TSAHB sound now like a 'You had to be there' phenomenon. Still, they did make quite a splash at the time. Especially as a live band.
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 13 Iggy Pop - Lust For Lfe
Talking of progenitors of Punk.
Song(s) of the Day # 2,408 Galore
New favourite band # whatever! San Francisco quartet Galore release their eponymous debut album and it's all low-fi, ragged Indie glory of the most basic but beautiful and colourful stripe. Start to finish.
You might like to mention Beat Happening as a possible inspirational source, but essentially this kind of approach has been at play since The Raincoats first appeared. Chuck The Pastels, Tallulah Gosh, The Vaselines, Daniel Johnson, Tiger Trap, Jad Fair, Mouldy Peaches,The Shaggs and The early Go Betweens and Modern Lovers into the mix and you'll have a pretty good idea of what's going down here. Minimalist youth with attitude.
Anyhow, it's all pretty sublime. Self-consciously inept because there's a proud tradition of wonderful bands and artists who are only too aware that being note perfect and proficient music wise has produced all kinds of variations on the deeply tedious down the years. Why bother, when you could be having so much more fun doing stuff like this.
Once Galore, and that's Griffin Jones, Ava Rosen, Hannah Smith and the outstandingly named Britta Leijonflycht, have set out their stall, (which they pretty much do in their first track), you kind of know what's coming next. But that's nothing to be worried about, because they get so much utterly right here. A sparkling, small joy.
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Song of the Day # 2,407 Hen Ogledd
Hen Ogledd, the Old North. Also a group containing Richard Dawson and harpist Rhodri Davies among others. They are as attractively eccentric as you might imagine.
Monday, August 17, 2020
50 Days of Glam # 46 Kevin Ayers
Probably a forerunner of the louche, decadent sensibility that Ferry and Bowie rode onwards.
Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 11 Ian Dury & The Blockheads - New Boots & Panties
'New Boots has dated. The music - a musicianly funk and hard rock, directly influenced by ancient cockney music hall and forged in the short-livedbut important UK trend that was 'pub rock' sounds quaint, and in the old and punkier numbers , old and sweaty. Dury himself is the reason that the album still stands up.'
Song of the Day # 2,406 Doublehappys
There are any number of obscure Flying Nun classics from the early Eighties. Here is one. Brittle. Perfect. Wayne Elsey of the band, died by misadventure on a train journey home from Auckland. The other two in the group went on to form Straitjacket Fits.
Sunday, August 16, 2020
Music Critics # 4 David Cavanagh
In December 2018 Music Journalist David Cavanagh committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train at Leagrave Station in Luton. He was 54 years old. Not perhaps the best known of writers, he nonetheless had a specific skill and insight into both music and life and his writing is certainly worth tracking down.
At one point an editor of Select, he also wrote for Q, Mojo, Uncut and Sounds. He wrote a sprawling 600 page plus history of Creation Records, My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize, a terrific account of the egomania and delusional nature of Indie 'stars in their eyes' wannabes where he treats The Loft as if they were The Velvet Underground.
The book was derided by Alan McGee as 'the accountant's tale'. McGee as an arch fabricator would have resented seeing Creation's myths and notoriety stripped to their grubby bones and himself represented 'in an inconveniently candid light.' Cavanagh does a splendid job and it's a must read for anyone with personal memories of the Eighties and Nineties Independent music scenes as well as the changing society that informed them..
Cavanagh also writes a brilliant Bildungsroman piece in Love Is The Drug a collection of essays by writers about their formative musical loves. In a piece called Hell of a Summer, He writes about his student days as an impoverished and unloveable university student in the mid Eighties who discovers and befriends The Triffids in their early days in London.
It's a brutally honest and marvellouly detailed essay, describing the desperate melancholia, loneliness and emotional shallowness of youth. Cavanagh clearly never entirely lost the vulnerable core portrayed so wonderfully here. His writing was elegant and measured and he's a great loss.
50 Days of Glam # 47 Middle Of The Road
Perhaps not strictly Glam, but it seems to slot in here just perfectly.
Song of the Day # 2,405 Andy Bell
Andy Bell of Ride has a solo album coming soon. This is the single that precedes it.
Saturday, August 15, 2020
Covers # 132 Beck
One of those songs. Apparently Beck has been playing a snippet of this Chris Bell classic in virtual concerts recently.
50 Days of Glam # 48 Iron Virgin
'Almost all the really great Glam songs were hits, but this is one of the best that wasn't. An abrasive slice of Sweetorama from a Scottish band, who toughened up the teenage-rampage meme while wearing Clockwork Orange inspired costumes. The singer had a padlock on his crotch with the legend : "No Entry".' Jon Savage.
Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 9 Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express.
Something still, so utterly haunting about this music.
