Hannon actually makes a pretty good job of it, sensibly not attempting to make an attempt at Billy Mackenzie's peerless vocal acrobats and bringing in what sounds like a tuba to ground the song in an oom-pah band backdrop. I hope this brings a smile to your face.
Songs About People # 202 Catherine the Great
The Divine Comedy remains a very good thing. This is their, (well Neil Hannon really) new sing from forthcoming album Foreverland. He manages to shoehorn some quite incredible lines in there rhymes branier with Lithuania. Follows it up with, 'She had great hair. And a powerful gait.' name-drops Voltaire. Then actually comes out with the line, 'She looked so bloody good on a horse. That they couldn't wait for her to invade.' Sure, it's completely pointless but many of life's small pleasures are and on a day when Britain could be voting to change its entire political and economic destiny, frankly it's a welcome diversion.
Song of the Day # 886 The Gotobeds
Pittsburgh band on Sup Pop Records with their new album just out. Too much of it sounds too close to generic Pavement / Parquet Courts to me but this will do just fine.
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Covers # 74 Portishead
One of the highlights of the recent British movie High Rise which had a great soundtrack, both in terms of the OST by Clint Mansell and also the featured songs from Can, The Fall and others.
Album Reviews # 67 Blondie - Blondie
Blondie sound forty years down the line entirely the most spontaneous, best fun and least pre-meditated of all the first wave of CBGB's bands. Their first album is still a thrill! Released just as '76 turned to '77, it's melodic and amped, with a poetic, caustic edge but not a note of pretension. Influenced by Warhol of course but not noticeably by The Velvet Underground, more informed by Surf, Spector, British Mod, Girl groups, and Pop with a capital 'P' and fronted by the most attractive woman ever to lead a band of any kind, and also one strangely devoid, even to this day, of egotistical posturing, despite her natural, arresting beauty.
'I saw you standing on the corner. You looked so big and fine. I really wanted to go out with you. So when you asked to go out with me. I laid my heart on the line.'
Twisted yet pure urban romanticism has never been nailed to the mast quite so definitively as by the opening lines of this record. With the initial Be My Baby drumroll and then Debbie Harry's voice cutting in a brief but devastating way. 'You watched my heart burst then. You'd step in...' We've all had these moments and won't forget them. X Offender is unsettling, given its subject matter, but that's what early Blondie were about, and in the promo for the song, (posted above), you can witness the unmistakable tension within the band itself that was smoothed out shortly after the album's release by the exit of Gary Valentine, who co-wrote the song. He and Stein vie for attention on the camera lens throughout the clip and it seems that one of them had to go and of course it was always bound to be Valentine, leaving the stage to Harry and the rest of the band's gradual relegation to becoming her backing group with all the inevitable tensions that would ensue from that point on.
'She loves you right now. So don't close your eyes. She'll be talking and laughing with six other guys.'
Little Girl Lies is more conventional and less tart. A classic if safe choice for second song on the record. Chorused by cheesy sixties handclaps and Jimmy Destri's Farfisa organ coming to the fore at its most Wooly Bully and 96 Tears. It's conspicuously throwaway and asexual. Nobody's favourite Blondie song but disliked by few either I imagine and paving the way for the gradual assertion of Harry's persona over the course of the rest of the record. This, naturally was always Blondie's trump card.
'We're walking one day. On the Lower East Side...'
This assertion begins to set in with third track In the Flesh, Blondie's first real hit of any kind, if only in Australia, but it set the bandwagon rolling. This is definitely Spector, though more explicitly seventies, and it laid down the blueprint which the band would go to work on and improve and subsequently storm the global pop charts over the next few years. But it's really all here. With the sign off line, 'Warm and soft. Close and hot...' Harry signaled her intent to be direct but alluring, distanced herself from the band's obvious sixties roots and set themselves forward as a different and more immediate and highly sexual proposition. It would take a while for the message to truly hit home.
'You look good in blue. It matches your skin. Your eyes dripping with pain...'
