I was told recently. By an excellent friend I have known since I was 15 that I have an excellent memory. He put it in stronger terms than that but as he probably has the worst memory of anybody I've ever known in my entire life, So I won't take the compliment terribly seriously and allow it to go to my head.
But my memory is pretty good. I have no idea why that is but I've discovered it's pretty remarkable. It can take me to places. So I might as well try to make the most of it. here. One emotion I can access and unpack relatively easily is the act of coveting something. In a shop window or a market stall. Should I buy it? I've decided with time that I should. Because otherwise it will nag at me until I do. . .
This isn't an emotion I feel about anything but records really. I'm lucky in that respect. I have an itch I can scratch. I don't yearn for sports cars or country houses or Rolex watches or designer label clothing or settees to impress the neighbours. I'm relatively content and so can live within my means.
Dortmund, Germany. 1993 I'm working as a freelance job as an EFL teacher at a school just off the Westenhellweg a long thoroughfare that bisects the city centre a five minute vertical stroll from the main train station. I'm looking at the cover of Blur's second album Modern Life Is Rubbish . It's got an old school image of a steam train on it. That will do me. I want it!
My governing emotion? I'm coveting it. I get the sense that Blur are getting interesting. Establishing an identity after starting off a couple of years earlier as mouthy but melodic chancers from Colchester, attaching themselves to any scene going. Shoegazing, Madchester, Whatever, if there are drinks and cheap drugs on the rider.
Anyway. I don't buy it. I should have. I own a vinyl copy now. I respect the coveting emotion these days. But back then vinyl copies had to be hauled around. I still bought records occasionally Parklife, Suede. Gram Parsons Siamese Dream. But the clock was ticking on me as with the rest of humanity in the early Nineties. . Vinyl is closing. CDs the practical but emotionally void corporate vacuum is here. For another decade and half. Until the world sees sense.
Modern Life Is Rubbish today is probably best understood by seeing it as Blur planting a flag. Marking out the territory. That Blur were still contenders. Parklife would be their moment. Where they wedded themselves to their artistic destiny and birth rights. Paid off the mortgage to the House in the Country. Before Damon and Graham guided them back to where they should be heading. Sounding a bit like Pavement and reheated Grunge meets Bowie.
Modern Life Is Rubbish isn't rubbish. It's pretty good. It ticks off the Damon / Justine plan for world domination. There are no end of lifts, stroke steals from XTC, Teardrop Explodes, Wire, Specials, Gang of Four et al. Then it tails off perilously towards the end. A couple of tracks could be pruned and wouldn't really be missed.. All of the band's signature elements are present and correct. Oi Oi Knees up Mather Bran. Next stop enormodome arenas.
Tenor Sax of the Young Siul Rebels. Learned his chops with the Geno Washington Band. The guiding musical spirit of the early Dexys horn section. Decamped with most of the band after the album was released to form The Bureay. Then spent decades as a jobbing musician in New York. Now retured to Cornwall and composing but still gets his sax out occasionally.
I listened to a Sonic Youth record yesterday and it reminded me how deftly they can crack open the visible and the unknown worlds and venture into unknown territory. So Daydream Nation this morning, An exhortation of spirit desire. Literary, dissonant, urban and desperate. Desperate at all moments to be cutting edge. And often hitting direct bullseyes. They tune their guitars to the sound of the New York Metro ! Sometimes it can be slightly irritating how hard they try.
I don't play this record very often but this morning I put it on at quarter to five and found it immediately compelling and stayed for the full four side trip. Sometimes, in fact always these days, this is what I tend to do with records. Listen through them in their entirity, as they were intended.
Like much of the best music, they don't spell much out for you, sometimes not at all, but there's so much here. This is an invitaion into mystery and experience. A beckoning figure drawing you first into the darkness, to the edge of the abyss and then leading you back, slowly towards the light, They make you want to find out more. And they Rock relentlessly.
