Pleasures Of The Harbor

Monica Queen

2011-01-06T15:50:00.004Z

El Rancho Relaxo, Bastille, May 27th 2006

Tasteful yet never bland, the perfect accompaniment to afterglow and mellow contemplation...the red wine Johnny Smillie sips between songs seems an apt refreshment. The ringing acoustics and impeccable vocals from Monica Queen and her enviably inventive guitarist satisfy the pallette like a bottle of fine Beaujolais shared between friends: mature yet fresh, eternal flavours sampled anew. Tonight the wood-panelled Bastille hosts a perfect match of performers, venue and audience. Exuding casual bonhomie, country club El Rancho Relaxo extends an amber-hued, candlelit Hola to an encouragingly diverse audience ranging from seasoned C&W connoisseurs to younger guns such as one young buck who could give Belle And Sebastian's Belfast Bob Kildea a run for his money in a Best Feathercut Of 1973 competition. From the moment Queen and Smillie take the intimate stageless stage through to the closing, spine-tingling The Holiest Night, the former Thrum chanteuse exerts quiet command through eight sorrowful mysteries. Rapt, we savour each word elegantly conveyed with the languid precision of a Patsy Cline. Heartbreaking ballads of love in the dark and a new, Loretta Lynn-style tale of living in a one-roomed house embrace the ether while 260 describes "a dreamer of dreamers" on the Glasgow to Coatbridge bus, "smokers at the back so much younger" with a transient serenity, the commonplace made magical, a vintage performance.

The Wellgreen

2010-12-14T13:20:00.002Z

The Wellgreen: Wellgreens (The Barne Society)

Inspiration is a gossamer thing. Honing and recording it is hard graft. Consequently it’s very rarely that an artist’s recorded work breathes and exhales the fresh air and exuberance that inspired it. From the Smile-era Beach Boys choral harmonies of the opening title track to the closing, timeless ‘Circle’, The Wellgreen are so tuneful it’s swoonful.

Feel flows through the short, playful ‘Store Keys’ which sounds like Pink Floyd jamming with Ivor Cutler on harmonium and in the way the McCartney-esque ‘Happy Enough’ leads via effortlessly superb drumming into ‘Wellgreen’d’ (these boys’ points of reference extend far and wide and back home again). The drums are played by Stuart Kidd (sticksman to the likes of BMX Bandits and St Deluxe). Kidd and Marco Rea wrote, played and recorded everything on this tour de force. And, boy, can they sing. Vocally, the gentle melodic meditation ‘Forever And A Day’ (“Faraway couldn’t get much closer, close enough but still so far away”) is a killer. On an album where every single note is impeccably intoned the intertwining vocals of Rea and Kidd are especially sublime here. Marching beats and military drums subtly weave into the mix along with the rubbery bass that makes the cream of 70s powerpop such a delight. In the same vogue, ‘Going Home’ kicks off like Bram Tchaikovsky’s classic ‘Girl Of My Dreams’ and proceeds to nag the ears with delicious familiarity on first hearing, in a manner akin to the cream of Teenage Fanclub’s golden repertoire.

Maybe geography’s the key to the Wellgreen’s store. The charms Clydebank has to offer are a somewhat mixed bag, but it’s a significant step out of the urban jungle. Like those melodic sons of Largs, Gallacher and Lyle before them, maybe it’s the pleasures of the Clyde coast that so beautifully inform ‘Maybe It’s The Pressure Of The City’. As Marco & Stuart sing “Over the hills through the night to the sea” the music ascends and subtly suspends and relaxes here and there, sharing some quality time with a George Harrison guitar solo.

Every sound emanating from Rea’s studio in Clydebank, The Barne, is life-affirming, sending good air billowing through its dusty mellotrons and vintage sound paraphernalia. It’s hard to believe that the entire album wasn’t conceived, recorded and mixed in a Quaker clean, muesli-fuelled, log-walled cabin, near a crystal fountain, the clear country light illuminating the wonderful land outside. ‘Why Today’ and ‘Don’t Give My Number Away’ are soft-rock in its most organic form, while ‘Mr. No-One’ demonstrates a strutting confidence and a pumping bass underpinning climbing piano modulations, the like of which were probably illegal till the early 70s when the likes of The Raspberries expanded the post-psychedelic envelope and power pop came to be. The legacy of Badfinger is in good hands.

‘December Child’ makes it easy to imagine the snow softly falling outside as Rea and Kidd croon “Winter is ours just for today”. Romantic, yet never twee, even as the angelic chorus chimes in: “Snowflakes falling on the ground for you and me”. If Phil Spector had ever felt content with his lot and captured some angst-less bliss on Gold Star studio tape it would have sounded like this. Equally, Paul McCartney and Todd Rundgren could conceivably be the masters behind the fresh masters of ‘Sand’, ‘Secret Footprints’ and ‘Keeping Me Alive’, paeans to the twin utopias of love and the elements: “The sun is in the skies but it’s the warmth that’s in your eyes that’s keeping me alive.” ‘Looking Through The Window At The World’ reiterates the bliss: “It’s amazing just to be alive when the day’s so beautiful outside”. Its Beach Boys feel and gorgeous production compensate for a rare occasion when the words maybe err a little on the hippy dippy side. All is redeemed by an outro that could have been piloted in by Roger McGuinn from the great Notorious Byrd Brothers album.

While there are occasional deviations from the tone poem this record weaves so beautifully (‘Into The Red Light’ steps back the best part of a decade from a clear 70s country day to a frenetic city night club), each moment The Wellgreen choose to share with us holds its own on a plangent, almost perfect album.

isthismusic? December, 2010

The Kaisers & The Beat Poets at Archaos

2010-12-08T13:04:00.004Z

Head Kaiser George Miller surveys a two-tier hall sparsley populated by early clubgoers and a few beat-chic acolytes. He and his group of eager beat practitioners are undeterred in their efforts to make this moment 1962.

Tonight two new Kaisers tread the boards. They are drawn from a seemingly endless line of Scottish succession. With his quiff, tight black jeans and black leather jacket, bassist Mark slots seemlessly into place. As rhythm guitarist Kaier keith takes lead vocal on "Peanut Butter", the crowd is swelling in number and the ultra noneties venue starts to resemble the go-go club scene of some sixties movie. Any sense of camp or irony is dispelled by this music's sheer muscle.

Favouring Archaos' huge p.a. system rather than The Kaisers' venerable oblong sound boxes. The Beat Poets immediately exercise the easy option, churning out "Pulp Fiction" fave "Misirlou". With cabaret sax section in tow, lead Poet Tom Rafferty resembles a nondescript best man in an eighties suit. And the average wedding reception contains more hints of menace than Rafferty's compacent crew display tonight.
Long Live The Kasiers!

Meantime

The Gin Goblins At Nice'n'Sleazy

2010-12-08T08:10:00.002Z

From Meantime...

Viewed through dry ice and chemistry set explosions, Big John is a mutated metal Billy Gibbons, a slobbo truckdrivin' cousin of Lux Interior squeezing hybrid Chuck Berryisms from his lamé gold Gretsch. Fake blood adorns his face, arranging it into an A(big)laddin Sane lightning flash. This is Mudhoney for blood money. Blood Uncle money.
Frontman Mikey casts off a harlequin hat, revealing a shaven-head to match a Rollins-style back tattoo. He claims he hasn't slept for days and he can't be bothered performing but, amid studied leering and bouts of cymbal bashing, you'd never guess. Decked out as punk panto pirates, the Gobs may try a little to hard to shock (not being bothered being part of the bargain), but they impress as sure-footed plunderers of rock mayhem.

Bigwig Showcase

2010-12-08T07:53:00.002Z

Glasgow King Tut's, September 16th, 1996

Blind Jump, opening a busy bigwig showcase at stadium-shaking volume, still have some way to go to rise from the ranks of dance metal wannabes. By contrast, the Starlets, led by a boyish singer/guitarist with a quavering voice, favour classic chord structures as they appropriate whole passages from "Raining In My Heart" and "I'll Never Fall In Love Again". "Carousel" and "I Told You So" add a melancholic tinge to their happy-go-lucky pop.
Derivative in a different direction, The Chosen's energetic Cuban heel tappers Angel and Check Out The Check Out Girl build on a basic mod framework that, augmented by trumpet, eventually veers into Teardrop Explodes territory. Eiderdown Walls are hailed as conqueing heroes before they even strike a chord. When they do, it has "Gallacher" written all over it. A stream of Manc-style hooks follows, the anthemic "Easy Come, Easy Go" standing out as something special.
Making a hastily rescheduled appearance, Mansun reward the faithful (who've stayed on till nearly midnight) with a short, punchy set. Delivering committed versions 0f the radio-friendly "Stripper Vicar" and "take It Easy, Chicken", all they need now is an anthem of their own.

Thee Faction

2010-12-04T17:57:00.002Z

Thee Faction: At Ebbw Vale (Soviet Beret) “Recorded in situ”, Thee Faction’s first ever official release, At Ebbw Vale was possibly recorded at an NUM benefit in Ebbw Vale in 1985. Whatever the exact genealogy of this recording, it’s as real as Billy Bragg and Wilko Johnson having a pint with Arthur Scargill in the wooden snug of a flat cap pub while, what Dylan Thomas would term a “giggle of schoolgirls” screams by, its members ensconced in a white stretch limo or decommissioned fire engine, oblivious to all but their own future X-Factored diva status.

In days gone by, when Britain knew the dignity of labour as opposed to the indignity of wannabe celebrity culture, the Welsh steel town of Ebbw Vale was the constituency of Michael Foot, a fashion disaster, perhaps, but a truly inspiring politician. Prior to this, your correspondent’s political hero Aneurin Bevan, the “father” of the National Health Service, represented Ebbw Vale as a Labour MP. Nowadays the steelworks have gone but the valleys remain. Even if it is indeed twenty-five years since this set was recorded, the surrounding hillsides surely still resonate to the invigorating backing vocals that help arm ‘Union Man’ the song sends At Ebbw Vale crashing into earshot. Seldom can an anthem against the decimation of Trades Unions have rocked so hard. Rock&roll and old-school R&B are sliced together in nicely nasty fashion throughout this record. There are distinct elements of Dr Feelgood in belters such as ‘Charm Alone’, a rhythm and blues stomper that scuzzes and pounds, and “Hands Untied”. and especially throughout the rousing ‘Don’t Sell Yr Consent’ as the down-and-dirty vocalisations of Billy Brentford intone, “they wanna keep you ignorant, behaving like an infant, it’s called Manufacturing Consent.”

‘Conservative Friend’ sounds like the Rolling Stones meets AC/DC with added juggernaut guitar, hijacked in the backing vocal zone by the Pixies. The lyrical conceit: “you got a Conservative friend – then that relationship, why it’s gotta end.” seizes The Specials’ ‘Racist Friend’ motif and, as heard now, re-establishes it for the Coalition generation. Brentford delivers both French and English lyrics with an appropriate sting in his wail on ‘The Catcus’, a taut, springy rendition of Jacques Dutronc and Jacques Lanzmann’s withering critique of aspirational mid-60s French society. ‘Gone Too Long’ adds more supercharged freakbeatery which really lives up to that garage band -style “Thee” in the band’s name. Sonic gears change seamlessly as ‘Rise Up, Don’t Give Up’ showcases the stirring yet lilting vocals of the splendidly-named Kassandra Krossing.

Ramones-ish both in title and execution, ‘Julie Got A Raise’ proves to be an excellent powerpop song about enlightenment in the workplace…this is Da Brudders for the Brothers and Sisters: foot-tapping and energetic, turbocharged, but with no excess flesh on the bone.

In the liner notes to this record, Thee Faction comment appropriately that their song ‘Social Inclusion Thru Marxism’ is “far catchier than its title suggests, comrade,” and while ’4Evry1′ may read like an unreleased offcut of Prince-style funk, it turns out to be a back-to-basics guitar-led crunching celebration of life after the Marxist revolution (“We’re gonna have a good time when capitalism falls”). Utopian, perhaps, but a glorious vision nonetheless, and all the more so for being wrapped up with ‘White Riot’ guitars.
Reserved, according to the band, for the “bourgeois pantomime of an encore”, ‘I Can See The Future’ builds via Phil Spector drums into an anthem of clear-eyed idealism.
Whether in 1985 or 2010, Thee Faction project a musical and lyrical vision that reinforces the ideal that it’s the moment that counts: it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at. And At Ebbw Vale is a very good place to be.

isthismusic? 2nd December, 2010

The Sexual Objects / Flesh / Wake The President

2010-11-18T08:27:00.001Z

King Tur's Wah Wah Hut, 17th November 2010

The first word that comes to mind when Wake The President take the stage is economy. Economy as template, not limitation. A certain classicism of sound and look: thrift-shop jumpers and Scandinavian college crops impress the eye as a frenetic urgency engages the ear, kick-starting a hotly anticipated evening. ‘Last Exit For The Lost’ adds texture on the spring reverb of a Fender Twin and a Vox tube amp. Guitars truly ring like the peel of bells, just as they should come Sunday evening on the King Tut’s stage. ‘She Fell Into My Arms’ nimbly soundtracks the implications of its title – it’s a song safely held in a stream of sonic disorder. Interplay between guitar twins Björn and Erik grows exponentially as dry ice starts to emanate onto the stage – maybe that’s why I can almost detect a touch of early Cure here and there. And that’s a compliment. Already masters at tonal colouration and possessing a demeanour utterly suited to their chosen field, Wake The President are extremely good – perhaps a chorus away from being very splendid indeed.
Flesh’s set commences promisingly, with a vocal-free heavy summer vibathon which positively bounces along, then, as a figure from a back projection screen repeats the word “Flesh” ad infinitum, Sharon Martin takes the stage to offer some proficient vocals as the material nosedives. Grammy-winning producer and ex-Altered Image Stephen Lironi’s impressively propulsive drumming is wasted on fare such as the clumsily titled ‘This Afternoon Tomorrow.’ Cue cliché after cliché as, visually, the way of all Flesh’s set is to trawl through a slew of over-familiar iconography: a worn litany of Warhol, Studio 54, Edie Sedgwick, Campbell’s soup cans, Amanda Lear, John Wayne, Lichtenstein, Coca-Cola, eighties break-dancers, Soul Train and Minnie Mouse that concludes, with stunning predictability, with the signature Warner Brothers’ sign-off “That’s All Folks!”.
Martin is a capable if somewhat bland performer, but lyrics of the caliber of “We’ve got to be strong if we’re going to survive” alienate your correspondent, which would be an agreeable enough condition were it of some Brechtian dialectic nature, but it’s more a case of gazing askance at someone else’s party in full swing as Lironi’s wife, Claire Grogan, and friends jig with unfettered abandon and whoop loud approval from the floor. Their endorsement is understandably partisan, but I feel numb and dumbed-down, enclosed inside some A&R showcase bubble somewhere between 1987 and 1991. As the Sexual Objects will later sing: ‘Outta Place Again’.
The sonic signifiers of the mid-80s to early 90s are nothing to be ashamed of. Hey, WIN were a great band, even as they had to mind the gravy train of remixers. And they still are, somewhere in the washes of Foamy Space Time. Because ultimately it doesn’t matter what the building blocks are. Put the man with the most febrile, fertile imagination since Mark E. Smith into any creative situation and genius will out. That man is Davy Henderson of The Fire Engines, WIN, Nectarine No.9 and The Sexual Objects. He is a demi-god next to Flesh’s Demi Moore.
Now, I’m sure this wasn’t the case (dapper bass player Douglas McIntyre runs Flesh’s label, Creeping Bent, after all), but to my tattered imagination the opening instrumental Sexual Objects squall seems to deliberately scour Flesh from the stage, with Davy Henderson hunkered down next to a mini-amp that has been de-“halled” to simply read “Mars”. As the splendidly tense ‘Culture Supervisor’ loosens its grip, we’re transported to somewhere the Spiders might indeed feel at home. ‘Queen City Of The Fourth Dimension’ is glorious, drummer Ian Holford providing handclaps and backing vocals with heartwarming conviction, and if tonight’s rendition of ‘Midnight Boycow’ overdoes the scrapyard thing its majesty still survives intact. Majesty builds as guitarist Graham Wann joins Holford for some uplifting Flo & Eddie vocal action behind Henderson’s inimitable drawl. ‘Merrie England’ percolates, as does”Full Penetration’ while ‘Here Come The Rubber Cops’ finds these guys delivering such sterling performances I later feel especially wretched about nabbing a taxi in front of them post-gig. I should have jumped on top of a stationary vehicle and thanked the whole band for bestowing levels of cauterization to this song’s denouement that matched Television at their best.
Kevin Ayers’ heartfelt ‘Soon Soon Soon’ concludes the set and the refrain strikes a chord: “We know what you mean, we know what you’ve seen, we understand”. I’ve heard the song before, on Marc Riley’s show earlier in the week and I liked it. To me, at this moment, it’s become a beautiful thing to sing to end the night. A night where two out of three ain’t bad: in fact two out of there have been pretty damn wonderful. Hey, I want to Wake The President and broadcast the news: I like my Sexual Objects with only the merest hint of Flesh.

Random Fifteen With Notes (Pop's Facebook Thing)

2010-11-12T11:40:00.002Z

1. Elected - Alice Cooper.
I used to work with a fifty year old Alice Cooper fan who apropos of nothing used to solemnly deliver the line "you and me together, young and strong" on tired Tuesdays afternoons in the office. Jim Smith looked like John Virgo and John Peel, a whole lotta Johns. He kept a picture of himself as he was when he started in the office in 1969. Hair down to HERE. I love the horns on this track.

2. Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles
I remember the incalculable thrill of first owning a bootleg of the sessions for this. After all their group and individual acid-drenched adventures in the staggering pop year of 1966 the boys get down to business at Abbey Road around the time Malcolm Campbell crashes Bluebird on Coniston Water and a baby Royster has his first verifiable memory (taking the top of his right middle finger in a swing door while waving at my family, Peacock Hotel, Newhaven, Christmas Day 1966. It grew back). I have this recurring image when listening to certain recordings of young men in groovy clothes making dusty old electrics work for them and for all time in old-fashioned studios, or sitting at pianos almost privately singing and playing their souls out after the screamfest, boozefest, pillsfest of their pop bacchanalia. I get that feeling from Eight Line Poem off Hunky Dory. I always see Bowie playing the Haddon Hall piano as he sits by a window, glass black with night on the English countryside, frame repainted white. Both elements matching the keys of the piano.

3. Drop Out - Pearls Before Swine.
It has long been my intention to cover this song live. Or cover it in even more thrift shop incense than it already possesses. It sort of swells up in a utilitarian way chordwise that's much more electrified folk process than Beatles or the Brill.

4.Whatever Happened To Saturday Night - Buffalo Springfield
Great spoken bit at the start - "tack tack tack". Stevie turned me on to this. He once spent half an hour in my room while I went out to the shops playing Flying On The Ground Is Wrong over and over off the Retrospective lp. That's the kind of thing I like. I still think the Springfield are a kind of well-kept secret.

5. My Lady Heroine - Serge Gainsbourg
Mais oui, this is good reggae meets pre-Les Beatles twisty Bobby pop.

6. All Mod Cons - The Jam
Title track from an album I borrowed from the Baird Hall record library. Since I first dropped the needle on the groove, this has always sounded like it was recorded one late autumn teatime after the clocks changed - a very studio season and time of day I'd say, akin to 2.

7. I See You - The Byrds
Oh yeah, this was used by Costello as a template for Lipstick Vogue and by Crosby as a template for Renaissance fair and Dolphins Smile. Which are both sublime. A track with seeds a-plenty to sew. Coolly psychedelic.

8. Do Right Woman - The Flying Burrito Brothers
I always expect that this, and Aretha's dare I say it definitive version, is going to start "Take me to Harlem" rather than "Take me to heart". Whatever way it commences, this song shakes the senses.

9. The Warmth Of The Sun - The Beach Boys
Written just after JFK and Officer Tippett, baby. I could even find it in my heart to love Mike Love.

10. No Salt On Her Tail - The Mamas & The Papas
Fabulous Like A Rolling Stone organ intro and beautifully rendered backing track. Calm, calm vocals - never has a band sounded so undruggy and taken so many drugs.

11. I've Got Dreams To Remember - Otis Redding
Beautiful. Reminds me of one of my favourite soul ballads. Gotta Make A Comeback by Eddie Floyd.

12. Gates Of Eden - Bob Dylan.
Live, 1964: "This is a love song". A tremendously stark yet vivid song.

13.Hollywood Baby Too - Win.
Ah, the genius of Davy Henderson. My friend Ian on the drums. Mr Russell Burn of the wonderful Spectorbullets and Bum-Clocks. A supremely catchy and overlooked track. Can't wait to see, and review, El Hendo's latest band, The Sexual Objects, on Sunday.What Will I Do 'Til Sunday, Baby?

14. TVC15 - David Bowie
When I was thirteen a supply music teacher took us for a single lesson. He announced he was an atheist and played us Stationtostation. Strangely enough, DB's most religious album. Not this track, though. This is the Thin White Duke looking back in a way to the Mannish Boys and spouting some nonsense about the TV eating his baby. Like all amazing albums, the throwaway tracks support and strengthen the whole. And this album only has six tracks. Bowie at this point was beyond godly.

15.Kardomah Cafe - The Cherry Boys
Lost Liverpudlian classic from around 1984.I used to listen to this beneath the bed covers on Saturday nights when Janice Long would play it. Friday night was my night out night. Saturday was recovery and music in the dark.

Spectorbullets

2010-11-08T09:05:00.001Z

Something is amiss. Call the cops: “Uh, we located the body of the song, and then a split second later we’re gazing at a chalkmark on the sidewalk where the body used to be. So it goes.” Rum goings-on lurk around each street-hassled corner of Spectorbullets’ eponymous debut album. Take the disquieting vignette Danny’s Day: over Shangri-Las-style fingersnaps, Swedish-born, NYC-resident Gustaf Heden lays some barbed jive on our prying ears: “You, unknown man. Many a time I’ve wanted to slash your face. Although I guess you’re my unknown soulmate through your love for her”.
A spare sonic electicism reigns throughout these lyrical, dislocated gems. Mars On Wednesday materialises like Yello busking outside a Moscow metro station, a bebop street poet spewing forth verses while a rock’n’roll biker trashes the keys. Typically for Spectorbullets, the song revs and raves, then abruptly pulls up at the kerb. Brevity is everywhere. Opening track ‘He Needs It’ features the last recorded performance by the poet, performer and writer Paul Reekie who took his own life in June, and to whose memory the album is dedicated. The song suggests a deserted cabaret briefly graced by Reekie’s preoccupied passing flaneur: “Past the stray fires and land mines we could work it out if I just knew what to do with your love.” Later, this theme is restated by the sweeping ‘She Needs It’ whose guitar, courtesy of Malcolm Ross (Josef K/Orange Juice/Aztec Camera), sounds like it’s emanating from some leaky basement of the Brill Building.
Actually the album was recorded in the Leith home studio of multi-instrumentalist Russell Burn, singer-songwriter Heden’s co-conspirator in Spectorbullets. (This is the debut l.p. release from Mayakovsky Produkts, a label Fire Engines/WIN founder member Burn formed with journalist and ex-Reaction Recordings supremo Innes Reekie). Lead single ‘Mayakovsky It Ain’t (Chaositis)’ also features Ross on guitar, and opens like a hyper- edgy Postcard 45, gathering momentum as Heden enquires “What are you going to do, rock ‘n’ roll?” Riffing on this theme, the rollicking Prince Of The Sun pivots on the line “So take your rock’n’roll stamp collections and get the hell out of my life” and follows that up with a joyous Jacko crotch-grabbing “oooh!”
From the tremolo tenderness of The Buffalos to the classic chordings of hidden track Hackescher Market, the sound of Spectorbullets is fashioned from materials as vintage as a brownstone apartment yet constantly refurbished. Encountering the poppy, hooky, reverb-swamped ‘Goldmine’ is like stumbling into a high-ceilinged room where a party is already in full swing, while ‘Miss Ground Zero’ careens around on rolling newsflash piano. Stairwell percussion reverberates as if someone’s rhythmically sledgehammering a door to force that piano out the apartment.
Detectable through this delectable chaos is a subtext of romantic reflection. ‘Drop’ (lyrics by the album’s cover model, the talented actress and writer Joanna Pickering) is led by a plaintive acoustic guitar wending its way up a cobbled backstreet – “fading silhouettes of memories gone”, while a lightly strummed acoustic also ushers ‘Deadest Room On The Block’ into a Euro-Bacharach arrangement. Here Heden’s voice is at its most gently affecting, before the song halts around the two and a half minute mark to conclude on a cowboy lope.
For all its abrupt detours, disappearing bodies, vulnerable shadows and plaintive contemplations, this picaresque gem of a record displays a dazzling confidence: Heden concludes on the album’s official closing song that “If I was the Queen Of Sweden I would know how to blow a king”. With such gorgeously amiss missives, he and Burn majestically blow the mind.

isthismusic, November 2010

The Sexual Objects: Cucumber

2010-10-17T08:41:00.002+01:00

An off-kilter sunbeam has landed on the old record player – the one that still plays 16 Revolutions per minute. It’s by The Sexual Objects – the T. Rex’n'all Objects: the latest, hey – the greatest, glam anagram of influence and insouciance fronted by Davey Henderson.
Once the opening ‘Here Come The Rubber Cops’ sheds its slippery skin to distill down to an elongated denouement of skewed pop bliss, a modus operandi emerges: wiry, meshed guitars prod and nibble around the edges of something ecstatic and then, augmented by lush banks of vocals, deliver in sublime abundance.
Sometimes you may marvel at how individual songs manage to hang together, but Cucumber works gloriously as the smart sum of its teasingly tattered parts. Henderson, the man who also drove the Fire Engines and Win, slithers down the greasy pole of pop armed with nuggets such as the whatever-THAT-means ‘Bluetime In Fluff 82′ (“let’s disappear into the badly glued-down stratosphere”) and its erstwhile A-Side ‘Queen City Of The 4th Dimension’, a strangely elegiac shuffling Bolan boogie.
In similar deliciously derivative fashion, ‘Merrie England’ lays a louche Velvet Underground self-dialogue drawl over a chugging VU beat. These blatant assimilations and audio verités lend Cucumber a freewheeling spirit that’s sensual and liberating while still plugged into the pop grid.
How this amalgam of previously released 45s and fresh glam bambalam by an essentially regrouped Nectarine No. 9 translates into teetering yet affecting cohesion is a mystery and a delight. Scratchy odes to alienation such as ‘Outta Place Again’ and closing track ‘Demonstration’ radiate analogue warmth like the warm valves of a Dansette on a rainy afternoon, while the sonic sparkle of ‘Kodak Projector’ and the courtly acoustic ‘Baby Wants To Ride’ are an aural delight, even as the latter ends with the band discussing the shortcomings of the take they’ve just recorded.
Poppiest of the lot are the hooky, urgent ‘Full Penetration’ and the sexy freakbeat of ‘Midnight Boycow’ which is all delicious drums and handclaps and trippy keyboard, kicked into action by a filthy bass lick, and melodically spun from the same catchy fabric that powered Win wonders like the vastly underrated Truckee River.
Mostly, though, these are pop songs that tell the standard Verse-Chorus-Verse format to take a hike and not come back till it’s read a beat novel and pulled a warm blanket of analogue hum and crackle over itself in some timelessly rundown cold water flat. Cucumber is as New York hip as its cover suggests. The East River with a River Forth dimension. Demonstration over: flip back to side A, replay and be repaid. In spades.

isthismusic, October 2010

Bob Dylan & The Hawks In Scotland

2010-10-04T20:38:00.010+01:00

Dylan snapped in Princes St (heading to Lothian Rd venue?) by Barry Feinstein – featured in his book Dylan’s Real Moments (2008)

The coolest white man on earth, AD 1966, Bob Dylan's visit to tweed-furnished Scotland was thankfully captured in sound, film and image.

