Brisbane's SGO on the evidence of latest album One More Year sound nothing, but nothing from that city's favourite sons and daughters The Go Betweens. Instead they sound remarkably like a marriage of convenience between Slowdive and New Order. With a dollop of Allvays sprinkled in for good measure.
Not being the hugest fan of Slowdive, in fact quite the opposite, this led to an unconvinced listening experience for me. Slowdive are the prominent influence visible on here leading to a slightly sopirific disengagement on my part. I'll give it 4..
Sounds too me much like easy listening for the alternatve New Hippie set. Perfectly pleasant without frankly transcending that description and becoming genuinely memorable
Any album called Warehouse that's over an hour long is likely to be sprawling.Especially one that's fuelled by the visions of two competing and conflicted singer songwriters. Husker Du's final album is certainly something. There's much that's quite mindblowing and tender but also some slightly variable moments.Way to go..
Pale Fountains had fantastic songs and spirit but they weren't managed or handled well and made a negligible critical and commercial impact It's only now that their leader Michael Head is getting his proper due. The Pale Fountains songs are for the most part are not fully realised or slightly over embellished, admirable as they often are, They seemed to always just tail off just North of the Top Forty so that's where they find themselves here. Nevertheless, the best stuff is generally slightly off the beaten track.
Chinese American Bear/ Out of Seattle and although not remotely in the image of Nirvana in any respect, you do get the sense that they do a thing which Kurt might have appreciated to a certain degree,
Latest abum Wah !!! apparently is a mando pop /rock duo creating bilingual ear candy. It's jolly and springy highly likeable fuzzy felt Outsider Pop Music. Probably not too great for the teeth but I imagine not bad for the soul..
This is a record that becomes more more-ish the longer it spins. Not an album that deserves to be explained so much as enjoyed..
One of those bands that you are told are 'legendary' and 'seminal' but actually seem rather loud and messy and less essential than you've been led to believe.
Duke seems like it's an almost conscious attempt to drain what was so outlandish and peculiar about Gabriel#s Genesis and monetise.I still like Turn It On but still have the same sense about Genesis that I did when I was 15 and saw them on Top of the Pops with Phil Collins swaying around the mic in a loud hawaian shirt and booming into the mic like some athletic uncle. That they are a fair bit older than me and this is music for people a fair bit older than me. I've got a lot of time for the initial records but this is incredibly pedestrian and going through the motions for the most part.
'When you're young, you don't especially think of yourself as being young. You're just alive and everything's interesting and you don't think of things in terms of age because you're not conscious of it.'
Richard Hell
Everything of course is a 'journey' these days, but I actually find it an invaluable metaphor as a portal here in accessing myself as a nineteen year old in the act of self-construction in preparation for leaving the family nest and heading out into the big world.
Objectively you might think that nineteen is not so young but actually I was callow, innocent, slightly clueless (but working on it in the only way I knew how).. Essentially happy. Protected and guided by loving parents I took a year out and went off for the invaluable gap year experience of Switzerland and Casa Locarno. I was terribly disorganised and haphazard in my decision making and have a focused and clear sighted mother particularly to thank that I'd got my applications and paperwork sufficiently in place to have a University place at UEA ahead of me when I headed off to my big adventure in Switzerland. I had just arrived at the Casa forty years ago from today. It's extraordinary looking back exactly how youthful I was..
I'd chosen to study The University of East Anglia for sketchy barely thought through reasons. I knew I was interested in writing and UEA famously had a Creative Writing course. Established by Malcolm Bradbury just over a decade previously with Ian McEwan as his sole student in its vanguard year. I fancied a bit of that. I was reading a lot. Making my way through Graham Greene. Camus, Sartre, Herman Hesse. Errm Agatha Chrsitie.
Now every further education establishment worth its salt offers a creative writing course, its worth remembering that that was a different time. A different world. A simpler one Before The Internet. Before the whole idea of 'fact checking' and the so called 'free speech drive'. 1984 and Brave New World were just books. Not templates for control, surveillance and living.