The Slits were unprecedented and opened up a new mineshaft. Incredibly brave but also playful and sinuous. This was an exmple of women using what they had to get just
If You Asked For a Picture, Blondshells' second album. Dreamy 90s Indebted Art-Rock. Sabrina Teitlebaum interrogates mid -20's heartache and complex family relatuisnhips with bluntness and guarded optimism.'
Well that's Pitchdfork's label on Blondshell's tin for you. But what do those guys know. It's a gently yearning carefully crafted album that diesn't demand much from the listen and repays unvestment as we head into the weekend.
Sonic Youth are a band that established an attitude, approach and sound early, reached their own summits in the mid eighties and maintined them to the start if the Nineties, continuing to put out excellent records thereafter until the painful split between Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon demanded that the band went their seoarate ways too .
Washing Machine is an album from 1996 with plenty of the bands characteristic vim. They never lack drive, fire or inspiration. Some of the dark romance of the great Sixties girl groups clicks in on Little Trouble Girl. At their sharpest they could jump between worlds. The known and unknown. They had a sense of the uncanny that wasaand is still rare.
Keyboardist in the initial line up. Spent his late teenage years in Dexys before opting for a Literature degree at UEA.He was a bit of an odd one out from his totally committed and combative bandmates. He did some time in The Damned. Who were sexm drugs and Rock & Roll by comparison to the driven and abstinent Dexys. He ;ools nack on his time in the band as on the road with' eight sociopaths'
You never stop mourning the important ones. They live within you. The ghosts of your life. You do what you can to calm their voices. To live with your loss. If you thought about it too long the voices would drive you mad. Unhinge and derange you. Best to keep going forward. You're doing these lost ones no favours by thinking otherwise.
I've got a few. More than some. Less than others. A couple of sorely missed siblings. A very good German friend who threw himself off Beachy Head on the coldest night of the year more than thirty years ago. Famuly. Some other good friends. One in particular. Someone I got to know in Dortmund in the early Nineties. Used to go over to his place and watch MTV. Smoke dope togethei and listen to Nirvana, Can, The Beatles or Tim Buckley with on Friday afternoons. Matt,
After Matt died a few years ago I kept his photo on my desk. But it upset me too much when I'd had a skinful when I'd been out on a Friday evening. I used too find myself sobbing. It was the beer. But also his photo. In the end I put his photo in the drawer and I was fine.
Matt was a big Kraftwerk fan. We neither of us cared much for Oasis. When their name came up yet again at a certain point his response was 'Why don't people listen to Kraftwerk?' Why indeed. This was music if the future when it came out un the Seventies. It still is. It has the grace and poise of the most resonant classical music . You could listen to Oasis instead if you like. But why not listen to Trans-Europe Express. You'll feel you're on the intercity from Dussledirf to Cologne. Music can do that.
1977-1982. My secondary school span. Perfect !. This record came towards the end of it and was about seizing contril. Phil Oaley finds his Supremes ! The Eighties meets the Sixties applying wat was learned in the Sixties.
I listened through to Wife Patrol's NOPLACE half heartedly as I was making my way yesterday towards my half eleven online class with insurance people un Dussledorf. They're a challenging crowd this group. Know each other very well. Have done this for years. But don't really crack a smile and certaily don't laugh out loud too readily. I don't like to generalise about nationalities. There's too much of that and we all know where that leads. Particulary the Germans.
Anyway, I took to NOPLACE and niw I'm listening to it again as I make my way to my half seven woth meducal people Auf Freitag. This is a cool noise. Out of Indianapolis. It shifts time, register and mide with every track. That's the indulgence the internet allows. One moment they're Crazy Hirse. Next they're heading towards the Portlang Oregon Indie oasis. Cool, coool, really cool! As Teddt Duchamp ranted in Stand By Me !
Patti Smith, Television, a proper investment in The Velvet Underground. Big Star. Wire. Pylon. The Replacements.Jason & The Scorchers. The Rain Parade. The Dream Syndicate, Jason & The Scorchers. True West. Green On Red. The Long Ryders.The Minutemen. Husker Du. The Meat Puppets. And the dBs.