Look Good in Blue is back to more comforting territory. Not a 'get together' or 'break up' song. Just maintaining the relationship with the listener with a string of compliments. The band laying back and immersing themselves in the joys of their record collections. Learning their craft in a way that again would serve them well further down the line.
'New York is covered by grey. Concrete piles. Blues play my way...'
In the Sun is back on the attack. Blondie understood the joys of the beach and surf sound in a way that none of the bands apart from them, save The Ramones, did. Perhaps that was the bond between the two of those groups. This stuff was deliberately throwaway. An understanding of a certain core of American Pop Culture that Patti Smith, Television and Richard Hell never really touched on, so keen were they to tap into the European poetic literary culture and a point of removed cool. Blondie didn't aspire to this at any point of their careers. Never straying for a moment from the street, the bar, the sun or the dancefloor. From the directly accessible and immediate.
'We're meeting in a neutral zone: the last car on the train.'
A Shark in Jet's Clothing lays down their schtick explicitly with its obvious West Side Story borrowings, finger clicks and whistling. So much of early Blondie is unashamed pastiche. Lifts from New York culture but with an emphatically light and poppy touch. Three minute melodramas which make you understand why they were never taken entirely seriously by their CBGB contemporaries with more serious pretensions but also giving you an insight as to why they outlasted them all commercially, so broad and well-versed were the sources of their initial inspiration and what they chose to do with them.
'Yeah, I've been sailing the sea of love. Experiencing romance. With what I know, he never stood a chance...'
So to Side 2. They're not hanging around here. Harry is backed on first track Man Overboard as on In the Flesh by Ellie Greenwich, Micki and Hilda Harris veterans of the classic sixties girl group sound the whole record is so deeply versed in. Here she takes the femme fatale role she was frankly born to play. She'd been in girl group territory before of course with previous bands Wind in the Willows and The Stilletoes, Blondie with time would refine the inspiration and make it their own. There's the briefest hint of reggae in the guitars here which would also feed into the original version of Heart of Glass. Also the vaguest hint of Prog stylings with Destri's synth breaks. But it's all highly efficient, chopped and minimal. They're virtually inventing New Wave, at least two years before its proper arrival.
'She looks like the Sunday comics. She thinks she's Brenda Starr. Her nose job is real atomic. All she needs is an old knife scar.'
To Rip Her to Shreds, probably as close to Punk in the conventional sense as the band ever came. But it's no thrash, Blondie were always too tasteful, not to say able for that. It's an acid, catty putdown of a female rival and it's great to see Harry flexing her claws. Backed by the mass slurred boy backing vocals that would become another of their trademarks, the lyrics are wonderful in documenting the CBGBs scene that Blondie grew from. The nicer but not altogether nice little sister of I Wanna Be Your Dog.
'If I lose my head, we'll be certainly dead. With visions of acid. How I wish they bled.'
Rifle Range is one of the record's finest tunes played out to probably it's sloppiest, least coherent lyrics. Never mind, you can't really hear them anyway and it works fine as a piece of music. Blondie jumped in terms of content from tales of romance, to espionage, to life on the mean streets. All pulp paperbacks, B-Movie features and trash TV, they were a less surly and better groomed Ramones. And ultimately, much to that group and particularly Johnny's chagrin they had an altogether better understanding of the Pop world they sought entry into and how to force that entrance. Blondie is very much an apprenticeship for what came next. Although it took them a while to distance themselves from the slight disdain some of their contemporaries at CBGB's viewed them with, (Patti Smith and Television particularly, both bands pilfered early Blondie band members), everything they achieved with third album Parallel Lines is rooted here, just waiting for the guiding input and touch that Mike Chapman provided there.
'Down in Chinatown, (the year of the cock). He sold the silver belt, put it in hock.'