Norwich had a thriving music scene which was another major attraction to me. Like all major British cities in those Post Post Punk days. Or at least it did when I applied for UEA. I had a fantasy within my head of forming a Rock & Roll band along the lines of The Smiths, The Velvet Undergroud and R.E.M. and began to write bad lyrics and imagine scenarios for myself at a mic in crowded student union buildings. A wannabe Michael Stipe or Lou. Driven by the music I was fuelled by and directed towards by the music magazine or papers. A dreamer.
But whatever had been happening in Nowich was dying on the vine by the time I got in to UEA. The Higsons had disbanded and The Farmers Boys were on their last legs, despite the fact that they had signed to EMI. For some bands leaving their Independent label for a major often proved to be their death knell rather than their moment of fruition and harvest.
Farmers Boys had been a dizzy, Norfolk response to Orange Juice. By 1985 they had run out of energy like the Duracell' less drumming bunny. Their last single before folding was competent but sparkless by comparison with The Smiths who were the British Independent Guitar band in ascendancy. This song picked up towards the end but not enough to break the Top 100 of the singles charts. It's not a classic like some of their early songs. They disbanded shortly afterwards.
I featured Steven R. Smith's marvellous Olive last year and he's back. With an entirely contrasting but equally splendid new album Triecade.
Smith is an American musician, instrument builder and printmaker with connections to the Jewelled Antler Collective.Triecade is a gently, rolling pastoral collection of atmospheric and calming instrumental pieces. Ut's beautiful.
Psychedelic Folk apparently if you need pigeonholes and tags. It's just an inspiring listen that doesn't really need labels. Classical in its mien in many respects. It's just a wonderful world to don headphones for; immerse yourself in and reflect on the light playing on the trees and natural life outside your window,
The Itchy Goblow Blow? Err yes. The Cocteau Twins to me are like walking round a Modern Art gallery. Why do I prefer Kandinsky to Joan Miro? Ultimately I can't really put my reaction into words. But I look at their canvases for a while and then move on to something I prefer.
Alex Turner and Miles Kane get together and decide they like David Bowie and Scott Walker rather a loy. I'm with them. But after a while the thought occurs. Why not listen to David Bowie and Scott Walker ?
'On the day of reckoning... Crashing down on the pavement...'
When I was at College I was very taken by classic Soviet Iconography. I studied politics and history and wore wire rimmed steel spectacles and got called Trotsky by co-travellers I went to the Soviet Union with at the end of 1983. The Redskins Marxist spiel and ace pop tunnery appealed enormously. It still puts a spring in my DMs. Some things change. Some never do...
The time of year where things start slowly in the Pop World and a relativetaly sedate commencement to my working year has allowed me to listen to the much lauded Magdalena Disk album Imaginal Disk a number of times.
I'm finally getting round to posting about it, Magdalena Disk are an Alternative Pop duo from Miami though they're based in Los Angeles.There's much debate on the band's Wikipedia page as to whether they're Alternative Pop or just New Pop. As if it matters
'Plus ce change. Plus le meme chose. le meme chose.' To my untrained ears it sounds much like an old school Pop Album of the sort that Madonna and Cyndi Lauper were pumping out when I was just a lad. All fine and dandy too. Both of them had streaks in their hair too. But the Pop is what makes this stand out.
Diamond Life was a wet dream for Face readers in the mid Eighties. Robert Elms types in black polo neck jumpers, 501s and DMs. The kind of trendies, (socialists from comfy homes generally), who made up my social circle in my first terms at university. Personally, at the time, I was more interested in literary gunslingers with Rickenbackers and Telcasters and friends with Kerouac, Philip K. Dick and Renata Adler paperbacks in their coat pockets. This record sounds heavenly to me now and Sade just divine darling. Espresso and Gitanes.
Death of a European and The Three Johns was staple Peel fare round about this time. Slightly grim but engaged and fractious stuff for kids on their way from the securities of hearth and home family home to Polys and Univerity with Fall and Befheart cassettes in their duffle bags.
'I want to be the one. Still dancing when the lights go on. Or at home with a cip of tea. Watching a documentary about Fanny Burney...'
Memorials Waterslides by MEMORIALS. A chugging, melodic Post Punk dystopian album in the vein of The Waeve, Novella and Wire. Just what the doctor ordered as we head, full steam ahead into 2025 and whatever it has to offer. More Elon Musk I imagine...