All of these came from the initial investment of mine in Murmur, the debut album frim R.E.M. which I bought towards the end of 1983, soon after it came out. That record was my great year zero. The moment when I really starting subconciously plotting my musical and in some ways my personal journey. I couldn't overstate the importance of this purchase for me. Everything came from there.
dBs I struggled with slightly for many years.They were eagerly recommended by the band . I bought their thurd album Like This, on import from Tower Records, just after coming back from Switserland where I'd spent six minths during my gap year, It confused me. It didn't sound like R.E.M. except that both were melodic and enigmatic.
Now I'm listening to the band's debut album Repercussion over and over again almost forty years later and much has fallen into place suddenly. I can see the strands that connect the bands. Repercussion and Murmur. Big Star most readily. The Beatles too. There's a lot of Beatles in R.E.M.
Twelve songs on both albums. A certain interest in the unconventional and narratives though dBs storyline approach seems more linear. A reward repayed to repeated listening. A withdrawal from the conventional. It's good to start getting there eventually. Whuch I think I am. This is a horse of a dufferent colour.. A remarkable album.
The Only Ones are largely known, apart from by the commitmed, for one song; Another Girl Another Planet. A pretty blistering three mintes, that transcends genres and comparisons. But still, they barely released a bad song during their existence. Robert Forster knew. He started a fanzine in the band's honour. Pete Doherty knows. He practically owes Peter Perrett his persona.
Even Serpent's Shine was the band's second album.. It came out in 1979 and was critically lauded but didn't so much as make the Top Forty in the album charts. The likes of me, who lap up French Romanticism and its legacy like hungry cats from a kitchen saucer, rolled over to have our tummies tickled but such appreciation doesn't pay bills. The band went their separate ways in 1982.
The album is incredibly lovelorn and doomed. It doesn't necessarily hang togrther as an album so much as throw forth brilliant moments like a classy jewel box or a firework display. But we're talking fleurs du mal here. It wallows in a state of self pitying poet maudit hunched projection that was unlikely to cross over into mass acceptance and was destined for eternal cult status. Mainly for those that are prone to this kind of wasted romantic elegance.
I have a relationship with R.E.M. as with no other band. I wouldn't claim for a moment that they were the best that's ever been by any means. Or even that they were more important than other groups who were also putting out great work in the early to mid-eighties, (The Smiths and The Go Betweens come immediately to mind), the period where they put out their first records, the ones that still mean the most to me and the ones I keep coming back to and always will. They're just my band, the one I constructed much of my personal identity and perspective of the world from, in my late teens and early twenties when you do these important, unrepeatable things.
'When the light is mine. I felt gravity's pull...'
Fables of the Reconstruction was their third album and was recorded and released in 1985 when they were undergoing a lot of personal change, as was I. I was in the middle of my gap year and then went on from there to university where of course so many of the important things begin to happen. As for R.E.M., they meanwhile found themselves in London, away from their former production team of Mitch Easter and Don Dixon for the first time, recording the album instead with Joe Boyd, producer of Fairport Convention and Nick Drake among numerous other notables.
'He's not to be reached. He's to be reached...'
R.E.M had a famously and well-documented terrible time during the recording of the record. It was cold, they were poor, and existing apparently on a dreadful diet consisting mostly of potatoes in addition to having to become acquainted with the dubious pleasures of the London Underground of the mid-eighties in winter on the way to and from their recording studio. The turmoil they underwent during this period is reported to have brought them to the verge of splitting, though the strong nature of their personal friendships and shared mission, (a notable feature of the band), stopped this from taking place.
'Way to shield the hated heat. Way to put myself to sleep...'