Kung Fu Girls is almost a scene from Tarantino. He didn't get here first by any means. Blondie, in their appreciation of Trash Culture, knowing exactly just how throwaway and disposable it all is and just as importantly what rich source material it offers for truly great pop music, were way ahead of the pack though they've never really got the credit they deserve for it in the eyes of the 'serious' rock critic. Both Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent, the dons at The NME at the time, remained slightly sniffy about them. But they were wrong. No-one had ever done this in quite the way they were doing it. Lester Bangs to his credit did fully appreciate them and lionised them for it. It's Pop Art in the truest sense, Blondie, more than any of those great seventies New York bands understood where Warhol was coming from and packaged themselves and their songs accordingly to appeal to a broader audience than the literati and the rock snobs. The cleverness of this trick is to pull it off and retain a central, keen intelligence. They would never lose it.
'Giant ants from space. Snuff the human race. Then they eat your face. Never leave a trace.'
Blondie would refine and revisit these same themes and melodic tricks over the coming years as they ascended to the fame their leaders looks and sheer charisma always offered as a prospect but which they would never have achieved without the required team ability, looks of their own and no little drive. They would never be as purely Pulp as here though ever again. This is one for their fanclub. Blondie is thirty three minutes long, plays at thirty three and is a better guitar and synth driven pop album than any young band is likely to put out in 2016. That's rather sad but also probably rather true!
100 Mavericks # 55 Coati Mundi
To the best of my knowledge the only vibraphone player in this countdown. Kid Creole associate and star of Miami Vice.
Song of the Day # 885 Beagles
Dreamy, meandering indie pop from Portland, Oregon, musing on the smaller things in life. Their whole, self-titled debut album, (just out), is well worth a listen.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Inside & Outside The Go-Betweens - Grant & I
This blog takes its name from a line in a song by Brisbane, Australia band The Go-Betweens, one of the very greatest groups of all. I've written plenty about them on here. It's great to see them being properly appreciated and documented all this time after their eighties peak as they didn't get the sales to go with the deserved and fulsome critical acclaim they did receive at that point in time.
Robert Forster, one half of the songwriting partnership that forged the band is acting as curator of their legacy, (following the premature passing of Grant McLennan, the other half), appropriately for a man whose first important song was one of unrequited love to a female librarian. The book above is to be released this September when I'm sure to write some more about it and them on here as soon as I have my sweaty paws on it!
100 Mavericks # 56 John Lennon
As we get further and further up this chart, I find myself slotting in more and more of the established canon. Lennon was a maverick though. certainly between the writing of Help and about 1973 after he'd decided he could and needed to be himself. So, pretty much all of his Beatles songs from Help onwards have a bit of that maverick edge as do some but less of his solo ones.
Song of the Day # 884 Lion
To carry on the Allah-Las theme, here's a selection from them from the latest of the excellent mixtapes they put up on their website. This is Lion, a Dutch duo from the mid-seventies.
Album Review # 34 Allah-Las - Worship the Sun
And to follow that up, another re-post for my review of Worship the Sun from a couple of years back.
'And I know where I belong. Cause I worship the sun.'
'I've never been to California where The Allah-Las hail from. I didn't come of age in the sixties and neither did they. They just make records now that sound like they did. But I do have evocative memories and associations with the time and its music, just as they do. Primarily this. In my first year at university, almost thirty years back, most Thursday nights, myself and like-minded friends in my block corridor would troop from our halls into Norwich, a trek of a couple of miles if I remember rightly. The object of our pilgrimage was a rundown nightclub in Magdalen Street called Santana's. Thursday night was Sixties Night. It wasn't much to write home about but had some of the inexplicable dark and bleak mystique that holds some kind of spell over your sensibilities when you're turning twenty.
Invariably when we arrived there were a couple of familiar figures, on the blackened dancefloor. Both were fellow students. One was someone who I came to make into a firm and lifelong friend named Andy who was known, (though he wouldn't and probably won't thank me for broadcasting the fact), as Andy the Hippie due mainly to his shoulder length hair, not a common phenomenon amongst student circles at the time. We later got arrested together in the middle of our first year which only served to cement the bond of friendship, (which has now lasted the best part of thirty years), along with a shared regard for The Velvet Underground and The Doors.