Verity Susman of Electralane and Matthew Sims, once of Wire humself, are a capable team for this kind of venture .Memorials Waterslides is just the thing for Stereolab, Pram, Vanishing Twin, Jane Weaver and Broadcast fans, looking for their next fix, Cosy adventurism.
Eliminator is quite a difficult record for me to listen ti. I've never listened to the whole album. It's so deeply etched in my memory in connection with Jonathan King and that awful AOR show he hosted in BBC 2 in the early to mid Eighties pushing Jefferson Starship, Styx, REO Speedwagon and Van Halen. ZZ Top and this record were probably one of the best things about the programme. But I still find it gimmicky and it says nothng to me about my life. Then and now. .
The kind of easy going, mild mannered slightly mannered Indie Art that Marc Riley enjoys. Easy listening for the likes of me. The English Riviera was Mercury nominated and had a mellow, artistic edge. It's Indie Easy Listening and this is by no means a slur.
I love Kate Bush. Every bit as much as the next English boy who turned thirteen in 1978 when she first appeared on the Pop horizon working out in that video on a heath in that pink leotard and doing funny things to our hormonal sensibilities forever. Oh Kate ! I've never got over it.None of us did.
But I'm contrary. I just don't like The Hounds of Love as much as othe Kate -heads and Pop Authorities . It's that Eighties production I think. Considered the height of modernity at the time, but I just don't like that sheen Fairlight thing. The relentless drums. The sense that it was all State of the Art. Generally it's a record that I admire rather than finding my pulse racing as is the case almost invariably on other Kate albums.
But still it's Kate. And in many respects 1985 was her year of realisation. So even if the Hounds of Love album still leaves me somewhat cold in contrast with her other records before and since.It's Kate! It's Kate!.
What is it with Gumshoes. They seem to be men with a mission. And a very fine one at that. To release an album at the dawn of each year and drag us forom Post Christmas ennui as we sail forth with no little trepidation. I like the cut of their gib.
And I like Bugs Forever, their latest addition to their slim portfolio. Driven forward out of Birmingham by singer songwriter Sam Sparkes on jolly, well constructed Indie tunes I like their homespun humility amd love their earnest intent.
The first post of actual new music on It Starts this year. A concept album apparently. With each song exploring the persepctive of life as it appears to a different bug. A Bug's Life. As the man would say. Tremendous. .
How Jude Rogers fell in love with Smash Hits and through it Neneh Cherry, a truly inspirational Pop Star. Someone who made records not to be famous but to change things.
For an old school Marxist, the state of the world must have been somewhat troubling in 1986. I wonder what he thinks now as he approaches his Eighties. This is a fine, ruminative if somewhat glum record. It quotes Chomsky early on.
Also a journal of my year in 1985 when I worked in a Swiss Hotel run by the Swiss Council of Churches in Locarno, Ticino. Then in the Autumn went to University at UEA in Norwich.
I worked for six months between January and June of 1985 in a hotel in Locarno, Switzerland set up as a guest home for priests and their spouses from all over Europe, (chiefly the former Iron Bloc), to stay without payment for a month. Three meals a day, excursions and theme evenings, boules on the terrace and songs in the evening in the dining and living room areas. It was a miraculous place and experience looking back, it certainly was to work in in return for a basic wage. And it must have been wonderful for the guests who stayed there free of charge. Established on incredible values of reconciliation and harmony. Built on Christian values but beyond that loving, peaceful and enlightened ones.
I worked there, in the Wash Kitchen, in the House and in Service as part of a monthly rotation process as part of small teams successively with Agnes, Hennie and Jytte three of the Danish girls. Also with Holger, a cooler than cool German guy, a good musician and a poetic soul. Sadly he left a few weeks in after we'd done the Gross Putsch the Casa required before the first guests arrived at the end of January. But he came back and a cool romance ignited between him and Franziska, the German girl and probably the best friend I made during my time in Locarno.