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 13 The Sex Pistols
'They made you a moron...'
Friday, August 14, 2020
50 Days of Glam # 49 Bonnie St. Claire & Unit Gloria
Not a classsic but hey it's only # 49 and it is very Glam.
Song(s) of the Day # 2,403 Exploding Flowers
Gorgeous early Eighties jangling from LA's Exploding Flowers. Their latest album Stumbling Blocks, (their first in nine years), might remind you of anyone from dBs to Soft Boys to the Chills to to The Three O'Clock to The Church to Wire when they chose to chime rather than drone. Soft, Psychedelic Guitar Pop music of a determinedly optimistic disposition.
If you're of a certain vintage age wise, this is likely to take you back to the days when you heard this kind of thing for the first time. Exploding Flowers definitely sound like they might have been early Flying Nun contenders.
The one city the band really don't sound like they come from is LA frankly. The joy all over Stumbling Blocks is so unconstrained that it feels distinctly provincial, but in a good way, if that makes any sense. There's a happiness here than seems born in the great outdoors.
Although I did slightly tire of the relentless perkiness a few tracks in and wanted a bit more light and shade than this offers, in short sharp bursts Exploding Flowers are hard to beat. Catch them while they're still in bloom.
Thursday, August 13, 2020
50 Days of Glam # 50 The Bay City Rollers
'We sang shang a lang and we ran with the gang...'
Another quite unnecessary and lengthy series but I'm always up for a challenge. Plus I'm making my way properly through Simon Reynold's excellent but enormous tome Shock & Awe, Glam Rock & Its Legacy so this should keep it company.
So, fifty days of Glam. Another countdown. An imaginary, purely subjective chart. That essentially limits us from 1970 to 1976. All of the usual suspects will be here. One song for each. Two for the main players. All singles. Which disqualifies Iggy & the Stooges, who would have made it otherwise, to describe properly the movement's dark underbelly. But no proper singles were released from Raw Power so they're out.
So what do you get with Glam? Plenty of good songs for sure, some a bit camp, many rather silly. Generally a good tune that could get played on the radio. Sometimes something a lot better than that. Particularly when we get to the Top Twenty. Mostly blokes. Mostly white, British blokes.
The other criteria for this rundown is that I will like the song. This isn't a favourite but it's good enough for # 50. So we start with The Bay City Rollers. It was this or Bye Bye Baby. They're both fine as songs.
Full of yearning for the Fifties. Gangs, jukeboxes, heartbreak though of course it's all really just candy floss for teen magazines. Simon Reynolds doesn't mention the Rollers once in his book about Glam. But then he's a rather serious fellow. Not sure they can be written out completely.
Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 7 Iggy Pop - The Idiot
Twins well with Kraftwerk today. As it says in Trans Europe Express: 'From station to station. Back to Dussledorf City meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie.'
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 11 Kraftwerk
'despite being arguably the most influential single in this book, initially (it) sank without trace.'
Song(s) of the Day # 2,402 White Denim
Much vaunted Austin, Texan rockers White Denim have often been too eclectic and flashy for my tastes, and I've never really listened to them at great length, even though I've been aware of them and their reputation. Perhaps for this reason, I barely noticed the release of their latest album World as a Waiting Room, which dropped a couple of months ago, and I'm only really catching up now.
I've given it a couple of listens now and I kind of like it. I'd probably slot it and the band into a category with two other contemporary West Coast Institutions Ty Segall and Oh Sees. Impeccable musicianship, covering a lot of ground, but often easier to admire than to love.
Because, boy do White Denim cover a lot of ground on World as a Waiting Room. Recorded earlier on this year, in a 30 days stretch at the start of Lockdown ,it seems to want to cram as many of the dubious pleasures of the first five years of the Seventies onto one album as it possibly can.
So you're getting T.Rex, Todd, King Crimson, Bowie, ELP, Sparks, Yes and that's all just for starters. A couple of times they also reminded me momentarily of The Stranglers and Joy Division too, which shows they're no completely allergic to the late Seventies either. But this is definitely, definitely not Punk.
It all might strike the casual listener as a quite inadvisable melange of Prog, Glam and mid to Heavy Rock that really shouldn't work. But actually it does. They even come up with one of my very favourite songs of the year too in Queen of the Quarantine which sounds like Robert Fripp or Tom Verlaine guesting on a mid-Seventies Bowie record. Quite gorgeous.
Elsewhere, DVD sounds like a shotgun marriage between Aeosmith's Toys In The Attic and Sonic Youth's Silver Rocket. There are some very odd things happening here sonically speaking. I kept actually telling myself that I should really be hating it but somehow it kept charming me back.
I enjoyed it, more I'd have to say than some of the more recent offerings from Ty and Oh Sees. While World as a Waiting Room is essentially showing off, and it's always showing off, it's highly enjoyable at the same time and it never once hurt my ears.