The record they came out with is notoriously muddy. Whereas the production of Murmur and Reckoning is thoughtful and layered and different instruments can be clearly differentiated in the mix, allowing the listener to follow different things each time, Fables still sounds like thick soup, even thirty years on. Boyd has been repeatedly blamed for this, much to his irritation.The muddiness though for me is part of its attraction and ongoing appeal.
'Two doors to go between. The wall was raised today...'
I bought and heard the record in the autumn of '85, just after returning from Switzerland where I'd been working for six months and where I'd fallen tentatively in love for the first time. I was already in love with R.E.M., however, their mystery and melody chiming with an idea I was developing of myself. I bought the album in Richmond in the company of a friend and went back to his parent's flat to listen.
'Joe, Bill and Ted, stand on your head, (that's my folly)...'
My first listening reaction was an almost total blank. It was nothing like I'd expected, nothing like either Murmur or Reckoning to my ears. It took me a while. There are of course clear continuations between the three albums, as I came to discover on repeated listens, the melodies, the vocal harmonies, the evocation of the American South and Michael Stipe's lyrical concerns, found poetry and thick vocal burr, almost as incomprehensible as previously in terms of the actual words or coherent sense of individual songs but slowly coming into focus in terms of what he was saying and where all this was going.
'Can't get there from here. (I've been there, I know the way)'
It does take some work however. I'm still working on it and thinking about it thirty years on but the album is worth it and things are beginning to fall into place. Fables is crammed full with duality. An album of eleven songs, each of them to some degree a narrative about the Deep South and the consciousness and troubled eccentricity it generates and shapes. Knowing your Faulkner, McCullers and O'Connor is helpful in this respect because the band feed on these forbears in their early work particularly.
'Green grow the rushes go. The compass points the workers home...'
Life is a great deal about narratives. Which R.E.M knew. They were grounded in narratives. Communal, happy living in Athens, Georgia and a shared experience which is where this record comes from. Listening to their early albums you can hear The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Creedence, The Band coming out of the mix but also the way that veers off into the road into the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Television, and on towards the arty side of UK Punk with Wire and the Gang of Four.
'Fever built a bridge. Reason tore it down.'
But the narrative here is actually a lot deeper. This is a confused, conflicted record.Ill at ease with itself. And in the tension, the awareness of their potential and the idea of where they might be going is pretty much what makes this the quintessential R.E.M. album along with Murmur and Automatic For the People. Knowing their talent, sure of themselves. Over the next few records they burrowed into the idea of being the biggest band in America and then from there to the world, slimmed down their songwriting craft, first through Fall on Me, then The One I Love and finally Losing My Religion which showed them the way back home to Automatic for the People which is probably their lasting statement and their best record and testament. How they found their way home.
'We never wrote the reasons that I need explained. Some things are givens and others get away.'
Pretty much all of the songs on Fables are unfinished. They're open ended and lonely. Orphans all. They speak of a certain kind of unhappiness and disorientation that never really knows satisfaction. But not one that doesn't know the way back onto the main road. When I went to see the band play in Hamersmith Palais in the autumn of 1985 with my older brother and younger sister they put on one of the great Rock and Roll shows I'll ever see. As they kicked into the opening bars of Feeling Gravity's Pull, the clean cut American college kids at the front of the venue felt the surge of the London crowd pushing behind them and melted in genuine but slightly unjustified terror toward the back of the venue. From that point on the night was all melody and tension. They were quite remarkable!
'I'd like it here if I could leave and see you from a long way away.'
I haven't told the whole story about Fables here. I can't. Nobody can. It's one of the best open-ended, inexplicable records ever made. You can talk and write about other R.E.M. albums but this one remains elusive. Even to the people who made it I imagine. It's like a fish out of water, flip flopping on planks. It's crammed full of great songs, some of the best this band ever wrote, but none of them done full justice.
'He had a dream one night. That the tree had lost its middle...'
As I write, Peter Buck, the guitarist of R.E.M. and one of the guiding visionaries of this great band has turned sixty and is heading on to sixty one. I wonder what he thinks of this album. I think I read a quote from him today that said that nobody else could have made this particular record. In that respect he's entirely right.