Drummer Mickey Jones, in his DVD "World Tour 1966" states that, heading to Caledonia,Dylan & the Hawks made a stop at Gretna Green and at Robert The Bruce's cave (the cave's in Arran so I'm not sure if that's true as there's no shots of them leaving the mainland but Mr Jones seems a details kind of guy so it could be right on). In this DVD, there's also a shot of George Square, Glasgow from the hotel room shared by Mickey Jones & organist Garth Hudson which proves the band stayed in a hotel near Queen Street station. Mickey says he and Garth could see something happening. They must have persuaded filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker and the others to join them.

Pennebaker's film of the tour will later be edited by Dylan and Howard Alk as Eat The Document. Early on in the film, shots of Glasgow are kaleidoscoped with concert footage. Notes CP Lee in his book on Dylan's movies, Like A Bullet Of Light: “..An auditory transition takes place as Garth Hudson tries out the bagpipe sound on his organ. This is segued on the soundtrack to real bagpipes and it suddenly becomes clear that we’re in Scotland…The camera lingers on a sandwich board man. On the board on the front are the words: “IT IS APPOINTED UNTO MEN ONCE TO DIE”. When he turns around we can see a photograph of what looks like a disaster and the words: “AFTER THE JUDGEMENT”. Dylan, Neuwirth and the crew are watching a police-dog display. Valiant Alsatian dogs leap at “armed” criminals. The Glaswegian public politely ignore them, even though Dylan’s crow’s nest hair was unprecedented for either a man or a woman at that time. A Highland pipe band marches backwards and forwards , pibrochts blaring, drums rattling…”

Beautifully portrayed, CP. Looking at the George Square footage I know the Central College Of Commerce is looming modern behind out of shot. A trolleybus moves on Westward on route 105. trams are gone four years, the dwindling trolleybuses have a year to go. Service 105 will run the Queen’s Cross on the Clarkston route through George Square till 27th May, 1967. Paddle-steamers still ply the Clyde, as do venerable turbine steamers but car ferries are taking over. After the “silent death” trolleybus moves out of shot we see a sandwich-board proclaiming “After Death The Judgement.” We hear Bob ask, “Do they do that in the middle of winter?”
One of the statues in George Square is of Robert Burns. It was created in 1877 by George Edwin Ewing , reliefs by J A Ewing cast by Cox and Son.
As far as we know, the party didn’t set foot in the wooden Tourist Information office clearly in shot .

After a brief scene involving a coach ride and an English farmer, shot of coach in street –hotel – someone – Neuwirth? reads from newspaper “a five year old Glasgow schoolboy was strangled today”
according to biographer Clinton Heylin in Behind the Shades: Take Two, there was an unsavoury incident in his hotel room.

He quotes Dylan's bodyguard and chauffeur, Tom Keylock, as saying: "There was a knock on the door and it was the waiter, with some buttered toast for Dylan, and some tea and honey ... The waiter comes in, puts it down there, I sign for it, and he suddenly says, **** him! I want to talk to him!'"

The waiter is said to have told Dylan: "You're a ****ing traitor to folk music", prompting Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager, to order Keylock to get rid of the man.

Keylock adds: "I shoved open the door and shoved him out. He pulls a knife on me - I've still got the scar on me to prove it - so I give him a good kicking ... But Bob wasn't quite there, like, he was somewhere else - he was a bundle of nerves."

Dylan's entourage included filmmaker DA Pennebaker, who shot extensive footage for a planned documentary commissioned by the US network, ABC. Dylan and colleague Howard Alk edited the footage, but the result, Eat the Document, was a self-indulgent mess that ABC reportedly declined to screen.

Bootleg copies exist, however, and the footage appears to show Dylan, in shades, in George Square, watching a police dog display while a pipe band plays.

The actual show that night, according to Heylin, "had fans shouting Rubbish!' and Shut up!'," and when Dylan was slow-handclapped before Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat, "something he had begun semi-orchestrating with an extended tune-up, he began burbling into the mike until curiosity got the better of the hecklers".

According to other writers, however, the concert was quite remarkable.
In his 1989 book, Dylan: A Biography, author Bob Spitz quotes Pennebaker as recalling that the concert was one of the best he had ever seen. I can well believe it!

GLASGOW HOTEL TAPE 19.05.66 with Robbie Robertson

What Kind Of Friend Is This/ When Will I Be Loved /What Kind Of Friend Is This/I Can't Leave Her Behind / On A Rainy Afternoon (as we can see from the weather in George Square this was a indeed a rainy afternoon) Paul Williams on the tape (from Performing Artist Vol. 1): “..Dylan sings three songs that he apparently working on, tiny clues to what he might have written and performed next if history had been different (they sound almost like traditional folk songs, but of course we don’t know what Dylan’s other songs at the time might have sounded like when he was first fooling around with them) – at a guess, the titles are “On A Rainy Afternoon”/, “What Kind Of Friend Is This?” and “I Can’t Leave Her Behind” (“where she leads me I do not know,” sung in this lovely high vulnerable voice). Somewhere there is more footage, on stage and off, stored away, that could possibly emerge someday. The time machine has not yet made its last trip.”

ODEON, GLASGOW 19.05.1966
Acoustic Set: She Belongs To Me,/Fourth Time Around,/Visions Of Johanna / It's All Over Now Baby Blue/ Desolation Row,/Just Like A Woman,/Mr. Tambourine Man
Electric Set (Rick Danko’s bass deep as the antique subway clattering under the city streets) : Tell Me Momma/ I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)/ Baby Let Me Follow You Down )/ Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues,/Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,/One Too Many Mornings,/Ballad Of A Thin Man,/Like A Rolling Stone
Robert Shelton in No Direction Home: "Although there were hecklers and walkouts among the three thousand at the Glasgow Odeon on May 19, those who liked the new music shouted down those who didn’t. Someone yelled: “We want Dylan.” Bob replied: “Dylan got sick backstage. I’m here to take his place.” While the antis were yelling “Traitor!” and “Belt up!” , the pros were shouting: “get your ears washed!”

Events in and about Glasgow 1966:

27th June closure of St Enoch Station & on 9th November Buchanan Street Station, ending steam train services to Fife-i-o..

Yorkhill Quay ends sailings to India

British Transport Film Glasgow Belongs To Me released
....And a few months later Peter Fonda will turn Larry Hagman onto LSD at the 1967 New Year’s Day Old Firm game.

Events in Edinburgh 1966
Mick Jagger lookalike Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencratz & Gilderstern Are Dead debuts at the Edinburgh Festival, a few months after Dylan visits Hamlet’s castle in Elsinore, Denmark.

"MEETING THE STARS WAS EASY AS ABC From: Evening News - Scotland Date: June 7, 2001 Author: John Gibson Copyright 2001 Evening News - Scotland. Provided by ProQuest LLC.Copyright information
The curtain has come down on one of Edinburgh's best-loved cinemas. But, John Gibson finds, the memories will be a long time fading Lynda Lovell must have been the envy of all her friends. When the Beatles played Edinburgh in 1964 she had the best seat in the house. Backstage she was introduced to John, Paul, George and Ringo. And again, when the Stones, the Dave Clark Five, Bob Dylan, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cilla Black and Gene Pitney starred at the Regal - latterly the ABC in Lothian Road - the teenage Lynda had the pick of the stalls. And she got to meet them all. Her dad, Les, ... !

EDINBURGH ABC Theatre 20.05.1966
Acoustic Set: She Belongs To Me/Fourth Time Around,/Visions Of Johanna / It's All Over Now Baby Blue/ Desolation Row/Just Like A Woman/Mr. Tambourine Man
Electric Set (ready to shake free some of the soot that clads the venerable stione buildings of Auld Reekie): Tell Me Momma/ I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)/ Baby Let Me Follow You Down )/ Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues,/Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,/One Too Many Mornings/Ballad Of A Thin Man/Like A Rolling Stone

Robert Shelton: ..”another divided audience. Dylan found a broken reed in his mouth harp, but Andrew Young of Haystack Cottage handed up his own .Dylan finished the song, got a new harmonica backstage, and returned the borrowed harp along with one of his own. The Scottish Daily Express :”..booed off the stage again last night..Some of the audience took out mouth-organs and tried to play down his singing…”
Reading accounts of shows like these and Glasgow Odeon, one wonders how come so many young men packed harmonica heat when attending gigs in the mid-sixties – were they all attending Hoots Mon hootenannies after the show?
This is Dylan really shouting the word NOW.
This is the show at which Ballad Of A Thin Man as featured in Eat The Document, No Direction Home & the NDH soundtrack was filmed, Pennebaker onstage with the musicians. CP Lee: “Visually.. it remains stunning cinema with one particular shot of Dylan with a halo of light hovering around his head worth the price of admission alone”.
On the soundtrack, so does the attendant musical performance…
Ballad Of A Thin Man – easy to hear how this merited inclusion in the No Direction Home soundtrack. Here’s Dylan, four days before his twenty-fifth birthday, sounding like the smartest, most switched-on cat in the universe. An intense performance with Dylan leaning into middle in extraordinary fashion (imaginaySHON)and changing several key lines throughout the surging song:
YES BECAUSE you know something’s happening here
There’s something happening HERE
You walk in so POLITELY (followed by a proto-prog organ riff from Garth)
You hand in your MONEY (not ticket)
BE such a freak

BO___ONE
STILL something ‘s happening
TELLS you how it feels
Here’s your MOUTH back – thanks for the loan
Begin to really know something is happening & you wish you knew what it was
You’re positive something’s happening & you know you gotta find out what it is
And the sly, sibilant way he pronounces “professors” is priceless. The ABC Regal cinema in Lothian Road was opened in 1938, and played host to various papackage tours in the sixties. Presently an Odeon Cinema. From The Scotsman July 10th, 2008: Robin Harper, leader of the Scottish Greens, said: "I remember going to see Bob Dylan in Edinburgh in 1966 when he went electric. We were appalled because we'd been hoping to hear just him and his guitar, but he appeared with a full-scale rock band. Someone shouted out 'Traitor!' and just left."
Blonde On Blonde had been released four days. Acoustic set version of Just Like A Woman – “Queen Mary she’s my friend” one imagines resonating with the audience sat within two miles of Holyrood Palace, home of Mary, Queen Of Scots and where she saw her lover David Rizzio murdered by her husband the Earl Of Darnley.

Bob Dylan In Glasgow, 1966

15 Films

2010-09-26T11:25:00.004+01:00

A Facebook thing:

Hell Drivers (Cy Enfield, 1957) Baker, Connery, McGoohan, Lom, Jill Ireland, Sid James!
Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, 1959) Why don't you?
Hell Is A City (Val Guest, 1960) Magisterial presence of Stanley Baker. Manchester. Billie Whitelaw!
The Manchurian Candidate (Richard Condon, 1959) I maintain Angela Lansbury played the same character in Blue Hawaii.
The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (Powell & Pressburger, 1943) Amazing performance from Roger Livesey.
The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes, 1976) Ben Gazzara is my favourite actor.
The President's Analyst (Flicker, 1967) James Coburn!
The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet, 2010) Beautiful.
Meet Marlon Brando (Maysles & Maysles 1966) Hipper than a flask of brandy.
Cyrano de Bergerac (Rappeneau, 1990) Such a moving denouement.
The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1968) Look at me, I'm wearing a cardboard belt!
O Lucky Man (Lindsay Anderson 1973) He's a sheep! Oh my god!
Seawards The Great Ships (Hilary Harris, 1960) Clyde 1
The Bowler & The Bunnet (Sean Connery, 1969) Clyde 2
The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977) Ganz and Hopper, Berlin and Paris!

Memories Of Babelfish

2010-09-26T10:27:00.003+01:00

My main memory of Babelfish Studios, Partick, Glasgow is the opening day - a Sunday around July 93, I think. I had attended a wedding reception the previous night at the Cameron House Hotel on Loch Lomond and boy, did I attend to the free bar. In fact, I was cautioned by the father of the groom not to partake of it quite so freely...Somewhere in the haze of Sunday morning I woke up in my soon-to-be-vacated flat, remembering that though I'd just relocated my wallet I had cancelled my cards at 3 am the night before when, freshly dumped off the coach, I thought I'd lost the contents of my pockets as well as my self-respect. And then I remembered not only was I due to be performing at the grand opening of my mate Alan's studio, I was also moving flat, from a lovely skylit room in Ruskin Place to a dump with permanently detached toilet seat in Kersland Street. Around one, Mike, my bandmate from the Prairie Dogs, called round to find me careening around the thankfully pre-packed boxes before heading to hell to barf in the downstairs toilet. Somehow we accomplished the move with a much greater degree of precision and timing than I brought to our mangling (me & Mike on guitar, Alan on bass, can't remember who played drums) of Hey Hey, My My. Nobody's fault but mine. Despite such an inauspicious start me, Mike and Alan - with a variety of drummers - rehearsed there quite a bit and recorded with Tony Soave on drums in December 93 using Mike's 8-track. I did some attic room rehearsals with Alan & Gavin, too. It was down at Babelfish where, desperate for some contemporary sheen to our efforts, I bought a light blue Boss chorus pedal secondhand.In a similarly misguided manner. I ended up working at the DSS in Partick over the road from a club called the Volcano (the only time I ventured in there me & my new friend Rob were advised by a dancing plumber to “get some ecky down your necky”) and a P45’s throw away from Babelfish. Other folk I remember being involved included a bearded chap there who looked like a young Roy Harper and his Dave Gilmour-obsessed girlfriend who sang with a guitarist called John (who sold me the chorus pedal) in a rock blues band in which Alan played bass. I saw them at the Halt once. Despite covering Black Velvet by Alannah Myles they were alright.

15 Big Ones

2010-09-26T10:25:00.003+01:00

One of those Facebook lists...

1. THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES REQUEST: The Rolling Stones - blew my mind one Cosmic Christmas. Citadel immediately made me think of Leith Citadel and the Tolbooth, High Street.

2. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO : The Velvet Underground & Nico - picked this up from Phoenix in the self-same High St, Edinburgh after a school trip to see The Triumph Of The Will by Leni Riefenstahl was cancelled. Probably the biggest physical and mental kick an album has ever given me on first listen. Actually, I typed "lesson" there. Freudian slip or what?

3. HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED: Bob Dylan - brought this back from a holiday in Canada. Got home. Slipped it on the turntable. WHAAAAAAAAT?!? "I need a steamshovel mama t'keep away the dead. I need a dumptruck baby t'unload my head". Then as now.

4. ASTRAL WEEKS: Van Morrison Bought for 12 and a half pence from Boston's Leith Walk. Contact high from paint fumes in my fols' house as I listened to this for the first time. Madame George, in particular, opened up whole vistas in my tender young brain.

5. RUBBER SOUL: The Beatles. Like the perfect autumn afternoon

6. HUNKY DORY: David Bowie. The same pictures I had in my head when I first heard this are still conjured up just by thinking about this record. Eight Line Poem, especially. Black evening sky, white iron window frame, longhaired David at the Sunday piano.

7. PARIS 1919: John Cale. News of this lp had come down the line and I bought it at an Assembly Rooms record fair. The cover invited me into an Art Nouveau world. The vinyl repaid my acceptance of the invitation a thousandfold. Hanky Panky Nohow was immediately sublime.

8. MARQUEE MOON: Television A world in tself - still as immediate and elusive as on first listening.

9 THE NOTORIOUS BYRD BROTHERS: The Byrds Fantastic album. Draft Morning is slightly sinister and utterly divine.

10. DUSTY IN MEMPHIS: Dusty Springfield. Songs, singing, playing, production. Everything right up front but full of grace. Is anything sexier than Breakfast In Bed? Only Cheree by Suicide comes close.

11.ELVIS IS BACK: Elvis Presley. The line that Elvis died when he went into the army is so wrong. In 1960 he made some of his greatest ever music and maybe sported his greatest ever pompadour. Which is also important. The gorgeous sound of RCA Nashville Studio B

12. LOVE YOU: The Beach Boys, Beauty, bonhomie, loneliness and a laugh out loud tribute to Johnny Carson. It's 1977 synthesizer Beach Boys and it works!

13. ODELAY: Beck. This is how the world sounded to me in 1996. Pre-millenium tension, baby. Beck on top of the world and underneath it at the same time. The party and the morning after through the dawn street detritus. Jack-Ass is transcendent.

14. ELECTRIC WARRIOR: T.Rex. Acoustic guitars like rays of sunshine over the funky rubble of the rhythm section topped off with narcotic oozing electric guitar lines and the wonderful vocals and songs of Boley himself. Actually, he plays the other musicians with his effervescence. This is Bolan and Tony Visconti's album.

15. BLOOD & CHOCOLATE: Elvis Costello & The Attractions. A thrilling concoction - from the red Bournville cover to the esperanto credits. And the desperanto music. A man back from the brink cataloguing the brink in an aggressively popoid manner. This record fair thunks with the sound of a top band tearing it up in a glorified rehearsal room, with Nick Lowe presiding. The songs are for the most part utterly ace and all the tracks work with each other to add up to a whole even greater than the sum of its parts. One of these parts, I Want You, is a tender, brutal masterpiece.

JB & AC

2010-05-04T09:27:00.003+01:00

Prior to Christmas, I've occasionally had discussions with friends running along the lines of "there's always a celebrity or two dies at Christmas, plus some sort of natural or human disaster is almost guaranteed". Well, today with 500 dead in a Lagos fuel fire, the latter part of this observation/prediction seems unfortunately fulfilled, a follow up to theologically-questioning events such as Darwin 1975 and, most awful of all, the Tsuami of 2004. As for the former part - first Charlie Drake just before Christmas proper, then a major superstar: on the day of JC, Goodbye JB!
When I was about fifteen, I used to have a three-paperback collection called the Encyclopedia of Rock. No illustrations, just hard fact and spare, terse opinion. A primer. I remember how the entry on James Brown couldn't decide whether to paint him as charlatan or genius. Like the two were mutually exclusive. He was certainly a genius, even as funky circus master, recruiting and drill sergeant, let alone dynamic performer and maker of great records. And he was, principally amongst his many, many titles, The Hardest Working Man In Show Business.
Age, personal conflict and PCP had not withered him when I saw JB on TV, closing the Murrayfield edition of the Live8 concert, on the eve of another human tragedy, the London bombings. He shouted, shook, shimmied and hammered the piano, screamed his scream and rocked. Now Syd Barrett has screamed his last scream and so has JB. 2006 has bid farewell to Arthur Lee. 2006 has had us fans of 60s music contemplating vitality versus mortality. At leat those guys made it to 60, 61 and 73. Last night I watched a documentary on Alma Cogan, dead at 34, and a fascinating part of 50s/60s showbiz fabric. Cute to begin with, she became really gorgeous as time went by. And, judging by her interview on this BBC4 show, her sister Sandra Caron still is. I don't know what it all means. The night before I saw Petula Clark in the same bio slot, voice fantastic and seeking new challenges in her 70s. I was impressed. Square don't exist anymore. Except for the two most crappy cuboid records ever made: Twistin' By The Pool and Walk Of Life by Dire Straits. Compared to those pieces of tired junk dross (and I like some other Knopfler!), these make even the most inane early outings by Alma C sound like the soul of JB.

December 26th, 2006

Sad Music Under Dark Clouds

2009-01-11T21:36:00.008Z

Well, that was the sub-editor's by-line for my spleen-venting as an 18 year old record reviewer for Strathclyde Telegraph in early 1982, taking a shot at VIRGIN PRUNES: Come To Daddy/ Sweet Home Cinder White Clouds/ Sad World (Rough Trade). I think it was part of a series they issued called A New Form Of Beauty.

The second part of the Virgin Prunes' seven part project begins with a terrible vinyl turd starring a moronic beat and a horrid vocal. It is too slow to stimulate me and too roughly produced to be practically listenable. A really strung-out Major Tom tries to make the most depressing record of all time using as his backing band a group of tone deaf eskimosimpersonating the early Velvet Underground backwards through a bad amp-.-Then the guygoes berserk; shouting 'NO ONE CARES ABOUT MUMMY!'
Bawling bollocks - gimme "White Light/White Heat' or 'The Flowers of Romance" and I'll show you how brilliant records can be made out of psychosis.
The second side consists of a lilting Krishna/PiL number and a piano-based ditty which are rather good.

Miscellaneous Meantime and Bigwig Reviews

2009-01-11T18:55:00.028Z

SINGLES

LONGPIGS: Lost Myself (Mother)
An epic mid-pacer, "Lost Myself" is the opening track from Longpigs' occasionally overblown debut "The Sun Is Often Out". Although not as immediate as preceding singles "Far"' and "She Said", "Lost Myself" works as an exercise in dynamics for falsetto vocals, strings and a big,slightly sardonic guitar outro. In such a setting, though, singer Crispin Hunt's pretence to vulnerability seems a little unconvincing.
Second track on the CD single, "Floss" is more emotionally persuasive with affecting vocal and intimate guitar fills. Combining trippy acoustic strumming and a psychedelic rap over a "Cold Turkey" guitar figure to rant at the soma of everyday life, "The Wonder Drug" is an inventive diversion while "When You're Alone" is what used to be described by pop hacks as a "live-in-the-studio rave-up" and a good excuse for Richard Hawley to let fly with some twisted punk axe-grinding.

