You Look Like a Star But You're Still on the Dole

Seeing as I've just posted my review of The Weather Prophets Mayflower, it might be a good time to re-post this. The first chapter of Luke Haines book, Bad Vibes. The Go Betweens in London. Haines recognises how great they were and gives a good kicking to other, lesser lights while he's at it...

The second chapter of Luke Haines' autobiography Bad Vibes. Another entirely  deserved doff of the cap to the namers of this blog. Brilliant in terms of tone in its sardonic bitchiness. It sums up indie London in the Eighties very well. I was at gigs with the Creation entourage and they were as snotty, self-important and comical as Haines paints them. He also describes the London of the time accurately. It really was a shithole!
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Lawrence from Felt, Pete Astor from The Weather Prophets, Bobby Gillespie, Alan McGee, Grant McLennan and Robert Forster from The Go-Betweens. In their own minds these men are rock royalty, (the notion of indie does not yet exist). David Westlake and I sit at the end of the table waiting our turn. Nineteen years old. Winter 1987. Pre-gig pints in the Devonshire Arms, Camden Town. Shane MacGowan's manor. He's in the corner. This is pre-money London Town. When the place was still a shithole. The pubs all close at three in the afternoon for a few hours and there are only four channels on the TV. How did I get here?

Straight from school to Art College, where after one year on a foundation course I am thrown out. - asked to leave as I have 'a bad attitude to further education'. Not true. I have a great attitude. I blag a place at the London College of music in Great Marlborough Street - a make-do for those not good enough to get into the Royal College of Music or Guildhall - leave my parents' home in Portsmouth and head for my first rented room, in Stockwell, south London. Just in time for the first weekend of the 1985 Brixton Riots. My housemates Chad and Ange are manic dole fiends. We get drunk on looted lager from the Sunshine Supermarket on Railton Road. Then with a little bit of Dutch we head out and watch the final embers of Brixton burning.

I have not yet turned eighteen. Music college is everything I hoped it wouldn't be. Like every teenage Velvets nut with a guitar I hold out the hope that I will meet a John Cale to play alongside my Lou Reed, naturally. Time, time. Running and passing. Got to get something together before I turned 19. November 1986. I answer an advert in Melody Maker for the first and only time. 'Servants singer songwriter seeks musicians.' The songwriters name is David Westlake. I obsessively read the music papers) so I have heard of is band The Servants. He has just sacked them. Westlake and I hit it off., and we're into the same stuff: The Modern Lovers, Dragnet and Totale Turns by The Fall. The Only Ones first album. Adventure by Television. Wire and The Go Betweens.By March '87 I am in Greenhouse Studio Islington playing guitar and piano on Westlake's first solo album, destined to be released on the then fashionable Creation label. By the end of the year the album Westlake is out and greeted with a yawn of indifference by a world far more interested in ecstasy and the latest incarnation of the Manchester scene. We, perhaps unwisely revert to the old band name the Servants.

Lawrence from Felt, Bobby Gillespie, Alan McGee, Grant McLennan, Robert Forster, David Westlake and me. Men convinced of their own genius though at 19 I am not yet a man, and it is strange to keep on meeting people who are at least ten years older. Pete Astor is the lead singer of the Weather Prophets, a Creation band who had their hour in the sun some six months ago. Pete's got the look and the regulation leathers. Ex-music journalist Pete has also got a theory on all rock'n'roll lore. Just as well because the one thing he ain't got is the fucking songs Bobby Gillespie wafts around saying little apart from who looks cool and who doesn't. Strangely people take notice of him. You're just too hip baby.