Probably the most amaiable of Dexy alumni. Played the bss in the original incarnation in his teens . Was bound for an apprenticehip but music took precedence and he opted for wearing a bobble hat and spinning and twirling on the spot while keeping the beat pinned down.
Schooled in the Midlands in Soul. Riddling with imposter syndrome though his technique was fine and high in the mix if Searching For The Young Soul Rebels. Pete rejoined Dexys for the One Day I'm Going To Soar sessions. He still makes a basic living as a hand to mouth musician. A happy man.
Record companies are pragmatic. Yhe $ is the common denominator. They look at The New York Dolls and think, 'No that won't work'. Kiss, Alice Cooper that will. Modern Lovers. No, Jonathan will not be marketed. Talking Heads. That's more robust. Robust wierd. But they'll tour. See Sparks, Queen. Orange Juice, Haircut 100. Japan, Duran Duran. It's not a tricky parlour game. It's probably a boo.
For Television think The Cars. Tom Verlaine was never going to sell to the masses. But you can see why the Cars sold to the Mid West. Filled arebas. Nothing that was likely to scare Mom and Dad who would have been more concerned to hear Marquee Moon blasting from Junior's room.
Not this. It's sleek and crisp and well produced. Just left field enough that the Jocks wouldn't tune in to it, but smooth and sleek enough to file next to Damn The Torpedoes and the first two Police albums. The sentiments are not threatening. Nobody gets hurt. Or particularly moved. But toes are tapped. A record that makes all the right New Wave sounds, ticks all the right boxes while keeping the cash tills ringing. You can imagine Andy Warhol approving.
If you can think up a better thing to do on a May morning between lessons than to crank this up on your TV screen and make yourself mushrooms on toast than let n
Valerie June's latest album Owls, Omens & Oracles alnost slipped through my net a couple of weeks back.How remiss of me. But I gave it a listen late last night and here it is as song of the days. And very excellent it is too.
June has a voice that sounds slightly squeezed and on the verge of anguish and an exquisite grasp on the soul songbook. Having a song called Joy ! Joy! that sounds like The Chipmunks trying their hand at Jean Knight is a good start. Find the Joy Joy in your Soul people. You know you want to.
The record moves on to different miids, dufferent temois. It's all deeply romantic in a milennial slightly David Lynch way. Occasionally slightly chintzy but the heart is firmly in the right place.
'This unique LP is bound to be forgotten.wrote Greil Marcis in his Rolling Stone review of this inadvertent classic, one of the kost cherished cult records of all time.'
Plenty has been said and written about Dexys Midnight Runners. But this may be the book they've been waiting for. Nige Tassell who is amicable and amiable is exactly the person to chronicle a band of intense driven and not entirely sane musicians who made up the various incarnations of Dexys. The encounter with Kevin Rowland waits until last.
We start with Kevin 'Al' Archer who was Rowlands Number Two. Archer turns down the invitation to speak to Tassell and its no surprise.to him. Archer's history with Rowland is tangled and embittered to a degree. He sparked the idea that Rowland took and ran wuth for the band's second album Too Rye Aye Folk and Fiddles. Rowland in time acknowledeged it and fed Archer a share in the royalties. But it's not hard to imagine the resntment festers.
I've just been on a short roadtrip and as generally when I return home to my bachelor pad I'm in a cleaning mood thinking I must at least attempt to emulate the splendour of the houses I've seen on my travels. So there 's nothing for it. I'm tidying the fridge. Trust me, it's a dirty job. And erm I've got to do it...
But being who I am I need a soundtrack. And this morning that's the eponymous album from Bay Area's Moby Grape from 1967. First things first. That's a fine band name indicative of the spirit of the Psychedelic Dawn, that unrepeatable era in which it was made.