OCEAN COLOUR SCENE: Riverboat Song e.p. (MCA)
"Riverboat Song", "The Day We Caught The Train" and "The Circle" lugubriously regurgitate a catalogue of hoary influences drawn from vintage vinyl in seedburned sleeves. "You Got It Bad" got it real bad in the lyric department. (Sample couplet: "If I brought you flowers would you watch them grow?") Given the choice between watching flowers grow and enduring the Scenesters, I'd stare at daisies every time. Meantime

COMPULSION: Question Time For The Proles (One Little Indian)
Leaden studenty title notwithstanding, the "Question Time For The Proles" ep gets better as it gets weirder, Top track "Drop" kicks Kinksy crooning through a grumpy rasp to a lilting chorus. The outro sports backwards noises and an effect like a sonar reading from a psychedelic submarine.

TONIC: Tonic e.p. (Flotsam & Jetsam)
As the first line of the first number, "Window Shopping" puts it "Again and again it's the same old story..."This poorly-recorded track is encumbered by unnecessary time/tempo changes while "Cry" would be utterly devoid of inspiration were it not for a plaintive guitar drone letting in some light and shade. "The Siren Song" is plain boring and "Lover's Leap" gives the game away again: "I must confess that more or less I'm the same as everyone." You said it, pal. Meantime

DONE LYING DOWN: So You Drive (Immaterial)
On the barbed shout of "I don't really like the way it makes me feel" abrasiev power chords flash in from all directions. Given a gleaming production, DLD revel in a blend of hyper-attitudinal Stateside drawl, taut springy rhythm and a dynamic grasp of sliding octaves. Meantime

SUPER DELUXE: She Came On (Luminous)
"She Came On" is a piece of pop fluff from a pocket full of nothing. Super Deluxe are Seattle's answer to Crowded House, complete with clumsy couplets such as, "Despite the flight of intellect, instinct will rule"> Amidst this meaninglessness, Supertramp's "Give A Little Bit" is a logical song for Super Deluxe to cover, fiddly guitar solo included. Meantime

DHARMAS: 3 Miles High (Rhythm King)
"A funky psychedelic indie six piece from Hastings". The press release just about says it all. Let me add that this CD is encased in a Marillion-lookalike sleeve and ploughs through a good-timey mix of acoustic guitars, sprightly fiddles, falsetto vocals, Hammond organ and an obligatory solo number from songwriter Simon Steadman. And there'a bloke called Dom on bongos. Their last single reached no. 7 in th eindie charts. The Dharmas are a mega-gigging, Glastonbury-playing apparition from jolly indie hell. Meantime

TROUT: Three Wise Men e.p. (Bosque/Rock Action)
Trout specialise in a back-to-basics dementia, surging and nagging in angular fashion behind vocalist Willie Rogan who sings like Peter Lorre cast as a Greek Bond villain (from New Delhi).
"Skunkrap" is an off-the-wall ranter while U.F.O.'s insistant riff and defiantly stupid lyrics emerged, we are told, during a gig. Adding the hangover psychosis of "livin' In An Oven" and "plasma"'s spatan strung-out surf, this e.p. is a clockwork orange injected with psychedelic snake oil. Love 'em or loathe 'em, Trout bring out the klutz in you. Meantime

SLINGBACKS: All Pop No Star (Virgin)
Someone's been doing their homework. Produced by Mitch Easter, All Pop No Star is a romping glam stomper which also helps itself to the melody line from Sheena Is A Punk Rocker and the keychange from th Buzzcocks' "I Don't Mind". The overall effect is that of Courtney Love fronting The Glitter Band, singer Shireen snarling; "This should have been your ride to riches, instead of detox wards and stitches."
While I'd have loved Slingbacks to be Glam 4 Real, the other tracks (a cover of the Beatles' "Two Of Us" and two acoustic numbers) offer rather more restrained samples of this US/UK trio's stroppy powerpop. Fair enough - just don't pawn the fuzz pedal.Meantime

IMPERIAL TEEN: You're One (Slash/London)
Roddy Bottum sings, plays guitar, occasionally drums with Imperial Teen. Its easy to forget his other occupation as keyboard player of Faith No More. as Imperial Teen hold their own as a college radiofriendly fuzz-pop band. Debut long-player "Seasick" is awash with girl-sung choruses, upbeat homoeroticism and snappy couplets barbed with the detritus from what Bottum refers to as "an extremely nasty time". First single "You're One" quotes from Kurt Cobain's suicide note but musically is as far removed from FNM as you can get. Like the Lemonheads at their best, Imperial Teen effortlessly combine dark drug fall-out with breezy pop. Pretty irresistible. Meantime

SPACEHOPPER: Mars Bonding/ SECRET GOLDFISH: Venus Bonding (Creeping Bent)Spacehopper bond in three movement. Opening: military drumming and pulsing E-strings. Middle: the now departed Sarah's whispered vocal amid wchoing sliding guitars. Ending: the intro ventures back for a swift conclusing kicking,
The Secret Goldfish present an irritating fuzzed-up Claire Grogan vocal over a blatant "I Fought The Law" rip-off. Meantime

FUZZBIRD: Change It/ Famous Babblington Baby (FR Records)Though not much of a song, Change It's warped guitars parade quite handsomely for three minutes pus. The acoustic-driven "Famous Babblington Bab"y is rescued from the brink of boredom by rolling bass, off-kilter keyboards and quick, somebody call the fuzz (pedal). dislocated, disturbed riffs.Meantime

60FT DOLLS: Happy Shopper (Indolent)This is Mott The Hoople updated to 1977. Richard Parfitt's "Ian Hunter rasp" and grasp of lad-glam is well to the fore: "Julie - she's a man". This blatant hero-emulation kicks with a little more spark than the bulk of The Big 3, the Dolls' debut l.p. where, despite the occasional quality track (Loser), songs such as "Talk To Me", "Stay", "The One" and "Good Times" 9"Let The Good Times Roll") lapse too often into the plain platitudes their white-bread titles suggest.Meantime

SOLAR RACE: Resilient Little Muscle (Silvertone)
A blatant rip-off of "Androgynous Mind" by Sonic Youth, this even has feedback and sonic stuff sprayed behind the impressive lung power of siger Eildh Bradley. Third track "Like Cow" is a hissy, distorted, drum-machine driven guitar fest, with skewed "Ooohs" and an out-of-it Pinky and Perky element. I assume the resileint little muscle is in her larynx, or refers to a cock or a clit.Meantime

PILLBOX: Invasion (What Really Turns You On?) (X-Ray)
What really turns Pillbox on is to be to Hole what Bush are to Nirvana. "Invasion" (in both standard and "dirty" versions), "Don't Call Me Babe" and "The Most" are tuneful girl-grunge trying a little too hard for lyrical shock value. Singer Susan Hyatt.Meantime

MANSUN: Take It Easy Chicken (Parlophone)
It's a stupid title, but not as bad as "Drastic Surgeon" (2nd track on this e.p.) "Chicken" lunges from Casio VL Tone beeps to big anonymous hackneyed riffs and snarling Britvox. Nest track "Moronica" still succumbs to empty Terrorvisionisms.Meantime

MAIL RAIN: Forecast For Storms (3rd Stone)
Officially confirmed as the longest ever single, this 76 minute "Organic Techno" fest from Mali Rain consists of elevem "b-sides" following the 5 minute 33 second title track. Throughout, one is reminded of those bland, burbling "relaxation tapes". Two tracks are especially irksome. "Aztec Gold" veers into world muzak territory while the artlessly-titled "Optimist Castle" (well, it might sound good if it were a Fall track) noodles around an ineffectual vocal. For those of us who're not chillin'-out E-heads or New Age armoatherapists, only "Sentinal" and "Pende" offer any eardrum buzz.Meantime

MOTOR LIFE CO: Be a Hero (Pendejo)
Taken as a guitar showcase, "Be A Hero" is a stop/start spiralling rockfest, dryly reminiscent of Garbage. Unfortunately, Sean Guthrie's earnest lyrics and slate grey vocal melodies go nowhere fat. The B-side is less turgid, whilst third track "Free Verse" benefits from a more memorable tune and less fussy playing.Meantime

HARDBODY: On Your Own (Sony)
Sleeved in Muji-styled chic, slightly alternative without threatening the equilibrium, Hardbod have created an undemanding audio accessory for a white-walled, wood-floored designer room. Hardbody's gliding lightness is their charm, and in terms of lasting impact, their undoing.Meantime

OLIVE: Miracle (RCA)
It's frightening what ten years in Simply Red can do to a man. While Mick Hucknall nudges Chris Evans in the irksome media redhead stakes, ex Reds keyboard player Tim Kellet now professes to be "anti-soul", whatever that means. Although those expecting a Road To J. Mascis-style conversion to hard guitar rock night be disappointed, "Miracle" features melodic, soulful (oops, Tim, ya fucked up) crooning from vocalist Ruth-Ann wafting over a melodic groove that sways pleasantly, if lightly, in the summer breeze.
Meantime

POSH: Mermaid (Jealous)
A singer called Pippa, a songwriter/keyboard playing chap called Dearlove...one doesn't need an Oxbridge degree to tell how Posh arrived at their moniker. Musically, this is quasi-contemporary fluff. Posh are to Britpop what The Motels ("Drowning In Berlin")were to Siouxsie and her crew. "Mermaid"'s "observational" lyrics aren't exactly brimming with insight: "she wants to be seen, she's a summer holiday queen." The anodyne new wave "Body Fascism" is, very plainly, obvious: "Steroid heaven in the gymnasium". Attention Anthea Turner, all game show hosts, Michael Portillo, Oprah Winfrey and Divine Brown: you, too, are easy targets and had better watch out for Posh's would-be poisoned pen.Meantime

ALBUMS

DELICATESSEN: Hustle Into Bed (Starfish)
Are Delicatessen authentically pervy or merely arty practitioners of a heavy-breathing, sweatypalmed music hall act? Their second I.p.suggests the latter. "Hustle Into Bed" is an excursion in libidinous MOR with the constant accompaniment of pastoral acoustic guitar and school music-room instrumental explorations. A fan of Nick Cave and Jeffrey Lee Pierce, mainman Neil Carlil! lacks their intensity: he's a book-lined boudoir poet with a powerful voice (on the title track he's Bolan duetting with Billy Corgan). And he swears like only a basically decent young man can. The '1" word is prevalent throughout the album, the single "Monkey Suit" boasting the line "the Clergy came & went & fucked & stayed up late." A little profanity can be refreshing, but here it seems somewhat self-conscious and overdone.
Musically, Carlill's gift for sustaining a mood is unquestionable but, while the panoramic arrangements and queasy, sliding string scores are impressive, "Hustle Into Bed" might have benefited from some variation in tempo and, dare I say it, a little less pretence.Meantime

THE FLOORS: Superbe (Dead Elvis)
This seven-track CD is a cool conglomeration featuring Lee Ranaldo, Lydia Lunch and the unheard helping hand of Kin Fowley. Masterminded by sardonic Dubliner Dave Donohue, Superbe opens with the lop-sided lament "Jesus Lived Six Years Longer Than Kurt Cobain", Nirvana chords give way to throwaway couplets such as "I am the walnut/you are the wall/ you are the Ringo/ I am the Paul" before returning to scenes of wakes in Ireland and Seattle.
La Lunch's contribution is culled from a hectoring 1986 live performance and is underscored by the controlled sonic mayhem at which Ranaldo, in particular, excels. The ferocious "Shadow Of A Gun" builds on a groove that sounds like it was stamped out one moonless midnight by some heavy industrial machinery while "Last Night I Broke Into Your Room" and "The Bee" offer repectively valeful Leonard Cohenisms and Ranaldo reading a poem by Donohue. At every crisp twist and turm, Superbe is an unexpected delight.Meantime

GOOBER PATROL: Dutch Ovens (Them's Good Records)Norwich's Goober Patrol are apparently guaranteed to put a smile on the thinnest, most sullen lips. I guess that means that everyone must love a helping of lowest-common denomenator fun-punk...
Furst track, "Hay, Hay and Thrice Hay" is Therapy?-lite complete with whacky title (Frankie Howerd-style) but minus the underto of angst (Of either Therapy? or the privately ruminating Howerd himself). Moody introspection is banished to nights in alone at the Halls Of Residence. Why, there's even a song called "paddington Bear" (which cheekily rips off Buddy Holly's "Everyday"). Appropriately enough, there are also numbers named "Don't Give Up The Day Job" and "Pxxx Off". See, these stupid wee boys may allude to captive prankster farting in the tirle of their albumcan't bring themselves to do a Patti Smith and actually print "Piss".
Surprisingly, I'm not grinning with glee to the sound of this professionally-played toy punk soundtrack for students spilling lager on their Levellers T-shirts. Bring back Dr & The Medics.Meantime

YELLOW CAR: Auto Erotica (Gift Of Life)
"Auto Erotica" recalls the "punks-who-can-play" bands signed in the wake of the Pistols. The keyword here is repetition. Repetition of the same authentic new wave clichesm such as the caterwauling backing vocals, become rather weraing over the course of fifteen songs.
Ultimately, "Auto Erotica" lacks punk's best feature: the incentive for the listener to get up and do it themselves. This ultra-tight take on punk would take most of us years to perfect. Checking out the intros to "All Over Now" and "Student Bastards", it's clear that creativity is itching in guitarist Agent Caper's fingers. It's a pity the restrictions of Yellow Car's chosen genre prevent him from exploiting his muse to the full.Meantime

HULA HOOP: The Lovelist Ring Of Saturn (Silver Girl)
Do they really want to sound like this? Despite upbeat opener Midget Love's teasing guitar work, Hula Hoop lapse almost immediately into perfunctory indie exercises, the hooklines in tracks like "X-Ray" never getting a chance to shine through. Glory by association doesn't work here, either. A song called "Tom Waits" has a spring in its step and an outro nod to The Fall ("Hey Mark, you're spoiling all the Paintwork") and "The Queen Of Gamaliel" and "The 20th Century Black Hole" have elements to recommend them, but elements are all they remain, Minimalism would be fine if less equalled more but the overall effect here is lack of inspiration. Umbrella starts well with a promising narritive and tremolo guitar but is soon rendered dull through lack of further embellishment, while "Dreamsicle '95" adds a 70s synth sound as an afterthought and the closing Raison lapses into banality. Oi, Hula Hoop: noooo!Meantime

VARIOUS: Amour (Silver Girl)
Subtitled "A Silver Girl Sampler", this compilation presents fourteen tracks from the San Diego label, just over half of them previously unreleased. As "Amour" casts its net across the U.S. from New York to Placentia, California and Houston, Texas, Europe is represented by Swiss Sub-Poppers Sportsguitar, who weigh in with Filthy and Dundee's prodigal sons Spare Snare. Recorded by Jan Burnett in his living room, "Clutch Me Now" is built round a nagging vocal loop that sounds like he's cut some Lightning Seeds with Mogadon.
Ranging from Holiday Flyer;s gentle bass-free replication of Galaxie 500's "It's Getting Late" to the well-worn grungey dynamics of Retriever's "Pen Pa", "Amour" also serves as an introduction to the V.U. country of Hoboken's Doug Shepard ("Fall From Grace") and the disaffected boy/girl duetting of Tipli who close proceedings wth "More Disappointment". The twin peaks of the collection recall the varied oeuvre of Sonic Youth. Gapeseed's angular "Ceci N'es Spasm Pipe" sounds like the spawn of "Confusion is Sex", while Gravity Wax's "Lanimar Flow" (which, thrillingly, shares its tile with an obscure 70s Rou Orbison l.p.) matches a lilting, Lee Ranaldo-style vocal to the most affecting melody on the album. More please. bigwig

RACHEL'S: The Sea And The Bells (Quarterstick)
Surf's up. Following their "Music For Egon Schiele", The Sea And The Bells is a double-album length series of interpretative tone poems from the soon-to-be-touring seventeen piece rachel's, an eclectic ensemble consiting of classical players and rock musicians such as Shellac's ubiquitous Bob ("Robert") Weston. Composed by Rachel's core trio of Christian Frederickson, Jason Noble and Rachel Grimes, "The Sea And The Bells" frequently recalls the stately, elegiac quality of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra's piano and cello-led pieces. At other times, often within a single track (particularly "The Sirens"), harmony gives way to music concrete blarings as dissonant changes of mood suggest a spiritual journey through elements by turns calm and perilous, Undulating like the patterns of waves, keening strins quickly turn menacing suggesting squalling seas and shipwrecks, The Bells toll forlornly through "Night At Sea", "Letter Home" and the resonant "To Rest Near You" which is augmented with sound effects of cannon fire. Atmospheric.
bigwig

LONGPIGS: The Sun Is Often Out (Mother)
Displaying the sure-footed guitar of Richard Hawley and Crispin Hunt's impressive vocal range, the singles "She Said" and "Far" pack the most powerful puches on Longpigs' debut. "Far", in particular, features an abundance of mangled guitar and flasetto hooks. "She Said"'s follow-up, "on and On", signals the album's more reflective side, at its best on the reverbed outro to "Dozen Wicked Words". As the catchy early glam of "Sally Dances" gives way to the overblown "Jesus Christ", it becomes evident that, like Radiohead, Longpigs' musical dexterity occasionally lapses into blandness. A sidestep away from the album, Hawley's edgy electric ballad "Tendresse" (available as a b-side to "She Said") proves this needn't be so.
Meantime

CHAVEZ: Ride The Fader (Matador)
Droning out of Dullsville, Indie-ana, Chavez should bow down and beg Saint Nick for a seasonal slice of candy apple melody to brighten their bilge water ballads and murky mid-range plodders. Shored up with fuzzy sonic sludge, Ride The Fader's 12 tracks consistently fall short of capitalizing on some promising titles. Consequently, Our Boys Will Shine Tonight proves less than luminous whilst the tepid Cool Joys would require enhancement from an infinite supply of cool jays to stand a change of flipping your wig. An album that's more "ho hum" than "ho ho ho!" bigwig

ANIMALS THAT SWIM: I Was The King, I Really Was The King (Elemental)
Animals That Swim emerge from the muddy indie backwater to get their kicks singing about Kit-Kats. According to their press release, lead singer Hank Starr is a "genius poet". Student smart arse, more like. The evidence before us suggests bedsit bard baloney, beloved of the NME and Melody Maker, for its "wry narritive". Indeed, one focusses automatically on the words (despite Starr's humdrum delivery) since ATS's music merely serves as functional scene functional scene setting for the ultra-English vignettes on offer. Chief irritant in this bland backdrop is an ominipresent trumpet that attempts to ingratiate itself over the course of the whole l.p.
The lilting, notably horn-free "Dispatches From Lula" is by far the best track, mixing acoustic guitar, piano, violin and a melodic vocal. "The Good Old Way" also deserves credit for employing that damn trumpet effectively (for once) as it buils to a stirring finale. The rest is just depressing, wighed down with too much literal observation("faded Glamour") and an anecdotal style ("The Greenhouse") which considers itself wittier than it is. Meantime
THE JESUS LIZARD: Shot (Capitol)
"Thumper" kicks off The Jesus Lizard's first major-label l.p. with Lydonesque vocals and fluid bass. as "thumbscrews" demonstrates, we have entered a land where well-turned vocal melody is not the primary concern. Updating the Dead Kennedys' "let's Lynch The Landlord", Yow declaims with his cop-baiting whine, "we're gonna ask the landlord why he's such a cock." Guitarist Duane Denison temporarily relieves the pressure, and throughout "Shot" applies slanted arpeggios to Yow's twisted narratives. Highlights? "Pervertedly Slow" - a nice turn of phrase; "mailman", delivered from the point of view of a woman describing a predatory man, and "Trephination" - quite bizaree. You should hear it.

PULP: Different Class (Island)
Simultaneously imemrsed as participant/observer for the last fourteen years in the worlds of pop and sexual intrigue, Jarvis Cocker imbues Pulp's successor to "His'n'Hers" with the observational and conversational gifts of a skilled raconteur. Nothing here possesses the sinister depravity of the earlier album's opener, "Joyriders", but Cocker's vignettes of new town/suburban life are still erotically charged, if by now edging towards over-familiarity. Whilst Pulp's brand of Europop burbles efficiently under Cocker's breathy vocals, "underwear" hardly seems fresh in its title and lyrical concerns while "Disco 2000" is rather mundane in its homage to Laura Branigan's "Gloria" and "i-Spy"'s self-referential spoken interludes are delievred in a fashion I find slightly too knowing to be satisfying.
These tracks pale into comparison to the the three already-released single a-sides included, "Mis-Shapes", "Sorted For E's and Wizz" and "Common People". "Sorted..." and "Common People" are great performances from start to finish, teh former poignantly recalling Bowie's "Memory Of A Free Festival" with its acoustic textures. Like "Common People" it delivers true pop realism, rendered more covincingly than Blur seem ever capable of, though over the course of this l.p., Pulp's music doesn't always rise above a stylish yet stylised studio sheen.

Kula Shaker

2009-01-11T18:49:00.003Z

KULA SHAKER: K (Columbia)
Packaged like an oriental boutique or a headshop circa 1972, "K" makes little concession to life in the '90's unlike, say, Suede whose old-fashioned glam concerns are leavened with a lack of glitter and an awareness of lost innocence. Kula Shaker's music can, at times, sound almost Madchester: check out "Hey Dude" where blissful blond Crispian Mills does his best Shaun Ryder and "Tattva"'s "Wrote for Luck" arpeggios.; but, when Crispian claims "I got my stash, I love my hash" he sounds more like a hippy Hugh Grant than Shaun Ryder.
'Temple of Everlasting Light" is Led Zeppelin at their wispiest, Mills sighing, "!f I wait another day to travel East.. Well, cod-mod Mills did just that, got God and made the time-honoured leap from mohair suits to psychedelia. That sort of thing seemed a little dated back in 1980 when Paul Weller made a similar transition with the Jam's "Sound Affects" I.p. However Weller kept things economical with a minimalist, modernist Gang of Four/Joy Division element. Sixteen years on, "Sound Affects" still seems more relevant than "K" which is laden with sitars, tablas, the works. Stray bits 0f~rock guitar crop up here and there: some "Kick Out the Jams" on "Knight On the Town", some Hendrix with balmy Monterey backing vocals on "Grateful when You're Dead"/Jerry Was There".Elsewhere, what was unthinkable back in '67 comes true: Hendrix jams with the Monkees.
"K" is the deal album for old hippies wishing to have their tastes re-affirmed in a way their fifteen year-old nieces and nephews can enjoy. Oh, and the NME loves it. Hey dude: strange times.

Link Wray

2009-01-11T18:48:00.003Z

LINK WRAY Cathouse, 1996 for Meantime Magazine

With (relatively) young buck bassist and drummer in tow, Link Wray leads a ninety minute up front, full on rock'n'roll assault beyond the capacity of most performers a third his age, Clad in black,behind cool shades, sixty-six year old Wray kicks off with "Rumble.ln 1958 this song was banned in some states on grounds of decency - quite a feat for an instrumental. A vocal "King Creole" follows, the first of several Elvis covers amongst classic Wray instrumentals such as the outlandish "Run Chicken Run" and "Ace of Spades"

During Springsteen's "Fire" Link breaks a string and plays on while replacing it, taking us into surreal Hendrix/Dinosaur Jr. territory. Calling for "Elvis echo" he delivers Hank Williams' "I Can't Help It" in authentic Sun Records style and brings his wife on stage, dedicating a fine "Young and Beautiful" to her. The mood intensifies with some savage instrumental work and a fast slam through Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild". Wray plays as loud and intensely as his devotee Neil Young on a particularly torrid excursion with Crazy Horse.

Jad Fair

2009-01-11T18:46:00.005Z

Jad Fair, Dick Johnson, Skinky - Nice'N'Sleazy, October 20th 1996 Bigwig Magazine

Skinky's skewed funk scratchings seethe and shift under Peter Rose's elliptical vocals which peck and gnaw at the fabric of bizarre relationships. From angular opener Call This? (propelled by frenetic brushwork from Boydy Crockett) to Her Brother~ pinched harmonics, Skinky display a tangible confidence as a slanted groove machine, riding restlessly on Matthew Lowe's fluid bass style. Last song tonight, the pounding, oppressive Torrents- is featured on their current single (a Flotsam and Jetsam '45 split with ~he Space Kittens). Check it out.

Dick Johnson, a bass-free female three-piece, play subverted rockabilly surf music that suggests the Cramps combing Cruiser's Creek for a low-rent beach party movie location. Armed with chrome-plated'whammy bars and a tight line in trash anthems, they end with a tribute to one of their favourite bands, braying I Wanna Fuck the Make-Up (a thrashy Gary Glitterstomp) like evil cheerleaders.

Jad Fair resembles an ultra-geek Randy Newman in a lurid Batman t-shirt. Having spent the best part of two decades lurking at the heart of American outsider-core, he's erratic on guitar and spacey of on-stage conversation. With an album currently out on Vesuvius (with brother David) Jad's backing band tonight is a Krautjock supergroup who provide a droning rhythmic drive. The Sleazy's crowd laps up every quirky drop - from a naked slaughter of All Shook Up through 1980's Frankenstein Must Die to moments of genuine luminosity, as in Turn Your Life Around, when honesty, vulnerability and life-affirmation bring the Jad Fair experience closer to the soul.