Tonight The Servants are supporting Lawrence's band Felt at Dingwalls. It is one of Felt's many farewell gigs to an indifferent nation. It will be a few years until Lawrence gets good and delivers his neo-glam masterpiece Back in Denim . Tonight, in the Devonshire, he is a classic example of  fabulous rock star egotism   in a hideous harlequin-motif jacket. Up his own enigma. Lawrence - a rock star in mind only - travels with a small entourage A lackey is always on hand to light Lawrence's steady flow of cigarettes, as the Felt singer pontificates in a Brummie monotone - to no one in particular - on the possibilities of 'sewing on a fringe'. You see, Lawrence has started to lose his hair and doesn't have the money for an Elton-style transplant. The somewhat unlikely option of sewing on a fringe has become an obsession. In later years he will on occasion, sport a hazardous wig. Photo sessions and video shoots will be at the mercy of the wig and it's inability to cope with inclement weather. On and on he goes. Another cigarette is lit. The lackey's are giving Lawrence's fringe predicament some serious consideration.

Unfortunately any suggestions provoke petulant fits from the eccentric genius. I don't want to be complicit in high-maintenance Lawrence mania., so I move over to Grant's table. Grant McLennan of the Go Betweens has become a mentor to David and me, pushing 30 and proud of his elder statesmanship to the assembled Creation mob. Alan McGee loves the Go Betweens; he even names his forgettable mini-Malcolm McClaren scam girl band, Baby Amphetamine, after an Only Ones fanzine that Robert Forster and Grant put together back in their native Brisbane. Thankfully McGee's respect is not reciprocated. Tonight Grant is on form and drinking like giddy up. The Go Betweens fly back to Australia for good the next morning, after a few tough years in unyielding, unforgiving 80s London. Tonight is partly a farewell drink for them. 'It's great to be here tonight with all my favourite English bands who all wanna sound like the Byrds and the Velvet Underground.,' muses Grant. 'Y'know Creation is my third favourite record label,' he adds with heavy sarcasm rubbing McGee's face in it.

Alan McGee, anointer of genius and self-styled record mogul. I first met McGee back in the spring of '87 in fury Murrays, a hellhole of a club behind Glasgow Central station. I am sound-checking my brand new Fender Telecaster. A Fender Telecaster I have scrimped and saved for in saved dole money and starvation. Hard won. If anyone so much as looks at this guitar in the wrong way they will unleash the winds of psychic war, Westlake and I are on the Scottish leg of a tour supporting the Weather Prophets.. McGee sidles up to the front of the stage and points at me. 'You. You're Tom Verlaine.' He is of course referring to the buzz-saw blitzkrieg maverick lead guitarist of seminal symbolist New York City art rockers Television. Maybe some people would be happy with this introduction. Not I. I am a stickler for manners and would have preferred a 'How do you do?' or even a simple 'Hello'. The eighties were plagued by these small time indie Svengalis, wannabe Brian Epsteins or mini Malcolms. Forever proclaiming some poor bugger to be a genius. Of course hype is fundamental to pop music. But it often says more about the hyper than the hyped. The start of the cursed holy bestowals.

'You. You're Tom Verlaine,' it says , utterly unbecoming. I fix the fool with a dead-eyed stare. Say nothing, say nothing. You, Alan McGee will pay for this transgression. You will pay.

Back in the Devonshire Arms Grant McLennan turns to me and whispers loud enough for anyone to hear, 'That Alan McGee, not much going on up top.'

  

Westlake, McLennan and I stagger up the road the 200 yards or so to the venue. The old long bar of Dingwalls. Robert Forster is in the shadows. Thirty years old and a lean six foot four. Always conspicuous. Forster has just come out of his Prince phase. His new look is somewhere between Raw Power period Iggy and Sherlock Holmes. With his long hair dyed silver grey - a homage to Dynasty's Blake Carrington no less - round wire-frame glasses and tweed cape. This is a bold, potentially tragic look, but Forster carries it off. David Westlake and I are in awe of the man. Everyone loves Robert Forster and no one can quite work out why he is not a huge star. He has hit a creative peak, having just written some of the best songs of his career - 'The Clarke Sisters', 'When People Are Dead', 'The House That Jack Kerouac Built'. A few hours earlier back in the Devonshire, Pete Astor developed a lecture on why all Robert's songs are merely 'filler material'. Yeah, yeah Pete. Whatever you say.