Superlative record too. Moby Grape had four fine guitarists, five songwriters, five vocalists and about' twelve distinct personalities'. This leads to the record sounding schizophrenic in addition to Psychedelic.It has any number of moods and paces.
I play it probably once a year, should play it more, but am now giving it a second play as I make my way to my half eleven online class. And my fridge is almost presentable. So all things considered, we're getting there.
I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp tails off in the last 25 pages. Really Hell was at his most interesting when he was at his height, 70 to 78. That's a pretty good run. The memorirs are slightly curate's eggy, I have ni unterest in the bodily shapes of the women he slept with. Why would anyone. It's poet's license but it's also invasion and indeicretion.
But when Hell writes well he writes very well. About the times. About Verlaine. About himself and their relationship. About drug dependency. About New York. The book ends with possibly it's finest and most moving passage. About bumping into Verlaine by chance in New York late one night.
'The other night I was walking home from a restaurant when I saw Tom Verlaine going through the dollar bins outside a used bookstore. I'd been surprised to see him there a few times in recent weeks. Usually I only spot him somewhere every two or three years. In public he always holds himself nervously apart from everyone, meeting no eyes, as if he assumes everyone wants to accost him. His head and neck perch like a raggedly spooked hawk on the high, bulky prospect of his middle-aged body above the crowds, his eyes self-consciously focused on something in the distance. When I see him on the street I don't try to get his attention, but this time I was too curious to let the moment pass. What was he doing? The books in the dollar bin are as useless as they come - outdated text-books, forgotten mass-market trash, operating manuals. I walked up to him and asked . "Finding out anything about flying saucers?" The last time I'd spoken to him in person as opposed to a few e-mails had been seven or eight years before. "Yes, this is the Greek edition." He grinned at me, holding out a Greek-language three-volume set of some sort, proffering it theatrically as if it were a great, but fragile and possibly dangerous prize and he was an animated cartoon, like Gumby, the way he does. He smiled something else, wide-eyed, going along with the flying saucer stuff. I replied "I hear Plato came from Pluto." He continued to smile widely. His teeth looked brown and broken in the night light, even worse than mine, (he still smokes), and his face was porous and expanded and his hair coarse gray. I turned away and walked on, shocked. We were like two monsters confiding, but that wasn't what shocked me. It was that my feeling was love. I felt grateful for him and believed in him, and inside myself I felt grateful to him and believed in him and inside myself I affirmed the way he is impossible and the way it's impossible to like him. It had never been any different. I felt as close to him as I ever did. What else do I have to believe in? I'm like him for God's sake. I am him."
I read a newspaper interview with Biy George once where he said he listened to Nico's Chelsea Girl every Sunday morning without fail. I wouldn't really want to listen to any record every week at the same time but if I had to, this would be a candidate. It's one which fills the space you're listening to and makes you ponder. Time seems to slow down. Somewhere there's a feather falling slowly from the sky....
Slightly mannered European crooner hauteur romanticism that is so aloof that it often leaves me slightly cold. Divine Comedy, Jack, (who Melody Maker liked a lot back in the day), Momus, Microdisney. People with lots of Scott Walker, Jacques Brel and Bowie in their record collection.
I persevered with The Road To The Sea as it was intruiging on some levels and I had time on my hands. this morning. It never let's the mask slip but has a spring in its step.It made me feel that I was in the South of France for 45 minutes. Elan. Strike a pose there's nothing to it !
'Sire's idea to promote the LP was to send us on a tour of England opening for The Clash. We would play twenty-one dates in twenty-three days in twenty cities. It was the first time I'd ever left the United States and the first time the band ever played outsode of New York.
England made a bad impression. It seemed defeated and ashamed. Its more priveleged youth manifested this in continuous cynical, self depreciating irony. Oder people were still fixated amazingly on World War II, which was apparently the most recent moment un whuch they could take any pride.Everybidystill seemed psychologically crushed b the collapse of the empire fifty years before.