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 6 Television - Marquee Moon
'New York's Television introduced beauty to Punk Rock...'
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 10 The Clash
Billy Nomates to The Clash.
Song(s) of the Day # 2,401 Billy Nomates
It's quite unusual for me nowadays to become genuinely excited upon first hearing a young British musician or band. Mostly, the new stuff I hear that really excites me comes from somewhere else. But it's good to hear that something fresh from the place I call home can still do it for me. Like this for example.
I first heard Billy Nomates last night, by chance on BBC evening radio. The track played, Hippy Elite, leapt out at me as a slightly new take on familiar themes, so I hunted down the eponymous debut album, just out, by the same artist and it had a similar, thrilling effect on me.
Billy Nomates is a young musician from Southern England, called Tor Maries . She's releasing this album on Jeff Barrow's (Portishead) label Invada Records. Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods guests on the record and has been voluble in his support for what's she's doing. So has Jon Robb, Punk stalwartand man behind the Louder Than War phenomenon. Marc Riley, BBC DJ, is also a fan.
So Billy Nomates has excellent credentials and testimonials. But what does the record sound like? It sounds like Punk. It sounds like Pop. It sounds terrific. It's stripped down to the bare bones. It itemises the minimum wage, down at heel humdrum, dead end job existence of British 'have not' life, which has always been here and if anything only seems to be getting worse. But it does so in a way that's sparky, energetic and pure fresh air, in a moment that needs it.
Bobby Nomates has eleven tracks, and only one of them goes much beyond the three minute mark. Bobby / Tor is pushed straight to the front right from the off. She can drawl, she can sing, she can do hobo street poetry, she writes and writhes and rants about the here and now and is clearly angry, but knows enough to channel her energy into something that's entertaining and fun first and foremost.
Being of a certain age myself, she reminds me of early Patti Smith, particularly Piss Factory one of Patti's finest and definitive statements. The picture on the album cover is perfect. Pure '77 cool. Shades, bowl of chips, coffee, definitive, miserable English seaside caff. A realisation of what actually makes these isles great. Not the given narrative.
There are other connections to be made. The Sleaford Mods ones makes sense. There's quite a lot of this kind of stuff around at the minute. Fed up, but up for a fight. Engaged.
So much going on here. No particularly seems like a manifesto. In interview Maries has said that she really started getting somewhere once she started saying No. Always a good idea when it comes to producing art that goes against the tide, an attitude which generally produces much of the best, proper art and always has. Probably always will.
Billy Nomates is currently biding her time, her career on hold as so many lives are right now what with Covid-19, she's moved back in with her Dad on the Isle of Wight and is doing her best to spread the word about the album via Zoom chats and the like.
Needs must. Anyhow the record is here and I love it! I'll be her mate if she needs one. I imagine I won't be the only one.
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Songs Heard on the Radio # 376 Billy Nomates
Cool hipspeak attitude, half sung, half drawled. From her eponymous debut album, just out which I'll have to tune into.
Silverbacks - Fad
They're clearly putting something in the water in Dublin these days. For Fad, the debut album from Silverbacks is just the latest frothing, urgent punky racket to drop off the production line following similar recent missives from the likes of Fontaines D.C. and The Murder Capital.
Fad by no means disgracess itself in this distinguished company. It's an accomplished and varied record, certainly not lacking in self belief. One moment agitated and furious, the next reflective and detached.
The fact that songs alternate between a male and female vocalist helps matters to. This is certainly not a predictable record. Nor is it a comfortable one. I always got the sense that a major detonation was imminent.
It may take a few listens for the tunes to fully flower in your consciousness but I get the impression that it should be worth the effort.
Song of the Day # 2,400 Valentine Dial
More from Melbourne. Slightly reminiscent of Mick Head of Shack this one.
Monday, August 10, 2020
This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 8 Elvis Costello
'It's essentially I think the same warning as God Save The Queen, but with shinier shoes, a bigger love for perfect garage pop, a bleak cynicism worthy of Graham Greene, and an even greater, more timeless sense of dread.'
Song of the Day # 2,399 Drug Store Romeos
' I have the misfortune to be an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drug store Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe...' Blanche Dubois.
Drug Store Romeos. My new favourite band # blah, blah, blah. Youthful Fleet, Hampshire trio grab their name from a Streetcar Named Desire quote demeaning Southern clothes horse teens, and come up with a sound that is reminiscent of others but somehow wonderfully still their own.
They have three tracks available as of now. The latest, Quotations For Locations is the best and shows rich promise indeed. Young Marble Giants, Stereolab and New Order meet up for a blind date and sparks fly. One of my favourite songs of the year so far. They're working on an album. If this is anything to go by, it could be very good indeed.
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