We do the gig. Too drunk to play well, we still - in the rock'n'roll vernacular - blow Felt off the stage. Everyone talks loudly through Felt's set. Lawrence is playing his latest epic, 'Primitive Painters'. On and on it goes. Somewhere, fresh paint dries upon a wall. Sadly, I am not there to watch it.

More drinks at the bar with Robert, Grant and Lindy Morrison, the Go Betweens terrifyingly blunt drummer. 'If you're gonna play Dingwall's you gotta fucken rock. Lemme hangs out here with fucken Johnny Thunders. You can't play like a bunch of fucken pussies. You've gotta fucken rock.' She has a point.

Lawrence. Pete Astor. Bobby Gillespie.. Alan McGee. Grant McLennan. Robert Forster. David Westlake. Me. All of these men convinced of their own genius. One of these men now sadly dead.'

* On Saturday 6th May 2006 Grant McLennan died in his sleep at his Brisbane home. He is sorely missed.

A Season in Hell

Music Critics # 3 Tom Hibbert

Music probably overtook Football in terms of my affections somewhere between the ages of 14 and 16. One book that probably played some small, imperceptible role in this process was The Perfect Collection edited by Tom Hibbert. They had a copy in the local library and I pored over it to a ridiculous degree, even though I was barely aware of most of the records it actually lauded. It certainly made a lasting impression on me in terms of highlighting exactly how much passion and babbling, almost incoherent enthusiasm could be invested into this stuff.

The basic idea behind the book was to list 199 albums that any self-confessed music fan should own. Compiled from the lists of contemporary writers and enthusiasts. Nothing new there. But the book was distinct from similar lists and projects in a couple of ways. Firstly, because it was really, genuinely funny in a way that I'd never experienced with music writing before. Secondly, because it was an education in itself. For example its listing there was the first time Television's Marquee Moon, a lifelong companion of mine, was brought to my notice. It was a particular favourite of Hibbert's and his unabashed enthusiasm for the record certainly piqued my interest, though it took me a couple of years to catch up entirely and actually buy the record.

Hibbert was a one off in many respects, in that he so clearly enjoyed writing about music but refused to take the process seriously and so his writing was scatological, irreverant and always first and foremost very entertaining. He made his name mostly due to his writing for Smash Hits and Q neither of which were particular favourites of mine but whenever I did browse through them his prose consistently stood out from those around him. In the words of friend Bob Stanley, 'His writing was offhand, intensely knowledgeable, iconoclastic, conversational and very funny.'

Pretty much a chain smoker, Hibbert was very ill for the last decade of his life before succumbing to a diabetes related illness in 2011 aged just 59. In many ways he's the polar opposite of writers like Jon Savage, who I've written about on this series previously. Hibbert never took the whole process terribly seriously and was all the better for that. Mark Ellen's Guardian Obituary here, sums up what made him so special.

El Goodo - Zombie

Calling yourself El Goodo is one way of making it absolutely clear what your musical goals are. The Ballad of El Goodo after all is one of the standout tunes from Big Star's hallmark classic debut # 1 Record. It seems fairly evident what lies in store for the listener. Ringing creamy harmonies, plangent melodies, the sound of heartbreak made as unstoppably attractive as it can possibly be.

Zombie the latest album from the Resolven Wales outfit, (their fourth in twenty years) , does all it can to live up to this billing. This is utterly old school Rock and Roll, from start to finish, drawing on Beatles, Beach Boys, Byrds, Burrito Brothers, Badfinger and Big Star in equal helpings and coming up trumps song after song. There only a couple on its thirteen track running list that I wasn't keen on and I can certainly forgive them those.

It's interesting listening to a record that is so definitively rooted in the past as this one. It simply doesn't bother to recast its influences in any respect whatsoever. This is an album that could have come out pretty much any year between 1965 and 1972 yet it's being released in mid 2020.

It would be easy to be dismiss this if the songs weren't almost all so uniformly excellent. You've heard them all before, if you've ever treasured an album from any of the artists listed above. But then again of course you haven't heard them before at all.