The other was a fat and rather unpleasant fellow named Gavin. Generally unwashed and invariably bedecked in large, loud paisley shirts. The one I remember was fluorescent pink, flaked in black. He would lean vaguely menacingly across the dancefloor at me as I came to greet him, shake his horrid bleached locks, still black at the roots and slur blearily, 'I've just had ten pints and I'm completely pissed.' Later in the year he almost burned his university room down when he left candles burning. Then he dropped out. Oh Gavin. What became of you?
Even this inevitable moment failed to dim Santana's appeal for me. We were there most Thursday evenings for my first two terms. I'd appreciate the chance of one more but the club is long gone. The Sixties was undergoing an unlikely renaissance at this point in the mid-Eighties. Pretty much banished to the margins, apart from Ska, Soul, The Velvets, Stooges and Doors, by the Punk and Post-Punk years, The Smiths and R.E.M. had made it respectable to delve again through these years and admit to its influence.
In R.E.M's wake a group of vaguely similar bands came to the British shores, all of them awash with Sixties reference points: The Dream Syndicate, the Rain Parade, Green On Red, the Long Ryders and True West amongst others who all tended to be grouped under the Paisley Underground moniker, reasonably enough because they all first came to public attention playing together. None of them really hit critical mass or quite deserved to as R.E.M. did, but they found favour, with Andy and myself amongst others, and for a couple of years they made The Byrds, The Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Buffalo Springfield and Creedence, vaguely respectable names to drop. When, inevitably, the Paisley Underground bands fell from grace, Creation Records, Primal Scream, The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays and others picked up the baton and ran.
This Tuesday morning I was reminded of all this while searching around for something to listen to while I planned my lesson. I thought of the Stone Roses first record which I haven't listened to for a long time, it being one of a number of prized albums that have gone missing over the years during my travels. It's a great record undeniably but I found after a few songs on Tuesday, its appeal dimmed and I'd had enough. If you've lived in the UK over the past couple of decades, that record more than almost any other has been played to death. On the radio, on pub jukeboxes, on the TV, exploited not least by the band themselves who recently reformed, still largely on the back of it I suspect to top up their pension funds. They've clearly not quite recovered from making it themselves. So I chose to listen to this instead. The second album by The Allah-Las. Just recently released though you wouldn't think it from listening to it. I got sufficient pleasure from the listening experience that at the end of day I went and bought it.
When I came to buy the album that afternoon I knew already that it wasn't the best option on the stacks in front of me. There was a Mose Allison record there, amongst others, which I was sure outclassed it in objective terms in almost every respect. This didn't lessen my resolve however. This was the one I wanted. I'm long past the point of buying things to impress my peers. I was after something which I knew would set off pleasant, relaxed well being within me when I listened to it and was already sure that this ticked off the required boxes. Mose Allison can wait.
The Allah-Las might as well be a Paisley Underground group. Their outlook is pretty much the same, filtered through thirty more years of music, almost exclusively in their case on white indie bands drawing from the same well of influences. From the beautifully designed sleeve which screams California at you, this is where the band are from, to the opening bars of the album's first track where it seems certain that the band are going to break into Love's Alone Again Or at any moment.
They don't. But they've already set down their marker. Some of the Paisley Underground bands owed something to Punk as do similarly minded contemporary American bands like The Black Lips and The Grumblers. The Allah-Las owe nothing to Punk. Their debt is to Sixties guitar driven pop, twangy instrumental music and light rock,(the album never gets too heavy, it's far too laid back for that). And in addition bands like Felt, early Primal Scream and yes The Stone Roses two records. Bands that had similar influences, goals and outlooks to The Allah-Las themselves.