. The Manager of the Casa and Haki the kitchen and cleaning manager sussed me and my lack of organisational skills out early and I wasn't allowed to work in the kitchen during my stay there. Probably for the best. I did alright elsewhere. It was just me and six beautiful young women, Haki and Frau Keller the manager. A German, Four Danes and an English girl. A quite blissful experience in every respect. and a golden refuge since then a safe place for me to go back to in bad times. A treasure trove to draw on whenever I need it. Still. Forty years on.
On Saturday evenings some of us would often head down the slope from the Casa into town to the Italian Disco in Locarno. It had a dance floor encased in mirrors where the young Italian playboys would preen, entranced by their own reflections.Quite oblivious to the astonishing beauty of the young women they and I were with. I didn't look at the mirrors.Why would you?
There are certain songs I remember which they played week in week out. Simple Minds 'Don't You Forget About Me, Bryan Adam's Run To Me. And this. They're the ones I recall. This, like the others came out in 1985. The first chapter of Talk Talk's reinvention. From New Romantic also rans towards the imperial phase.of their great mythical albums,
I just need to hear the bassline still and I'm back there. 19 years old. On the dancefloor. With Jytte, Franziska, Agnes and Helle. Young. And happy.
GIFT are a strange band. Brooklyn Anglophiles. Second album Illuminator finds them throwing odd shapes from a bygone age. Like some Blackburn hopefuls warming up for a support slot with The Charlatans in the early Nineties.
It's a very difficult album to dislike but is such an odd synthesis of Shoegaze and Baggy that I left the record a few songs in and found myself listening to Nowhere instead. It felt a bit more authentic somehow.
At a certain point in 1987, virtually every third record John Peel ever played on his nighttime show was by the Wedding Present. The other two records were more than likely by The Smiths or The Fall. Every once in a while he'd throw in a Bhundu Boys song to break things up a bit.
I'm sure it was never actually quite like this, but it certainly felt a bit like it at the time. Peel was known for his eclecticism of course but his shows could tend towards the relentless and grim. This might be why they're remembered, (or misremembered), so fondly by so many all these years later Just like the Eighties in the UK might be falsely encapsulated by a Charles & Diana memorial plate, a VHS video cassette, an episode of Neighbours, a photograph of Maggie and Ronnie getting together at one of their summits. The birthmark on Mikhail Gorbachev's head, which of course always remained the same shape. Even though it seemed to morph, mutate and contort, like oil in water then, like some kind of cosmic barometer of the times.
The Wedding Present were the band from the C-86 movement that actually made it without changing. That strange scene of scruffy and almost willfully inept guitar bands that had their brief moment just after Live Aid and before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I didn't buy their records at the time. I was in love and WP seemed as dour and inappropriate to any form of actual romance as taking your girlfriend for a weekend in a two star hotel in Leeds when she wanted to go to Paris.
They came from Leeds actually. And boy did they sound like it. I had just started university when they emerged and had a couple of important friends from there on the same Literature undergraduate degree course as me. They were different from most of the students on the course. Most of us were from London and The South East and boy could you tell. Set fair for careers in media, journalism, fiction and The BBC. Probably rather full of ourselves.
But Paul and Gavin from Leeds, and Maurice from Sheffield, (the Northerners I remember most strongly from university days) were definitely different. They had the same caustic edge that bands from that part of the world generally did. The Smiths, New Order, The Bunnymen, The Wedding Present. Dave Gedge, lead singer and guiding pilot of The Wedding Present didn't even bother to enunciate properly, you couldn't make out half the words to the songs which were called things like Everyone Thinks He Look Daft and What Did Your Last Servant Die of?
By 1987 Wedding Present were The Smiths you could afford to see, with a set of songs that generally seemed built on the riff of the Velvet Underground's What Goes On sped up to near breaking point and a lyrical narrative that was pretty much a word for word transcription of the story boards and storyline for one of the younger couples in that week's episodes of Coronation Street.
It was a winning formula. I imagine it depends which Wedding Present album coincided with your first year at University or Polytechnic from the late Eighties to the early Nineties in terms of which you consider their best. I have a good friend who's a bit younger than me who swears by Bizarro. But like I said, he's a bit younger than me. George Best will always do the trick for me in terms of taking me back to my university days which were very, very good and then very, very bad in close succession.. I imagine like most people's.