Like Teenage Fanclub, Super Furry Animals, The Coral and The Allah Las before them El Goodo make Rock and Roll excavation sound like one of the best ideas there's ever been. I've just listened through to Zombie from start to finish and it's set me up wonderfully for a lazy, laidback Sunday afternoon. It's a glorious record.

Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 3 Stevie Wonder - Songs In The Key Of Life

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 7 ABBA

Song of the Day # 2,398 Golden Hallway Music

Evocative instrumental album.

Songs About People # 1,151 Cole Younger

Kirk Brandon always had a thing about cowboys and indians. This is no Do You Believe in The Westworld. What else that he did was? For Cole Younger leader of his part of the James / Younger Gang.

Album Reviews # 77 The Weather Prophets - Mayflower

A journey back in time this one. Back to my youth, a time of mixed experience, lost opportunities and mistakes as well as much happiness. Just what youth is all about after all isn't it? Not just for me I suspect but also for the record and band I'm going to write about here.

So back to 1987, the year that I turned 22, still youthful I'd suggest, by more generous estimates. Not a particularly happy year among my own memories as I'd fallen ill during my second year at university with a rare and serious condition and I had to take a couple of years out of university.

I had much else to contend with, but I won't trouble you with all that here. I retreated to convalesence to the home of loving parents in Teddington. During the next couple of years, I caught up with reading for my degree but continued my obsessions with the weekly music papers and the London music scene, venturing out sometimes to see bands, usually at The Hammersmith Clarendon, the Indie Mecca of South West London at the time.

During one of these jaunts I saw The Weather Prophets who were the big hopes for those of a jingly jangly disposition for a couple of seasons in 1987. These hopes were slightly misplaced but at this point in time those who worshipped The Velvet Underground, The Byrds and Big Star, looked to Creation Records to supply them with their latest leather clad Rock Gods and while House of Love and then Ride were warming up in the wings to make this a genuinely viable possibility, we were left with Creation's main contenders at the time. Primal Scream and The Weather Prophets.

The Weather Prophets had emerged from the ashes of The Loft, early Creation contenders who had split in spectacular circumstances, (well if you think in Indie terms), onstage at The Hammersmith Palais during a Colourfield gig in 1985.

The roots of the severance were surely inarticulate, youthful male rage and ego. Regardless, in effect Pete Astor and Bill Morgan, the main songwriter and drummer of The Loft proceeded with undue haste to the formation of The Weather Prophets, primarily designed as a vehicle for Astor's songwriting, constructed on classic guitar beat poet lines

Astor was certainly a talented songwriter if arguably a rather conservative one. Other bands of a similar stripe were after all making inroads, at the time, artistically certainly but also commercially. The Smiths, R.E.M. The Triffids, Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, The Go-Betweens, Prefab Sprout and others were all indicating that being sensitive and literate were not necessarily handicaps to getting on. Astor and The Weather Prophets might be contenders.

After all, they'd just emerged from the studios clutching their shiny debut album Mayflower,

 (released on WEA offshoot Elevation), twelve songs of lean, guitar driven suburban attitude, produced by Lenny Kaye of the venerated Patti Smith Group no less. 'Kaye plugged Astor into an heroic lineage of art, poetry and critically lauded rock'n'roll.' 

They'd also been granted a cover, by the still respected NME magazine. Wherein NME scribe Len Brown made slightly vaunted claims as to their worth.At the time the two prize goals of bands of the Weather Prophet's stripe was the cover of the NME and an appearance on Top of The Pops. They had achieved the former, if they wanted the latter Mayflower would need to provide it.

It failed to do so, though there are several worthy contenders here. Most notably Almost Prayed the band's debut single and probably their finest song where in less than three minutes they uttlerly evoke the ghost of Television and images of decadent lonesome indie cool, standing by the river on the dockside in the midnght hour, quiff and shades resplendent, lighting a cigarette, all the while thinking profound method actor thoughts.It gets absolutely everything right and then is gone. Should have been a hit.

Perhaps they should have saved Almost Prayed 'til later, but there are other contenders. She Comes From The Rain, also a single and a thing of limpid, liquid beauty, which limped to # 62 in the UK Singles Charts despite the NME cover push.