Felt are a particular valid reference point. I've been listening to them quite a bit recently. They're a band who never got their due in their day but whose fingerprints can be heard all over all kinds of records made by introspective, independent guitar bands in the decades since. Felt's love of pop music and melody was clear for all to see as were the inbuilt limitations of their horizons and their potential commercial appeal. Both bands' music seems to emerge from an introspective bubble of their own making. Felt were destined never to trouble the charts and the same holds true for The Allah-Las though they seem happier to dwell within the margins of cult obscurity. Lawrence of Felt seemed sure that he was going to be a big star. The influence of Felt here is clear and heartfelt. The album itself surely take its name from the band's early classic I Worship The Sun. This was dreamed up in English Midland's gloom but it's particularly apt to hear it transposed to California's eternal sunshine.
All four band members write and sing lead across the record. It's a noble, democratic principle but it all leads to a variability in quality across the album. Occasionally it's a slightly frustrating listen as you cry out at sloppy laid back playing or wilfully out of tune vocals that you feel could easily have been tweaked and fine tuned to take the band onto a higher plain. To allow them to compete. This however, is slightly denying the record's ambition and the band's driving ethos. It seems they care most about not seeming to care. And I can't really find fault in that.
So Worship The Sun is an undemanding, relaxed and it has to be said, a pleasant listen. I'm glad I bought it, though there's a nagging itch under my skin telling me that the Mose Allison record still nestled on the rack at HMV is superior in every respect objectively speaking. It's a slightly confused incoherent listen at times. It speaks more clearly of Spotify, ipod culture than the vinyl culture of the Sixties. It's quite telling that all four band members used previously to work in record shops and they seem just the types who would interrupt a track midway through and reach for something else saying, 'Hey listen to this.'
Halfway through the record's second side comes the album's title song and it's a very odd experience listening to it. It seems that the Bobby Gillespie of 1986 has been transported forward in time and stepped up to the mic in his Chelsea boots, leather troosers, polka dot shirt and Byrds fringe to intone once more for the indie faithful. I have to say I enjoyed the moment thoroughly. It's a faultless recreation of indie underachievement. I think it's the albums most evocative song.
Never having been to California, only having experienced it through the refracted lens of books and records I realise I'm at something of a loss to do Worship The Sun complete justice so I'm grateful for this perspective from someone who probably has and is more aware of the cultural and geographical reference points it's grounded in.
'Allah-Las’ second album, Worship The Sun, expands on the sound established by their maiden effort, honing their fusion of West Coast garage rock and roll, Latin percussion and electric folk. As richly textured and timeless as a Southern California beach break, the songs are evocative of Los Angeles’ storied past. Beatniks, artists, surfers, nomads. Remnants of a bygone Sunset Strip. Golden tans and cosmic sunsets. One can feel the warmth of the sun, but the band deftly avoids the kitsch so often indulged by lovers of these things. Hints of Byrds, Love, Felt, and those who follow are threaded into the tapestry.
LA’s seminal Ferus Gallery – the home of Wallace Berman, Ed Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston – is paid homage in an eponymous instrumental, broadening the scope beyond mere sea, surf, and sand. The lyrics reveal a new maturity; reflections of a band that has grown together through experiences on the road and in the studio. Worship The Sun is at once the perfect soundtrack for the greatest surf film never made and for a golden hour drive through Topanga Canyon. Yet, while grounded in the Southern California experience, the appeal of the album is not limited by locale. It is a teenage symphony to the sun, for all those who know its grace.'
So Worship The Sun evokes a condition where the waves are always lapping at the shores of golden Californian beaches. Where open topped sports cars are always winding round its hills. Where pop songs are always accompanied by twanging, echoey guitars and 'ba ba' backing vocals. Where the point of the exercise is in not being seen to try too hard. A place peopled by girls called Julie Anne and Susie Lou, the best girls on the block, who you're going to make yours. Sounds and words that take you to other places in your record collection, other memories. And for me where it's always Sixties Night at Santana's. The band's third album will be out in a couple of years and I doubt very much whether it will stray far from this formula. It clearly works for them. I'm not sure I'll buy it. I have the Allah-Las album I need to achieve the particular kind of relaxed, reflective state they cater for. It's the sixties refracted, skilfully and knowingly through the eighties and I have little doubt that bands will emerge in twenty years time who list the Allah-Las as formative influences alongside Felt and Love. This stuff will never go away, any more than those waves lapping against Californian shores will.'