Physically it was mire of the same.. The streets of the East Village were burned out and lawless., but they were Joyland compared to the death row oppressiveness of urban Britain. A lot of its streets were ugly fir having been cheaply and tastelessly rebuilt after the World War II blitz bombings, but even the ninettenth-century blocks were endlessly monotpnous lie mishappen penitentaries.
For food there were fried potatoes,, and potatoes and beans, and potatoes and eggs, and meat potato pies and boiled potatoes.'
Waking in a fabulous stone Cornish cottage belonging to the guy who I lived in a corridor opposite forty years vback. Ready for the lessons and then the long journey back to Newcastle. Headphones on at my laptop.
Samantha Crain's Gumshoe makes a sturdy soundtrack.Somewhere between Sharon V and Big Thief . Fragility and resonance in the voice. Solid walls of etherl sound. That'll do. Time for my shower.
I had the opportunity to see the Stone Roses just before their wave hit in 1989. They were playing a small Indie club around the corner from where I had my lodgings. I had a cold so didn't go. You can't win them all.
Car Seat Headrest's latest album The Scholars is a bold new Rock Opera apparently inspired by an apocryphal poem by Archbishop Guillermo Guadelupe Del Toledo. You certainly can't fault them for their ambition.
The bnd have become more adept musically since they made their initial splash.This is an intense, driven and multilayered album that is Indie in essence and Prog in scope and range.
When I listen to Rattlesnakes I always think of a giddy dance with a beautiful girl, my first true love. In a student disco. Third term at university. Befroe hopping into a minibus which took me back to my student lodgings. Thinking only of her. We got together not long after. Rattlesnakes.was the perfect soundtrack. At the time. And now, almost firthy years on. Whenever I wish to think about those moments,
The twang of laptop steel . On Kassi Valazza third LP Fron Newman Street. It's a good record. A comparison was made in the Mojo review. That's high praise.
This is not an album destined to be remembered in those terms. But this is a gently lilting record of slow poetry and evocative, slightly Psychedelic rhythms and tones.
Valazza lives in Portland, Oregon. A city with a reputation that goes before it. This is a record which eased me into a Saturday on a road trip to spend time with special friends from different times in my life. Taking cars, buses and trains and travelling acroos England' s still and shifting landscape.
The Decemberists areengaging Folk Rockers who get interesting features in magazines but rarely get or deserve the cover story. This is no criticism. We cannot all be the Smiths or R.E.M. I would like to see them.
Whenever I think of Surfer Rosa I picture myself. I'm upstairs in my bedroom in a three story house in Teddington. Abour 23. I'm not well. I'm suffering from a mystery illness. A serious one. It's been diagnosed as Sceleraderma but the causes and effects are still shrouded in blackness. Dr Carol Black and her focused team are working on it a short bus ride from where I'm standing, in Hounslow, as the illness attacks me and tries to claim me as its own.
I'm listening to Pixies Surfer Rosa. My windows are thrown open and the dial on my NAD amp is cranked up. 'This is a song for Carol...' Carol Black? Probably not. That riff. We haven't heard that guitar intensity that shaking the body free of its constrictions for years. Bowie knows. His antennae are up and he recognises fellow travellers.
I wrote a lyric about the illness I was struggling with. What it felt like. For a band I imagined being in. A song I wanted to sing called Howl. 'I'm living in an elephant skin. Shaken something loose inside. A thing apart from the skin I'm in. Scratching the skin of life...' It was powerful. I knew it was. But neither the song nor the band was ever realised. It was not a million miles from Pixies. Television. Feeling Gravity's Pull.I was feeding off other people's ideas. Greater talents.
Listening to Surfer Rosa now it's both deranged and profane yet also calculated and maintained. Like all great Rock & Roll debuts an incredible achievement for ones so young. I remember Frank Black, or Black Francis or whoever you want to call him saying he wrote lyrics as mathematical exercises. Equations. Pixies were a perfect formula of distressed sound and ideas.. Like all great bands.