At which point the Weather Prophets moment as genuine chart contenders was probably gone. But almost 35 years on I can still warm to much of Mayflower. There's little that leaps out at you and grabs you by the throat but that is not Astor's way. There are 12 well constructed and solidly played Indie guitar songs dreaming of being something more though never quite attaining it.

Also opener Why Does The Rain?, (Astor clearly had a thing about rain), which was The Loft's debut single back in the early Creation days and such a good song that Astor understandably felt the urge to give it another plug here. 

But there was the rub. Why Does The Rain? was released as a single itself after  She Comes From The Rain's failure but didn't stand a chance. Simply because it's not a patch on the glorious original which captures once and forever the pure glory of a sulky type in his late teens waiting for his morning train into the city and his dull admin job. Semi- poetic thoughts popping like clouds in his head and wondering most of all, when he is going to be recognised for the star he clearly is and taken away from all this mundane, everyday tedium.

Never Pete, and here's the reason. Because you weren't quite good enough. Or perhaps you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because you did write some good songs, and a few approaching greatness.

Essentially though Astor was 'A fair songwriter who had neither the powerful voice nor the force or personality to appeal to listeners in large numbers.'

Never mind. We're all a bit older, and we hope wiser too. Astor is now a senior music professor at the University of Westminster, a good way to divert frustrated youthful dreams of stardom into a worthwhile career path that pays the mortgage. He still makes great records and tours occasionally as he pushes onwards towards Sixty. I'm fairly well on my way to that milestone myself.

So now, if I look back to that night at The Clarendon a Google search has helped me rediscover a flyer for the gig. Bottom of the bill Pop Will Eat Itself, who went on to some chart success themselves, (they, unlike the Prophets made it onto both the cover of the NME and Top of the Pops, on several occasions).

Also on the bill were The Servants who did several decent songs, were fronted by a talented songwriter David Westlake and also boasted Luke Haines in their ranks. A man who went on to form The Auters Black Box Recorder,  Baader Meinhof and more, and pen a particularly acidic portrait of Astor at the time which I'll repost here presently.

But more significantly than that, the other band on the bill that night, and the support I remember most, The Happy Mondays. I remember them because I had no idea who they were and because they seemed so out of place with the polite, groomed, middle class indie cool that was everywhere else that night. They were lairy, they seemd to be playing in five different bands, probably because they were on five different drugs. They made an impression. Their's after all, was the future.

Well Mayflower still sounds fine to me. A melodic, well crafted record that stands up all these years down the line. It's good, but certainly not great. Might as well leave the closing words to Astor himself..

'It didn't capture the vibe... It's that whole anal, antiseptic  way of making records that's ruined millions of good albums. People not undersranding how to record a rock'n'roll band. That was a lost art for many years.'

Don't worry about it Pete. Perhaps you were right. It bombed at the time. Made # 67 in the Albums Chart in 1987. Sounds fine now. What after all, do chart positions really matter.

Blog Discovery - Punk Girl Diaries

A latest blog find. Yesterday, when seeking further Internet information about Jill Birt of The Triffids of all things. During that random quest I chanced upon Punk Girl Diaries, now listed on the right hand side of this page. It's a treasure trove. One of the greatest things the Punk seizure did after all was throw open the gates once and for all for female musical and artistic expression. From Patti to Siouxsie, To Poly, To Ari and on and on and on. Itemised here to excellent effect by Lene Cortina and Vim Renault two women who were shaken by its seismic detonation burst at the time and are still clearly not entirely over it. And why should they be?.

Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 2 The Modern Lovers - The Modern Lovers

'The true missing link between your avant-thug experiment of your arty type, and the blithe naivety of your suburban garage band.'

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 6 The Damned

Song(s) of the Day # 2,397 Gaudi

The theremin, developed in 1920 by Russian Physicist Leon Theremin is one of the most ghostly and evocative sounds in all of music to celbrate its centenary, London producer Leon has applied its other wordly qualities splendidly to the echo chamber of Dub.