Allah-Las - Calico Review
It's interesting to see bands moving into what appears to be their 'imperial' phase. Such a thing seems to be happening to Allah-Las at the moment. Their new album Calico Review is due out on September 9th and they're already beginning to preview it very boldly on their band website. Marketing is a considerable Allah-Las strength, (the members once worked in record shops and the experience they picked up there shows), and they make the record seem incredibly appealing almost three months before we actually get to hear the whole thing.
Trailed by an excellent track Famous Phone Figure, it's abundantly clear what we're going to get. Souped-up, romantic sixties guitarmelodies, an imagined marriage between San Francisco's Beau Brummels and LA's Love, the West Coast living in eternal harmony. Song titles resonate, the vinyl version of the release is marble. When I reviewed their previous release Worship the Sun I said that you really only needed one Allah-Las album to stand for the whole. They may well prove me wrong here.
Monday, June 20, 2016
Covers # 73 Chiemi Eri
My reading matter at the moment is Julian Cope's splendid and inspired Japrocksampler, which has led me to YouTube browsing as these things do nowadays. Here's an early Japanese Rock and Roll cover from an artist he references, in this case of Hank William's classic. Splendidly other-worldly!
Songs About People # 201 Brian Wilson
It's strange to think that the man's still with us given all that he went through. Here's the opening track from John Cale's splendid 1975 album Slow Dazzle. A heartfelt tribute, as Cale was a big fan.
100 Mavericks # 57 Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson was always going to be somewhere in this series. As it's his birthday, it might as well be here. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short, dismissive review of the Beach Boy's Pet Sounds on here. Of course I realised almost immediately that I was selling it woefully short. That just because it didn't float my boat all the way out to sea like for example Love's Forever Changes always does, it doesn't make it and all of the rest of Wilson's best Beach Boys work any less remarkable or world-changing. So I'm listening to Smiley Smile now to make amends. For verification of Wilson's right to be included in this list, I refer you to the picture above.
The Heart of Rock & Soul # 937 Alice Cooper
'In 1972, at the height of the critical infatuation with the idea that making stoopid noises can sometimes result in great rock and roll, Lester Bangs wrote a Rolling Stone review declaring that alice Cooper would someday be regarded as the American Rolling Stones. RS reviews editor Jon Landau cut the line, and when Bangs protested, told the irate critic, 'Lester, someday you'll thank me for this.
In June 1972, Landau received a note from Bangs, who'd gone on to become the enfant terrible of noiz rock criticism at Creem. It read, 'Dear Jon: Two years ago, when I wanted to call Alice Cooper the American Rolling Stones, you wouldn't let me and said that someday I'd thank you. Thank you.'
Song(s) of the Day # 883 Nancy Pants
Nancy Pants, from Montreal do that loud, gently howling, melodic guitar thing that will hopefully make you as happy as they claim to be! 'Sonically they evoke a bunch of awesome dogs playfully tussling on a sandy beach under a palm tree that has caught fire This description comes from the band's own website and I feel I can add very little to it. Their album from 2015, Total Nancy Pants is a blast that sounds like a slightly better adjusted Kirsten Hirsch, appropriately fronting her little sister Tanya Donelly's band Belly.
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Dad Rock
It's Father's Day, so here's a potted history of Dad Rock from Pitchfork. For the record my own father goes alternatively for Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash.
100 Mavericks # 58 Kevin Ayers
In the early seventies, in what was left of the British counterculture there was some idea that Kevin Ayers, formerly of Soft Machine but now a solo artist, was going to sweep in from leftfield and become a huge, alternative star. Of course it wasn't to be. Ayers and the leftfield were made for each other.