The Wedding Present charted the important dramas of your first important relationships. The highs the lows, the heartaches and betrayals. Curly getting dumped at the end of an episode of Corrie, wearing a dirty pully which was wearing a hole in the elbow that deserved to be ditched just as much as he did. It was brilliantly done and certainly said everything that most singles coming off the Stock, Aitken & Waterhouse hit conveyor belt at the same time, failed to say about either what was important about life or good about music.
R.E.M. brought me to Patti Smith as to so many things. The story about Michael buying Horses when it came out. 'Since then, I never looked back.' Eating a bowl of cherries and eating them while listening all night . Then throwing up.
Radio Ethiopia grows on me with the passing of time. The same sentiments apply to Easter and Wave . The title track isn't always to my tastes. Otherwise this is feral and inspired.
Simply Red got an enormous amount of flak when they came out. How dare that Ginge get all that attention from women. How dare he rip off Marvin and Curtis. Soul purists shook their fists in rage at Top of the Pops switched off and rushed for their Teddy Pendergrass albums.
Holding Back The Years sounds poignant and classy to ne at this remove. I don't listen to the radio shows where they play it on a daily basis so it sounded fresh as a field of daisies when I gave it a listen just now. It had to be re-released in 1986 before it got the chart placing it deserved.
La Grand Accumulation by Anadol & Marie Klock the kind of record that is relatively commonplace these days. Very French and mixing in aspects of Lo Fi European synth pop and rambling psychedlic sound design.
Instantly soothing and phenomenally more-ish. Thirty seven minutes to wake up to or drift off into calming slumber. Hauntology frankly. C'est magnifique. Pur et simple.
Sometimes the best albums of all are the ones you find entirely by chance. Sich is the case with this. An albym released in 2011. The bedut record by a Prividence, viad Chile via Chile producer. He was 21 when he released this. It is a greater work of art than most of us will produce in a lifetime of striving.
A great record with a dreadful cover. Here's something I wrote some time back in another context.
A great record in a dreadful sleeve. Here's something I posted a while back in a different context.
Might as well re-post my own review of this exceptional record. In the Melody Maker book that's the focus of this series, Andrew Mueller writes about it. An Australian, like the band itself, he too has gone on to an interesting career in music and travel journalism. He gives an interesting account of probably his favourite record but after all, this is my blog, so !
'It's taken me a while to get to a Go-Betweens album on here, almost three years, given that this blog is named after one of the lines in a song of theirs and that they stand very high among my personal and musical inspirations. They've been a regular and constant source of posts on here I've gone for this, their third album proper though I could have easily plumped for any number of others. The first thing that needs to be said is that the cover is rotten. In terms of presentation, this is possibly among the very best records ever to be housed in a truly dreadful album sleeve which would not help for one moment to sell it. It's worth stating that despite their many attractions and strengths, visual presentation of their skills and talents wasn't always upper-most in the band's mind which is perhaps at least a partial explanation of why they didn't achieve the recognition that they deserved during their first, great golden spell in the nineteen eighties. This as well as switching record labels for whatever reason, while similar and more successful bands kept going a much more consistent career path.
For myself, and other fellow travelers The Go-Betweens are an almost mystical band in terms of quality, up there with The Smiths and R.E.M. their most obvious contemporaries in terms of their recorded ouput and general achievement. A sensitive, reflective band, going against the grain of a pretty vulgar, recidivist decade. But while the other two bands undoubtedly made their mark, The Go-Betweens, the equals of both in terms of quality, were left, apart from those who fully appreciated them at the time, to wait for their due appreciation, which has really begun to kick in now, a couple of decades or more along the line.
As I've already indicated, I think this was partially at least their own fault. All three of these bands were defined by shyness, and turning their heads away from the defining culture and the prevailing mood. But The Go-Betweens were distinctive from both R.E.M and The Smiths in a couple of respects in that they had a couple of songwriters and singers with quite different emotional and lyrical perspectives in addition to a female drummer who happened to be going out with one of the front-men and subsequently being resented by the other one. It was a soap opera mix that added to the drama but possibly didn't contribute to a smooth ride and an obvious curve of commercial acclaim.