Supported in his project by proper genre heavyweights, Adrian Sherwood, Mad Professor, The Scientist, Dennis Bovell and Prince Fatty, 100 Years of Theremin (The Dud Chapter) is, pure and simple, highly enjoyable stuff.

The Raincoats

Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 1 The Ramones - The Ramones

Having got a few days through This Is Uncool, I realised it was going to be a very interesting journey through time. So we might as well go through it's companion piece with it at least half of the way. The album equivalent. Only 261 of these, (rather than the 500 of the singles equivalent) ,because that was the number of albums that Garry Mulholland wanted to write about. Starting in another place that you should get started from.

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 5 Heatwave

Song(s) of the Day # 2,396 French Alps Tiger

August seems thus far a rather arid landscape as far as interesting albums are concerned. So, good to have these to fall back on. A couple of songs from a new young Swansea band named after a mythical feline purportedly stalking the Welsh Alps.

Both beautifully crafted on 'Pixies go to Wales' songwriting lines. The sound of a band quite obviously having fun and seeming like they might have a fair bit more in the tank.

Songs About People # 1,150 Thomas Ediison

Let there be light.

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 4 Boston

Song of the Day # 2,395 Liela Moss

Very Eighties Pop feel to this. As if Roland Orzabal is throwing odd shapes on an early Tears For Fears video or Howard Jones is coming up with another ludicrous humanist manifesto over a slightly annoying, slightly infectious electronic pulse. Like it anyhow! From a new album Who The Power which is out tomorrow on Bella Union.

Songs About People # 1,149 Jackie Robinson

A hugely significant figure in American history.

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 3 Buzzcocks

Song of the Day # 2,394 Canadian Sweetmen

Covers # 131 The Hinds

Well this has certainly made my day. The Hinds have a lot going on for them anyway. Already a fine album under the beltthis year  and plenty of wonderful records over the past few years too. Now they've come out with what surely is destined to be cover of the year here on It Starts With a Birthstone.

It's an abolutely priceless take on one of The Clash's most glorious moments Spanish Bombs. The Hinds have been playing it live for at least a couple of years now, (see below), but the studio version seems to have just come online in the last few days. 

Possibly more bouncy castle than Spanish Civil War, though The Hinds have the upper hand on The Clash in that they are actually Spanish. With cries of Top of the Pops!'  and 'Ole!' to top and tail the track. It's an absolute breeze from start to finish.

I'm not quite sure how serious they are. This is serious subject matter after all. But the panache and bravado of this is a joy to behold regardless of whether they actually care who Federico Lorca is. I absolutely love it!

Songs About People # 1,148 Johnny Depp

Utterly ludicrous Dutch drinking song. Forget about it.

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 2 Rose Royce

Song(s) of the Day # 2,393 Le Ren

The sound of heartbreak. Deeply felt and wonderfully simple songs from a new EP called Morning & Melancholia from Canadian artist Lauren Spear, going under the moniker Le Ren.

Songs About People # 1,147 Tim Hardin

A song for one of my abiding favourites.

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco #1 The Sex Pistols

I actually just ditched a series I started on yesterday because I realised that it would entail me wading through too much truly awful music. This is a much more worthwhile endeavour and should take us through to 2022. From Garry Mulholland's fine, provocative book of the same name. We start in the only place we really can.

Song of the Day # 2,392 Awful Sirs

More middle aged American men doing note perfect recreations of the C-86 sound. I'm not complaining.From the album Looking Up.

50 Days of R.E.M.

So, the end to this particular one. On the band that still matters most to me and inevitably always will. Mostly, concentrated on their early records but with a Number One from probably my least favourite album of their's, Out Of Time.