Sonic Youth

2009-01-11T18:36:00.007Z

SONIC YOUTH/ THE MAKE-UP BARROWLANDS 1996

For Meantime Magazine
The Make-Up are visually stimulating in camp matching yellow outfits with bouffant girl bassist and a vocalist who thinks he’s Travolta and David Johannsen of The New York Dolls. Unfortunately their plundering of vintage riffs (including Kirn Fowley's "Bubblegum" - once covered by tonight's headliners -doesn't exceed the sum of the constituent parts. Although entertainingly served up with a side order of sixties organ, the Make-Up never surpass novelty status.
Sonic Youth's set is drawn heavily from the "Washing Machine" l.p.

Lee Ranaldo and an ice-cool Thurston Moore flail at a series of unconventionally-tuned guitars, abusing them with drumsticks and sliding and scrubbing at the surrendering strings. On record their blend of harmonies and dissonance resonates with a silvery sci-fi aura that evokes eerie urban vistas, sprawling hi-rises and pale concrete subways. Cool and focused amid sudden strobes and projections that dart and flicker above the stage, they add a strange intimacy toniqht. A demure-looking Kim Gordon breathes jaded innocence through several lead vocals and occasionally trades her bass for six-string guitar, most notably on "Washing Machine" itself. Making lull use of a crystal-clear drum mix, Steve Shelley is exceptional. On "Sugar Kane" he alternates expert power-housing with delicate cymbal and hi-hat work behind sub-aqua guitars.
Tonight all rivers lead to "The Diamond Sea": twenty minutes of shimmering dynamics and six-string savagery like on air-raid in calm, sunny weather. Arpeggios ruffle like flags after battle. Soundwaves recur and intensify.
A truly Sonic experience.

Patti Smith

2009-01-11T18:31:00.005Z

PATTI SMITH, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

She reads "Piss Factory" clad in Rimbaud-fixated rock-waif rags, down to a "Horses"-style skinny black scarf. Time may have added flecks of grey to the original pre-Morissette swaying black mane but, despite personal loss and two lengthy breaks from the rock arena, Patti Smith retains her emotive voice and instinct for intense celebratory performance.
On "Piss Factory"'s culminating cry of intent: "Oh watch me now!", the band - including Tom Verlaine and long-time Smith cohorts Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty - launches into the New York reggae of "Redondo Beach". Adept and adaptable players, the sound the Concert Hall gives them is pristine. On 'Wing" it's as clear, calm and wide as prairie at dusk. Smith's voice glides sublimely over acoustic guitar, rolling bass and brushed drums while the seated Verlaine, resplendent in floppy hat, supplies a discreetly keening slide.
The upbeat "Dancing Barefoot" is addressed literally: American punk always retained a hippy element. Smith sits on a monitor, shedding shoes and socks. then dispatches strident single "Summer Cannibals" with extrovert vigour. But as you meditate on the bohemian maturity on display, birthday boy Jackson Smith appears from the wings, heavy metal axe in hand, Usurping his mother's spotlight, teen-dude Jackson squalls through his party-piece; "Smoke on the Water", vocals courtesy of Lenny Kaye. Significantly, Verlaine coolly disengages his elliptical prairie-picking from this and a later Kaye -sung aberration.
"Beneath the Southern Cross" - modal, acoustic - and the incantational "Ghost Dance" redress the balance, which only slips briefly as Smith follows a tender, near-immaculate "Crystal Ship" with a wandering reggae-fied extrapolation of Prince's "When Doves Cry".
The home strait is cruised in some style. Patti dances "Because the Night" away in the eight foot pit between stage and audience - a killjoy imposition she's decried all evening. During the encore medley "Land"/"Gloria" the fevered front rows spill to the lip of the stage, grasping the singer's naked feet, shaking her hands and cheering as she mounts the P.A. Solo encore "Farewell Reel" closes a show of impassioned rock, shimmering elegies and occasional taste-free indulgences. I don't expect Patti Smith will care what's considered cool. As she proclaimed in "Babel": "i am an american artist and i have no guilt".

The Sex Pistols

2009-01-11T16:57:00.005Z

SEX PISTOLS SECC 1996 Meantime magazine

I got into this gig via a photo pass lent to me by one of the Meantime photographers, Nick McKenzie, and with one of his (empty) cameras slung round my neck. Having wandered away from my appointed photo pit and ended up in a pogo-or-die scenario...

Since the glory days of '76, "yoof" culture has rapidly fragmented. still, the sight of a twentysomething in a Woodstock '94 t-shirt at a Pistols gig does seem slightly incongruous. But who cares? Roll over Malcolm McLaren: Showman Lydon is here to cream your cash.
The Pistols' equipment displays an endearingly archaic, rather than anarchic, touch: crosses of St.George and St.Andrew emblazon Steve Jones' and Glen Matlock's speakers, Paul Cook plays a Union Jack drumkit. John Lydon's sporting tartan, more or less de rigeur for him. As the first chord's struck, cobwebs are defiantly blown away. There's no time for theorising when you pogo for your life as Lydon wails "Bodies". The whole of "Never Mind the Bollocks" gets an airing, along with "Satellite", "Did You No wrong", "Stepping Stone" and “No Fun".
Those terrace anthems and Rotten lyrics are at once more direct and full of wit than the bulk of pretenders to the Pistols' gob-festooned crown. The improbably youthful Matlock still looks like he's in it for the tunes as he enthusiastically shares a vocal mike with a barechested Jones. The muscular guitarist belies his post-Pistols past
as a Christian, growling “Where’s the crumpet?” And, for an encore, flashing his forty-year old bare bottom.
The Pistols’ performance many lack the resonance of relevance but as "No Fun”’s central riff sounds like it could eat the SECC for breakfast I, for one, am not complaining.

Space 1996

2009-01-10T16:52:00.005Z

Here's a review I did for Top (Tower Records' in-store magazine) back in 1996. I remember getting pissed with Stef at the reopening of the 13th Note in Glassford Street - or some similar event- prior to the show and later finding that I'd lost my wallet (for the second time in the same venue having, as a very fresh fresher, lost or been relieved of it at the reggae club in the pre-Garage Mayfair). Anyway, I give you Space...

SPACE
GLASGOW GARAGE 1996

THEY ARE THE urban Space, man: the hybrid offspring of Cast, Black Grape and the Bonzo Dog DooDah Band. Jokers in the Britpack, Space are several leagues away from the turgid beat group rehashes of their less inspired contemporaries. Bizarre lyrical twists, forays into cocktail jazz and dub basslines find the foursome playing footsie, as the equally eclectic Beck would put it, in another dimension. Confidently kept back for the encore, their recent hit 'Female Of The Species' updates the Scott Walker-penned arabesque lament 'Deadlier Than the Male'. And the epic sweep of 'Me & You Vs the World' might seem incongruous from a bunch of scallies who clearly have no pretensions to be Suede were it not for Space's ability to blend the two disparate elements so effortlessly. Franny Griffiths and Andy Parle keep stirring the musical melting pot behind naturally nonchalant bassist/vocalist Tommy Scott and guitarist Jamie Murphy, who exhibits a penchant for wisecracks from behind Captain Sensible shades (thankfully, he's not sporting a beret). There's a surreal buzz at the front of the stage as stage-divers thrust themselves over aficionados acquainted with the Spiders LP word for surreal word. This is escapist pop, spaced and spiced with a sinister edge and a shameless magpie habit. It's a trawl through a dope dealing vinyl junkie's record collection where Bacharach ballads share a bong with crunching guitar riffs to a backdrop of hardcore techno. Welcome to '96's true pop neighbourhood where Space really are the boys next door.

Manxman

2008-12-31T02:50:00.005Z

My mum, dad, holidaying in Llandudno in July 1972, took a cruise one overcast Sunday round Anglesey and Puffin Island on this wonderful boat. I was nervous throughout the trip in case I repeated the extreme bout of seacksickness I'd had (still my one and only) on the MV Gulfoss travelling from Leith to Copenhagen in July 71.

I have a vivid memory of subsequently seeing Manxman and her older sister (?) King Orry moored at the Llandudno pier in late afternoon sunshine. It was a glorious glimpse into a bygone age.

Powderfinger

2008-10-13T11:28:00.013+01:00

It wasn't Queen for me. I enjoyed it, sure, but my main turn on at Live Aid came from Philly, not Wembley. I'd attempted to bond with Neil Young before, been lent a copy of Decade by a Freebird-singing would-be hippie. Maybe that's what put me off initially. My ears heard California whine instead of maple leaf rock. How could The Old Laughing Lady and The Loner remained ignored at the end of my musical subway car?
It changed that July day in 1985. 39-year old Neil Young, slinging his Bigsby-armed Black Beauty, white sawn-off t-shirt and, as far as I could see, patch-free jeans, delivered a blistering Powderfinger and I, just turned twenty-two and was what to do, was hooked.

I'd been moved before: one1979 Easter holdiday mid-morning MOR Radio One DJ had played

Welfare Mothers from Rust Never Sleeps in some afterthought spurt of new music after his fabled Our Tune segment had left another legion of housewives Kleenex-clutching.. Why, I don't know but I'm glad he did. I filed it in my head as Out There and never forgot it. Occasionally Decade woudl play in some "back for a smoke and some Floyd man" residence but my ears had flapped closed for the Floyd and in the company of those stonedly celebrating patched-jean Neil, Decade wasn't enough to open them again.

In the winter of 89/90 I was working out in Bishopbriggs and one of my colleagues was an early twentysomething Duane Allman lookalike called Gerry. He gave me my first (of two) tastes of Buckfast and a further turn on to Neil. I think it was through Gerry that I first heard Barstool Blues and in the crisp Scottish winter, sparkle flashes of its poetry - "burn off all the fog and let the sun through to the snow" fused with a searingly Television/Richard Thompsonesque solo and a riff of relentless electric lifeforce to splendidly life-affirming effect. Thanks, Neil. Thanks, Gerry. I got connected to Zuma's clean winter morning guitars, balanced left and right just like the stripped-down New York album by Lou Reed. On Danger Bird I heard Crazy Horse invent Joy Division.

In the winter of 89/90 in the back of that Bishopbriggs office I was experiencing Zuma for thefirst time, and the Young reaching my ears seemed to be back in that the forward-lurching place Barstool Blues suggested with its relentless riffing urgings, rusting proudly on the march, welding like a demon till it would start fuckin' up in all its Ragged Glory. The NME and Sonic Youth and Neil Young were a holy trinity of proto grungathon celebration.

I remember Gerry bringing in a cassette of some fresh Neil Young tracks from a Japanese import e.p., Eldorado, some of which had ended up on the Freedom album and some of which, like Cocaine Eyes, didn't. These tracks, at the end of 1989, seemed like they were being delivered from the end of the world. From this dark place I couldn't have fore-heard the country contentment of Harvest Moon. But back then I wasn't that well-versed in Neil's habitually tuning on a sonic dime. Sleeps With Angels would chase the Harvest Moon from a haunted city dark place. A honed consolidation before the swerve back to Martin from Gibson: Ragged Glory would help me see in 1991 in the company of Neil, Crazy Horse, Douglas and Fran. Within a month it was over and over with Fran and I hardnosed the highway a hundred yards across Great Western Road to an attic room in a bedsit in Ruskin Place where, thanks to Kinardo, as February brought tight snows I became immersed in the far-off caught in time delights of Van Morrison's Too Late To Stop Now.

That was also the time to reinvestigate that crash-pad staple, Decade. Grooving to Mr. Soul, I copped out to the change while a stranger was putting the tease on. Or as I heard it "while a stranger is putting the teas on." Another Youngian line I could connect with. recalling after hours revelry in someone's flat, maybe even my bedsit, where I would grow 2 a.m. hazy while someone I'd just met that evening put on a brew. Didn't matter I'd misheard it. I'm sure Neil had similar experiences back in the old folkie days. Days he carried through with the dark night envelopment of Eldorado to 2010's Le Noise. I'd never heard the legendary Hitchhiker in any Inca-rnation before. It, and its companion tracks, blew me away in the lacquered one-man. two-man darkness, blew me AWAY.

Michael Shelley

2008-09-07T10:54:00.002+01:00

Speakerspushtheair, December 2004.

As a Speakerspushtheair reader I trust you agree that, when it comes to music, a pleasure shared is a pleasure doubled. If so, here’s a link you should check out http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/SH - the Real Audio archives of radio shows on New York station WFMU hosted by singer, songwriter & self-proclaimed “Rock Superstar” Michael Shelley, a man whose enthusiasm for spreading the word on his favourite music recently had him rising at 3 a.m. on Brooklyn Saturday mornings. As they used to say on rock’n’roll radio, meet one of the Good Guys. Clearly in his element on both sides of the studio glass, Michael Shelley is the kind of rock superstar we need more of - a man obviously blessed with a healthily funky record collection & attitude to creative collaboration:“Some of the most satisfying moments of my life have been collaborating with other musicians in the recording studio or on stage. It’s an amazing thing to see someone else’s idea improve on and feed your own. It’s like in a romantic relationship where two people get together and both become stronger. In some ways a good live audience are collaborators in a good show”. Having embarked on a variety of jobs that could fill a separate article in themselves, Shelley started writing songs for his first band, The Sloppy Joes, in the mid-eighties, releasing The Girl With The Light In Her Eyes/Keep On Truckin on Diesel Only records in 1991.
1997 saw Shelley come to listeners’ attention this side of the Atlantic via the fruits of his collaboration with BMX Bandits, Teenage Fanclub & Radio Sweethearts drummer & Shoeshine label supremo, Francis MacDonald. “I had heard the Shoeshine 45 of “Satellite Girl” by the band Speedboat and I just loved it” enthuses Michael. ” I had visited Scotland twice, as a tourist and drove around and saw most of the country, but that 45 was my first conscious musical connection with Scotland”. The connection expanded into the first Cheeky Monkey album, “Four Arms To Hold You” . “On that album Francis & I really clicked. We made that album in 4 days, and I think the time constraints really kept us focused. I’ve learned a lot from Francis.”
With a Cheeky Monkey song (“Down”) covered by R. Stevie Moore & a Shelley song (“Think With Your Heart”) featured in the movie "Love & Support" does Michael ever imagine another artist singing a song while he was writing (improve) or if got inspired to write or work up a song in the style of someone else? Or imagine a song in a particular scene of a movie?
“I actually have written a few songs for other artists and actually mailed them copies, which seem to disappear into the black holes in outer space. In every case I’ve just felt really inspired and the songs came quickly. Some of those songs have been recycled and end up on my records”. Speaking of cover versions, as well as contributing to a Teenage Fanclub tribute album, Michael has recorded a song for a Gene Pitney tribute. As a fan of the art of the popular song I wonder whether, if Michael could ride the New York subway back to the heady heyday of the early 60s he’d prefer to be working in the hallowed song factory Brill Building? Or would he have been a folkie hanging round the Greenwich Village coffee bars? His answer is as succinct and direct as a Goffin-King classic:“Brill Building. Ernest folkies drive me nuts.”
The Shelley solo catalogue started taking shape when, fresh from releasing Cheeky Monkey’s “Four Arms To Hold You”, Shoeshine & US indie BIG DEAL issued Shelley’s first solo album, Half Empty, an engagingly spare-sounding debut, establishing a template Shelley’s embellished with subsequent releases. “Half Empty sounds the way it does because I had a fixed budget, and tried to figure how I could best put the songs over for that budget, so it’s a sparse rock trio record. The more I learn, the more experimenting I wish I could do, and that takes money. But there are limits; bands that spend $400,000 making one album will roast in Hell for eternity. Having said that – yes I would use more horns & strings, hire Nick Lowe to produce, buy some guitars, build a home studio, and do some experimenting with some of my favourite musicians.”
Sharing his enthusiasm for his favourite musicians comes naturally to Shelley, who introduced BIG DEAL his occasional collaborators Baby Lemonade (who in their latter-day co-incarnation as Arthur Lee’s Love are responsible for three of the finest shows your correspondent has ever seen). And Michael’s A&R abilities have led to his most recent, & quirkiest, release: an 8” vinyl straight-to-lathe super-limited edition e.p. on London label Heliotone: “When the BIG DEAL label was still around I pitched them on the idea of a “best of” The BMX Bandits, which they were going to let me compile. I got in touch with Ed Jung (who runs the Heliotone label) because he was running the BMX Bandits web page at the time, and I asked him for some input. BIG DEAL went under before that project happened, but Ed & I stayed in touch over the years, and he simply made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to do the 8”, and it was my pleasure.” The Heliotone release is graced by a rendition of a classic Shelley song, Baby’s In A Bad Mood, the lead track from Too Many Movies which, following a pattern of globally staggered releases, appeared in the USA in 1998 on the BIG DEAL label, in Japan on Nippon Crown in 2000 & on Shoeshine the following year.. .
No matter what year or continent they first heard it in, Baby’s In a Bad Mood introduced Shelley listeners to his newly- enriched musical palette , suggesting an elegantly rueful Bob Dylan with its thin wild Mercury sound & uncanny nailing of a domestic mini-drama, Michael sharing situations most songwriters struggle to articulate or wrap up in elaborate conceits. “I don’t think I've ever had doubts about sharing personal details although”, he admits, “it has freaked out some folks who I’ve written about. Some people are so crafty they don’t rely on point of view; I’ve always strived for a balance of craft and point of view. Some of my favourite songs are ones that sound both personal to the writer, but universal in the sentiment… but I try not to think about the process too much.” Too Many Movies continued Shelley’s Scotpop Scotpop connections continued with appearances from the likes of Belle & Sebastian’s Chris Geddes & Stevie Jackson as well as the ubiquitous Francis Macdonald plus New York-based Shoeshine country artist & DJ, Laura Cantrell.
The Cantrell/Shelley duet, “Let’s Fall In Hate”, on Michael’s next outing, “I Blame You” again underlined Shelley’s adept touch at portraying a delicate domestic situation (“We can’t make it through a meal much less eternity”). Elsewhere on the record, “Stoop Sale” is a collaboration between Michael & his erstwhile New York house guest Stevie Jackson – a list of items an ex-lover’s shedding after splitting with the singer including a mix-tape he compiled for her, while “Mix Tape” itself the finest paean to a sharing art all Speakers readers can relate to – the music compilation that traditionally heralds the start of a music lover’s new relationship (improve). Michael struck me as an artist who draws inspiration from a wide range of daily situations & popular culture.
“Sometimes an event in my life will spark a song idea. Some times I’ll hear a song or read a phrase or hear a comment and it will suggest a mutation (like “Lets fall In Hate”). Notes get written on scraps of paper while riding the subway, then get washed in my pants pocket in the laundry. Eventually enough fragments in my brain get stuck to each other enough to start a real song idea, then I start writing down any word or phrase that moves that sentiment along, when I’m purged, I see if I can organize the mess into a song. Occasionally an idea pops into my head and a few minutes later the song pops out of the guitar whole, like giving birth to a 30 year old person. But more often I get the chorus and the verse structure pretty quickly and then I take a painfully long time ironing out details.
“With (the title track) “I Blame You” I had the general concept and a lot of words, but I couldn’t figure out a chorus that sounded right following the verse. I showed what I had To Francis and he wrote the chorus in about ten seconds, and the bridge in about five seconds. Amazing! It was originally written with a country-ish feel, and it was drummer Dennis Diken (ex-Smithereens) who suggested the feel we ended up recording it with”.
Michael’s imminent new release is "Goodbye Cheater" recorded, says Michael “mostly live in 2 days in Brooklyn by Bryce Goggin (Pavement, Lemonheads, Apples In Stereo…).” It features my amazing band of the past couple of years: John Lee, Jon Graboff & Steve Goulding, augmented by some old & new accomplices Jay Sherman-Godfrey (guitar) Drew Glackin (Silos, Tandy) Dan Miller (They Might Be Giants) Dave Amels (keyboard ace) Jim Campilongo (guitar genius) and Laura Cantrell (sings a duet). I added vocals and a few more guitars in my basement then Bryce mixed it. I think it’s a new approach sonically, and hopefully there’s some growth as a songwriter… but who knows.”
He's pretty modest for a Rock Superstar but we know one thing for sure: whatever Michael Shelley chooses to share with us will be more than worthwhile: "Goodbye Cheater" is out on Confidential Recordings in January.

Readers Chart

2008-09-04T23:55:00.004+01:00

Subsequent to the Rhino Disciples, I didn't really pursue music as a pastime. In late 1983 a guy I knew at University and myself caught a coach that November down to London just to use a Fostex four-track. Later on I'd hire one for £18 per night (or a special weekend rate if available) from CC Music in Great Western Road and stay up as late /get up as early as feasibly possible to use it. Now access to basic recording is easy and, boy, do I like to exploit that… I did get in the Melody Maker in 1985 but that was for my Reader's Chart. They printed my photo with the comment "here's a good-looking boy to thrill our lady readers" (!). They also printed my address but I never heard from any interested MM readers, ladylike or otherwise.
Shortly after the publication of my Melody Maker top ten I had my first proper demo reviewed in an action-packed oblong-shaped fanzine called Pure Popcorn, run by Sushil Dade (then bass player in the Soup Dragons). I ran into him a little later in Edinburgh's mid-eighties Indie Central, Ripping Records, and thanked him for the review. Recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder I'd bought from a second-hand music shop in Woodlands Road back in Glasgow, Camera Shy by That's Alcohol Talking - as I styled myself- was, as Sushil observed in his review, a very tinny recording but it had a nice central riff underpinned by Dr Rhythm drum machine. Actually, that tape recorder was a hard won prize. Living back at my mum's in Edinburgh, I'd bought the reel-to-reel from the Woodlands Road shop (home not just to guitars and kit but also a tarantula in a tank), dragged it through to Edinburgh on train and bus, switched it on and found it to be dead. Our local electrician Mr Forrest checked out the electrics and found them all melted. "Looks like you've been sold a pig in a poke", he said. Cue dragging the blessed machine back to Glasgow and, if memory serves, being found an equally ancient - but thankfully operational - replacement. A tape I made under the name That's Alcohol Talking reviewed by Sushil K. Dade in his Pure Popcorn fanzine. A while later, I got a nice letter from a Pure Popcorn reader in New York asking me to send him some of my stuff, which I did, but by that time I'd fallen under the influence of 80s upfront pop, got into keyboards and, not for the last time, lost direction.subsequent to the Rhino Disciples, I didn't really pursue music as a pastime. In late 1983 a guy I knew at University and myself caught a coach that November down to London just to use a Fostex four-track.

Around that time I bought myself another damaged (hideously scratched rather than bitten) bargain, a scuffed vinyl masterpiece, Astral Weeks by Van Morrison from Boston's in Leith Walk, where I later bought my first, second hand, Drum Machine , a Dr Rhythm DR-55. Matt black, with a big dial on it, it resembled a transformer in 1930s schoolboy electricity set.

Later on I'd hire one for £18 per night (or a special weekend rate if available) from CC Music in Great Western Road and stay up as late /get up as early as feasibly possible to use it. Now access to basic recording is easy and, boy, do I like to exploit that… I did get in the Melody Maker in 1985 but that was for my Reader's Chart. They printed my photo with the comment "here's a good-looking boy to thrill our lady readers" (!). They also printed my address but I never heard from any interested MM readers, ladylike or otherwise.
Shortly after the publication of my Melody Maker top ten I had my first proper demo reviewed in an action-packed oblong-shaped fanzine called Pure Popcorn, run by Sushil Dade (then bass player in the Soup Dragons). I ran into him a little later in Edinburgh's mid-eighties Indie Central, Ripping Records, and thanked him for the review. Recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder I'd bought from a second-hand music shop in Woodlands Road back in Glasgow, Camera Shy by That's Alcohol Talking - as I styled myself- was, as Sushil observed in his review, a very tinny recording but it had a nice central riff underpinned by Dr Rhythm drum machine. Actually, that tape recorder was a hard won prize. Living back at my mum's in Edinburgh, I'd bought the reel-to-reel from the Woodlands Road shop (home not just to guitars and kit but also a tarantula in a tank), dragged it through to Edinburgh on train and bus, switched it on and found it to be dead. Our local electrician Mr Forrest checked out the electrics and found them all melted. "Looks like you've been sold a pig in a poke", he said. Cue dragging the blessed machine back to Glasgow and, if memory serves, being found an equally ancient - but thankfully operational - replacement. A tape I made under the name That's Alcohol Talking reviewed by Sushil K. Dade in his Pure Popcorn fanzine. A while later, I got a nice letter from a Pure Popcorn reader in New York asking me to send him some of my stuff, which I did, but by that time I'd fallen under the influence of 80s upfront pop, got into keyboards and, not for the last time, lost direction.