Song of the Day # 882 John Foxx
And the cry went up from the UK playgrounds of the late nineteen seventies, 'UNDERPANTS!!!' Awash with dystopian lyrics which probably tell of too many hours reading Burroughs and Ballard. Foxx was something of a pioneer, on his leaving and replacement with the more conventionally ambitious Midge Ure, Ultravox set sail for the charts, but were never so interesting again.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Vinyl Purchases # 25 The Rolling Stones
June 18th 2016 Rock Bottom Records, Whitstable £9.00
A family Saturday in Whitstable, Kent and a wander down to the specialist record shop in the high street where I'd chanced upon The Left Banke first record round about this time last year. This time a Stones B Side album released in 1973 caught my eye. With the band during the Brian Jones era on the front turning their backs and on the back brandishing weapons and masks and looking mean.
Many great songs here; Child of the Moon, Surprise Surprise, Stoned and so on. The Stones being surly and dark and menacing and tossing stuff aside with some disdain. Some nice cherry picking of things not deemed quite good enough at the time. Oh and I also was delighted to but a five quid copy of Graham Parker's wonderful Squeezing Out Sparks which I hope to review on here at greater length further down the line.
100 Mavericks # 59 Tim Buckley
Of course it's largely about the voice. Buckley had one of the greatest of the Twentieth Century. But it's also about the utterly fearless poetic spirit. Buckley recorded nine albums during his career and they're all markedly different. In some respects he was quite peerless!
The Heart of Rock & Soul # 939 Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes
Written by Steve Van Zandt.
'You think that's just a love song? Must have missed the seventies altogether.'
Covers - # 72 Fantastic Negrito
And here's another from it. This one dates back to at least the 1870s, but the emotion is a lot older than that!
Song(s) of the Day # 881 Fantastic Negrito
'Let's make a sandwich. Let's make a new baby.The seeds were planted long ago. Let's watch the tree grow.'
The Blues has a particular signature sound associated with it. It's a low, long deep moan that signals the expression of a particular experience that's hundreds if not thousands of years old. Most of all it expresses the idea of people in chains. It's perhaps the polar opposite of the idea of Twee that I've been writing about on here over the last few days. For Brooklyn, New York in 2016, read Oakland, California in 2016.
'That man. He cracked the whip and beat you down...'
That blues moan is all over Fantastic Negrito's debut album The Last Days of Oakland. Just out. The moan starts track after track on here and then goes on to occupy them. It's an expression that we're here in 2016, but is that actually an achievement in itself? America actually has a Black president but we're still not where we ought to be, in fact we may be heading back to a place where we should never even think of going back to. The record is an incredibly cocksure angry and considered statement. At times blues, at times punk and then by turns jazz, hip hop, spiritual, folk and every point in between. Ultimately it's just great music and an incredibly good record and document of the times we live in and the mistakes we continue to make.
'There's a bird at my window. She watches it all...'
It's soaked in spoken samples that tell its story alongside the actual music itself. Slavery, Emancipation, Klu Klux Klan, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Black Panthers. America's great historical shame. Fantastic Negrito, actually Xavier Dphrepaulez, (yes really!), spreads it all thick. This is as much an act of scholarship as one of music expression but you don't need to make your way through a reading list to catch his drift. It's an oft told tale. As I said it's 2016 and Muhammed Ali has just died.
'I've been working three jobs just to pay my bills...'
I'll be playing this a lot over the coming months and will be curious to see if it does grow, like the tree Negrito talks about on its introductory rap. It certainly deserves to. I generally don't do politics on here, at least explicitly, but I suppose I have done on this post. These are trying times, not just in America but where I'm writing from too, (a British Member of Parliament was shot a couple of days ago for seemingly racially motivated reasons). Last Days of Oakland in many ways is the best candidate to soundtrack 2016 I've heard so far this year. Onwards and upwards!
'We travel and we travel, trying to find it. We're just people, lonely people. You and I...'