1. Losing My Religion
2. Radio Free Europe
3. Harborcoat
4. Feeling Gravity's Pull
5. So.Cental Rain
6. Talk About The Passion
7. Sweetness Follows
8. Cuyahoga
9. Sitting Still
10. Man On The Moon
11. 7  Chinese Brothers
12. I Believe
13. Carnival Of Sorts
14. Try Not To Breathe
15. Driver 8
16. Find The River
17. Fall On Me
18. World Leader Pretend
19. Pilgrimage
20. Nightswimming
21. Life & How To Live It
22. Orange Crush
23. E-Bow The Letter
24. Perfect Circle
25. Drive
26. Gardening At Night
27. (Don't Go Back To) Rockville
28. The Flowers Of Guatemala
29. Maps & Legends
30. Finest Worksong
31. These Days
32. Can't Get There From Here
33. New Test Leper
34. It's The End of the World (As We Know It And I Feel Fine)
35. Get Up
36. Green Grow The Rushes
37. Exhuming McCarthy
38. Begin The Begin
39. Country Feedback
40. Swan Swan H
41. West Of The Fields
42. Let Me In
43. Wendell Gee
44. The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight
45. You Are The Everything
46. Letter Never Sent
47. What's The Frequency Kenneth
48. The One I Love
49. Crazy
50. Pretty Persuasion

So there you are. Fairly arbitrary and there's plenty more that might have made the cut. 1,000,000, Wolves Lower, Laughing, Moral Kiosk, Shaking Through, Second Guessing , Old Man Kensey. Kahoetek, Monty Got a Raw Deal, Electrolite and on and on. To prove what a relentless trainspotter I am, here's where they come from. 

• Two from Chronic Town
• Six from Murmur
• Six from Reckoning
• Seven from Fables
• Seven from Pageant
• One from Dead Letter Office
• Four from Document
• Four from Green
• Two from Out Of Time
• Seven from Automatic
• Two from Monster
• Two from New Adventures
• None after that

Right, that's enough R.E.M. for a while. Onwards and upwards.

Music Critics # 2 Jon Savage

I probably own more books by Jon Savage than any other 'music critic' and they're all about much more than just music as all good criticism of this sort should be. He's the best example I can think of, of someone started off their career writing for fanzines and the music weeklies and then went on to take it somewhere much broader but still never lost touch with his first loves and obsessions.

Savage was born in Paddington and read Classics at Magdalene College Cambridge so hardly came from the rough side of the tracks, as if that matters at all. After graduating, he zeroed in on Punk early, interviewed all of the main players as a fanzine writer and then for Sounds, probably the least hip of the three weekly UK weekly papers, but one that clearly gave him a good grounding for what came next.

Famously beaten up by Jean-Jacques Burnel in a pub called The Red Cow for giving the second Stranglers album No More Heroes a bad review that it probably deserved. He moved from Sounds to the Melody Maker, and then onto The Face and bigger things. In the meantime, he had also spent some time in Manchester, recognising early the importance of Joy Division and what was going on there.

Probably made his big splash in 1991, with the publication of England's Dreaming, I'd say still the most important and best documentation of British Punk. Since then he's continued to be an essential writer. I could recommend any number of books by him. He has an academic's level of scrutiny but has retained the beating heart of a fan.

In In Their Own Write, Tony Parsons, (who will not be included in this series because I think, first and foremost, he 's not a good writer), wrote the folllowing:'I was looking at the NME the other day and some of them are still there. I think it's sad seeing names there now who there in 1982. That's a shame because Julie and I showed you can take it anywhere - a column in The Daily Mail, write book, on television.'

But are they good books Tony? And is writing a column for The Daily Mail really so much better than and so much of an advance to hanging out with and writing about The Clash? Savage and what he's done, is probably the best response to Parsons comment. I wonder what he thinks of him  Possibly not very much.

50 Days of R.E.M. # 1 Losing My Religion

'Oh Life...'

Perhaps a predictable but probably inevitable end to this particular journey. I'd say their most important song. Possibly the one that made them the biggest band in the world for a while. Smells Like Teen Spirit did a similar thing for Nirvana. It sometimes only takes one.