The Name Of The Game

2008-09-04T22:14:00.008+01:00

The wintry perfection of ABBA’s The Name Of The Game is pitched somewhere between a George Martin Beatle-arrangement and the subsequent Green Shirt by Elvis Costello & The Attractions: adult pop rather than Rumours-style Adult Oriented Rock (much as I love Go Your Own Way) - not quite the assured European tactician “masters of the scene” they’d portray in Voulez-Vous, nor quite the love-loser coming good in Lay All Your Love On Me, but still “an impossible case” brought to life by a the loping basslining arrangement, by turns anticipatory,celebratory, lyrically wary, warily lyrical. I heard this all the time on the radio when it was number one - particularly several times in one day on a school outing to New Lanark. I remember thinking I’d never heard one track so often in my life (& I didn’t even have the single). To my young ears it wasn’t quite Elvis or the Beatles but solid enough stuff - older, the blend of lyric & arrangement (which also carries a tinge of the More Than A Feeling/Debaser/Smells Like Teen Spirit riff) is, to my ears, a masterwork.

Love's Unkind

2008-09-04T20:19:00.006+01:00

I loved it at first listen. Almost forbiddenly-hooky, I' fell for the classic massiveness of Donna Summer's skyscraper-eating seventies Spector update Love's Unkind. We tried to cover this spectacularly unsuccessfully in Meth O.D. Part of the reason we sounded so utterly weedy in our anodyne attempt was that there's very little song here - and this works out wonderfully on record, letting the towering production rampage relentlessly & evoke, in tandem with the fragments of story that emerge in the lyric, some chilly dark city high school preparing for a Thanksgiving dance that you can imagine the Shangri-La's insolently chewing gum in the corner at. This is pop confectionary as monolith rather than today's tinny aural equivalent of a

strip-lit gaudy-grey McDonalds interior....it's also one of the few perfect pop records not produced by Spector or Brian Wilson that stays immaculate despite a sax solo. (I love Plastic Bertrand's Ca Plane Pour Moi but the sax does seem un peu superfluous). After a brief two-bar respite those strings swing rigidly (contradiction - yes!) back in to play in a sort of twelve-inchy coda and the sexily semi-emoting Donna emotes a little more & mmm....I suppose one man's marvellous monolith is an other man's overblown edifice & I've never really dug River Deep, Mountain High but how about the prehistoric night city synths of Tubeway Army's Are “Friends” Electric, The Wailers' Mr.Brown & the gossamer & leather psychocandy threat of Cheree by Suicide: Goosebumpage. Oh BABY! (Sounds like they've syphoned off some ancient electrical source for some unwholesome purpose in the back of a cold water flat on the East River).

The Four Tops

2008-09-04T19:58:00.003+01:00

I once picked up a second-hand copy on an EMI/ Motown hybrid imprint of the greatest hits of the Four Tops in the now long-closed Virginia Galleries in mid-eighties Glasgow. I don't know how it would have sounded new on some Garrard or Pye deck but on my plastic music centre with the bit burned by an over-zealous incense stick this golden brown & white sleeved record sounded as it smelled - musty & like someone had sandpapered off the best bits of bass & treble, blunting the four-string genius of James Jamerson temporarily but now I'm in a different world on my iPod and hail James J, hail Levi Stubbs, hail Holland-Dozier-Holland, hail bespectacled Abdul "Duke" Fakir for getting to “duke” Supreme dream girl Mary Wilson (as did Tom Jones, lucky man), could it hve been as sexy as the slinky intro of forbidden notes that seduces us into do what you gotta do? -and hail Keeper Of The Castle for surely begatting children of the revolution by T.Rex, a track replete with my favourite ever line: “I drive a Rolls Royce cos it’s good for my voice...

Last Train To Clarksville

2008-09-04T19:50:00.005+01:00

I'd heard it a thousand times but then I heard it on headphones - Last Train to Clarksville by the Monkees. I really heard it: all remastered sparkletone, guitars building on guitars from session guys I'd never heard of - Wayne Erwin, Gerry McGee, Louie Shelton. Masters of the groovy verse, the hip riff, the suitably railroad rockabilly rhythms. Somewhere it's always sat in stereo like this, even when encased in thick vinyl, ancient RCA label and old-fashioned sleeve featuring four young lads depicted in front of an old brown door and brick wall, no guitar-style Monkee-logo yet in place....Clarksville was recorded on 25th July, 1966 -Miick Jagger's 23rd birthday - with Aftemath engineer(& sleevenoter) Dave Hassinger at the controls. Only Monkee on the track - Micky Dolenz. Wonder if Papa Nes dug the countryish guitar fills. Written & produced by Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart in the era of the whizzkid malchick. The Boycester co-wrote our teenage rampage favourite Under the Moon of Love - originally Lee Curtis but we stomped it with Showaddywaddy. Rock & roll at the height of punk. We was punk attitude. Or at least the braver members of the class were..

Ezy Ryders & Better Books

2008-09-04T16:51:00.004+01:00

Blame it on the Beatles. My Dad got me a book of their lyrics. I Am The Walrus fired my imagination and they are still my favourite band.

After initially getting together to perform scripts of 60s BBC radio show Round The Horne, which we'd never heard, Mark and I pursued a mutual affinity for all things Beatle and formed a non-performing. initially imaginary, band called the Rhino Disciples (name from random dictionary opening). People from school were becoming involved with the local music scene (Josef K, Fire Engines, Little Red Duffelcoats) but I wasn't quite part of the in crowd who attended gigs but I liked the music I heard, particularly Poor Old Soul by Orange Juice. The chords reminded me of Dear Prudence. You could see the Postcard Singles tantalisingly aligned in their black and gold postcarded-inserted livery in Ezy Ryder's small counter-hosted singles section. Over the street, near Greyfriars Bobby, was a bookshop sanctuary (Rock And Roll and Helmut Newton photobooks lay in wait for my fevered finger) called Better Books, established (I subsequently discovered) by literary legend John Calder. Better Books was itself just up the road from Bauermeister where I did myself a Faber, buying my own copy of a book of poetry we studied at school - Ariel by Sylvia Plath. - I also purchased a Penguin book of talks in eastern philosophy by J. Krishnamurti.

Mark and I did some recording, both at home and in a studio through a Space Invader-sentried door beneath Ezy Ryder's emporium in Forest Road. This shop - Europe's second-largest record store, no less -was where, from a stock of 10,000 platters, I'd bought my vinyl copy of Loaded, having taken the sleeve up to the counter and inspected and approved the vinyl, finally obtaining those radio-heard versions of Sweet Jane and Rock'n'Roll. Still besotted with All Tomorrow's Parties I bought the famous Velvet Underground and Nico from a record shop in the High Street called Phoenix. Similar in size to Bruce's Records in Rose Street (established in 1969 by future Simple Minds manager Bruce Findlay), Phoenix was where I ventured one afternoon after a school trip to see Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph Of The Will fell through.

Uh..so which Eric was really God?

2008-08-24T00:17:00.007+01:00

Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe meet Otis Redding on RSG.

Malcolm Ross

2008-08-18T17:18:00.008+01:00

Malcolm Ross interviewed by Roy Moller, Edinburgh, October 2006 for isthismusic magazine.
Edinburgh 1979. In Bruce’s Record Shop Josef K’s talented teenage guitarist is raking through the record bins when a unique version of Bowie’s Boys Keep Swinging spinning instore catches his ear. “I’ll buy that!” enthuses Malcolm Ross to the assistant. “Who is it? ” Ross is directed to the young aesthete across the counter: “It’s his record.” Billy Mackenzie has just offloaded a brace of debut Associates singles sale or return. Prompt purchaser Ross is suspected of being an accomplice…
Collaborator, certainly, on some of the finest Scottish music of the last quarter century, Ross has just released a solo compilation on Re-Action Recordings entitled Wrong Place, Wrong Time. As the hauntingly sardonic Josef K would have it, It’s Kinda Funny: Malcolm Ross has an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time. … the right man, for instance, for former Fast Product supremo Bob Last to recruit to tutor the likes of Ian Hart and Stephen Dorff to mime convincingly in Hamburg Beatles biopic Backbeat; and tailor a 50s gypsy score for Hollywood hit Chocolat with afterhours guitar contributions from its male lead, Johnny Depp: ”We did Johnny’s parts at midnight, after he’d done a day’s filming, in his hotel suite", reveals Ross at his Leith home. " Luckily he’s a very accomplished guitar player”. Praise indeed from the man whose new single Low Shot’s delicious riff uncoils as menacingly as a gunslinger’s gaze around a shanty town, and who delivers a post-punk masterclass on Josef K’s farewell single, The Missionary. Never mercenary, Ross “decided in the late 80s I didn’t want to be in any way a session man, making music for money. I know a lot of people who do it”, he avers, “ and in the end a lot of them stop liking music”.

Liking music, but not always each other, fellow Postcard popsters Orange Juice frequently sought Ross to smooth relations at sessions, such as one for an early single whose unique refrain gained the diplomatic Edinburgher’s particular admiration: “Ye Gods, I’m Simply Thrilled Honey!”
Fast forward to 1982: the day singer Paul Haig quits Josef K, Ross - in Glasgow for what proves to be the band’s final show - bumps into Collins and finds himself joining up for OJ’s Rip It Up album and preceding single Two Hearts Together, a substandard stab at mainstream success in an ill-judged sleeve: “we probably wore too much make up…Edwyn’s wearing a boy scout’s uniform …”. Collins sported a kilt on earlier single sleeves with some aplomb, but a scout uniform? Ye Gods! “There was a time when Edwyn would have bought every copy of that and burned them”, Ross recalls. But with Collins aggrieved that the likes of Altered Images and Haircut 100 having hits in lieu of Orange Juice, his group consented to dress for success. “Nobody twisted our arm. That was the be-all-and-end-all to have a hit single, to use the latest production techniques which was probably a stupid thing to do as it ages so badly.” Refreshingly free of inbuilt aural obsolescence, Rip It Up’s title track hit the Top Ten before OJ decided “to try to get back to where we were – sort of left field”. The group concurrently returned to its former fractious state and Ross quit with bassist David McClymont. While a new Orange Juice line-up continued releasing superbly individualistic flops, charting via en vogue production formed the gameplan for the next Postcard legend to recruit Ross: Roddy Frame harboured ambitions for prodigally poetic Aztec Camera to break America with a smooth Scritti Politti-ish sound. For Ross, recording the Mark Knopfler-produced Knife epitomised sterility: “He would spend an afternoon getting a bass drum sound. I had very little input, just got to play my guitar parts…” Live, the group cut more slack and Ross’s blistering guitar abilities coloured Frame’s assumption of whose fretwork ignited Texas Fever’s standout single: ”I remember Roddy saying, “You played that guitar on that song Bridge. The guitar playing on that’s fantastic”. I said, “Roddy, that’s Edwyn !” “

With Knife failing to make an incision in the US market, drummer Dave Ruffy accompanied Ross in the briefly, brightly buzzing High Bees, fronted by Malcolm’s wife, Syuzen Buckley, chanteuse on Applebush, which closes new Josef K compilation, Entomolgy, released by Domino, home to Franz Ferdinand. Impressed by the Glasgow quartet – who he reckons sound closer to the Monochrome Set than to his oft-invoked former cohorts, Ross admits to “enjoying this period when Josef K are kind of trendy again”. Not given to hubris, Ross is simply glad of guitar music’s general goodstanding, and has a fresh outlet for his talents: Stac Lee, formed with Fire Engine Russell Burn and bass-playing folksinger Maggie Holland - a treat for 2007.

Back in time to 79: Ross discovers the identity of the cool-looking guy with the guitar in his French & music college classes: Associate Alan Rankine, to whom Mackenzie has relayed the Bruce’s incident. Friendship fortuitously forged, Ross goes on to work with both Associates, later writing Happy Boy partly as a lament after Mackenzie’s suicide.
This affecting title track of his second Marina album graces Wrong Place, Wrong Time, alongside other gems from his career with the Hamburg label such as football‘n’fame meditation Slim Jim On The Slippery Slope and the infectiously loping Big Guitar (also featuring Buckley and originating from the country band Ross played in during a fifteen year London stay. The couple currently play country together around Edinburgh in Buckley’s Chance). Featuring several Collins-produced tracks and guesting many former bandmates, the compilation testifies to Ross’ standing as one of music’s gentlemen.. and, indeed, a scholar. “I started thinking I should study music”, he says of the music degree he gained in London. ” I wanted to really get to the bottom of it, how it all worked.” With two superb new compilations illuminating a CV also encompassing stints with Blancmange, Momus, Paul Haig and Bad Seed Barry Adamson, it’s the right place, right time to appreciate how Malcolm Ross has always innately known how to work musical magic on a Big Guitar

Paul Haig

2008-08-18T12:03:00.006+01:00

Paul Haig interviewed by Roy Moller for isthismusic?magazine, August 2007.

Sammy Davis Jr. knew what he was singing about: the rhythm of life is a powerful beat. For twenty-five years, Rhythm Of Life’s been an imprint for numerous Paul Haig projects since his first solo ventures after the break-up of the gloriously edgy Josef K.Haig’s independent label Rhythm Of Life Inc has just released Electronik Audience, an album that finds him inspired by Kraftwerk/Yello-style electropop, and seminal Iggy Pop l.p. The Idiot. “When I first heard Iggy it was just my cup of tea - a deep monotone voice …instantly appealing”, recounts Haig with a wry smile: there’s a decidedly Iggy/Lou Reed timbre to his baritone and The Idiot’s well-turned lyrical economy continues to exert its influence. “Words that are quite choice and direct can really portray a whole feeling. So I was purposely trying to hold back on the lyrics as well”.
Electronik Audience started taking shape when, one Sunday afternoon, Haig sat down at the computer in his home studio, close to the sun-drenched Edinburgh park where we’re speaking. Embarking on what he terms a “voyage of discovery” through do-it-yourself technology where the tap of a synth key can inspire a whole song, he quickly created the sinister Traumatik. Its contagious electro-groove spurred Haig to fashion a whole album in a similar vein. “I wanted to stay in one specific genre”, he tells me. “Electronik Audience does what it says on the tin. I stuck to it quite stoically. I hardly went out for two or three months. I’m amazed how disciplined I was. I could have gone haywire with all the sounds I was hearing. Nowadays you can get all the sounds you want in one computer bank which is fantastic. It makes me want to write all the time”. This creative buzz is tangible, from the vocoder-laced title track to the darkly uplifting new single Thieves and former Radio 2 Single Of The Week Reason. The succinctly-titled Disco Gem is aptly described by its creator as “simplistic but infectious and minimal”. Discussing the Greek airport-sampling, teleport-evoking Departure 60, he adds : “I was thinking about a robotic character in a futuristic airport, not wanting anyone to touch him or bump into him…It’s like a filmic soundtrack hopefully the listener can make up their own imagery to.”
Having established his credentials as a composer via the Cinemathique series of soundtracks for imaginary films, Haig’s confident he’d revel in scoring movies: “I think I’d be able to come up with music very quickly, having been doing it the other way around for so long”.
Haig’s track record is lengthy and impressive. At 21, he found himself in a New York recording studio with Thompson Twins/Grace Jones producer Alex Sadkin. Like many renegades from what Dutch critics termed “depressy-wave” bands, Haig was consciously moving towards pop accessibility, signing to Island on the strength of portastudio demos.” I don’t think they’d heard any Josef K”, he says. “Coming out of Josef K into this shiny pop world was quite bizarre, a complete culture shock, especially from the dark indie past”.

Sorry For Laughing, a shining highlight from that past, has led an impressive pop life of its own - covered by Propaganda, and, most recently, by the 1990s. Nouvelle Vague titled their 2005 debut album after their own cover. Haig sang it with them at their recent Dunfermline show while in London, in March, he performed another Josef K classic, It’s Kinda Funny, at a Billy Mackenzie tribute concert. He describes the occasion as “a very strange night, a real mixture of emotions. I was really terribly nervous. But I was speaking to Billy inside my head and that got me through it”.
A favourite of Mackenzie’s, the Josef K original features incongruously hypnotic syndrums from sticksman Ron Torrance: ” It was his idea”, reveals Haig. “He paid for them, so he was going to use them. You heard them on disco records and then to have them on Joy Divisionesque indie rock is quite creepy”. They crop up, too, “like dark white noise, quite industrial” on Variation Of Scene from Josef K’s postponed debut l.p, Sorry For Laughing. Expanding the band’s post-punk guitar-based sound with synthesizer on these sessions, Haig was keenly “experimenting with anything I could find that made a noise before and during Josef K.”
This fascination with creating instrumental soundscapes is evident on Haig’s 1981 lo-fi curio, Drama. “I did about 500 cassette tapes, just cassette to cassette recorder”, he remembers, recalling 80s home-recording and mixtape culture as “the MySpace of its time- not the internet but people talking and posting each other cassettes”.
The spirit of experimentation extended to the singer’s award-winning tonsorial style, initially sculpted by Ron Torrance and inspired by another Sadkin client: “I was so young that I thought I’d have a haircut like Grace Jones: Straight up. Pillbox. I was Haircut Of The Year in Melody Maker. What a ridiculous accolade”.
The self-explanatory Swing In ‘82 (shelved till ‘85) saw the sharply coiffured Haig move further from the scratchy sonics of Josef K: “I was living in Brussels and listening a lot to things like Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire and I attempted to do a swing e.p. It’s ridiculous. I was far too young to sing these songs. You can hear it in the voice. I was just not mature enough. That was a huge mistake but it’s quite cute and silly in a way”.
A more assured venture was Haig’s 1984 collaboration with Cabaret Voltaire, recorded at the techno-industrialist dance outfit’s Sheffield base: “ I came back on a really old train. I was in this compartment when this woman and her daughter came in and all the way up the daughter was staring at me”. The pre-teenybopper tried figuring which current popstar the stylish Haig must be. Eventually she decided: “She thought I was Nik Kershaw”.
By the mid-80s, Haig was building a ripe-for re-exploration catalogue of dance-pop, galaxies beyond the scope of contemporary Kershaws and Joneses. He looked every inch the intergalactic pop-icon when teamed with Billy Mackenzie for STV’s 1986 Hogmanay show. Performing right after the bells,” We took Amazing Grace and did a weird guitar futuristic thing to it which had nothing to do with the song”. Bemusing both studio audience and fellow guests Big Country, this performance – YouTube it - followed two radiant shows by the duo in Edinburgh and Glasgow: “We weren’t competing - just chums having fun and I think that came across. Around that time we were offered a big deal from London Records and that would have been great but Billy was still contracted to Warner Brothers and couldn’t get out of that”. The Haig/Mackenzie collaboration Memory Palace, recorded at the Edinburgh musician’s flat over a four year period prior to Mackenzie’s death, was eventually released by Rhythm Of Life in 1999.
Co-produced with Mackenzie’s fellow Associate Alan Rankine, Haig’s 1989 album Chain is reissued by Cherry Red in November. His most recent collaboration, The Cathode Ray, started “as a bit of fun with my friend Jeremy Thoms and we ended up with an album”. Their glam-inflected 2006 single on Pronoia and forthcoming Marina album see Haig returning to catchy guitar-based pop. Though he views his two latest projects as ”chalk and cheese”, they’re united in homage to favourite influences. While Electronik Audience deploys a Kraftwerk aesthetic, the formative guitar inspirations Haig cites - Wire, Television, Pere Ubu and early Talking Heads - inform Haig and Thoms’ guitars and vocals, vibrantly underpinned by Neal Baldwin and David Mack’s recorded-as-live bass and drums.
Currently recording a follow-up to Electronik Audience which he predicts will be “more organic, a bit warmer with real bass guitars and more lyrics,” and with his work proclaimed an influence by artists from Franz Ferdinand to Bloc Party, the rhythms of Paul Haig’s musical life reverberate through past, present and future. A powerful beat, indeed.

Below: Josef K - Chance Meeting

Lloyd Cole

2008-08-17T20:58:00.026+01:00

Lloyd Cole interviewed by Roy Moller and Douglas Clark, Basement Cafe, Otago St, Glasgow, 10.08.85 for Spanky Farrell's Interview fanzine. At one point in the interview. Lloyd asks us how old we are, "Twenty-two" we reply. "Ah", says Lloyd, twenty-four. "Not so young".

The "Mirror Image" series you recently featured in on Channel Four seemed quite stifling. Were you happy with the result?

I hated it. I really really hated it. It was filmed just after we'd released "Perfect Skin" and the versions of some of the songs were not the same as they are on the l.p. - they weren't finished. "Charlotte Street" had a different chorus. We recorded it I think in May last year and were told it would be shown in September/August of that year but it wasn't on till this April. Our profile in live performance is a lot different to what it was in those days and I just think it represented us really badly considering we'd released two subsequent singles and an l.p.

Did you enjoy touring America? Did it live up to your expectations?

I still can't really say to be honest - we didn't really see too much of America as such. We saw a lot of promoters and people in the record business and most of the other people we met beyond that were people who'd come out their way to try to meet us and these weren't normal people so you never really get a fair view of it. A couple of times when we were in New York I wandered round the place and I was most impressed although it was pretty fast, and I managed to get about half an hour in San Francisco which was very pretty...Georgia was nice. All we could really tell is that they're a lot more foreign to us than people like the French are.

Lloyd describes most of the new US bands as "garbage"and we agree, although we'd make an exception in the case of R.E.M.

I was just going to say except R.E.M. R.E.M. are very good. We did a festival with them in Belgium recently: that was a ridiculous bill. It was the Ramones, R.E.M., us, the Style Council, Depeche Mode, Paul Young and U2. It was really great, it was lovely. All those groups you'd think would be very stuck up and wouldn't went to speak to you were all very polite. U2 are actually the nicest people on earth. Bono got a bit carried away on stage but he's very earnest when he's not on stage and he's just a lovely man beyond that -R.E.M. were brilliant. I was kind the kind of person who thought they were pretty good. Lawrence (Donegan, bass player) has most of their records, and I'd thought they were alright - some really good songs - but when I saw them live I thought they were magnificent.

Do you have any pet band that you think deserves more exposure, the way that Morrissey champions James?

I haven't really. I've never heard anything by James. One of these days I'm just going to go out on a shopping spree and just buy records because I can't be bothered listening to John Peel, quite frankly. I can't bear to listen to all the garbage to hear one or two good songs and I don't really like the radio. Occasionally I go on a shopping spree and buy things and if they don't turn out very well I give them to my brother and things. Who do I like these days? There must be a few.. I think del Amitri are very good. I think they're the kind of group that one should champion anyway 'cos they're never gonna set the world on fire and have big hit singles but I actually think the l.p.'s very good and I like Justin as a singer.

What is it that appeals to you about being a pop star?

Well, nothing very much to be honest. I think you want to be one when you're very young and even when you're quite old. I think the worst thing in the world is to be ignored and obviously being a pop star is the opposite of being ignored. I don't think I ever really thought "pop star", I just thought to be somebody in a pop group.

Have any of your idols disappointed you?

I was really disappointed in Tom Verlaine when I met him. I just found him quite bitter. I met Richard Lloyd (Television's other guitarist) recently who's now completely dried out. Apparently when Television became a heroin addict which is very sad. Tom Verlaine has become quite embittered, he's quite cynical. It's very sad to see somebody who was obviously quite starry-eyed in the first place very embittered so he's kind of let me down. Edwyn Collins has been very nasty to me.

He seemed to think Polydor were giving you more attention than they were giving him.

They were so well but I don't think it's something he should feel bitter towards me about.

Wasn't "Forest Fire" a funny sort of follow-up to "Perfect Skin"?

I just thought it was obvious. As a group we all thought it's a dead good song and everyone'll just like it but it's not as easy as that. It was unfortunate but when "Forest Fire" come out there were two Radio One roadshows a day or something ridiculous and you have to be in the Top 40 to be on them so if you weren't on the radio you didn't get in the Top 40.

Only one DJ proved to be really unhelpful in promoting the single...

Steve Wright really disliked it. For some reason he played it one time and said that's the follow-up to "Perfect Skin" which I liked but that's not very good is it and then a couple of days later he said the Commotions have a new single out but I'm playing the old one...We were a bit disconsolate after "Forest Fire" but we were really pleased after what happened to "Rattlesnakes". It didn't really get any bad reviews anywhere. It got a Grammy in Holland or something.

Paddy MacAloon (of Prefab Sprout) accused you of name dropping. He said you'd be all right if you stayed away from film influences and "groovy French existentialists". (and yet he called his l.p. "Steve McQueen").

Did he say that? When did he say that? I was talking to him the night before last in London and we were talking about writing and he was saying to me what d'you think's wrong with your writing and I said I'd like to use less words and he said that's what he thought about himself as well. He's a nice person but I don't like the idea that because somebody doesn't think you're perfect they should be annoyed with you. I don't like their new l.p. I really don't. I have to say it. I only like four tracks on it. The rest I just find too slick and laid back. I like "Faron Young" a lot and I like "When Love Breaks Down". I bought "Faron Young" in fact but I was really disappointed with the l.p. after I'd read all these things about it that told me it was going to be marvellous.