I was young when I bought this record. I could have died from the illness I had. But I didn't. I'm sitting at my desk listening to the sme physical object that I listened to in my room in Teddington in 1988. My record is immaculate. Unscratched. I saw Pixies at the Doolittle stage. They were phenomenal. David knew. Kurt knew. Me and my mate Andy knew. It shouldn't have taken Fight Club to make the world sit up and pay attention. It was all here.
Sometimes when chancing upon something that's new to you it's best just diving straight on without exposing yourself to things which will give you misconceptions and cloud your thinking.
Take Wishy's Planet Popstar. on the surface it's a bracy leftfield whirl of inventive guitar rhythms and core changes of the kind that American alternative bands have been prone to for over forty years.
This is 21 minutes long. It's an EP, not an album. It's easy listening in the way music in a genre you're familiar with can ease you ito the coming day. It'll definitely do.
There are Nine Commandments of Love. At least according to Al Green's Call Me. One of the sheep got lost on the way back to the pen. But it'll do. You don't notice any shortfall.
Looking at the records I bought in my teenage years they seem increasingly like realisations. I bought Call Me at some point in my first year at university in realisation that white, literat guitar bands did not tell the whole story. Al Green was one of the names you knew you had to become familiar with.
I bought a Greatest Hits shortly afterwards and bonded over it with my girfriend. As for t he studio albums frankly you could get pretty much any of them. The consistency, the quality is pretty remarkable. The studio sound. The production values. Th tap, tap, tap of the drumwork. Like a beating heart .The loving quality of it all. Turn it over. Play it again.
Perfect concept. 'It's such a perfect hour Francoise....' I'm glad I spent it with you. Spend an hour with your imaginary French girlfriend. Pretend it's still The Sixties. Stroll round Montmartre. Pretend you've read Rimbaud and Verlaine. Pretend you like absinthe. Pretend you speak French. These songs are woven gold. The ones in French sound much, much better than the ones in English.
I actually have a lasting connection with this record and moment in Pop History, The Jesus & Mary Chain's first and always most significant album . My first term at University. The band were touring in support of the record and there was a riot every night. Partly because they were instigated by the band's surly and provocative behaviour, partly because their notoriety went ahead of them in those days, drawing types who were looking for bother or drank themselves into states where they were up for it and went looking and hoping to smash stuff up.
The girl I was fated to fall for and go out with for the next four years was there. Snapping excitedly, (and this was an excitable girl) on her classy old school camera like some budding Factory shutterbug. I wasn't and regretted not going because those who did babbled, (and are probably still babbling), about the utterly magical legendary frisson of the evening.
As for the record, the cameragirl left me her copy when we parted company at the end of the Eighties. It's not an album that I feel like listening to first thing for obvious reasons. In fact I don't feel like listening to this today. The sun is climbing to its height. It feels like the second day of a glorious, balmy Summer.. This can waut until a day when it rains. I'm happy then....
Where R.E.M. went after Bill Berry pack up his sticks and made for the departure gate. Released in 1998 it sounds like nothing quite as much as a CD. There's something unmustakeably lengthy about some of the records from this era, as if they were barely intended to be listened through at a single sitting.
Still, I make no ttempt to disguis my undiluted love and affection for these guys and after Berry left this was a creditable effort. They always tried to do something different from what they'd done and although not everything works there is plenty that does.
A tugboat is a romantic old school image. A song by Galaxie 500. Tugboat Captain meanwhile are a homesy, Indie Folk collective who churn out cutesy and loving product that express warm and loving and inclusive sentiment.. Dog Tale is their latest record. I'm listening to it wuth a mug in my hand at my desk as I prepare myself for a drawn out breakfast and then an afternoon train which will take me to Cheltenham to stay with my best friend for a couple of days.
Sometimes it's good to keep things simple. That's what Dog Tale does. Songs about hearth and home, that keep me company as I sail between six and seven on the first of May and occasionally swell to charming, blissed out ephiphanies. I think I'll run my bath.