I don't want to labour the point because I pretty much love all three of these bands equally, but it is worth stating that both Michael Stipe and Morrissey were both obvious pop stars in the making despite their reticence while neither Robert Forster or Grant McLennan ever were. The Go-Betweens were pretty much always a band that aimed beyond the charts until their final album 16 Lovers Lane, when they finally came upon a recipe that might have achieved commercial dividend and by that stage sadly it was all a bit too late.
I can't find immediate links to all of the songs here which is also telling thirty years on. You'll have to hunt down the missing gaps and fill in the spaces for yourself. But it's worth the effort. The Go-Betweens, (appropriately considering they named themselves after a novel), are pretty much the ultimate book-readers band, housed on shelves, gathering in dust and waiting for the appreciative browser to select them, withdraw to a sofa and read at leisure.
In this respect they're incomparable. Sometimes their songs are cast in full sunlight, sometimes in gathering darkness but always somewhere slightly apart. Evasive from immediate physical recognition. Their music is always suggestive, but somehow away from absolute definition.They're utterly consistent, fully living up to their name and the novel they originally chose to call themselves after.
Most of all their songs sound like considered work. Carefully crafted work, chiselling thoughtfully at the seams and inwards into human experience. An ongoing discussion between the band that results in the most gentle, loving products imaginable.
This might not be their best work. All true Go-Betweens fans have their own favourites. I'd go for this, the album before it, Spring Hill Fair and their last album from their first phase, 16 Lovers Lane as the ones to go for first. Others would choose Before Hollywood, which I personally think, apart from Cattle & Cane, their obvious early masterpiece, to be still a bit too rough at the edges to make it through at one sitting. I think they were transitioning from being a singles and songs project to becoming an albums band. In this respect Liberty Belle hits the spot in every respect as well as showing off a truly joint effort between Forster and McLennan. Neither one's songs are noticeably stronger than the other's on here and they dovetail and complement one another throughout.
In the year that this came out I went to see the band at Kingston Poly, across the Thames but walking distance from my parent's house in Teddington, with a couple of university friends (in the second term of my first year), my sister and a friend of hers. We walked into the hall to see the band doing their sound-check with the room fully lit. It was a strange, but unforgettable moment. A truly great but unappreciated band, at the height of their powers displaying their magic before a handful of people. At the end of the song, Lindy Morrison, their tall, slightly ungainly, but wholly gorgeous drummer, climbed off her stool and stretched her limbs in the unnatural glaring light of the venue. I can't remember particular instances of the gig that followed once they returned in their natural, dimmed setting but will never forget that.
The Go-Betweens albums, more than anything are a transcript of lost moments. This perhaps more than anything explains why they never sold as many records as they should have done. Thirty years down the line they sound if anything more intangible and impenetrable than they did at the time. 'Like a lip lifted from a lip'. Like trying to recall the pleasures of a kiss. A lost discussion between lovers long since parted. I could itemise the individual joys of this album but as with all great records you're best advised to experience it for yourself. This record is every bit as good as any in your collection although it's still so introspective and considered that it may never be truly recognised as such. This is probably the world's loss. It's certainly not theirs!'
Also a journal of my year in 1985 when I worked in a Swiss Hotel run by the Swiss Council of Churches in Locarno, Ticino. Then in the Autumn went to Univesrity at UEA in Norwich.
Music was already a fundamental aspect of my psychological make up in 1985. I was constructing my identity. 'Mein Gestatl'. I was nineteen, had just finished my A Levels but I was fundamentally still very innocent as my diaries from those days attest. I'd become an NME disciple during my college days. It was an incredible tool for determining your ideas opinions and direction back in those days
They told you the music to listen to, the records to buy, the films to see. The books to read. The opinions to have. The opinions I wanted and needed. But it took me a few months after I arrived in Switzerland to find a library in Locarno which stocked backdated copies of the NME and Melody Maker for me to pore over .
But I felt I was missing something fundamental to me even as I soaked up this fresh new experience and invested in and got to know the people I was working with. What was happening in the charts? . In the music press? Who were The Triffids and where were they coming from? What was the third R.E.M. album going to sound like.These were things that mattered to me.