Friday, June 17, 2016
Patti Smith & Peter Pan
There's another wonderful interview with Patti Smith in today's Guardian. She never gives a bad one, never repeats herself, never grows old. In London to play a concert in Hyde Park with Massive Attack, she talks about wanting to go to Kensington Gardens beforehand, to visit the statue of Peter Pan.
'Have you seen it? Oh, it's so wonderful! He's got a pipe and there are fairies about!I used to go and see it in the 70s. I still do. When I was younger, I wanted to be just like him and never grow up. So whenever I'm in London, I always go say hello to Peter Pan.'
100 Mavericks # 60 Sky Saxon
Born Richard Marsh in Salt Lake City, Sky Saxon led The Seeds one of their very finest of all the mid-sixties American Garage Punk bands. The Seeds distilled everything that was great about that scene down to its most basic and thrilling ingredients. Bored, pissed off, frustrated, spaced out and vaguely paranoid. But most of all young. A simple, but quite timeless sound. Every song on their debut album sounds almost exactly like their hit single and signature tune Pushin' Too Hard. Except for the one posted below.
Marsh changed his name in tribute to Errol Flynn because he felt Sky Saxon had a similarly star-like allure. The Seeds lived the life, took drugs, pumped out singles and albums all drawing from the same template of shaken mania as if there were no tomorrow between '66 and '68 and then were gone. Saxon, joined a religious sect continued to make music under names such as Source, Yodship and YaHoWha 13 the line-ups of which featured the musicians Djin, Octavious and Sunflower Aquarian among others. He reformed and toured with The Seeds late in life.
The Heart of Rock & Soul # 940 Jessie Hill
'Nobody's ever cut a more joyous version of the New Orleans parade beat, and it's hard to beat a lyric in which the singer vows to drive his lover nuts and backs it up with a series of genuinely demented yowls. There's nothing more to Ooh Poo Pah Doo than that, but then, why would there need to be?'
Song(s) of the Day # 880 Kid Congo & the Monkey Birds
One of the more exciting prospects of the coming week is getting back to Newcastle next week and seeing Kid Congo & the Monkey Birds playing next Wednesday at a small but excellent music venue. Kid Congo is definitely a legend of sorts, having trodden the boards with The Gun Club, The Cramps and The Bad Seeds to name but three. I'll report back from the front line on proceedings in a week but in the meantime here are two selections of typically primordial ooze from Kid & the Bird's latest record La Arana Es La Vida.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Covers - #71 Scarlett Johansson
Yes, of course the fact that you know this is Scarlett Johansson is a considerable part of the appeal of this. Such has always been the way going back to Gainsbourg, Monroe and beyond and so it will always be. Here, Johannson does the femme fatale thing very well indeed.
June 16th 1986 The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead
Some anniversaries really hit you and this one is hitting me more than most since I realised it hit today about half an hour back. The Queen Is Dead is exactly thirty years old today and I go spinning back to the summer term of my first year at university, my first and only time in court, my first really important relationship, all those incredibly important friendships and experiences you make and have at that point of your life. Oh and The Queen Is Dead an album and band that have utterly mushroomed in significance in the intervening years, (and they both felt extremely important to those in the know at the time). I'll listen through to the whole damned thing now. It's a phenomenal record of light and shade. You get a song that has a fair mixture of both.
Andy Partridge Plans to Join the New York Dolls
Turning into a small XTC day. Here he is talking about the New York Dolls. Morrissey was not alone.
'I was a huge fan of the Dolls. So much so that you probably know that I penned a letter to actually join them.'
No, I don't remember that story.
'Oh, Yeah! I was such a huge Dolls fan, around '73 or '74 when they first came out that I thought, 'Wow! This is the band I want to be in. And I actually wrote a letter - I never plucked up the guts to post it - and my pseudo-name was 'Lord Andrew English'. You know along with Syl Sylvain and Johnny Thunders and Killer Kane I was going to be Lord Andrew English!'
Instead of which he did this...
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