Lloyd cites "Faron Young" as an example of using a name in a way that makes sense within the songs as a whole...

It's a lot easier to use somebody's name in a song than to use several sentences describing what kind of person Arthur Lee was. I mean Grace Kelly's in a battered old sportscar 'cos she always drove them in these films. I don't think there's any names in the new songs except Jesus.

Are you doing "Jesus Said"?

No, we've dropped it. We recorded it and it turned out sounding quite lightweight. It's quite a shame 'cos the lyrics were good and the chorus was good so we'll try and salvage the chorus and put some other words to it and make another song out of it.

You've said you don't like people singing along to your songs at your concerts.

I think I should be more sympathetic 'cos many people probably do that as an escapist thing but I think it undermines the basic idea I have that people come along to watch us (laughs). I'm always changing things about anyway so these people never have total success. I just think jumping up and down and throwing about to Commotions music is a bit silly. If you want to do that then the Ramones are definitely the group for you. In America they tend to bring out lighters. That's happened to us a couple of times and it's so funny. When we did the Belgian thing, I stayed on and watched U2. I'd never seen them live before and I thought I must see them. (In hushed tones) They were good as well. They were doing some song, a quite gentle one, and there were 65,000 people there and they all started lighting lighters. You can imagine it - very strange.

Fans of "Rattlesnakes" have also come up with some strange interpretations of Lloyd's lyrics...

It's really funny some of the things people think you say. A lot of people complained they didn't get a lyric sheet and some girl in America wrote me a big long letter and a lyric sheet which she'd managed to write herself and she said "I've spent ages and these are the words to the songs". There's a bit in "Four Flights Up" where she said "When I ask you what you want you say you do want a crocodile!" - there were some lovely ones in it. In the new single ("Brand New Friend") there's a line that goes (sings) "If I were to ask you what you would do with yourself/ If I were to tell you would you just talk to yourself" and the person who directed the video said I really like the line where you say (sings) "if I were Italian" (laughter) and actually I will sing that one day.

Whereas much of "Rattlesnakes" was recorded by direct feed, Lloyd tells us that the new l.p. will be more "luscious" with some rough guitar passages - and a more danceable feel on "Brand New Friend" and "Perfect Blue". He says he's been aiming for the feel Talking Heads had on "More Songs About Buildings And Food".

We haven't started it yet. The working title for it is "Decline And Fall". It probably definitely won't be called that but that's my working title. I think half the songs on the l.p. are about falling from grace or falling from somewhere else or falling apart or something.

As there's been talk in the press of a slightly Presleyish air to the young Cole's appearance, we ask if he's going to make good on his reported intention to cover the King's 1955 classic "Mystery Train".

We'd love to but it's dead really kind of weird trying to sing a song with a beat like that. I don't think I could sing (sings) "Train I ride". I don't think it would suit me. It's a bit repetitive. I find it very difficult to keep my mind on things where the words just go round and round. I'm trying to write less but it's still difficult.

As for his Joan Didion fixation, Lloyd likes her new book "Democracy", but he's still not made it through her first novel, "Run, River". She's very popular in America, he tells us. Over the water she's not the obscure intellectual figure she can appear to be from a British perspective. Talking of intellectual figures, is it true that Glasgow University dropout Lloyd is a fan of the works of post-Structuralist Roland Barthes?

A little. He's about the only one of these modern French people I can understand. Shame he got knocked over by a milk truck. (Laughs). What an inglorious way to go!

del Amitri

2008-08-17T18:35:00.021+01:00

del Amitri: Beating Pop Hands Down 13.09.85. Interview by Roy Moller and Douglas Clark. Spanky Farrell's Interview fanzine.

When Justin, Bryan and Iain of del Amitri came up to Spanky Farrell Office to be interviewed they brought with them a cassette of their new 45 "Hammering Heart" - a standout track on their eponymous debut album, which features on the b-side the Beatlish Lines Running North and an enthusiastic live canter through Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl. This was Bryan's ideas and stagewise is the band's first cover since their essaying of The Kinks' "Tired Of Waiting For You."

Justin: There was a gap in the set when we were on tour, when everything was pretty serious and we wanted a couple of light-hearted things and it always works so well, Brown Eyed Girl" when you do it live and everybody goes (sings) "Sha la la la la la.."

Do you feel you use too many words in your own songs?

Justin: Oh, I take it as a compliment. A lot of that sort of criticism doesn't bother me, like "you use too many words" which is part of what we do, and "your guitars are too involved and too worked out" and stuff like that. We realise that as well, but if we sat down and we said "Let's write slow vocal melodies" so there was less words and "let's make the guitars sound like we can't play them quitw as well", then it would just be really unnatural. If we tried to retreat to that level of pop sensibility or whatever it would sound really pretentious.

Is writing a democratic process?

Iain: It's not so much democratic as a four way war of attrition.

Bryan: Sometimes you go through patches where we'll be really quick - like matbe two in two or three days but it's still democratic and it does take a while because we're fussy...Some of the new songs are a bit more direct...

Justin: We've not concerned ourselves so much with making each second sound right, just let the whole song sound right, which might or might not be an improvement...

Bryan: I think you always have to be aware of the fact that "the age we live in" has a very short attention span. People are saying that you only have a certain amount of time to grab their attention. That is, frankly, a lot of crap...90% of people who make records take the attitude of the lowest common denomenator, like a particular rhythm or whatever, the most cliched words that anyone could sing along to and that's it. That's pop.

How did you feel about being Scottish pop's flavour of the month?

Justin: That process went wildly wrong.

Iain: It seemed like that recently, because the initial being plastered on the front page of Melody Maker...

Bryan: Which was the single most damaging thing that ever happened to us...

Iain: That was just a catastrophe in publicity terms.

Justin: The single got dropped because Chrysalis panicked when they saw us on the cover of Melody Maker and thought we were going to be a big hit and decided to wait until we'd recorded the album to choose the correct single. It just blew the timing.

The dels agree it's no advantage being on Big Star, a pretend indie part of the mighty Chrysalis label.

Iain: We're not even n a pretend independent label...

Bryan: We're on a pretend independent part of a pretend label...The thing was that we were considered like an ersatz indie project as far as Chrysalis were concerned, this little independent credibility thing. I suppose if someone came along, some judge of musical taste and said Chrysalis have got the worst rota of horrible commercial piss in the universe, they could go "No, no, we've got this little independent Scottish band. We'll just sort of dig their tapes out." And the angel of death would pass along to CBS. They've got Santana. This plan was completely scuppered because the guy from the Melody Maker thought we were the best thing ever, ever, ever." I think they're wonderful and everybody had better watch out." And half the people at Chrysalis had never fucking heard of us and they said "Oh God this is one of our groups. We better do something. And they hadn't bothered to promote the single or anything - they were just going to put it out, throw it out the window as a passing shot. But we didn't actually produce anything for two months after that because the record company got cold feet. All our potential fans had lost interest, all the people who had their knives out had been sharpening them for two months.

Justin: The article also perpetuated that sort of wee Glaswegian boy image, that the Melody Maker went in for to give it some kind of zest instead of presenting us as we ought to be presented. These bloody interviews that put in "oohs" and "ayes" when they may not even have been said. It's really condescending.

Speaking of image, how do del Amitri regard The Jesus And Mary Chain?

Justin: The reason people go to see them is because they think it's going to be part of history and it really isn't and the audience think it's going to be an exciting event. But I think when you're actually faced with it, it's actualy pretty boring...Whenever you're involved in that pure negativism thing, anti-pop or whetever, it's so easy to get away with murder. They can say OK we annoyed you but at least it's a reaction...

Bryan: I quite like their records but when I saw them on The Tube I thought they were extraordinarily predictable. They did exactly what you qould expect and in that way they're exactly like Bruce Springsteen.

Justin: Or Lloyd Cole...

Bryan: Lloyd isn't so much a parody. You know Lloyd isn't going to duckwalk across the stage.

Justin: The best thing Lloyd Cole could do is come on in front of a packed house and give it feedback for half an hour, then walk off stage and that would be hilarious. If The Jesus And Mary Chain came on with an incredibly six-month rehearsed dance routine and played reggae songs it would be brilliant, but they're not going to because they've found their little niche and they're going to keep picking it.

Bryan: The Jesus And Mary Chain for a lot of really young naive people in anarchic or as subversive as you can get. The Jesus And Mary Chain are just puppets and puppeteers. Their version of anarchy is a five album deal with Warners and an interview in The Face.

Is the topic of your ex-manager a closed one?

Bryan: Well, what do you want to know?

Just the facts - that's all we want.

Justin: Bastard! When we worked with Tom Verlaine the people who could play their instruments professionally were Paul (Tyagi, the drummer) and Iain and me and Bryan were pretty rotten, but for some reason Paul got all the stick, because the most important thing is to get the drum track right, especially when you're making a Tom Verlaine-type rock record which is what he was after , so Paul was getting so much stick and Tom Verlaine was saying things like "is this guy on a contract because he's going to cost you a lot of money in studios" and nobody has any right to say that to a band, because if we'd been more impressionable we'd have gone "Oh God" and spent two days worrying about it and gone to Paul, "Oh you'll need to leave the band", but we had the sense to know he was talking crap but that happened to everybody and if there's any doubt in your mind, the band's just going to go like that.

Bryan (finally answering our question): One good thing Tom Verlaine did say after Jackie (ex-manager) left was "Who is that guy? Jesus Christ. I tell you if you don't have someone working for you who knows the rip offs you'll get riped off."

How did you meet your current manager, Barbara (Shores)?

Iain: She wrote us a fan letter after the first Peel session and said if you're looking for a manager just get in touch, just as a completely innocent request. We fell out with Jackie and we got to a point where we just couldn't handle the business that was going on around us and we eventually thought, "Right, this guy's got to go", so we asked Jackie to stop managing us which he refused to so for a few weeks: "I'm going to manage you anyway, I'm going to manage you anyway!" (We said) "Jackie, we don't want you to!" That was a bit mad. We just got in touch with Barbara. The only other candidate was John Dingwal.

Justin: Son't print that, don't print that.

Bryan: Yeah, print it. We were going to ask John Dingwall.

Iain: So now we've got Barbara, She's terrific. She goes and beats people up at the record company occasionally, bounces them about....

Here's an incisive overview of Del Amitri's career

Plus two videos: a hairtastic Ian Harvie leading them through a cover of Ace Of Spades by Motorhead....

and, below that visual evidence of their rock god incarnation, a rather more collegiate band, as featured on BBC Scotland's TV show FSD. I think this is from 1986. The song, Life Going Backwards, used to open their sets around then and was the most brilliant thing I saw them play in the fourteen times I caught them live between 1985 and 1992. (1990's stunning Barrowlands set not withstanding - the homecoming conquering heroes opening with a cover of The Boys Are Back In Town, Currie as Lynott on bass, vocals and on-the-up aura). Back in '86, I recorded the audio off the telly and the interview you'll hear (this time by the Beeb, not Douglas and I) and was dubbed in at the time. The visuals are a brief muckabout by me on Windows Movie Maker...

Bobby Bluebell

2008-08-17T18:01:00.006+01:00

In And Out The Dusky Bluebells. Bobby Bluebell interviewed 12.09.85 by Roy Moller and Douglas Clark Spanky Farrell’s Interview (fanzine)

Photo (some years later) by Martin Gray.

After the relative failure of All I Am, the Bluebells have been, in the words of Bobby, “taking a long break”. After having to change bass players twice because both of them ran off with their girlfriends, they have now settled down with new bassist Nick Clark (ex- Cuban Heels and Shakin’ Pyramids) and are going into the studio with Daniel Miller in November to record new material, so don’t expect a new Bluebell record till 1986. Our interview begins in Berkeley St. studios with Bobby confirming that Alan Tarney (producer of Cliff Richard’s "We Don’t Talk Anymore" and "Wired For Sound") wouldn’t allow lead vocalist Ken McCluskey in the studio during the recording of their single "Sugar Bridge".

Bobby: We had a big house, a big studio in it, dead posh, nice smell of disinfectant, clean and tidy, and I was like that. “Oh…hi. This is my song”. And he’s going, “Oh, that’s really nice; it really reminds me of Dvorak”, and I was going “Aw?” Next day I brought Ken, right and Ken was going (sniffs) “Awright, then? That’s fucking pish.” He (Tarney) phones up the company the next day and says “Can you just send Robert down. I don’t really need Ken there”. I walked in and he’s going, “Hope you don’t mind not having Ken here but my wife didn’t like him”. You can’t tell Ken this, he thinks I’m making it up, but it’s true.

"Sugar Bridge" didn’t lead anywhere for the band and is laden with a particular drum roll that Bobby describes as “really horrific…something like Phil Collins”
The 12” of "All I Am" has a really naff edit on it.

It’s fucking shite, innit? We hate doing 12 inches. I did a fly one for "Cath", right. It’s fucking terrible: they (Ken and drumming brother Dave) go mad every time they hear it.

"All I Am" didn’t get played on the radio because it stopped and the record company hated it. They don’t like a surprise: “Imagine you’re eating your breakfast, Robert, an’ you’re finking bath catching the bus, right. All I Am’s suddenly on the radio and “aw, what the fuck’s that?”

London Records wanted to cut a noisy guitar part from the track and Booby says he wishes he’d let them as he originally thought of "All I Am" as a dreamy kind of song but was persuaded in the studio to put the works on it. He also points out that both "Cath" and "All I Am" would have been bigger hits with decent exposure….

The only way to beat the record company is to do nothing. The unfortunate thing is you have a hit and then everyone in the world gets involved…If you had the personality you could kick up a fuss like Edwyn did, but no one’s interested. He was really unfortunate cos Lloyd Cole was just signed and he was anything but kicking up a fuss and Edwyn couldn’t sing and at the end he had a pretty nasty personality. And Lloyd Cole, he’s got a really great band. Edwyn couldn’t play guitar very well and David McClymont wasn’t a very good bass player but they got Zeke in and had a hut, right. I hate "Rip It Up", wish they’d never put it out…Then he (Edwyn) started getting involved with people like Clint Ruin and Stevo, all that Bizarro lot, going “Edwyn, why don’t youu have a bit of screaming in this song. I’ll do it for you. Waaaargh!…And it’s really avant garde but it’s hardly fucking gonna be a hit, right? And you reas all the Orange Juice interviews and it’s “oh we really want to be Top 10” and all that and as soon as they get it they do everything to stop it.

The video for "All I Am" was hilarious – Ken with a dogcollar on…

We took it down to London, right. I wasn’t there. I was in Glasgow, lying in bed. This must have been about five past two in the afternoon and the phone rang: “You fucking bastard!” It was the record company. I just hung up. They were going “You can’t get it on TV – a priest and all that” and I was going “look, Sting was on, Spread A Little Happiness, with a dog collar and all that. (Growls). “Different kind of song”.

How did they react to Young At Heart on Top Of The Pops – Ken wearing NHS specs?

They were almost crying. They told us how much damage it would do to our sales. They went crazy. He couldn’t get them off, right? If you watch the video he’s trying to get them off. I wanted to put a hearing aid in, the whole thing, make him look like Morrissey. Just a pure piss-take…We played in Berlin, went down really well – and it’s probably the most trendy city in the world bar New York, right? “Ja, seen it all before, ja”. We came back on and said “Right, we’re going to do The History Of Rock’n’Roll and played every song we could think of from 1957 onwards, ending up with (Culture Club’s) "The War Song" and The Thompson Twins’. It took ages and ages. Next day in the papers: Kick Down The Statues! This is national newspapers y’know and they thought it was us destroying rock’n’roll; we thought it was us taking the piss.

When we move to the Spanky Farrell Office at Kent Road, Bobby tells us what he did, or rather didn’t do, on his break. But his inactivity is nothing, he says, compared to the sloth of Roddy Frame..

I didn’t play records for ages and ages cos you get dead fed up, especially if you’re in the business… write a lot of songs at once, then nothing for ages. I mean, look at Roddy: he hasn’t written a song for ten years. He had to do his l.p. and I was getting phone calls from his manager: “Remember I was talking to you ages ago and you said you had an Aztec Camera demo?

Still got it? “Thinks so, aye”. “What was on it?” “Oh, "Green Jacket Grey", "Real Tears" and "Abbatoir” ". “Are they good? D’you think you could send us it?” He wanted to put it on their l.p.
I used to fall out with Alan Horne all the time. I knew about Aztec Camera before them. They wanted me to join Aztec Camera. “Aw, they’re really good, Hodgey, but they cannae really write the pop songs. You should get in there, right. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Hodgey: I was gonnae put you in Orange Juice, they could back you, but I’ll put you in Aztec Camera. You can write songs for them, OK? Think that’s good idea, Hodgey?” “Naw”. “Aw, Edwyn thinks it’s a good idea…”
Edwyn played with us, he was our first bass player. He was my best pal at the time: “Come on Robert, come round here, have you got any songs? Oh, that’s a really good one”. He’s got really suspicious about everybody. The first time I met him "Falling And Laughing" was about to come out, and they were sitting there having meetings and Brian Superstar was sitting there going “you can’t put that out, it’s the exact same as Talking Heads”. “You think so? Aw fuck, it is a bit like it” – this is Edwyn and Alan. “All that money, aw no!” Real paranoia…
Aztec Camera were just pure Joy Division, then Alan Horne got them listening to Decade by Neil Young: “I’ll tell you how to get it, Roddy. There you go, pal, there you go” – and he come back later on. And he’s got all these songs. It’s the God’s honest truth, y’know?
..Primal Scream: the b-sides’s exactly the same as my first demo. Stephen Pastel pointed it out to me. I remember Bobby (Gillespie) when they were all anti-Postcard, anti-Velvet Underground. I was caught between both camps. They used to hate that stuff…I remember exactly, talking about the Velvet Underground, how it all started. They had a four-week thing in Sounds about the Velvet Underground, had the Bunnymen talking about it, had nothing to do with fucking Postcard, y’know? You’d go down to Paddy’s Market and then you’d go back up the road and it’s like “Oh, I’ve got a Velvet Underground l.p, y’know?” “Oh?” And there’d be about ten guys there trying to find another one.

And with that, Bobby heads out from the Spanky Farrell office, leaving us with a reminder of the old Postcard slogan, adapted from Vic Goddard,: “We OUTPOSE all rock and roll”, (rather than "oppose"), and taking with him a pair of 3D glasses we gave him that we’d pinched from John Menzies.

Below is a version of Sugar Bridge from a TV show called Switch:

Neds Got On At Springburn

2008-08-10T14:55:00.014+01:00

Watch
Neds Got On At Springburn,
a field recording by Roy Moller....

Richard Hawley

2008-08-10T11:42:00.005+01:00

Richard Hawley (then of the Longpigs) Unpublished Meantime Magazine interview by Roy Moller @ Glasgow Garage 30.09.96.

You’ve supported quite a variety of acts in the last year – Sleeper, Skunk Anansie, Ash & Pulp.
We supported Echobelly last year. We did a tour with Northern Uproar – they supported us.

Has the reaction to your set varied a lot depending on whom you’re supporting?
What’s happened over the last twenty months has been we’ve been nicking the audiences of the main bands we’ve been supporting so now they’re just incredibly varied. It’s quite nice, really, because our music’s just for human beings. The maddest one was this one in Leicester that we did at the Prince Charlotte which is actually quite a small place and just after we finished the soundcheck all these skinheads turned up and we were like “Oh fuckin’ hell!” so we told our security man, Nasty, “Watch them fuckers cos they’re gonna be trouble tonight” and we got to “On & On”, played that and they all started crying. And then on the other side of the audience there’s this old bloke about fifty singing all the words. It’s quite nice, really. I mean music is a bit too ageist. Through history it’s all been centred around youth.

The album is much more unified than the extra tracks on the singles. Was that a conscious decision?
We’d got a collection of songs and they all kind of naturally sounded the same cos they were all written in a relatively short space of time. Cos Crispin’s the main songwriter and we just said “On the b-sides we’ll have a bit of fun & do other things." When we so an album it’s always trying to keep it tighter cos obviously you can get so varied on an album it becomes a bit too eclectic and then you struggle, you know.

“Floss” on the b-side of “Lost Myself” sounds like Cliff and the Shadows
That’s kind of exactly what it was – often our stuff is half serious and half taking the piss. We only had “Floss” and “When You’re Alone” as b-sides so “The Wonder Drug” (a weird mix of drum loop and abrasive guitar) was just written in the studio as a laugh cos we really like the Velvets.

Ah, so the idea was to do a “Murder Mystery” sort of song. Maintaining the Velvets connection, Moe Tucker came to see the Longpigs when they played New York.
I was in another band years ago (Treebound Story) and we supported her on her tour of England and Sterling Morrison was playing guitar for her and he was a really lovely bloke, a really nice guy. I had a Gretsch Country Gent(leman) – that was my dad’s – he used to play in Dave Berry and the Cruisers and that was my guitar from being six, which was when I started playing and the day I joined the Longpigs it got fuckin’ nicked. But when I was supporting them he started talking about guitars and said he used to have a deal with Vox and a garage full of old Vox stuff.

When the Velvets played the Edinburgh Playhouse in June ’93 I was there both nights and it was great but Lou’s vocals sounded rather too much in the vein of his later solo stuff. I guess you could say the same about Lydon when I saw the Pistols played the SECC on their reunion tour earlier this year….
We did Top Of The Pops – we did “She Said” – and the Pistols were filming their Top Of The Pops (appearance). They didn’t mime: they did two live songs and it was fuckin’ great. We were in the first twenty-five people to see them for the first time since they split up. It was a brilliant day cos we just met loads of our idols – Joe Strummer was there, and Edwyn Collins.

2008 note: Back in the dressing room after the gig I’m introduced to the legendary Digsy, immortalised in the Oasis opus Digsy’s Dinner – or as I think of it at the time, Diner, which is maybe better. This is 1996, Britpop is about to enter its final trajectory. The Glasgow Garage is a long way from the Camden Mixer or even the Hacienda.but Hawley’s affectionate remarks regarding fellow local lads made good underline the fact it’s still the era of Britpop party central…
We know Black Grape and we get fucking bladdered with them, but we’re only allowed to see them every now and then because we get so twatted. The most rock & roll band out of all the bands that we’ve ever played with are Pulp. They are fuckin’ animals – absolute animals. I was out with Jarv the other night. He’s just a complete nightmare: he can drink a bottle of vodka easy though you wouldn’t think it.

There’s the notorious incident when Cocker fell out of a window showing off at a party..
I was there the night he did that – he was trying to impress this girl by climbing from one window to another and fell out and had to do all their next gigs in a fuckin’ wheelchair. Very silly, daft cunt.

Do you ever get sick of playing “Far” and “She Said”? Do you change them around to keep things fresh for yourselves?
We always sort of have, really. “She Said” for live has got a different arrangement but that’s probably more for effect. The one song that does constantly change is “Elvis”. We tend to play stuffas pretty near to the album as we can and “Elvis” is the one where we’re allowed to stretch it a bit…I get sick of playing “Far” cos it’s a lot older. It was deliberately meant to be sort of a throwaway pop song. It's actually about taking an E and going to a nightclub and all that. You fall in love with somebody and you can’t work out if it’s the drugs or you really are. It’s taking the piss out of E-heads really.

The Longpigs always seem to be on tour. Not that they’re complaining…
We didn’t necessarily want to be a band that broke on having bullshit written about us. We just wanted to play and build up a fanbase cos you’re gonna be around longer. I don’t think we’re the kind of band that if we don’t make an album in another four months then we’ll miss the boat and if it’s a fashion-based thing you only have a certain amount of time so we’ve just played…it must be over three hundred gigs now.

How do you handle it?
You can go a bit mad. You just have to go with it, really, and that’s the best way to survive it – just go off your head. The cycle of the day is wake up, feel hideous, vom, then sit about moaning for ages, take Resolve or something then do the soundcheck, then go for something to eat – we only eat once a day, at night, then talk a lot of gibberish in interviews for a bit and then have a couple of beers before you play just to stop your hands from shaking and then play the gig and you’re fuckin’ buzzin’ your head off and then you just get off your head.
I always write stuff, and (Cri)’spin does a lot actually, when you’ve got a hangover cos your brain is kind of half-sober and half-pissed. There’s no mental censorship – it just comes out.