Locarno was a dream town on the Northern shore of Lake Maggiore. Looking back I imagine heaven. I wandered up and down the main thoroughfare when my working day was done, past guys on street corners who tried to sell me dope. which didn't remotely interest me at the time.
I spent my time in newasgents leafing through Rolling Stone an inferior corporate stopgap for the lack of the NME which told me about Bruce Springsteen's Born In The USA, Madonna and Prince. Also about the return of John Fogerty who I was interested in as I had recently discovered Creedence.
Lone Justice were much trumpeted within its pages. I didn't hear their music until I got back to the UK and it would take me a while to absorb and appreciate them as I wasn't ready for C&W any more than I was ready for Folk or Jazz at that age. I was immediately taken by Maria McKee but there were probably other factors at play rather than pure curiosity about the music.
' Lucy wants to write the next great American novel. She can't even read the bottle.'
Maya Hawke's third album Chaos Angel is a charming, conversational exercise. According to a Spotify bio review 'it's sonically sophisticated and thematically nuanced.'
In 'real world language' it's a crafted, warm record that sounds as if it was planned and recorded in a bedroom and designed to be listened in one. It's full of smart, perceptive lines that you'll wish you'd written. Admirable. Also lovely
A book which asks a lot of pertinent questions and then goes in search of anwers.
'The Sound of Being Human explores, in detail, why music plays such a deep-rooted role in so many lives, from before we are born to our last days. At its heart is Jude's own story: how songs helped her wrestle with the grief of losing her father at age five; concoct her own sense of self as a lonely adolescent; sky-rocket her relationships, both real and imagined, in the flushes of early womanhood, propel her own journey into working life, adulthood and parenthood, and look to the future.'
What music means to the individual and the human tribe.' Stuart Maconie
A sad book in some ways. But a resonant one. About the healing and restorative and central role of music in evrything we do. 'Let me know who gets to Number One.' An early mesage from a father to his daughter, Jude Rogers the authir of the book shortly before he dies. The connections we make with people over music or sporting events. The way that football players combine together to score goals and musicians who come together in studios in the service of a song. Songs that carry you through life in expressions of desire, despair, recovery and resolution.' 'Songs that still keep us stimilated, soothe, alert, afloat.' ABBA pin my life have always been very good for that.
A record that takes e back like a time machine to a time and place. One where I was not particularly happy perhaps but I was rich in friends. This is still an incredible compelling, hypnotic record. Bring on the trance.
1985 was one of the most wonderful years of my life. So as the whole world seems to be succumbing into a nostalgic fug of bliss and comfort, to say nothing of delusion I might as well surrender to its spell for a month and a half in this countdown of my favourite 45 moments from a year that is now forty years back.
So what did I do in 1985? First of all I took a train from my parental home in Teddington, London and then took a ferry and then more trains through Swiss Mountains. Until I was in Locarno in Ticino. On the Lago Maggiore in Switzerland. A bike ride from Italy. Over the next six months I had an incomparable experience and made some of the most wonderful friends I ever made in my life. I fell in love for the first time among other things, an important moment in anybody's life.
'And I fell...' 'Did you feel low'... 'Huh'. 'Not at all,' I fell, right into the arms of Venus Di Milo.' I already had a Felt album by this time. Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty. Their 1981 bruised and pristine early classic. Felt and Lawrence their guiding (and wilfully deluded) leader had a few years of blissful under achieving under their belts already and had made their way to Creation where Alan McGee did very little to direct them to the charts. With material like this he should hang his head in eternal shame and stop banging on about Oasis immediately and forever
Welcome to 2025. And we rise for air from the tumbleturn with forty days until we reach our four thousandth consecitive Song of the Day since this particular serues started and really kick started It Starts With a Birthstone.
There are worse ways to spend the first day of the year in a church. Storefront Church A front for musician Lukas Frank and his latest album Ink & Oil a canvas for projected emotion in vagely orchestral trimmings, prking its tent between The Divine Comedy, Elbow and John Grant. .
As the clock tovcks down to 2024 here is the list of lists a hastily calculated combination of the Top Twentys from Mojo, Uncut, Guardian , Best Ever Album and my own. As in many cases Beth Gibbons Rules !