First time I ever heard Losing My Religion. It was at quite an important moment in my life. I'd just graduated, didn't really know what I wanted to do but knew i didn't want to work in an office. I decided I'd like to be in Prague because the Velvet and less Velvet Revolutions had just taken place in Eastern Europe. I decided I'd quite like to be there writing poetry and playing chess with Americans.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get a teaching job there, only in a small town on the Danube called Komarno on the border between Czechoslovakia and Hungary. My brother and sister and law drove me down there. Slovakia was just awful at that point in time. Really Stalinist. Flat and quite featureless. When we arrived in Komarno my brother asked me whether I wanted to just drive back home.

But I stayed. It was a very interesting year. I won't bore you with the details, as this is supposed to be about R.E.M. but Komarno was a proper shithole then. Looks very nice now. There was almost nowhere to go as almost all the bars were gypsy bars and no-one would go to the gypsy bars. I was just about the first person from Western Europe a lot of the people had met. I tell you it was so dull someone sprayed my name on a wall somewhere in town. True that.

Anyway to R.E.M. The people there were all very nice and hospitable but thank goodness for my sanity, there were two young American girls, round about the same age as me working at the other colleges in town.They were great. We'd meet up occasionally and discuss our experiences and support each other through the weirdness of it all. . One afternoon we were sitting in one of the few bars in town and Losing My Religion came on on MTV. They both liked the band.

It was just such a memorable moment. That video is so weird and out there, still not entirely sure what I think about it. As for the song. You couldn't make out any discernible tune or chorus, (it doesn't have one does it?), or get a handle on it at all. It was quite uncanny. Now everybody knows it back to front a lot of people are probably utterly sick of it but it sounded phenomenally brave the first time I heard it. I'm not entirely sure how a case to say it was a sell out could be constructed really.

Song(s) of the Day # 2,391 Mike Polizze

Mike Polizze, frontman of Philadelphia's Purling Hiss, has just released a solo album, Long Lost Solace Find that is quite distinct from the sound and fury bluster that band are renowned for.

Essentially this is a reflective and laidback affair with a set of folk-ish songs that foreground Polizze's introspective side to excellent effect.

Polizze has a definite resemblance to fellow Philadelphian Kurt Vile, (who contributes to the record), in terms of his delivery and sensibility. If this is Folk, its Slacker Folk in terms of its laconic modesty and simplicity. It's all winningly unpretentious.

These are not songs that are set to change the world, nor do they imagine that they are,. My attention wandered slightly on occasion, but nevertheless  Long Lost Solace Find proves a restful and likeable listen.  

Fontaines D.C. - A Hero's Death

Having almost exhausted my obsession for R.E.M., with the Number 1 of my countdown coming up tomorrow, it's good to find something freshly out that's equally inspiring. A Hero's Death, the second album from young Dublin colts, a quite brilliant record.

Having set the bar incredibly high for themselves with their debut Dogrel just last year, they've surpassed themselves here. They sound to me like a band who are going to be just huge and will merit every last drop of their success.

What's more remarkable about all of this is that their music is built on the most basic and rooted ingredients. In many ways this could be a late Seventies Punk or Post Punk album, in the vein of The Clash or Joy Division. There's rarely almost nothing that's remotely innovative or experimental here but it all pounds with the most intense, brooding conviction that is very, very rare indeed.

In the words of a friend and supporter of this blog, who wrote a similarly fulsome description of the record on social media: ' Direct and indirect, clear and vague, sad and joyful, nunaced, visceral, ambitious, fearless, hurt, strong, vulnerable, tender.' Thanks Rod. I couldn't put it better myself so am borrowing your words.This is a blazing album that demands enormous respect. There are precious few who can match them right now.

John Lennon

50 Days of R.E.M. # 2 Radio Free Europe

Where they started from. The band's first single released in July 1981, and then re-recorded as the opening track of Murmur, two years later. Radio Free Europe is the band in full flow, pure energy and enigma.

Song(s) of the Day # 2,390 Alex Izenberg

Baroqie early Seventies vibe from Alex Izenberg's latest album Caravan Chateau. Not for everybody, it's self-indulgent,  but I kind of like it.

August

It Starts With a Birthstone - Albums For July

It Starts With a Birthstone - Songs For July