Did you write “Tendresse” when you had a hangover?
We went to see Gargbae and Crispin was doing some vocals in the studio for this other track that we’ve still got on tape somewhere and he just sort of lost interest in it and he goes “Why don’t we do that song of yours cos it’s a nice song”. But by this point it’s two in the morning and I’ve been out to see a band and I’m completely off me head, you know. I was quite pleased how that came out because it was just a mic going straight into an amplifier. I just sat there with two amps and one electric guitar and one mic straight in and it’s quite bare and very naked. I write a lot of stuff like that. ‘Spin’s got some great atmospheric stuff.

Richard’s good pal Mark Lewis, now head of Decca, has a treat lined up for him: sorting through Decca’s files to choose tracks for re-release.
I’m the historian of the band from Barrett Strong to fuckin’ whatever. I’m gonna choose what is good stuff to re-release and listen to all the out-takes as well and I’m right looking forward to that. I’m definitely gonna have Marianne Faithfull’s first album reissued and put in the original packaging cos it’s been reissued but it’s all fuckin’ useless and I’ll get all the original artwork and do it all properly and get into it. I want to use the old Decca label, not some hideous modern thing.

How was T In The Park?
Awesome. Every time we play Scotland it’s always brilliant and the one time we ever had a bad gig was in Glasgow – here, actually, supporting Skunk Anansie but that was fuckin’ Crispin’s fault cos there was this bloke who was pissed up and he shouted at him: “You fuckin’ Scottish bastard, fuck off!”

Hmm. Perhaps not the best strategy to use to court a crowd. Hawley then remembers a Caledonian concert that takes the disco biscuit for bad shows.
Cumbernauld Sax was the worst gig I’ve ever played in my life. Small towns are the same anywhere. The people are bored and they turn into nutters.

By contrast, a Pulp support slot at the esteemed Paris Olympia has been maybe the Longpig’s most memorable show of 1996 so far. Impressive as it surely was to tread the same boards as Brel, Piaf, Hallyday and Aznavour, it was the pre- and post-gig shenanigans that seem to have left the biggest imprint on Richard’s recent memory...
I got left in Calais that fuckin’ night. That was completely mad. Got left in Calais completely bladdered: no passport, no money, no coat. One shoe. Cos one of our roadies was pissing about taking me boot off and I ended up running after him and they all shot off somewhere else. He don’t work with us anymore – he was a nice bloke, but he was just a nutter and I was fuckin’ dodging all these French police with fuckin’ guns cos they’d got a terrorist alert and I was left in Calais in the departure lounge for fifteen hours. I turned up about four-and-a-half minutes before we did the gig. I was so fucked by the end of that I went back to the hotel and I met these guys, three black fellas in the hotel, and one was a guy from New Orleans called Corey Harris and a guy called Wayne Baker Brooks. It turned out he played guitar for Prince when Prince was doing something else. It was fuckin’ mad. I can’t remember the other fella’s name cos he was really quiet and didn’t say much.

Richard casts his mind back to the unpromising hours spent in departure lounge hell…
If somebody had said in twenty four hours time you’ll meet these great guitarists…it was the real fuckin’ thing, man. I stayed up till half four with them so I stayed up forty-eight hours.

Ivor Cutler

2008-08-09T07:37:00.003+01:00

Written March 3rd, 2006

Two things really knocked me out as a schoolboy listening to John Peel's 10 till midnight show. One was Totally Wired by The Fall and the other was a session by Ivor Cutler. I think Mark had heard it, too. And our friend Neil. We used to make comedy tapes together and shared an ear for the bizarre that perhaps our classmates didn't. I remember us all singing together: "Step it out lively boys. Put your best foot forward & the other foot as well. Don't forget the other foot boys, the other foot boys as well. We want to get there, boys, it's half past ten" etc. A little while later Mark & I went to see the great man live at the harmonium at the Edinburgh Fringe. A day or so before the show, Mark & I were busking at the Art Galleries just off Princes Street. Out of the corner of my eye I spied a tandem being parked next to one of the benches by Princes Street Gardens. "Hold on a minute", I said to Mark, excitedly motioning towards the slightly wizened bespectacled figure dismounting from the bike: "That's Ivor Cutler!" And indeed it was, accompanied by his friend & fellow poet Phyllis King. Mr Cutler was friendly, a little spikey, perhaps I wouldn't have wished him any other way, and obviously a genius. " How does it feel to be so famous people recognise you in the street?" I asked. "F%*£king awful!" came the reply. Undeterred, I gauchely sought his advice on becoming successful: "Do the opposite to what everyone else is doing", he advised. Goodness knows what he made of Mark & I's electric guitar and bass rendition of Smokey Robinson-via-Japan's I Second That Emotion as he and Phyllis courteously stopped for a while in front of Mark & I, the Rhino Disciples, fronting our little Mark-made amp.After his show at the Assembly Rooms I never saw the great man again on stage or indeed on the street but I continued to derive great pleasure from his ouvre. A true individual. What he saw of me was a 19 year old who didn't know who he was yet. Ah, well. I've never met a hero of mine I didn't like. Then again, I haven't met many of my heroes. Farewell, Ivor may you rest in perfect harmonium and farewell, too, John Junkin. Stars of Magical Mystery Tour & A Hard Day's Night respectively. And so much more. You was gear.

We Love You (Post-army Elvis & psychedelic Stones)

2007-01-23T12:40:00.012Z

I’ve been reading The Rough Guide To The Rolling Stones by Sean Egan (Penguin, 2006). It’s informative and opinionated which can be a good combination. Of course I don’t agree with everything he says – Memory Motel (or “Hotel” as it’s typo-d) n my book is an absolute classic and not a “failed attempt” at an epic. Like Iain McDonald’s Beatles tome, Revolution In The Head, I reckon the man is generally a little too critical …. And I don’t agree that, charming as it is, Wyman’s In Another Land is the best track on Their Satanic Majesties Request. But what a fine description of a single that is in my book the best thing the Stones cut in 67 along with Satanic Majesties’ finest track, 2,000 Light Years From Home – the totally groovy John & Paul harmony- enhanced We Love You: “Nicky Hopkins provides a dark, rippling piano motif while behind him an indefatigable Jones creates vistas of sand dunes and Bedouins”. Nice. Jeremy Reed, whose Orange Sunshine describes Marianne Faithfull thusly:

The drugs are Smarties with a kick

they make her see her own TV

as substance commentary

turns some evocative lines towards Their Satanic Majesties Request:

Court cases nagging in their nerves, they wire

their newly channelled Faustian energies

to off-tilt numbers, svelte Moroccan drums

The apprehension of bells, rattles, gongs

textural fade-out and fade-in harmonies

Egan goes on to quote engineer George Chkiantz’s marvelling Brian’s feats of wildly imaginative and technically blinding musicianship. There’s also a new interview with 60s Stateside engineer, Dave Hassinger, presumed missing in action in Andrew Loog Oldham’s 2Stoned. 2Stoned is my favourite book ever but Rough Guide To The Rolling Stones has plenty to commend it, even if I love Hang Fire from Tattoo You and Sean does not. He doesn’t pick out the monumental Try A Little Harder for kudos from Metamorphosis, either. (It’s fantastic – check it out. And, while you’re there, the Richards-Oldham composition I’d Much Rather Be With The Boys – one of the great Be My Baby/Just Like Honey intro’d tracks). Neither does he pick out Child Of The Moon in his list of 50 Greatest Stones songs but has the admirable nerve to include Come On and is alright by me for including Long Long While and Blue Turns To Grey (the latter covered by Cliff and also beautifully instrumentalised by the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra). P.S. Does anyone else really like Transcendental Meditation by the Beach Boys or is it just me? It just does it for me like Touch Me by The Doors (hey – The Soft Parade l.p. ’s well up for reassessment if you ask me) and the aforementioned Try A Little harder. Generally when it comes to sax I prefer a cup of tea but I’m a jeepster for these sax-laden groovefests. And then there’s Boots Randolph on the great Elvis Is Back lp, proof that two of the greatest ever John’s, Lennon and Peel, weren’t right to say or imply, in the pages of Playboy (1980) and Mojo (1993) respectively Elvis died when he went into the army. Like A Baby and Reconsider Baby which end this amazing 1960 platter (which also features classics such as The Girl Of My Best Friend and A Mess Of Blues) prove that as do (for example):

His Latest Flame

Little Sister

Guitar Man

In The Ghetto

Suspicious Minds

Wearin’ That Loved On Look

(Such An) Easy Question

Lead Me, Guide Me

Where No One Stands Alone

Rags To Riches

Burning Love

Hi-Heeled Sneakers

I Washed My Hands In Muddy Water

Tomorrow Is A Long Time

Return To Sender

Indescribably Blue

Long Black Limousine

Suspicion

Bosom Of Abraham

He Touched Me

I, John ....

hand me my scarfs and water, Charlie..

...Polk Salad Annie

Clean Up Your Own Backyard

If You Talk In Your Sleep

If You Don't Come Back

See See Rider

I Just Can't Help Believin'

Doin' The Best I Can

Way Down

I Will Be True

It's Still Here

I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen

That's Someone You Never Forget

Pieces Of My Life

Anything That's Part Of You

Puppet On A String (not the Sandie Shaw number)

I’m Movin’ On

Patch It Up

Big Boss Man

I’ll Hold You In My Heart

Rubberneckin’

Walk A Mile In My Shoes

How Great Thou Art

An American Trilogy

A Little Less Conversation ...

And the 68 Comeback Special. Post-army Elvis, We Love You.

Below is an intense and moving performance on his last tour of Unchained Melody. The King may have lost the war but he won this battle:

And here's a treat I thrilled to one Friday teatime, summer 1985 when Ready Steady Go compilation episodes, courtesy of drummer-turned-business bigwig Dave Clark, whose Five seemed to feature with unseemly regularity..... The weekend once again started here. The Rolling Stones and ALO: I Got You Babe....

Some brief personal psychedelic recollections: I remember buying the Between The Buttons lp (UK edition) from Woolworths on Boxing Day or December 27th, 1981. Whichever was the Sunday. The record felt very Decemberish, or very January 67-ish: the 4pm twilight of She Smiled Sweetly, muted rubbery bass and Visions Of Johanna drums to the “if you're out tonight on your bike wear white” Dixon Of Dock Green “Evening All” gentle acid comedown of Something Happened To Me Yesterday. The pre-Christmas before I'd turned onto Satanic Majesties. A spooky psychedelic blast. Citadel is the sound of Edinburgh's phantom Tolbooth on a chilly and dark Hogmanay.

The Leopards (Featuring Gardenia & The Mighty Slug)

2007-01-22T17:01:00.006Z

Around 1986, I remember listening to Janice Long interviewing Dr Robert of the Blow Monkeys. In the studio to spin some of his favourite discs. Like Bowie had done with Sweet, and Zappa had done with All Tomorrow’s Parties in their respective slots on Radio One’s Star Choice the man blew my mind by playing T. Rex’s The Leopards featuring Gardenia & The Mighty Slug. This amazing, sexy track whose verses culminated curled like a pole dancer round a shining steel guitar lick put forward the proposition that it’s wrong to live your life inside a song. Not that Boley sounded as if he believed that for a moment. Who wouldn’t want to live in a song like this, possibly setting up home with one of the lovely lady backing vocalists.
It certainly didn’t seem wrong to me to live your life inside a set of songs .

Star Special

2007-01-22T17:00:00.022Z

The first place I really bought vinyl was the record department in Boots in Princes Street. (The sign indicating "Records" was located directly below the "Way Out" sign. "Way Out Records". I always liked that. And what I was buying was pretty way out for a fourteen year old. Me and Dad would also pour over the racks of a strange little vinyl subsidiary of Comet built on the site of the old Bonnington Goods Junction, I think. Every time I smell a PVC protective record sleeve I'm transported back to that breezeblock-encased emporium.

The Christmas that found me fifteen, Dixons in the St James Centre in Edinburgh having a sale & picking up cassettes of The Beatles blue 67-70, The Stones' Some Girls & Simon & Garfunkels's Greatest Hits - a release which had strange applause merging the songs. The visuals painted by the Beatles & S&G songs were immediately vivid to me (although Nana Mouskouri fave El Condor Pasa never hammered or nailed me except to the fast forward button). I dug the busy but never cluttered The Sounds Of Silence and I Am A Rock, driving with impsssibly groovy guitarsa and gushing Hammond organs, I saw true moons rising over open fields, pretty nurses selling poppies from trays but I couldn't incorporate this into my own manuscripts of unpublished rhyme. It would be a further eight years till I tumbled blindly into Costello-style wordplay - me minus the picture painting of, say Sleep Of The Just from King Of America or Battered Old Bird & Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head from Blood & Chocolate. Yeah, between though & expression lies a lifetime, especially when your means to an end is to stubbornly recycle the same forced pun couplets into any lank melody that'll have them. I was trying to create songs by some osmosis-like process rather than letting in the air & empathy they needed to breathe. I can hear it in my over-strident voice in tapes from that period...

Back to a holiday in Canada in 1979... I bought With The Beatles & Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan. That Christmas, the BBC broadcast all the Beatles films, including their Shea Stadium concert. I was never the same again.I started listening to the Stones, Bowie, Sun rockabilly, country, Motown & Stax & a BBC radio show called 25 Years Of Rock.I really liked the psychedelic tunes I heard on the show. Another great BBC show, Star Special, hosted by various celebs from Bowie to Frank Zappa (introduced me to Sweet Jane & All Tomorrow's Parties by The Velvets, 96 Tears by ? & The Mysterions & endless great stuff. I recall Tim Curry, Bryan Ferry and Marianne Faithfull spinning their stuff along with Bowie and Zappa - and Ian Page of Secret Affair. Here's Bowie's full selection:

Love Street - The Doors
TV Eye - Iggy Pop
Remember - John Lennon
96 Tears - ? & The Mysterians
The Nursery Suite (extract) - Elgar
Inchworm - Danny Kaye
Trial Prison - Philip Glass
Sweet Jane - The Velvet Underground
Helen Fordsdale - Mars
He's My Star - Little Richard
21st Century Schizoid Man - King Crimson
Warning Sign - Talking Heads
Beck's Bolero - Jeff Beck
Try Some, Buy Some - Ronnie Spector
20th Century Boy – T Rex
Where Were You? - The Mekons
Big City Cat - Steve Forbert
We Love You - The Rolling Stones
2HB - Roxy Music
It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City - Bruce Springsteen
Fingertips - Stevie Wonder
Rip Her To Shreds - Blondie
Beautiful Loser - Bob Seger
Boys Keep Swinging - David Bowie
Yassassin - David Bowie
The Book I Read - Talking Heads
For Your Pleasure - Roxy Music
Something On Your Mind - King Curtis
Lies - The Staple Singers
Outro (Speed Of Life - David Bowie)

It was a good time to feel young and at one with the new. Even when I didn't totally love a song, there was something about pop production in 78/79 I really felt the zeitgeist in, a new freshness, the aural equivalent of those modern clear perspex basses and drumkits you'd see on top of the pops, an element of economy that united your Message In The Bottle and your Down In The Tube Station, a dropped down dynamic three quarters of the way through the track, a presence to the sound, the presence of modernity.
I taped the tracks I liked off the top twenty show, maybe bought some jukebox cutouts at the newsagents a couple of months after they were hits. But mostly I was backtracking a lot further. I started listening to the Stones, Bowie, Sun rockabilly, country, Motown and Stax and BBC radio. I'd seek out Studio B15 - a Sunday afternoon music magazine from the early 80s, broadcast from a basement studio in Broadcasting House presented by the late Adrian Love. A pre-luvvie Stephen Fry was a regular contributor with Beatnews, pastiching Radio One's youth-angled news programme. I'd try to catch Peter Powell's Five 45s at 5.45, - he'd play five new single releases starting at a quarter to six.

Byrd Bytes

2007-01-22T14:12:00.014Z

Long agos & worlds apart an experiment was carried out where music was introduced onto the tops of Lothian Buses via small plastic vents in the ceiling of the upper deck. We'd sit marooned in our early eighties teenage years in the maroon-liveried Atlanteans, digging Booker T & The MGs McLemore Avenue version of Carry That Weight/The End and, though we didn't know what it was, The Byrds' Fifth Dimension dynamic tension instrumental Captain Soul. We used to think the lead guitar was a bit weird, its toothpaste was smeared, there were flies in its beard. Around the same time Mark & I would frequent the first floor second hand section of The Other Record Shop in the holy cobbled High Street. I picked up the sleeve of The Byrds' Greatest Hits & brought it to the young girl assistant behind the counter. She turned round to fetch the vinyl - the anticipation bit, the best part of buying a record, and retuned with a cute giggle: "Looks like somebody was a bit peckish", she laughed and we switched our eyes from her onto the 12 " vinyl she held on her hand. Except it was 11" vinyl: the first inch had been gnawed through/broken off/eaten/smashed in a fit of primadonna pique by a folk-rock loving Elton John. No point examining the record in that time-honoured ceremony where, certainly not dressed to impress, the average scruffy record buyer would glance knowingly over the grooves, assessing the platter's purchasability, grading it with a keen auction house mind. Or not. For me, that bit was always a pose. I'd fling the thing around merrily when I got home, like it was unscratchable or something. Back home, I flung the l.p. on the turntable and, inch-imperfect as it was, it started not with Mr Tambourine Man but Gene Clark's Feels A Whole Lot Better. A tastier bite I can't imagine. And the solo wasn't weird, it was sublime. Still is to these ears. McGuinn was made for it. That's one track that always, always does it for me. Dig the "probably". Would I play it right now? Left to my own devices I probably would...

The Hollies

2007-01-21T10:13:00.007Z

I Can't Let Go of The Hollies. I could theorise about just how 60s Mancunian their records sound, just as informed by their surroundings as Joy Divison's was by the late night inner city underpass and looming morgue-white highrises. Perhaps the sunshine harmonies of The Hollies are a reaction against rather than an immersion in their surroundings. Jeremy Reed elucidates something similar in Orange Sunshine: the song graduated from Mancunian fog to an instructive light. Reed speaks of: "Yes I Will" put into corners by angular mood Clarke, Nash and Hicks, the choral three orchestrate urban surf, not blue like the Beach Boys' Pacific themes, but russety like autumn flowers... I could theorise about how Tony Hicks' charmingly chiming guitar plonk in the middle of Here I Go Again ("what can I do when there's nothing I can do?") implies through its vintage timbre an implicit connection with the leather upholstery, driver's cabs and conductor's platforms of the early to mid sixties Mancunian metropolitan public transport system. To my ears, see, it's more than a note, it's a peek into a whole past vista. Somebody from a different environment just wouldn't have played that note in that way. Possibly. I may be on safer ground putting forward the preposition that Tony Hicks had a seventies face a decade early. Grew right into it, too - all he needed was the air that he breathed. I rate Hicks as a guitarist. It's said John & George never dug the Hollies at all and the quiet one didn't keep his strong opinions about their version of If I Needed Someone to himself. Maybe it was a Lancastrian thing. Ah well, as someone who sees it as his duty to contradict, challenge & generally come down like a ton of jelly babies on anyone making lazy and/or ill-informed about Ringo's supposed lack of drumming prowess, I have to say that yeah he definitely was the best drummer in the Beatles and then I got to say RAIN!!!! and then I'd have to go on about magic tom fills and hissing cymbals and fab gear everything... However I got to say for all that he wasn't the best drummer in the northern England gig circuit or Abbey Road studios: that would be Bobby Elliott. Oooh, what a drummer! Listen to him on Listen To Me. And, of course, we have the sheer exhilaration known as I'm Alive. Jeremy Reed: just listen in, their moment seeming not frozen in a lost decade, but expansive as though climbing the stairs in a highrise we net the sun brimming orange on every floor... Right now it's quite possibly the song I'd have played at my funeral. I hope I never die, though, because feeling alive with pop is such a great feeling, especially on a sunny morning with a Bobby Elliott operating behind the traps in your headphone world.

You know when it's special. You know you do. Inventively propulsive drumming, bassline that hold the pop moment together, helping that motoring engine purr, insinuating melody on repeated listens like a reward for listening to the song over and over. It happens. It's magic. You don't have to be stoned to pick out a bass line with your head between the speakers. Of course that can happen to the lone groovers pop always needs along with the screamteen rave scene and elemental Howlin' Wolfian geniuses (now there was a guy you can listen to any time of the day & he always sounds fantastic), but personally speaking I like my pure pop best brisk and invigoratingly morning-shaped. It soars.

Thanks For All The Turn-ons

2007-01-18T17:42:00.011Z

“Thanks for all the turn-ons” (Keith Richard bidding guitar farewell to Mick Taylor, 1974)

Vision on…the psychedelic super apex - The Beatles doing Rain & Paperback Writer promos, Kew Gardens...The Who accompanied by two delicious white-booted sixties models aboard the rear veranda of a Paris bus...any Paris bus with a rear veranda...Serge Gainsbourg suited up in what looks like it could be a foggy Hyde Park at 7 a.m. - maybe he'd been up all night at a party & was over to record Initials BB or something like that...not far away in space & time The Rolling Stones & Gered Mankowitz shooting the cover for Between The Buttons...Buffalo Springfield playing support to the Stones at the Hollywood Bowl with huge cardboard photos of Keith, Brian & Charlie in view behind them...almost any photo of Michael MacClure - the handsomest poet ever...a long-haired Jacques Brel with flat-top acoustic guitar at a late sixties session, looking like a classic Kurt Cobain photo from the recording of In Utero...a youngish Marlon Brando chatting up a girl reporter in a short black & white verité documentary...Dylan taking off his shades & rubbing his eyes in Don't Look Back as steam power fades from British Railways...Stanley Baker looking like a prototype for Morrissey in Hell Is A City...Elvis in a conventional white suit throatily delivering If I Can Dream with emphatic arm gestures on the 68 Special...Everlasting Love by The Love Affair's true pop stereo action, especially the brave bit where the pennywhistles come in eerily like an Ulster marching band (with the Troubles still a year away) - 16 yr old Nicholas Lyndhurst lookalike Steve Ellis doing a sterling job (much like the even younger Alex Chilton on The Letter by The Box Tops)..any photo featuring Miles Davis, a trumpet & a beautiful, elegant woman...Ronnie Spector looking every inch the alluringly tough/vulnerable siren her Lorelei voice suggested.. Pink Floyd, pre the Pros & Cons of Hitch-Hiking & Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports Pink Floyd, pre raffish young Rick Wright turning into John Major's hipper brother backdropped 66/67 by Coronation 50s taxis, steel grey vans captured in the colour you see in World War Two footage of English airfields servicing American bombers, Syd taking a ground break between a series of Icarus flights...
Published in the Sunday Times Magazine’s article on The Mal Evans Diaries, McCartney with shorthair, shades, mod jacket & Pepper moustache.

Beatle bedecked with a big-lensed camera. He’s in Denver Airport, April 1967, says the caption, waiting for Sinatra’s Lear Jet. A couple wait with him – a slightly Ed Sullivan-esque man (though younger) & an older lady, shades on too, with a blonde bun. Everything behind is silver in the sun, like some 1930s photograph or the backdrop to one of my favourite 1950s tramcar pictures. A Mercedes waits in duck-egg blue. On the corrugated silver airport building wall a sign declares « Customer Lounge » in old-fashioned lettering. Maybe simultaneously those Pink Floyd pilots are lining up in London back at Abbey Road.

A quote from Milton Schulman in his article“Theatre” (Len Deighton’s London Dossier, 1967):“In Chelsea, the girls in their breathtaking short skirts, their outrageous dresses inspired by anything from art nouveau to theUnion Jack, their mod stockings and kinky boots, their oblivious acceptance of the stares of stunned, gasping males, are so tantalizing and so beautiful that any account of entertainment in London must inevitably give them pride of place”After ectstasy the laundry. Quote. Zen saying.All the magic chunks of vinyl time John Lennon's voice ruled the earth...and still Lennon said in Rolling Stone that when you're thirty it's somehow passed you by, you've missed it & he was it!!! Wouldn't you feel a sense of achievement from meeting Elvis, limoing with Dylan, dallying with Eleanor Bron, 2 books, Pete and Dud? Yeah, that's not even counting the songs, the records, the gigs, the hair. Is that all there is? Someone else's weekend is the best you can expect. Quote. Elvis Costello.

Looking back at being 17 in 1980, the strange thing is the sixties didn't seem any closer to me than when I hit 40. This despite the fact you could still just about find real ex-mods yet to turn thirty. The era when mod stripes got paisleyed was an almost unimaginably tantalising time to tune into for the first time on Radio One's 25 Years Of Rock, entering my teenage head only 12 or 13 years after Middle Earth hit Middle England (And even less time since it hit Central Scotland) but a psychedelic constellation away, epitomised by this San Franciscan soundbite "The lights get brighter, the music gets louder and the guy who freaks out just hasn't passed the acid test". Ah, good old Fleetwood Mac Oh Well theme-tuned 25 Years Of Rock. the first time I heard the Rolling Stones' groovy but threateningly dark-as-summer-windows John and Paul harmony-enhanced We Love You. Sweet teenage tantalisation...and not second-hand news to me.

Northern Soul

2007-01-18T17:41:00.009Z

This is my antidote to formulaic post-Chart Show Pepsi-ad, Top Shop, bling blang R&B. Formulaic some Northern Soul may be – and some eighties drum machines and keyboard horrors are present on some less scruplulous compilations – but what a formula it works on. The clean northern breeze Albert Goldman detected blowing through The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night seems to sweep through Northern Soul sides too, even though, with the exception of tracks cut in Detroit, none of it is actually Northern. Rufus Thomas, for instance, is Deep South, baby. Anyway, it’s the energising opposite of fetid, surface sheeny R&B, all the pseudo-soulful mass-sung but gospel-free wailing that’s clogged up our airways, shops & transport systems for the past eight years or more...wouldn't it be L7 if every Pink Floyd number was The Great Gig In The Sky with a plastic beat instead of Nick Mason? All that wailing for effect – works occasionally to my ears but not when fitted as standard to the airwave machine. I never could get into this style when it cropped up years ago – say on Heaven 17’s Temptation: Michael Heseltined mane of unfascistgrooved Glenn Gregory’s deeply unfunky “Temptayshun”s and Carol Kenyon’s hysterical wailing, detailed elsewhere in these blogs.
Let's leave the M1 service station forecourt of my audio hellness & get wigan'd out on the floor to:
Contours – Just A Little Misunderstanding / Shirley Ellis – Soul Time / Don Gardner –My Baby Loves To Boogaloo / Diana Ross & The Supremes – Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart / Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons – The Night / Rufus Thomas – The Memphis Train / Frances Nero – Keep On Loving Me / Velvelettes – Needle In A Haystack /Isley Brothers – Behind A Painted Smile / Jimmy Radcliffe - Long After Tonight Is All Over (intimate intro growing into a discreetly communal anthem, gaining a shiver-factor from the knowledge it closed so many Northern Soul allnighters)/ Reperata & The Del-Rons – Panic ...What a great name Reperata is. What are Del-Rons ? Why did doowop group names start with Del ? Why does the radio never play this Diana Ross classic ? You tend to hear Frankie Valli singing Grease in Saturday Night Fever nostalgia airplay & maybe some other Four Seasons tunes but never this one. Way up here beyond the North of England I go for artist’s names that sound Northern British – The Elgins, the gloriously named Wakefield Sun. Maybe he inspired the genuinely homegrown Wigan’s Ovation & Wigan’s Chosen Few........

Random Radio

2007-01-18T17:39:00.003Z

March 05 Random "tune-in to the work radio & see where it takes me" time:
More funny-voiced antics from a leather-booted, ecstasy-beated, pernernially bleating Cher on the verse of Believe. I used to like her Heart Of Stone & Just Like Jesse James back in the Census Office days, despite the line about “ a small town dude with a big city attitude “ that kinda blighted the latter. Despite providing the first four letters of Aerosmith’s finest (for me) moment, the word “dude” doesn’t usually sit well with me in a pop song. Now we have Xanadu – Olivia Newton-John fronting the ELO. Must admit I didn’t think that Physical video was at all sexy – more” clinical” than anything else. Anyway, when I was in my first two years at secondary school one of my co-pupils, with a particularly acute case of perma-cattarh- also brought along to class a plastic fawn-coloured mini fruit machine & a big love for ELO. Result: every time I heard the signature bearded Brummie backing vocals I imagined them being sung by an acned catarrh-ridden Scots boy which detracted a bit from my appreciation but I fondly remember watching Tony Curtis introducing them live at Wembley on TV as the Out Of The Blue spaceship grandly descended & I proudly displayed the album poster on my bedroom wall… Next, Eric Clapton’s drekky clapped-out hangover paen/pain Wonderful Tonight. Thank God (no pun intended) you gave her the car keys, Eric. And then we have the obligatory Scissor Sisters track – Take Your Mama this time round,. There’ll be another one along within the hour. I don’t mind them too much although Mary doesn’t do it for me & I can’t go for Laura with its Jamiroquai-like “Cincinatti”s & “Come on Come on” which I thought was “Shimon Shimon” for months which sounded worse. Now a bit of Coldplay, Keane – interchangeable music for plodders.
Several times a week we have Stereophonics Have A Nice Day. Don’t know if the titles supposed to be ironic but like the radio is a sucker for anything with “radio” in the title it’s deployment to express bland sentiment isn’t, like ray-yay-ain on your wedding day – ironic. Next up The Mavericks’ Dance The Night Away which always seemed tailor-made for a wedding reception in the West Of Scotland & thankfully comes fitted with the brief saving grace of a chrome plated whammy-barred 1961 guitar solo, Men At Work’s Down Under which annoys me with its sub-reggae sub-Police pre-Scheme vocal stylings – Mr. Colin Hay’s dispassionate phrasing irks me – as did one of their album covers in particular – a horrid yellow & white affair as dry as their most enervating musical moments. However Down Under does include the words « Vegemite sandwich » which is sort of rock&roll & that humid flute always makes me feel like I’m 20 & it’s early overcast summer, wet trees limpid with promise. What else gets played every single day ? Annie Lennox Walking On Broken Glass. Always overegged & pretend-scary to me – I thought the « Wooh-ooh » on that KT Tunstall record was Ms Lennox sampled but I don’t mind it – even if it’s not quite Here Comes The Rain Again or the world’s best Here Comes The Sun derivative Thorn In My Side . Constant Queen – usually One Vision, sometimes It’s A Kind Of Magic – Sun City badguys bit forgotten now. She Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals. You can imagine that five note intro riff filling 80s dancefloors. At the time it sounded like a Prince pastiche – less so, now. Also a slew of tracks with funny voices from Waiting On A Train by those guys who used to be the Easybeats including Angus Young ‘s brother to Berry Gordy’s son doing Someone’s Watching Me to Steve Wright lookalike Matthew Wilder’s Break My Stride, Cameo's Word Up to Hey Ya by Outkast.

Maybe I’m just of a certain age – but what happened to R&B? What was soul deep has become staccato showing off. At work, the radio mixes formula R&B with early examples of the “look-at-my-technique” method such as I Will Always Love You by Whitney Huston & the processed piano, crashing drums dated eighties thing. And we get Mary’s Prayer, Money For Nothing, Wouldn’t It Be Good? All those eighties faves of someone else plus the modern national anthem, Angels by Robbie Williams. I used to find Let Me Entertain You quite exciting when it came out of some pub speakers early in the evening of a night out during my BT daze. Flying to Ibiza from Glasgow in 2003, he was in the inflight magazine, documentaries on him featured on the inflight radio. His boatrace seemed to encroach everywhere. Back at BT in '92 the “Switchroom” where we “handled” the Directory Enquiry calls was graced by a small poster of Mick Hucknall. Let me end this on a positive note though: Holding Back The Years (which I believe went back to his Frantic Elevators days) was & is a good song & the record gets more points from me by being punctuated by stylish guitar chops. You don't have to purge yourself at an AA meeting to admit this is an RAC - Reluctantly Admitted Classic.

Ten Years Of Belle And Sebastian

2006-10-27T12:09:00.002+01:00

Thought this might be worth putting up as a tenth anniversary thing: an interview I did with Stuarts Murdoch and David in Glasgow’s Gallery Of Modern Art back in October 1996 and published in Bigwig magazine the following month. Rereading the piece, I guess hindsight’s shown I was wrong to presume the “atheism” of the song “If You’re Feeling Sinister” but on the whole I hope the article captures something of the atmosphere of the band’s early days…

LOVE AND FATE : Belle And Sebastian by Roy Moller Bigwig, November 1996

“Maybe it was the fact we’d just got together that meant I felt I could just let go for the first time. I was quite confident the band would do it. We only had a very short period of time to do the LP and if we didn’t leave everything up to fate and combinations of our actions, we’d never have got anywhere”
Belle And Sebastian singer/songwriter Stuart Murdoch is recalling the recording of Tigermilk, their first LP (released on Glasgow Stow College’s Electric Honey label). Since then, the Glasgow septet have recorded a new album and played a Mark Radcliffe radio session. And they’d like to record a third LP before the year’s out. Good going for a band formed early this year.

These days such an alliance of productivity and talent is rare indeed. With so many Britpop bands adopting string sections like so much costume jewellery, Belle And Sebastian’s second album, If You’re Feeling Sinister (out this month on Jeepster), is subtly augmented by cello, violin and trumpet. From the wistful Mayfly to the upbeat atheism of the title track, rich yet understated arrangements permeate the record like the warm flush of a good malt.
Allied to vocals that suggest a folk Momus or Nick Drake with a Morrissey fixation, bittersweet evocations of childhood and adolescence such as the recorder-enhanced Judy & The Dream Of Horses combine vulnerability and directness in equal measure. “I think CS Lewis said that if you have to write for children and reduce everything to quite simple, clear ideas then you’re gonna come up with something pretty good”, comments Stuart.
It’s an approach that’s paid dividends. According to bassist Stuart David, keeping things simple and clear is the Belle And Sebastian ethic: “It’s just about not doing unnecessary things ‘cos all it really is is writing a song and letting people that want to hear it hear it”.

This dedication to clarity is matched by the trust in instinct that saw the band through Tigermilk. Hence Belle And Sebastian’s signing to Jeepster. As Stuart M explains, “We knew we had to do a record for them because they were just nutcases really. You should always let yourself feel it by fate and they were the first company that hassled us”.

True to their penchant for favouring locations like Glasgow’s intimate Café Soma over traditional rock venues, an upcoming visit to London sees the band playing the Rough Trade shop and supporting the Tindersticks for two nights at the Institute Of Contemporary Arts. Due to these commitments, the recording of that third LP will probably have to wait till the new year.

Since recording Tigermilk, in March things have happened pretty fast. “It’s like a battle with the real world but that’s to be expected,” says Stuart M, adding, “It’s a nightmare but sort of fun as well because in the past you might have started off with a little idea, then you indulge yourself to the point of playing in a pub and you’re trying to carry on your indulgence and see your perfect little idea through to the high street.”

Seek out If You’re feeling Sinister in a high street near you now. If you’re looking for music to warm your winter, Belle And Sebastian are the perfect indulgence.

The Blue Nile Meets The Grey Clyde

2006-10-20T23:21:00.005+01:00

The Grey Clyde
I lived in Haghill. I should know all about headlights on the parade, I should know all about the second city of the Empire glistening in a downpour. But I still find myself a little perplexed when I encounter The Blue Nile’s Tinseltown In The Rain playing on the radio. It’s just the way I am, I guess, but I’ve never been able to unpack the sublime melancholy others find in this band’s music. I’ve always regarded it as music for other people. The first time I heard them, on the tranny in my wasabi-coloured room at Baird Hall one rainy Radio Clyde Tuesday teatime, I didn’t know what to make of the anguished vocals over music created to display the hi-fi products of the Linn turntable company. A quarter of a century on from their debut, I Love This Life, I still don’t know. Is I Love This Life an ironic title? Could I spend a wet bus journey pondering the same thing about Black’s Wonderful Life? Maybe James Stewart could explain it all to me. Personally, I regard Lou Reed’s Perfect Day as being quite simply about a Perfect Day and have on occasion taken issue with those who put forward the proposition that it’s about heroin. Would you really drink Sangria in the park prior to shooting up? Maybe catch a movie and then head home for a fix wishing you could ride on a clipper shop in sailor’s suit and hat going from this land here to that. Well I guess that I just do know that I don’t think you would.
The great thing about songs, even songs written by hardbitten, druggie Noo Yawk quadsexual superfly guys, is that a lot of the time they don’t have a big hidden meaning. To think they do is, in my book, kinda adolescent. I mean, it happens: we know Major Tom’s a junkie, of course but there’s no double meaning in Heroin, is there? Or are you trying to tell me it’s not actually about heroin? Maybe There She Goes by The La’s (even Lynne Truss would have to acknowledge their right to apostrophise where they wished) is about heroin but I’ve always heard it as an attempt to write There’s A Place by The Beatles.
I said I always regarded The Blue Nile as music for others. I sometimes find it odd what the rest of the world latches onto. In my head I’m hearing the chirpy little riff that burbles through Everybody Wants To Rule The World by Tears For Fears like a dose of corporate coffee. The first time I heard that song I was frightened. Frightened by the notion that everybody wanted to rule the world. Frightened by the projections my mind made of certain people getting their way. Frightened by the blandness of the record. Frightened by how people had told me how they really related to TFF’s Shout which I regarded as an extremely facile allusion to the primal scream. As silly in its way as Roland Orzabel’s robotic 80s dancing in the Mad World video. As silly as Curt Smith calling his post Tears For Fears band Mayfield (“Curt Is Mayfield)”. But at least he had a sense of humour, and maybe I was the silly one. Maybe everyone did want to shout it all out and rule the world or at least run the world in a Live Aid T-shirt. In every dreamhome a heartache . Every theme bar host to a hundred tormented souls. Karaoke masks anguish and megalomania. Discuss. Use only one side of the paper.
Perhaps I have a fear of bland music akin to a deep-rooted aversion to men in labcoats. Some of them might wear specs like those donned Gerry Rafferty. The kind of 70s design where you can’t see what the wearer’s thinking. But I like Gerry Rafferty a lot. Paisley should be proud of him. To me he’s not bland at all. Every time I hear his masterpiece, I’m always right there pushing up Baker Street. That track’s a perfect aural tapestry to my ears. Maybe because he doesn’t try to come over all anguished. His cool delivery is like a Radox bath after a hard journey home. And he followed it up with the best white reggae-lite track ever, Right Down The Line. Not my favourite musical category but in the hands of the great GR, it’s a different story.
Back in Glasgow, RealRadio followed Tinseltown with a commercial break, then Rod Stewart singing Hot Legs. Maybe somewhere across the metropolis somebody’s reverie was broken but your correspondent remained strangely unmoved. I saw no winter academy trainglimpsed landscaspes the way I do when I swoon to the Associates' sublime Breakfast. Decent chap as I’m sure Paul Buchanan is, he just doesn’t walk me to the Easterhouse and lay me on the ground with judo the way Stuart Murdoch does. I don't get the tang of the city but maybe Glasgow doesn't have it anymore, that heady mix of vintage and modern. For that head to Soho, Bloomsbury or several Parisian arrondisements. Perhaps it was still here when in 1989 Justin Currie sang about the breweries and abbatoirs on the edge of town. The Return Of Maggie Brown (from the big black smoke), Nothing Ever Happens, Spit In The Rain, Be My Downfall. These tracks really do sound like Glasgow to me.. Glasgow in the rain is like a giant old-school charity shop, snivelled noses, last year's toys in scuffed cardboard, drizzled-on faded gaudy tack. Whatever happened to the sharp schmutter The Slab Boys would have us believe existed, the sharp Mod Small Faces showed us - what happened to that? Outsized, overstuffed or sagging on raw bone romper suits for the young & old, the eccied, the Buckfast-unfastened, the swaying self-righteous practitioners of the old firm patriot games.
Me, I’m from Leith, myself. Sunshine there on pictured above...

Hell 17: Early 1980s

2006-10-14T14:26:00.010+01:00

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Eighties classics. Love some of them, hate others. Probably different ones to you. Am I the only person who feels prickly and unwell when my ears are challenged by Heaven 17's Temptation? Perhaps assisted by my dim recollection of the video, it reminds me of some horrible chintzy 80s style bar. There's something unappealingly seedy businessman-ish about besuited Glenn Gregory's po-faced intonation of the word Temptation, crushing me with wheels of industry, while Carol Kenyon warbles ever higher into proto-R&B mode like or is trying to describe Pink Floyd's The Great Gig In The Sky using only her power of screech.
In the battle of 80s songs called Temptation, give me New Order every time. It shared something with Heaven 17's finest moment - Fascist Groove Thang, a time when the 80s were still post-punk, an air of "this is the 80s: let's get down to brass tacks about love and politics." Not in a naff "The Politics Of Dancing" way but in a way, that to the ear of this beholder anyway, seemed to share the sensibilty of the freshly-scrubbed, newly-demobbed look that northern English bands seemd to adopt so naturally. Funk was rigorous, as disciplined as a James Brown-imposed band fine. The world into which we drifted after staying up all night at our first parties glinted righteously in the winter sun of anti-Thatcherist purity... Not that I hate the rest of Heaven 17's output, though. And I saw Glenn Gregory on a moving and superb TV tribute to Billy Mackenzie on YouTube. He seems like a top bloke does Glenn. It's just that one record kinda gets my goat. I'm sure there's other great Heaven 17 stuff out there. Ican't recall Sunset Now too well but I think it was alright. And At The Height Of The Fighting was quite amusing.
Hey-la hoo!

I'm going to bring in the late Ian MacDonald here, a man whom received oipinion has awarded the acccoloade of writing the finest ever Beatles book, Revolution In The Head. Noel Gallagher raved about it and so did everyone else, it seemed, but I found it too critical, too dismissive of some wonderful tracks. In the quote below - from Uncut, it's MacDonald who goes against the grain of received opinion, challenging the esteemed legacy of ABC. I don't know if I agree with him completely, but I like the cut of his jib here as he asses the musical legacy of the 80s. I'm all with what Alan McGee terms the non-ironic revival of Phil Collins but still feel ill when confronted by the Sussudio horn sound. I feel ill when confronted by a lot of modern R&B, too. Soporific nausea as unburnished as a glazed shopping mall floor gets in the way of my digging everything. Tin and pastic still get in the way when I'm trying to do some black iPod listening to wooden acoustic music on a shellsuited bus with white livery flashed pink and purple, grey interior walls, purple floors, purple floors, Pinky & Perky ringtones for tinny, tiny DJ-ing... Anyway, Mr MacDonald, roll up the sleeves of your designer jacket and step up to the plate:

"No era in pop roduction has dated as badly as 1981-6...with its indiscriminate appetite for tacky synth-sounds, monster drums, metronomically percussive bass-lines, garish fake-brass stabs, and asphyxiatingly compressed EQs". MacDonald points out the rightness of Trevor Horn's Frankie and Grace Jones productions but they were huge where so much was tinny and cheap.

Golden Years, part one

2006-10-12T20:21:00.013+01:00

Sunshine on the wasteland, as Bowie sang in his Hunky Dory cast-off Bombers, from 1970/71 – a time when I was in a red anorak and there was a lot of wasteland around in your average UK city, London still Luftwaffed & everywhere planner’s dreamed. Sunshine on the wastelands of Springburn and 70s & 80s Leith, a sweet balm on troubled turf like the airy flute solo that provides such sweetly bittersweet relief in Elvis’ American Trilogy, like the beautiful air that precedes the finale of the 1812 Overture. Nightime urban sprawl may have sounded like Joy Division but not every new dawn faded. Perhaps it still sounds like Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation which, despite its title, indicates to me the loom of white tower blocks and the fluorescent glare of the city backdropped by a vast dark subsonic clang.

Elvis and Bowie. Shared a birthday and a riff. One great man reportedly wrote Golden Years for the other. One damn song The King didn't record. Not long after I started secondary school Elvis died and, hearing his records played back-to-back on radio forth the following night, I fell in love with his music. I still love it. ..Having only one Elvis album prior to the King's passing, a gospel compilation called You'll Never Walk Alone, I got the Elvis Presley Sun Collection soon after. The quality of these tracks blew my mind. Indeed all Sun recordings did. I later got a Pickwick two lp ultra narrow band compilation from Woolworths called Kings Of Rock And Roll or some such title that was as filled with lacquered mystery as I could ever wish for. Lonely Weekends by Charlie Rich was a monolith to marvel at. Every track almost as mysterious and enrapturing as the New Orleans platter that mattered to me like no other, Blueberry Hill by Fats Domino. Saxophone like bagpipes. It was like the sound of the Scottish glens at their most benevolently beautiful and hauntingly lonesome... Back to 706 Union Avenue, 1954. As Jim Cogan & William Clark's superb guide to recording engineers and studios, Temples Of Sound (Chronicle Books, 2003), notes: "Presley and Phillips would make only nineteen tracks together. Among the most astonishing recordings in pop history is a union of these two souls, feeling their way in the dark new world of the studio...On "Blue Moon" the old chestnut gets a makeover that doesn't quite sound like it was performed or recorded by earthlings. With just a clip-clop rhythm beneath, the nineteen year-old Presley makes a mournful lunar plea that is embedded in a swirl of gossamer echo. Both men would go on to greater heights, but neither one would ever hover above like this again". It intrigued me on the rainiest night with my turntable keeping me dry in my bedroom. It beat any ex-jukebox singles I bought from ARDs in Great Junction Street on Saturday mornings nearby the redbrick 1880s fire station as the Sunshine On Leith illuminated the wasteland.

I always entertained the suspicion that Bowie’s vision of the sound on Sound & Vision was indebted to Suspicion, cut by Elvis in 61 and a UK hit for him in 76, the year befor Bowie’s beautiful hit single lit up our radios and continuity TV announcements with blue, blue electric blue. I imagine it was still providing an ethereal undertow to BBC2 trailers as I sat in the inky black winter night, listening with my family to a Radio One series called Elvis narrated by the man who made Deck Of Cards famous, Wink Martindale. Perhaps because I was cognisant of this, and because the series was broadcast for twenty-six weeks at Sunday teatimes, my young self was struck by the holy ghost drifting from the fifties & early sixties into post-modern 1978. (Where did all the calm come from and where did it go? Records used to sail like stately ships. Elvis' Gospel and 50s/60s ballad output a case in point....like truly silent passages in old movies before they it became obligatory to liven up the moody bits with Shine On You Crazy Diamond guitar yowls).
Twenty-six weeks but my mind’s eye just recalls those wintry teatimes and how I pondered Elvis’ careful enunciation of Peace In The Valley or Crying In The Chapel and felt how they spooked me and intrigued me. I couldn’t figure how such an apparently deep religious calm could have given way to the fresh in the mind bloated demise as described in a book I bought by his former bodyguards, Elvis: What Happened? I didn’t want to believe all the stories in it and annotated the book by writing “true” and “untrue” in the margin with a trusty, trusting pencil .

And so much of my life on Mars and closer to home has been soundtracked by Bowie. listened to Low which I bought on cassette from Lost In Music on the train to London (and back) in 1986. So exciting. I re-heard it again in a friend's kitchen recently under, um, enhanced circumstances. It was utterly brilliant. And David Live is so underrated - especially by David.
In 1988 the Cygnet Committee officially abolished the expression "Curate's Egg" and replaced it with the phrase "Tin Machine". But that's another story...my Bowie began with ChangesOneBowie:robably the sexiest piece of Bowie out there. No filer, all killer and a sea of possibilities. Took me right along Great Junction Street and halfway up Leith Walk. Saturday sunlight on winter glitter. Love on ya.

Raison d'etre

2006-09-28T07:46:00.003+01:00

This Blogspot is named after a beautiful courtly piece of chamber pop written & performed by Phil Ochs. It could have also been named No More Ghettos In America, a stunning one-off single by Stanley Winston I first heard on the John Peel show when I was eighteen or so, and was recently reacquainted with. It may vie with I’m Never Gonna Live It Down by the Knight Brothers as my personal Best Record Ever Made. Not that I could place anything above Ticket To Ride by The Beatles, Sunny Goodge Street by Donovan or Why Not Your Baby by Gene Clark. Or We’re From Barcelona by I’m From Barcelona. Or Telstar by The Tornadoes. Has there ever been a more beautiful melody than The Dark Island or Sukiyaki? A better intro than Wah-Wah by George Harrison or Search & Destroy by Iggy & The Stooges?

George put it best: "Everyone has choice to raise or not to raise their voice". A song called Run Of The Mill that is anything but. That wintry horn line shivers me each tiem I commune with the track. So I'm asking George, What Is Life? But another guitar genius, Tom Verlaine, puts it best: “it’s too, too, too to put a finger on”. John Lennon put it best; “Every time I put my finger on it, it slips away”.Shall I compare Claudia Cardinale with Sophia Loren? Or Ava Gardner? Penelope Cruz with Salma Hayek? I like Kym Ryder Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? And if so, would it be spent queuing in a clammy More Store subjected to the vocal pyrotechnics of much cheapness R&B on RealRadio? Or perhaps a beautiful reverie like Coney Island by Van Morrison. Van The Man put it best: “Why can’t it be like this all the time?” Enlightenment: I don’t know what it is. Morrissey put it best: "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I dunno”.

Back in 1967 , Phil Ochs concludes the beautiful piano-led Pleasures Of The Harbor and applause bursts forth across the auditorium between my headphones. Gets me every time - this gem's being played live. It's Tim Buckley sweetly surrendering without the grandstanding;, it's an elegant, elegiac masterpiece - a measured, calm lovely thing from the pen and mouth of a tormented soul. Meanwhile back at the blog that shares its name....